The Coat

by April Grunspan

Overview

"An intelligently conceived meditation on the curative powers of storytelling." –Kirkus Reviews

Seth Feinberg, in spite of being an atheist, has always seen life through a Jewish lens. Inheriting a Nazi officer’s full- length leather coat from his Holocaust-survivor grandfather motivates him to research and write fictional stories about his grandparents’ and the coat’s possible history. Ultimately, he is able to define his personal relationship with the coat, his Judaism, and the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684334384
Publisher:	Black Rose Writing
Publication date:	04/23/2020
Pages:	198
Sales rank:	1,113,432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

April Grunspan became enamored of writing while studying under author Carole Klein at Goddard College during the 1970s. She worked as a journalist and an editor until she took a long break to raise a family. She has now returned to her love of crafting fiction. Her inspiration for The Coat is a Nazi officer's coat her son did, indeed, inherit from his Holocaust-survivor grandfather. This is her first published novel.

Editorial Reviews

"An intelligently conceived meditation on the curative powers of storytelling." –Kirkus Reviews

"Imaginative, emotional, and thought-provoking." –Readers' Favorite

From the Publisher

2020-03-16
A young man’s inheritance from his grandfather—a Holocaust survivor—ignites a desire to learn more about his own Jewish identity in this debut novel.

Seth Feinberg grows up in a thoroughly Jewish home, but it's one defined by ceremony and custom more than an obviously deep wellspring of faith. Seth’s paternal grandfather and grandmother are both Polish survivors of the Holocaust. (The teenager calls them Saba and Savta, “their Hebrew honorifics.”) But they rarely speak of their World War II experiences, which remain “shadows in the twilight, barely perceptible in the fading light of memory.” When Seth turns 18 years old, Saba promises him a gift, a leather coat worn by a Nazi officer. But when Saba dies, Seth is deprived of the full story behind that coat—a “single tangible piece of my family’s history”—so he’s compelled to investigate his grandparents’ backgrounds and the tragedy that tormented them. In the process, he begins to write short stories, fictional vignettes that imaginatively explore the different roles the coat could have played, some sad and others redemptive. Grunspan delicately charts Seth’s search for some fuller sense of his family’s identity, and, by extension, his own, and his struggle to understand what his grandparents endured and how they carried on. He’s poignantly baffled by the optimism that seemed necessary but impossible for their survival: “When did optimism peek through the clouds of despair? When people found surviving family or friends? With the promise of three meals a day, even if those meals were small and unfamiliar?” The author chronicles Seth’s investigation with exceeding sensitivity and thoughtfully raises questions about the healing abilities of fiction. In addition, the embedded short tales are a surprising delight and make up for the plot’s occasional tendency to lag.

An intelligently conceived meditation on the curative powers of storytelling. (glossary)

Kirkus Reviews

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