Quarry

The five stories and one novella in Grossinger's debut fiction collection, which has won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, center on Jewish-Americans who are haunted by persecutions imagined and real, including the Holocaust. It isn't the absent victims or direct survivors of the Holocaust who are Grossinger's focus, but their children and grandchildren. In ""Dinosaurs,"" a paleontologist discovers that his recently deceased grandfather's estate is immodestly large due to his racketeering. The young protagonist of ""Hearts & Minds"" finds himself falling in love with an older woman even as he comes to understand that his separated parents are willing to play only modest roles in his life. The eponymous novella--the most powerful tale here--is told from alternating points-of-view by a father and his son. It traces their lives through a series of calamities: the death of the boy's mother; the estrangement of his sister; the pair's emotional adoption of a couple of refugees permanently haunted by their experiences in the concentration camps the father helped to liberate. Grossinger displays a strong command of dramatics and a plaintive writing style suitable for taking on the most emotional of topics. The structure of his stories appears scattered at times, but that seems almost a proper response to a world in which tragedy can be so overwhelming that its survivors come to believe, as one says here, ""that there is no fitting end for people like us."" (May)