Elijah Visible: Stories - Paperback

by Thane Rosenbaum (Author)

With the publication of Elijah Visible, Thane Rosenbaum emerged as a fresh and important new voice on the American literary scene, a young writer in the great Jewish storytelling tradition of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Isaac Babel. In this haunting debut, Rosenbaum weaves together nine postmodern tales about Adam Posner, a young man determined to climb the American corporate ladder, who finds himself paralyzed by he legacy of the Holocaust. Encumbered by the psychic screams of his deceased parents, Posner embodies the disintegration, as well as the spiritual search, of the modern Jewish family. Rosenbaum's stunning portrait of the post-Holocaust world will resonate with contemporary readers of all backgrounds.

Back Jacket

Evoking the terrifying childhood and the seemingly successful adult life of Adam Posner, Rosenbaum reveals, through the haunting cadences of his fiction, that we all remain, however transmogrified as adults, the children we once were. No one underscores this realization more than Adam Posner, determined to climb the proverbial ladder of success, yet encumbered by the psychic screams of his parents and by the memories of a world where the sun never shone. The Adam Posner who emerges from these pages, stumbling from darkness into light, is actually a composite character, a mosaic of a man whose different incarnations overlap to form a textured collage that represents the lives of America's young and affluent Jews. The duality of experiences - the juxtaposition of the jaded, materialistic lives of the young with the wraithlike apparitions of an older, tortured generation - creates a stunning portrait that suggests that the mystery of Elijah the prophet may be slipping from our grasp and that the Holocaust was perhaps just a horrific prologue to the disintegration of the modern Jewish family.

Author Biography

Thane Rosenbaum won the prestigious Wallant Prize for Elijah Visible. The literary editor of Tikkun, he also contributes to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of a novel, Second Hand Smoke. He lives in New York, where he teaches law and human rights at Fordham Law School.