Second Hand Smoke: A Novel
2/5
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About this ebook
In the seamy atmosphere of Miami Beach's Collins Avenue, Mila Katz, a streaky card shark and confidante of mobsters, lives by the wits with which she has survived the Holocaust. Second Hand Smoke is the story of Mila's sons, Issac and Duncan, the one secretly abandoned in Poland, and the other, American-born, raised as an avenging Nazi hunter, poisoned with rage.
Told in bursts of fractured realism and dark comedy, Second Hand Smoke is a postmodern mystery of great lyrical power, deep insight, and emotional resonance.
Thane Rosenbaum
Thane Rosenbaum teaches courses in human rights, legal humanities, and law and literature at Fordham Law School. He is also an award-winning novelist (The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke, and Elijah Visible). His essays appear frequently in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and other national publications. He lives in New York City with his daughter, Basia Tess.
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Reviews for Second Hand Smoke
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5A story of the impact of the Holocaust on the lives of the next generation - the children of survivors. Duncan Katz is born of Auschwitz survivors who fled to America but continued to live the trauma of their harrowing experience in their daily lives, passing on the burden of their tortured psyches to the next generation. The mother, Mila, is the driving character --- shrewd, tough, ruthless, her main obsession is to exact vengeance for the past by rearing the new "hero" who will destroy steorotype of weak, timid Jews. Duncan was never a child in the normal sense -- his mother drove him to excel in everything, imposing a strict military discipline and a rigid schedule with no room for fun, play, or friends. The world is a jungle to be survived, everybody is an enemy. Outwardly, he becomes the "perfect" man, but he is destroyed, hollow inside. He has turned out to be a robot, incapable of feelings other than revenge, hate, a bully, unable to sustain any relationship, including even with his mother. He becomes a federal prosecutor and a top Nazi-hunter. He breaks from his family, starts his own, discovers some secrets, travels to Poland and attempts an interpretation of justice Duncan-style, and so on...The novel is well-intentioned, it draws us to the battle inside individuals who grew up in such families who have to live with their demons the rest of their lives, and to carry this burden. But the novel reads too much like the script of a commercial movie --- it sensationalizes everything so that it becomes an odd mix of suspense, crime thriller (Mila is a card shark and a gangster, a leader even of the Jewish Mafia), melodrama (Mila with cancer, reunion with a "secret" brother), and other stuff too "fantastical." I regret reading something on such a dreadful and serious subject, written in a way which "cheapens" it. Perhaps this appeals to those who like hollywood hero type movies with a bit of "historical" element thrown into it (this was highly starred in Amazon, but i should have known better).