Confidential

Grynberg expands on a short story from his collection, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, for this deeply humane portrait of a Polish Jewish family in the decades after WWII. In episodic chapters, Grynberg pieces together the stories of his vulnerable and quick-witted characters as they struggle to move past their grief. Grandpa, a doctor, lives solely for pleasure and has sex with other women while married to Grandma, who met him when she worked as an accountant, and who eventually develops Alzheimer’s. Their son, Father, is born during the war and raised in a Jewish ghetto. Later, he becomes a respected physicist, though by the early 1990s he alienates himself from the European science community by refusing to attend conferences in Germany, ostensibly due to his “experiences in the war,” as a colleague unsatisfyingly puts it for him. He has two sons with Mom, a loving yet sorrowful woman who grew up in orphanages while her parents were detained in concentration camps (only her mother survived). The boys also carry the weight of their ancestors’ grief, which follows them as they grow up and raise their own families. Grynberg deploys wry humor in his keen depictions of parent-child and spousal relationships (“Let’s agree that once he dies, we’ll stop visiting,” Father says to Mom about Grandpa). This powerful novel is not to be missed. (Jan.)