The Family Morfawitz

Turtel (Greetings from Asbury Park) chronicles in this messy saga a Jewish family’s fate as it’s driven from Eastern Europe during WWII. By the early 1980s, the Morfawitzes have become an ultrawealthy clan of real estate investors in Manhattan, where they reside and run their business from the top 10 floors of one of the many buildings they own. Each Friday night, Hersh Morfawitz shares a version of the family’s origin over Shabbat dinner. According to the narrator, Hersh’s older brother Hezekial, Hersh is an unreliable source who has “changed our family’s origin story into a series of bad jokes.” Eventually, the narrative shifts to the pogroms in Ukraine and Nazi Germany, with one family member working as a kapo at a concentration camp while others have horrific run-ins with Cossacks and Nazis (it’s here that the jokes feel particularly gratuitous and tasteless, including one involving a Cossack who only wants to rape younger women). In another horrifying anecdote, a character accidentally suffocates a sibling in attempting to keep her quiet and them both undetected by the Nazis. There’s no pathos or unifying plot to these threads, unfortunately, leaving readers to conclude the family’s ancestral pain formed the basis for their later ruthless ambition, which is not the most novel idea. On the very crowded shelf of multigenerational family epics, this one doesn’t stand out. (Feb.)