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 163 TOWNSEND BIRMINGHAM MI 48009 TELEPHONE 248.433.3700 FAX 248.433.3702 HOURS: TUESDAY THROUGH SATURDAY II - 5:30 DKGALLERY.COM SANDEE BRAWARSKY Special to the Jewish News 899900 The A 4189 ORCHARD LAKE AT PONTIAC TRAIL IN WEST BLOOMFIELD et Restaurant (248) 865-0000 DINE-IN ONLY Open 7 Days a Week for Lunch & Dinner 1()% OFF LUNCHES $C50 starting at NW Total Bill Expires 11/30/04 COMPLETE e nr DINNERS '? Not good with any other offer. Not available on lunch or dinner specials. as low as Voted... Best Middle Eastern Restaurant by the Jewish News Readers! ok u OFF Bangkok I Sala 11111111 ill 1.01 1 TOTAL BILL! One coupon per check • Expires 11/30/04 THAI CUISINE Farmington Fills (248) 553-4220 Open 7 days a week Mon-Sat 11 am-10 pm • Sunday 4 pm-9:30 pm „ verizgpwireless 0 • • Cellular Phones • Satellite TV • Send Global International Calling WiRtt.PIS, C.1.11.1UNICA7IONS 11/ 5 West Bloomfield • (248) 681-7200 Bloomfield Hills • (248) 335-3345 2004 4276 Orchard Lake Rd. @ Lone Pine 43183 Woodward Ave @ Square Lake 54 I 27903 Orchard Lake Rd. (NW corner of 12 Mile) Cafe 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-