Just Enough to Start Over

nThis beautiful and deeply moving novel by Sara Gothelf Bloom takes us through a very hard time in history, but there is so much soul on display that one can only rejoice. Hanna is among the vivid characters in contemporary fiction, and she--with the Dubrovsky sisters from the earlier generation of this marvelous family--will stay in my mind. Just Enough to Start Over is an impressive achievement, one that reminded me at various times of I.B. Singer. A vivid chronicle, told with poetic specificity and hard-won elegance. n--Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Borges and Men nThree German-Jewish sisters must start over (and over) in Sara Gothelf Bloom's vivid novel of historical displacement and the knotty and abiding nature of familial bonds.n nA newly-married pianist, a painter, and a budding poet, respectively, sisters Bertha, Annelene, and Hilde Dubrovsky have grown up in comfort and prosperity in Mannheim, Germany, but as the threat of the Nazi Party looms ever larger, the family packs their lives into two crates and flees to China. Just Enough to Start Over follows their experiences as refugees in Shanghai (and London, and Toronto); their crash-landing with an unknown cousin in New York; the slow effort to build a life in a new country; and, later, the struggle of Bertha's American daughter to find her own identity outside of her family's difficult history.n nEchoing the sisters' odyssey is the story of the family's three valuable paintings. First stolen, then transported through wartime Europe and the Soviet Union as plundered art, the journeys of these artworks and the lives they intersect with deepen the book's perspectives. Meanwhile, the novelist's versions of the Austro-English Expressionist painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, the German painter Max Beckmann, and members of the Soviet Trophy Brigade all play their parts in this wry and poignant novel of loss, resilience, and the saving grace of making art.n