The Laws of Return: A Novel - Hardcover

Stracher, Cameron

3.33

18 ratings by Goodreads

9780688149024: The Laws of Return: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688149022 ISBN 13: 9780688149024

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1996

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A young Jewish man takes a personal journey from the wealthy suburbs of New York to western Massachusetts and the Arctic Circle in search of spirituality

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Review:

Colin Stone grows up a privileged Jew in an age where material concerns seem to overwhelm any spiritual identity or loyalty. His personal journey toward faith and Jewish roots takes him on a search which leads from law school to romance with an unlikely and powerful woman in this absorbing account. -- Midwest Book Review

The existential angst of assimilated Jews in America is the theme of Stracher's fiercely honest, caustically funny and ironic first novel. Blond, blue-eyed Colin Stone ("my name sounds like an intestinal disorder") grows up in suburbia, the grandson of Holocaust-haunted, Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants and the son of a scientist father and a mother who pursues a Ph.D. in comparative literature while raising three children. Determined to join the American Melting pot, Colin's parents have shed their religion and traditions, unwittingly casting their children in a spiritual void. At the same time they send conflicting messages: to assuage their guilt, Colin is forced to attend Hebrew school to prepare for a bar mitzvah. Obsessed by the sense of a tragic history but denying that he is part of it, Colin develops friendships with other spiritual and cultural misfits, participating in encounters that often verge on the farcical but capture the tension of secular Jews walking the tightrope between assimilation and isolation. Stracher has a sharp, irreverent eye for the hypocrisies and contradictions of his protagonist's life, which he describes in prose that snaps with staccato one-liners and resonates with insight. He follows Colin's belated coming of age through a series of unfortunate relationships with unattainable women (a set piece on Colin's first date is hilarious), college in New England (transparently Amherst) and Harvard Law School, followed by virtual bondage in a white-shoe Manhattan law firm where Colin hides his religious background from the anti-Semitic boss. It's not until his endearingly neurotic non-Jewish girlfriend accuses him of being "filled with self-hatred" that Colin can move from passivity to affirmation, cast off his ambiguous identity and declare that he is a Jew. In Colin's insistently mocking voice, Stracher writes first-class social comedy. -- Publishers Weekly

From Publishers Weekly:

The existential angst of assimilated Jews in America is the theme of Stracher's fiercely honest, caustically funny and ironic first novel. Blond, blue-eyed Colin Stone ("my name sounds like an intestinal disorder") grows up in suburbia, the grandson of Holocaust-haunted, Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants and the son of a scientist father and a mother who pursues a Ph.D in comparative literature while raising three children. Determined to join the American melting pot, Colin's parents have shed their religion and traditions, unwittingly casting their children into a spiritual void. At the same time, they send conflicting messages: to assuage their guilt, Colin is forced to attend Hebrew school to prepare for a bar mitzvah. Obsessed by the sense of a tragic history but denying that he is part of it, Colin develops friendships with other spiritual and cultural misfits, participating in encounters that often verge on the farcical but capture the tension of secular Jews walking the tightrope between assimilation and isolation. Stracher has a sharp, irreverent eye for the hypocrisies and contradictions of his protagonist's life, which he describes in prose that snaps with staccato one-liners and resonates with insight. He follows Colin's belated coming of age through a series of unfortunate relationships with unattainable women (a set piece on Colin's first date is hilarious), college in New England (transparently Amherst) and Harvard Law School, followed by virtual bondage in a white-shoe Manhattan law firm where Colin hides his religious background from the anti-Semitic boss. It's not until his endearingly neurotic non-Jewish girlfriend accuses him of being "filled with self-hatred" that Colin can move from passivity to affirmation, cast off his ambiguous identity and declare that he is a Jew. In Colin's insistently mocking voice, Stracher writes first-class social comedy. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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