Summer Long-A-Coming

Beginning with an ominous invasion of hornets and ending in a tragedy that tears apart her haunted family, the summer of 1968 - the summer she turned fifteen - is one that Brantsche Szuster will never forget. Summer Long-a-coming, Barbara Finkelstein's shattering first novel, is a story of victims of Hitler's war whom history has mostly overlooked: the children of Holocaust survivors. For Brantzche's parents, who have come to southern New Jersey to run a poultry farm, the war remains, after twenty years, the central, obsessive event of their lives. Driven by memories of persecution, they have made their home a stronghold against a world they are convinced will not and cannot ever welcome Jews. For the younger Szusters, though, that home has become a prison. This remarkable debut is above all a book of uncommon power. By turns blackly humorous, blisteringly angry, and profoundly moving, it looks unflinchingly to the heart of a family, finding there both pain and the healing power of forgiveness.