Bøger af Ruhama Veltfort

"Other people's passions are as hard to fathom as their dreams," Karen muses. A mother yearning for security and happiness in a second marriage, she has no idea that her loving husband, a successful scientist working on climate change, is molesting the pre-teen girls on the swim team he coaches. Spencer's feelings for "his girls" develop into an obsession as he is increasingly provoked by Karen's son Sammy, a college student defending himself against a charge of date rape. Karen's denial, fed by her own childhood anxieties and her passion for her husband, finally gives way before the revelation of truth, and she begins to feel her way to a new realization of the meaning of love. Meanwhile, Karen's older brother, a man either too spiritual or too scared for an intimate relationship of his own, finds that coming to Sammy's aid forces him to leave his monkish isolation and find his place in the real world.

Ruhama Veltfort's exhilerating debut novel delves into the nature of will and of faith, telling the story of a modern exodus that echoes the American quest for spiritual fulfillment. What begins as a search for a better life by a group of Jewish immigrants in the mid 1800s becomes the embodiment of the longing-physical, familiar, and spiritual-we all feel for a home.

Ruhama Veltfort was a young Barnard graduate living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when she gave up her newborn son for adoption. Thirty-one years later, she discovered that he was living only five blocks away from her home in San Francisco's Mission District. With tenderness and wry humor, these fourteen well-observed stories trace the roots of that cycle of relinquishment and reunion, offering an intimate perspective on the social transformations of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Lovers, husbands, children and a "rag-tag band of seekers and screwballs" wind their way through this vivid and even-handed memoir of a Bohemian "red-diaper" childhood in 1950's California, a rebellious coming-of-age in the earliest days of the Grateful Dead and an Ivy League education gone sour. Universal themes of idealism, betrayal and redemption weave through a moving account of the author's adventures in political activism and the human potential movement to culminate in a maturity graced by family, friends and an eclectic spirituality.