Flora's Suitcase

Rabinovich's quirky, wry and perceptive debut won HarperCollins's ""Best Seller"" contest to launch a first-time novelist. Her narrative focuses on an initially hopeful Jewish-American woman who leaves Cincinnati in 1933 and moves with her quietly domineering husband and their baby to Colombia, where she copes with culture shock and his obstreperous, Russian-Jewish emigre family. Three more children and a quarter century, later, Flora Grossenberg has been worn down by her manipulative husband, a textile manufacturer, by his venomous family and by Colombia itself, portrayed here as a deeply superstitious, backward country beset by endless civil wars. By the late 1950s, when Flora makes her first return trip to the U.S., she is full of suppressed rage, stifled by the wrong choices she made by bowing to her husband's will. Rabinovich, who was born in Colombia and now teaches writing at Brooklyn College, invests this exotic adventure with mordant feminist observations of cross-cultural misunderstandings, but her characters are too often caricatures (e.g., Bolivariana, the Grossenbergs' wizened, defiant maid, who claims to be freedom-fighter Simon Bolivar's illegitimate daughter; and Harold, Flora's eccentric brother-in-law, obsessed with mangos, who blows off his toe with a rifle). Flora's suitcase, symbol of her hope that she will someday escape her frustrating life, in the end becomes a poignant metaphor for her failure to do so. Editors, Sharon Bowers, Fiona Hallowell; agent, Jimmy Vines. (Sept.)