Rooms for Vanishing

Nadler (Wise Men) follows a Viennese Jewish family shattered by the Holocaust across four alternate timelines in his dazzling latest. In each of the four narrative threads, a different member of the Alterman family is the sole survivor. The first, set in 1979 London, focuses on Sonja, rescued from the war at age five by the Kindertransport train. She’s married to Franz, a famous orchestra conductor, with whom she lost a young daughter to a terminal illness. Franz disappears after becoming convinced the girl is still alive. Nadler then turns to Sonja’s mother, Fania, who survived a displaced persons camp somewhere in Europe and now works as a masseuse in 1966 Montreal. In the third timeline, Fania’s younger son, Moses, an infant when the family was rounded up by the Nazis, narrowly escapes being killed during an anti-communist protest in 1960s’ Prague. While Moses awaits the birth of his grandchild in 2000 New York City, the ghost of a friend begs him to return to Prague. The final iteration centers on Fania’s husband, Arnold, who lives in Vienna in 2016. He receives a message from a woman claiming to be Sonja after she tracks him down via the DNA test he shared on an ancestry site. Throughout, Nadler beautifully conveys the ways in which his characters’ sense of reality is distorted by their trauma. This is a wonder. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)