Heirlooms: stories - Softcover

Hall, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 188615791X ISBN 13: 9781886157910

Publisher: BKMK Press, 2016

Synopsis

Fiction. Jewish Studies. Montaigne Medal Finalist. Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Marge Piercy. HEIRLOOMS begins in the French seaside city of Saint-Malo, in 1939, and ends in the American Midwest in 1989. In these linked stories, the war reverberates through four generations of a Jewish family. Inspired by the author's family stories as well as extensive research, HEIRLOOMS explores assumptions about love, duty, memory and truth.

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Hall’s short stories and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies including Black Warrior Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, Fifth Wednesday  and New Letters, which awarded her the Alexander Cappon Prize for Fiction. She has received other honors and awards from Lilith, Glimmer Train , the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ragdale, the Ox-Bow School of the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Hall is a Professor of English in the creative writing program at the State University of New York at Geneseo where she holds the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She lives in Rochester, New York with her husband and daughter. Her family’s wartime papers and photographs, the inspiration for these stories, were recently donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

From the Back Cover

Heirlooms is a fascinating series of interconnected stories about members of an extended family of Jews before, during and long after the holocaust, in France, in Israel, in the United States. Different women and men define themselves in resistance, denial and ignorance of history through four generations...In some ways the entire book is a meditation on the meaning of family and history. -Marge Piercy

Heirlooms is an exquisite and thrilling collection. In fearless and incandescent prose, Rachel Hall traces the fragile resilience and quiet horrors of those displaced by war. She happens to be writing about the Second World War, but these are stories that speak to the essential human experiences of exile and loss and survival. Heirlooms captures what it is to be a refugee, and an immigrant, with a delicacy and precision that delights and haunts. -Steve Almond

Heirlooms is a masterful collection, infused with devastating beauty. Focusing her precise artistry on the chaos of war, Rachel Hall succeeds in animating loss, preserving memory, and adding powerful imaginative truth to the historical record. -Joanna Scott

In Heirlooms, Rachel Hall has built an irresistible and gem lit kaleidoscope, capturing within it the intricate, ephemeral private moments of women and men fleeing wartime violence, neighbors who bear witness or turn away, and children who carry the legacies. Each turn brings another vital angle, another dimension: Hall's vision crosses borders and generations, through language at once lyrical and deeply distilled. Heirlooms is a beautiful, transporting, and necessary book. -Nancy Reisman

Edition details

• Publisher: BKMK Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 188615791X
• ISBN 13: 9781886157910
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192