Praise for The Worlds We Think We Know
“The Worlds We Think We Know depicts the worlds of cultural and ethnic Jews, worlds she reveals are sometimes at odds, sometimes overlapping, and always tinged with the darkness of a people long persecuted yet cut with the humor it takes to survive. . . . Through her poignant prose and spare, effective dialogue, Rosenfeld conveys a multi-dimensional portrait of the worlds of Jewishness.”—Los Angeles Review
“A wholly unique voice . . . Equal parts funny and sorrowful, strange and grounded, human and sometimes magical.”—Bustle
“Funny and poignant . . . The lush melancholy of this collection is bolstered by the characters’ deep intelligence and wit. . . . Jewish history is shredded through with displacement, and many of Rosenfeld’s characters are caught in the position of a having a long cultural history and no sense of home.”—Electric Literature
“Rosenfeld's debut book of stories is funny, touching, awkward, and wry. . . . This collection charms with quiet humor.”—Kirkus
“In this moving collection of stories, Rosenfeld examines Jewish, Israeli, and American experiences by examining their many intersections and divergences. . . . With humor and sadness, Rosenfeld illuminates how the self is at once informed by and wholly separate from culture.”—Publishers Weekly
“A profound debut from a writer of great talent.”—Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son
“I’ve read Rosenfeld’s stories with huge admiration: the tone, the perfectly balanced control of every sentence in the space made for it by the sentence before, the quiet implicitness of every gesture, the scenes so well observed that they seem like indelible steel engravings, and especially, whole lives subliminally yet substantively limned by a phrase or two. Flying beyond what we are used to calling ‘conventional realism,’ Rosenfeld points to a shimmering spot just beyond the horizon, and leaves us yearning. Is there a name for what she does? To find out, I think one must consult Borges. Or Italo Calvino. Or little fragments of Sebald.”—Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies
“A gorgeous and wise collection of stories filled with deeply human and unforgettable characters. Rosenfeld is a profoundly gifted and compassionate writer, and this is an extraordinary debut.”—Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
“Outstanding . . . Set in locales including present-day Jerusalem, the permafrost region of Russia and the streets of Manhattan, Rosenfeld’s best stories focus not only on loss, but on its aftermath: living in the presence of absence. Reprising this theme underscores a common truth about exits: when one person leaves, another gets left behind. But millennia after the Israelites fled from Egypt, is there anything fresh to say about the subject? Turns out, when it comes to Rosenfeld’s fiction, there is. . . . All the old literary tropes that get bent and burnished by [Rosenfeld] feel at once familiar and strange, fathomable and mysterious.”—Haaretz
“A master of her craft . . . [Dalia Rosenfeld] chooses words with the care of a composer choosing notes, yielding magnificent sentences. Some of Rosenfeld’s stories feature what I might call a shining sonata; others a lively allegro.”—Jerusalem Post
“Rosenfeld is very funny, Jewish, and wise.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
“A wondrous collection, rich with melancholy humor and insight. Rosenfeld’s stories will go on glimmering in your mind long after you’ve read them.”—Mona Awad, author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
2017-02-06
Stories about Jewish life—in all its painful absurdity—in the United States and in Israel.Rosenfeld's debut book of stories is funny, touching, awkward, and wry. In most of the stories, not all that much happens: instead, Rosenfeld deals with the quotidian and the absurd. In the title story, a young woman volunteers to keep an elderly Holocaust survivor company. Mostly, she watches him eat onions. "Lotzi ate it with bread, one slice for every three bites of onion, and washed it down with a cup of tepid Wissotzky made from old teabags reduced to the size of walnuts." In "A Foggy Day," a girl takes piano lessons. In "The Other Air," a woman can't stop sighing. Almost all the stories are told in the first person, and most of these narrators share a common voice. Then, too, there are certain images, or motifs, that recur throughout many of the stories: lemon trees, migraines, pianos, and books—more than books: some of her characters read compulsively, for hours, for days, almost unceasingly. Rosenfeld writes with a dry, sardonic deadpan. Her characters are lonely, homely, maladroit creatures. In "Vignette of the North," the owner of a vegetable stand finds that an artist across the way has painted her stand. "Simona stared at a crumb that had settled on the painter's beard and wished it away. As the object of artistic inspiration, she felt almost entitled to brush it off herself." She invites him to her home to finish the painting "without all the distractions of the market." She expects him to add her into the painting. He might as well stay for dinner. "I'm a very good cook," she informs him. Inevitably, she's disappointed. Readers won't be. This collection charms with quiet, wry humor.
