The Family Markowitz - Softcover

Goodman, Allegra

3.4

865 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671013882 ISBN 13: 9780671013882

Publisher: Washington Square Press, 1997

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Allegra Goodman has been described as an "altogether original talent" ("Los Angeles Times") whose writing is "hilarious" ("New York Newsday"). In "The Family Markowitz", Goodman writes with charm and compassion about three generations of Markowitzes making their way in America. Among them are Rose, the cantankerous matriarch; Henry, her formerly gay but now married son who runs a Laura Ashley shop in London; her younger son Ed, a terrorism expert at Georgetown; and Ed's daughter Miriam, the medical student who, to her parents' consternation, becomes a born-again Jew. Through extraordinary crises and ordinary rituals, they assert their love and independence, and never fail to speak their minds.

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Review:

The stories in this collection are so linked and consistent, the book is almost a novel. It tells the comic and endearing history of a family of archetypal American Jews. Rose, the finicky and irrational Jewish mother, becomes increasingly dependent on Percodan and on her two sons, Ed, a hard-headed academic, and Henry, an arty dilettante. Ed's writer wife Sara suffers through teaching creative writing at the local Jewish Community Center. Ed painfully endures an interfaith weekend with crushingly banal Christian ecumenists, even though both he and Sara are completely irreligious. Meanwhile their daughter Miriam alarms them by rediscovering Judaism. Goodman, whose stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, delights the reader with recognition of the funny in the familiar.

About the Author:

Allegra Goodman's first collection, Total Immersion, was published in 1989. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Commentary, and has been selected for Prize Stories 1995, The 0. Henry Awards, and other anthologies. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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