The Family Sadness

Abstract

The Family Sadness is a novel-in-progress that spans four generations of women in one Eastern European Jewish family and engages the idea of a speculative queer lineage. The story zigzags geographically and temporally, moving from Poland in the 1920’s to Brooklyn in the 1950’s, to Maryland in the 1980’s, and finally to contemporary Warsaw. The characters communicate across space and time, and their stories are woven through a body of invented Jewish folklore that collages age-old Jewish folk tropes with a contemporary queer sensibility. The narration of this book is polyphonic – humans and other creatures, animate and inanimate, contemporaries and time-travelers all participate in building this universe. Shiva, the youngest in this lineage, travels to Warsaw amidst ancestral refractions. This is, in part, a story about how stories are made. About how what feels impossible is sometimes truest, and about what is visible when we start to pay attention.