Jewish Book Fair
David Klein Gallery
presents
Kate Ostrove
Love And War
In Buffalo
Estate & Antique Jewelry
Decorative Items & Vintage Accessories
Friday, November 12
Preview Party 5-9pm
Exquisite first novel examines fragile bonds of siblings
and parents as one family struggles with private secrets
and public turmoil.
Saturday, November 13 1 1 -5:30pm
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Ann Arbor
brother announces to his sister
that another sister has van-
ished, as The First Desire
(Pantheon; $24) opens. Nancy
Reisman's highly praised novel is
unusual in many ways, from its prem-
ise to the quality of writing to its set-
ting. She follows the lives of the
Cohen family, from the Depression to
the years following World War II, not
on the Lower East Side or in
Brooklyn, but in a stately neighbor-
hood in Buffalo.
Sentence by sentence, this is an
exquisite story of family. Reisman
writes with assuredness and tender-
ness, as the story unfolds serially from
five perspectives: three of the four
Cohen sisters, the brother and their
father's mistress.
This writer spoke with Reisman by
telephone at her home in Ann Arbor,
where she teaches in the graduate cre-
ative writing program at the University
of Michigan. She's upbeat and both
modest and grateful about the book's
strong reception.
She speaks of her own family — her
long-married parents and three sib-
lings — with a depth of love and con-
nection. Clearly, she understands the
themes she writes of — the unbreak-
able though fragile ties among siblings;
devotion to parents, beyond their
lives; how a family is much more than
anything any one of them might have
created. But her own family sounds far
less eccentric than the characters she
has created.
When Goldie, the oldest Cohen sis-
ter, disappears one July day, there is no
sign whether she has left town or per-
haps tragically fell into nearby Niagara
Falls. The book's title is first men-
tioned in reference to Goldie, who was
born in Russia and came to America
with her mother in 1901, rejoining
her father who had come earlier and
settled in Buffalo.
For Goldie, "the first desire was to
be with her mother, the second to be
invisible." The title reverberates
through the novel in all sorts of yearn-
ings — for love and affection, for
rootedness, for something that feels
like happiness, for freedom — as the
characters affirm their ties to the fami-
ly and also seek to vanish and be inde-
pendent of it.
Although Rebecca Cohen, the late
family matriarch, is absent through the
novel, she has a profound influence on
all of the characters, sending "ripple
effects through their lives," as Reisman
explains.
The novelist captures the small
moments of life — a grown daughter's
pleasure when her father calls her by a
childhood endearment, the silent
understandings between sisters as one
washes the hair of another — and the
emotional static that erupts in fami-
lies.
Although Reisman shifts the story-
telling angle among characters, she
keeps the narrative in the third person.
Of Goldie, who loves books and
resents the responsibilities she has for
caring for the others, Reisman writes,
"She found that slices of herself were
missing and she imagines her body to
be a variegation of solid stripes and
empty space, like a wrought-iron
fence. "
Sadie is the most grounded, the only
sibling to marry and have children,
who maintains a Jewish household and
whose life is most connected to the
Jewish community; she secretly refuses
her father's command to sit shivah for
Goldie. "You can't erase a person," she
says.
Celia is impaired and needs the fam-
ily more than any of the others. Irving
loves to play cards and go out with
women, often invading the petty cash
box in his father's jewelry store and
turning to Sadie to repay his debts.
For him, the name Irving is a cloak
that doesn't fit, and he takes on a gen-