For readers of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn and Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale, an exquisitely moving novel about a circle of German Jewish immigrants who, on the eve of World War II, are shoved across the sea with very little left to sustain them except each other.On the eve of World War II, one German Jewish family is forced to emigrate and face a new future in America, one fraught with degradations big and small, which each person suffers and conquers in a unique way. Egon Schneider, a thriving ophthalmologist and ladies’ man in Frankfort, is reduced to being “The Cheese Man” at a local grocery in Washington Heights; Catrina Harty, a vivacious daughter of dirt-poor Irish immigrants, has fought her way to a comfortable if unhappy spinsterhood; and Meyer Leavitt, Egon’s terminally acerbic best friend, is a former children’s book author turned sandwich-board salesman turned newspaper columnist. Together they suffer the wonders and indignities of this strange new world—and each other—in the hopes of creating a permanent home for “The Lucky Ones.”
