In Fathers, Herbert Gold tells that most American of stories: how one American, transplanted from Europe, makes his success in the new land. The hero of the novel - a genuine, life-size hero - is the Father. His tale, told in the form of a memoir, is seen through the eyes of the son. And while one Father is at the center of the book, it extends to other fathers - grandfather and great-grandfather, the son as a boy and then as a father himself in the turbulent American of the 1960's. The various fathers of this book, those who invent themselves and those who accept what they are given, find their American culmination in the image of Sam Gold and his adventures.
The novel gathers many worlds: the village life of the old country, the ghetto in New York, the striving and lustfulness of a greenhorn making his way through the early days of the century in Cleveland, the hard times of the Depression, and the passion of the Second World War. The book ends in 1966, with the Father now in his eighties, a patriarch, wealthy, successful, full of life, still striving. Besides the central figure of Sam Gold, there are many, many others: Shoimi, the pushcart racketeer who ends up owning a hotel in Vegas; Caruso, the truck driver who steals the Father's truck out of pure exuberance; Frieda, the mother, who learns slowly, what the father has always known - "a man is never secure"; poor Uncle Ben , who cannot fit himself into American life; Myrna, the lusty woman who draws the Father to her. And the cronies at the Russian Baths who teach the son what it means to be a man; the conninving, narrow-eyed speculators and the enthusiastic gamblers, the miracle-working rabbi and the landlord who knew Eddie Cantor's wife's uncle. But most of all there is the Father himself, boisterous, powerful, funny, raucous, tender.
Herbert Gold has put firm hands on the most dangerous relies in a novelist's heart - his own life, the lives of those dearest to him - and made of this intimate understanding a novel of the widest significance. He uses elements of history and autobiography to tell us both what American is about and perhaps what it should be about. The difficult work of being human is accomplished with high spirits by the fathers and sons, children and lovers, who compose a unique American myth.
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Herbert Gold, Fathers
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