cover image The Far Euphrates

The Far Euphrates

Aryeh Lev Stollman. Riverhead Books, $21.95 (206pp) ISBN 978-1-57322-075-0

Reminiscent of a Hasidic tale in its deceptively quiet, gentle tone, this masterful debut offers up its darkest secrets with heartbreaking delicacy. The son of a rabbi in Windsor, Ontario, Aryeh Alexander ben Shelomo lives in a sheltered world tightly circumscribed by his parents' friendship with the family of Cantor Bernard Seidengarn, which includes his wife, Berenice, and his twin sister (and fellow Auschwitz survivor), Hannalore. This tight-knit family circle can't banish unspoken memories of the Holocaust, memories that debilitate Alexander and send him into escapist reveries. When his mother, Sarah, worries over his daydreaming ways, the three women consult a gypsy ""prophetess""; later, when 16-year-old Alexander withdraws to his room for a year, his father consults a Hasidic rebbe. Thus buffeted between ""my mother's uncontrollable fears and my father's unanswerable intellectual and spiritual pursuits,"" Alexander harbors a disturbing secret, a secret even he doesn't fully understand, about the horrors that the twins suffered in the laboratory of Auschwitz's mad doctor Josef Mengele. Though steeped in religious sensibility and learning, this warm, contemplative novel works on its readers' most visceral sympathies and fears. German rights to Kindler Verlag; Dutch rights to Meulenhoff. (Sept.) FYI: Stollman, the son of a rabbi, is an interventional neuroradiologist whose stories have appeared in Story, the Yale Review, American Short Fiction and Tikkun.