REVIEW | ‘THE HOUSEGUEST’

As Nazi atrocities threatened the Jews of Europe, members of the American Jewish community were deeply divided over ways to sound the alarm and aid their people. The struggle to find a shared solution (and to build support for any such solution in the wider American populace) is the backdrop to Kim Brooks' debut novel, 'The Houseguest.”

A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Brooks has penned a novel largely set in Utica, N.Y., but with the world as its larger stage. The character of the title is Ana Beidler, a woman who arrives in Utica as a refugee but is not precisely who she seems to be. Throughout the novel, Ana is compelled to become the person she perceives the men around her need or want her to be. Her inconstancy is essential to the novel's plot as well as to its theme of uncertainty in the face of implacable moral conundrums.

Also at the novel's center are Abe Auer and Max Hoffman, the former the owner of a junkyard and the latter a rabbi in Utica. It is Abe's family that takes Ana in after a friend of Max's - a man who longs for the Jews of the world to take up arms against their oppressors - entreats the rabbi to find a place for her to stay. Abe and Max each carry a secret shame that wells up and threatens to overtake the lives they have built for themselves in Utica.

Brooks does a masterful job of withholding key details of her characters' lives until the precise moment when they must be revealed. She accomplishes this with subtlety and grace, building the reader's empathy for her characters, each of whom seeks a way to survive with a clear conscience as personal and world events relentlessly reshape their lives.