The Family Morfawitz
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From acclaimed author Daniel Turtel, winner of the Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel, comes The Family Morfawitz: a gripping Jewish family saga inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis.
When Hadassah Morfawitz flees Nazi Germany with her siblings and arrives in New York, she is determined to turn the city into her own Mount Olympus—at any cost. In choosing orphaned concentration camp survivor Zev Kretinberg as her husband and accomplice—ensuring his loyalty with the promise of riches and the burial of a dark past—she begins a ruthless journey toward the upper echelons of Park Avenue synagogue society. Their combined ambition knows no limits, and nothing will stand in the way of their realization of the American ideals of wealth and beauty, even if it means abandoning their son, Hezekial.
Decades later, through machinations worthy of his parents, Hezekial becomes entrusted as the family’s chronicler. As he sits with his aging father, transcribing a litany of Zev’s sins—from serving as a kapo at Gusen, to betraying the friends who helped him, to his blood-bound commitment to Hadassah despite numerous affairs and illegitimate children—the younger Morfawitz is faced with a choice: whitewash a lifetime of cruelty, indifference, and lust, or repay his mother at last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Turtel (Greetings from Asbury Park) chronicles in this messy saga a Jewish family's fate as it's driven from Eastern Europe during WWII. By the early 1980s, the Morfawitzes have become an ultrawealthy clan of real estate investors in Manhattan, where they reside and run their business from the top 10 floors of one of the many buildings they own. Each Friday night, Hersh Morfawitz shares a version of the family's origin over Shabbat dinner. According to the narrator, Hersh's older brother Hezekial, Hersh is an unreliable source who has "changed our family's origin story into a series of bad jokes." Eventually, the narrative shifts to the pogroms in Ukraine and Nazi Germany, with one family member working as a kapo at a concentration camp while others have horrific run-ins with Cossacks and Nazis (it's here that the jokes feel particularly gratuitous and tasteless, including one involving a Cossack who only wants to rape younger women). In another horrifying anecdote, a character accidentally suffocates a sibling in attempting to keep her quiet and them both undetected by the Nazis. There's no pathos or unifying plot to these threads, unfortunately, leaving readers to conclude the family's ancestral pain formed the basis for their later ruthless ambition, which is not the most novel idea. On the very crowded shelf of multigenerational family epics, this one doesn't stand out.
