“Let Edith Wharton have high society.
In Carol Glickfeld’s first collection of short stories, she staked out her own particular milieu: the streets of Brooklyn, forever teeming with raucous, foolish, poignant life, where laborers deceived their wives, kids without shoes discovered sex, and families somehow stayed together. More than a decade later, Glickfeld’s first novel, “Swimming toward the Ocean,” reinforces her claim to this territory while demonstrating her continued affection for its denizens … and all their foibles. In the winter just after the Korean War, soldiers and sailors, teenagers and grandparents – all of them desperate for “amusement” – brave searing winds to crowd the boardwalk at Brighton Beach. Against this gritty, colorful backdrop, a young girl recounts the story (which begins before her birth) of working-class parents who stray and start over (though not with each other), her voice brimming with instinctive awareness and gentle bewilderment. The story focuses mainly on the mother, Chenia Arnow, whose deepest feelings the child conjectures as an almost constant interior monologue. A immigrant from Russia, Chenia remains as steeped in superstition as a character in any Isaac Bashevis Singer tale, seeing curses and portents in every shadow and constantly on the alert to defend her children against the Evil Eye. But Chenia needn’t invent problems in these mean streets. Despair and domestic violence, abortion and sexual obsession, even mental collapse and suicide attempts are chronicled by her daughter, but always with respect and kindness and even – astonishingly – humor. Glickfeld also illuminates romance … or at least the yearnings for it that keep her characters going.
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Robert Dunbar wrote this review Thursday, February 19, 2009.
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