Book review of City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

The protagonist of Temim Fruchter’s outstanding debut novel, a queer grad scholar learning Jewish folklore, describes her work as accumulating scraps. In the wake of her father’s demise, 30-year-old Shiva decides to get her grasp’s, hoping to unravel the household mysteries her mom has saved hidden from her all her life. Shiva finally travels to Warsaw, the place a sequence of experiences, from an evening in a queer bar to a efficiency of a well-known Jewish play, lead her to a deeper understanding of herself, her mom and her ancestral heritage.

This novel, like Shiva’s work, is a set of lovely scraps—scraps of folktales and reminiscence, hidden household histories, love letters, accounts of unusual happenings prior to now and current—all tangled collectively and rewoven into a complete that’s unusual, lush, imaginative and pulsing with life. Fruchter attracts on folklore remembered from her personal childhood, in addition to a whimsical (and typically darkish) universe of invented tales to create one thing fully new.

The narrative refuses to sit down nonetheless, leaping between factors of view, many years and nations as Fruchter traces 4 generations of Jewish girls from a tiny Polish shtetl within the early twentieth century to modern New York. Fruchter’s wealthy and unwavering exploration of queer lineages, alongside matrilineal and Jewish ones, is extraordinary. As Shiva turns into extra deeply immersed within the lives of her foremothers, these foremothers change into extra vibrant and detailed, in prose that strikes from shimmering and dreamlike to sharply humorous to splendidly contemplative.

Readers in search of straightforward explanations is not going to discover them in City of Laughter. Readers in search of questions—and the areas they open—will discover them in abundance. This is a e book full of stomach laughs, intergenerational marvel, queer magnificence, Jewish historical past, and storytelling that reshapes worlds. It’s a narrative in regards to the work it takes to look right into a rupture—in your self, in your loved ones, in historical past—and, via wanting, start to rework it.