Resonance: A Novel (Paperback)

PARIS, 1971

In the basement of Shakespeare and Company, Sophie Hadad—a restless Wellesley student from Charleston, West Virginia, motherless and adrift—uncovers a forgotten valise. Inside lies the diary of Anna Grinberg, a Jewish sculptor born in Warsaw in 1900, orphaned when her father is murdered in a pogrom and her mother is claimed by the Spanish flu.

PARIS, 1922

Anna arrives in the city with nothing but her will to create. Her diary is fierce, intimate, and unsparing—alive with the pulse of Les Années Folles, when Montparnasse cafés throb with painters, sculptors, and expatriate writers reinventing art and language. She fights to carve a place among Pascin, Bourdelle, and Frenkel; finds allies in Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier; and collides—dangerously—with Ernest Hemingway. Even in those incandescent years, she senses the gathering shadow over Europe and writes as if time itself were fragile.

Half a century later, Sophie bends over Anna’s words and feels them press against her own life. The diary refuses to remain merely historical. It exposes her evasions, unsettles her defiance, and forces a reckoning with identity, inheritance, and the past she has tried to escape.

Resonance unfolds in two distinct voices: Anna’s impassioned diary, lyrical and immediate, and Sophie’s sharp, searching, contemporary narrative. Together they tell a story of art, exile, and Jewish survival—passed not through monuments or archives, but from one woman’s hand to another—across time.

Michael Tobin has spent fifty-one years listening to people’s stories and just as long imagining his own. A clinical psychologist and award-winning author, he began writing at twelve with a three-act play on the Warsaw Ghetto—a child’s attempt to understand courage and loss. His memoir, Riding the Edge, won the Silver Prize in the Nonfiction Book Awards; his novel The Veil earned third place in the BookLife Prize; and his essays have received awards from The Free Press and Letter Review. He writes to create characters who live at the edge of beauty and brokenness.

Daniel Chertoff worked in various aspects of the investment industry but retired early to pursue doctoral studies in English literature. He has published academic articles and is an associate editor of a scholarly journal. Daniel’s first book, Palestine Posts: An Eyewitness Account of the Birth of Israel, grew out of a series of extraordinary letters written during Israel’s war of independence. Perhaps most importantly, in the summer of 1972, Daniel was a “tumbleweed” at Shakespeare and Company in Paris—where Resonance begins.