In the King's Arms

by Sonia Taitz

Overview

Lily Taub is the brilliant, beautiful and headstrong American daughter of Holocaust survivors. Seeking relief from their traumatized world, Lily escapes to Oxford University, where she meets Julian Aiken — black sheep of an aristocratic English family. When Lily is invited to the family’s ancestral home over Christmas vacation, her deepening romance with young Julian is crossed by a shocking accident that affects them all. Julian must face the harsh disapproval of his anti-Semitic family, who consider Lily a destructive force, not only in Julian’s life, but to their own sense of order. In the King's Arms is a lyrical, literary novel about the healing possibility of love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780975561867
Publisher:	McWitty Press
Publication date:	10/11/2011
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.53(d)

Editorial Reviews

Nominated for The Sami Rohr Prize in Fiction by The Jewish Book Council

"Sonia Taitz weaves a witty, literate, and heartfelt story filled with engaging characters and relationships. The reader is moved by and invested in Lily's realization of who she is, where she comes from, and her hopes for a more tolerant and healed world."— Renita Last, Jewish Book World

"Taitz zigzags among her culturally disparate characters, zooming in on their foibles with elegance and astringency. She keenly pinpoints the ways children filter their parents' identities; embracing what works, discarding what doesn't and then moving on. Or not." &mdash Sunday New York Times Book Review of In the King's Arms

"Mid-1970s London may be thirty years post-war, but New Yorker Lily Taub, who embarks for graduate studies at Oxford University, can't seem to neatly cover the territory between the Europe her Holocuast survivor parents remember&mdashand burned into her own consciousness&mdash and the bright, shining new world she longs to prove exists, and to inhabit....This novel is richly embroidered, each page a highly polished prose gem, rendered with a loving literary hand, a gift to readers, a mitzvah." &mdash Lisa Romeo, ForeWord Reviews

"Sonia Taitz weaves a witty, literate, and heartfelt story filled with engaging characters and relationships. The reader is moved by and invested in Lily’s realization of who she is, where she comes from, and her hopes for a more tolerant and healed world." &mdash Renita Last, Jewish Book Council Review of In the King's Arms

"Along the way, I thought often of Evelyn Waugh &mdash the smart talk, the fey Brits, country houses, good clothes, lineage for centuries. And I thought how, as the decades rush by, Waugh increasingly seems to me as remote as…oh, Thomas Hardy.... What Sonia Taitz has done is, therefore, very appealing. She’s created a young, attractive, brilliant Jewish graduate student from New York’s Lower East Side &mdash the daughter of Holocaust survivors, even &mdash and, in 1975, tossed her into the rarified world of Waugh. This is no Philip Roth Jew who believes the goyim are, if not actually dumb, less bright: “She loved the strength of Renaissance brass, and the moody words ‘heath’ and ‘moor.’....And now we’re thrust into a love story, rich in complications, richer in echoes like her parents in the Nazi camps, Lily is out of her element. Happily, Taitz has a light touch; there’s no ponderous organ music underneath these moments, they’re just markers, sign posts of the distance traveled.' &mdash Jesse Kornbluth on HeadButler

"The daughter of concentration camp survivors suffering great personal pain and loss, Taitz finds hope for the future in the human capacity for compassion and change. In her engaging novel, the immature and irresponsible Julian rises to the occasion, becoming, we are led to believe, a truly noble man and mensch. It is in Lily, though, that Taitz shows us the most convincing transformation, from heroine to hero, with the courage to look back on a dark river of pain without losing the chance to proceed on her path." &mdash Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet's review of In the King's Arms
"In her gloriously rendered novel, In the King's Arms, Sonia Taitz writes passionately and wisely about outsiders and what happens when worlds apart slam into each other." &mdash Betsy Carter, author of The Puzzle King, The Orange Blossom Express, and Nothing to Fall Back On.

"In the King's Arms is a deeply felt, lyrical novel, at once romantic and mournful, that brings to life the long tentacles of the Holocaust through the generations....The author's finely wrought observations about class structure in England, the vagaries of first love and the overriding possibility of redemption will stay with the reader long after finishing this book." &mdash Emily Listfield, author of Best Intentions and Waiting to Surface.

“ Sonia Taitz’s witty, sensuous prose enlivens this tale of two cultures converging in Oxford in the 1970s. Lily of the Lower East Side, daughter of Holocaust survivors, falls in love with a son of the English gentry and is drawn into his family drama. Taitz deftly contrasts the lovers’ opposing worlds &mdash and the surprising middle ground where they embrace.” &mdash Barbara Klein Moss, author of Little Eden"s

Praise for Mothering Heights:
"Wise, witty, and often hilarious."
— Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

In this beguiling first novel, Taitz interweaves Lily's comical fish-out-of-water mating dance with her family's grim and discomfiting Holocaust chronicles. Improbably, the mix works.
—The New York Times Book Review

Jan Stuart