Curse of the Blumenthals

Journalist Karas (Where’s Whitey?) blends memoir and true crime in this intriguing family history. Her mother’s family, the Rhode Island Blumenthals, were a large Lithuanian Jewish clan already haunted by tragedy when Karas was born in 1944: a drunk driving accident had killed six family members nine years earlier. Then, in 1954, Karas’s 18-year-old cousin Ronnie confessed to murdering his family’s dressmaker. Ronnie claimed he did it because the woman was having an affair with his father, but relatives suspected that Ronnie was either also having an affair with the dead woman, was a bored rich kind seeking thrills, or was taking the fall for somebody else. He spent the next 12 years in prison and descended into alcoholism after he was paroled in 1967. In 2015, three years after Ronnie’s death, Karas was moved to look at the whole saga with a reporter’s eye. She probes the profound impact of the drunk driving accident on her aunts and uncles, digs into her ancestors’ entanglements with bootlegging, and reexamines the pressures put on Ronnie to redeem the Blumenthal name. Along the way, she nimbly balances the disclosure of scandalous family secrets with a prevailing sense of empathy. It’s a bruising portrait of generational trauma. Agent: Doug Grad, Doug Grad Literary. (May)