An Afterlife by Frances Bartkowski

An Afterlife by Frances Bartkowski

In a small Bavarian town, a displaced persons camp set up by the Allies after World War I sets the scene for the opening of Fran Bartkowski's touching novel, An Afterlife. There, Ruby and Ilya, both survivors of concentration and labor camps, meet at a time of heightened intensity, mate and wait to find out where their lives are about to begin again, either in America or what is then known as Palestine. They have survived the war, but are hardly unscathed. Family and home will need to be created anew. They forge tentative bonds with the German inhabitants of the town, bonds that might favor them in the process of applying for visas, living contained within the boundaries of the camp, guarded, ever-walking on eggshells.

An Afterlife follows Ruby and Ilya to northern New Jersey, where they face a whole new set of challenges, as individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress in a completely foreign culture, and as a young couple who are still coming to know one another.

The novel is told mostly from Ruby's point of view, a character whose vitality and curiosity in the post-war years are her most remarkable features. Long after turning the last of its pages, readers will remember Ruby, with her pain and indomitable hope, and the love she holds for Ilya, a love that may or may not contain within it the seeds of her salvation.

Frances Bartkowski is a feminist theorist and literary critic, teaching English and Women's Studies at Rutgers University-Newark since 1989. Her books include Feminist Utopias; Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement; Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary; and the textbook, Feminist Theory: A Reader.
Elena Glasberg writes about visual arts, music, literature, and ice in publications including Political Legal Anthropology Review, Genre, The Scholar & Feminist, Journal of Historical Geography, New Zealand Journal of Photography, and Women's Studies Quarterly, and teaches in the Writing Program at NYU.
Taylor Black is a lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at NYU and currently working on a book project, Time Out of Mind: Style and the Art of Becoming, which explores the practices and uses of style in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Quentin Crisp and Bob Dylan.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781627201674
ISBN 10	162720167X
Title	An Afterlife
Author	Frances Bartkowski
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Apprentice House
Year published	2018-10-01
Number of pages	200
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.