They Shall Not Pass

"Language is not for God, but for man to get beyond his primitive feelings..."

In Frederick Mark Kramer's They Shall Not Pass: A Novel of Manhattan and Madrid, the interior ruminations of disembodied, anonymous voices twist together in slow, constant alternation, and we gradually come to know four main figures: Jacobo, an American who fought in the Spanish Civil War and then returned to New York; Esmeralda, the woman he loved in Spain, who unbeknownst to Jacobo later moved to New York with their child; Conchita, her granddaughter, an actress in experimental off-off-Broadway productions; and Joseph, Jacobo's grandson by his later marriage, who becomes Conchita's lover. The weave of their reflective monologues summons up with uncanny concreteness and detail an all-encompassing world: of their past loves, and of the vast but intimate New York City they all shared.

"A thought being thought but not felt is not a thought just a mirage..."