Safe in America

Safe in America speaks to the very contemporary fear that we can't truly protect ourselves from all that surrounds us. Set in Cleveland, the novel opens in 1967 as Evan Eichenbaum suffers a heart attack; it then moves back to the thirties and early forties before coming to a heartwrenching end in the present. Three generations of the Eichenbaum family, each in its turn, face the same crucial question: How is it possible to keep those we love safe when the world at large is beyond our control? In the 1930s, Evan and his wife, Vera - once immigrants to America - try to save their Jewish relatives left in Europe, only to be challenged by hostile U.S. immigration laws; during World War II, they try to shield their sons Teddy and Hankus from the draft; in the present, their daughter, Joy, and her children face the peril of AIDS. Marcie Hershman makes these characters come alive in ways that will astonish you, and she depicts so vividly the events that threaten them that it seems as if you are seeing history from an entirely new vantage point. Although the horrors of the past sixty years form the background of the narrative, Safe in America is in fact a love story: of parents for children, of brothers for sisters, of all the pain, grief, and grace that are part of the complex ways we are bound to one another by blood. In exquisite prose and with an understanding of history as subtle as it is profound, Marcie Hershman looks into the heart of a family to reveal the real triumphs that exist within devastation, and tells a story you will never forget.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.