Customer Reviews

Chains Around the Grass

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I read Naomi Ragen's weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post religiously. But I could not understand when she said this was what she had lived her whole life to write. Then I read the book.

This autobiographical novel of family resilience distills many truths that obviously took a lifetime to learn--truths that melt bitterness.

The book weaves several layers together--a of a family's travails, its near ruin in a tangle of poverty, bad decisions and relationships gone sour; a soul's awakening; and family renewal. The poetry of all three resonates throughout in a voice as subtle and profound as it is sensible.

Ragen has given few details when she notes that readers will all feel sure that their "own knowledge would have kept you safe," and then warns, "Of course, you'd be fooling yourself."

Poetry comes in what follows: "It is a false security, that feeling of superiority we have listening to someone else recount the steps to personal disaster because all of us are so very similar--we humans. We feel safe only because the teller is untalented, the truth unconveyed. And so, you must consider the soft building dust underfoot, the newness of the place."

One can only relish Ragen's description, some time later, of a child discovering the value of her own life. "She dropped to her knees, breathless, aware of her own heart pounding like some stranger begging to be let in.... She lay down in the sand. First she wiggled her toes, feeling the air pass through them like the cold touch of metal. She felt a strong sudden consciousness of her ankles and the firm muscles of her calves, the long wonderful stretch of skin, so smooth and soft, that ran from her toes to her hips. She felt aware of her stomach and the softly beating heart in her chest and her mouth and her nose and eyes and ears.

"A nameless joy began to rise inside her, wavelike. She felt it spread, as a wave of breaks and spreads, touching the far-off shore, flooding the sand in a quick deliberate flood. A sudden searing light, like the sun, pierced what had been dark and cold and filled with fear.

" 'I'm alive!' she thought, and was comforted."

Have we not all been in that place? The same child still later astonishes herself and readers with her discovery of her soul and place in the universe. The sense of discovery alone makes this wise novel worth reading. But the book also rewards readers with intense optimism, even when its characters are at their lowest.

With the same poetry that the book opens, it closes: "The echoes moved out of the corners, beating like wingless birds around the room."

I cannot recommend this book or author highly enough. Alyssa A. Lappen

This beautifully written tale brings the impoverished Markowitz family to life as their American Dream turns into a nightmare. Set in the 1950's in the projects in The Bronx, those "chains around the grass" are metaphoric as well as physical for little Sara. Her strength of character comes from the strength of her faith and is a wondrous thing to behold. The autobiographical nature of this novel makes it a heart wrenching and compelling read.  

I typically love Naomi Ragen's book, but this one left a lot to be desired. I believe that she felt that she needed to write a book and this is the first thing that came out of her pen.

While the first half of the book is the story of Dave, the husband, the second half is the story of no one. Depsite the fact that the back of the book leads you to believe it is about the daughter, Sara, she is not the main character in any sense.

There is no story for you to follow and the characters don't develop well. Their characteristics just sort of "appear."

The Jewish thread seems manufactured as if she had to insert it somewhere.

If you want to read a bood Naomi Ragen book, read ANY of the others.

Naomi Ragen's four previous novels dealt with Orthodox Jews and their personal problems and struggles. These novels were intensely human, very frank and controversial. In a departure from these themes, Ragen's new novel, "Chains Around the Grass," focuses on the unfortunate Markowitz family and their myriad personal problems.

The time is the 1950's and David Markowitz, husband of Ruth, and father of three children, is again forcing the family to move, for the fourth time in ten years. He is a dreamer who thinks that one day he will strike it rich, and his family will then have the life that they deserve. For the time being, however, the Markowitz family is moving into a low-income housing project in Far Rockaway, Queens, while David plies his trade as a taxicab driver.

"Chains Around the Grass" does not succeed, mostly because Ragen has no central focus beyond describing the family's miserable lives. She touches on many themes, but they do not coalesce into a satisfying whole. Ruth Markowitz stays at home with the children, as was traditional in the pre-feminist fifties, although she has few domestic skills. Her considerable brains and talent are underutilized, which contributes to her depression and keeps the family income low. David is a charming but unstable man. He fights with his relatives who are better off than he, and he is simply unable to work at a steady job long enough to make good. None of these themes has enough resonance to make the novel come alive.

The book does have its poignant moments, especially those that center around the middle-child, Sarah. She is an excellent student, who believes that school and perhaps religion will be her ticket out of her dead-end existence. However, Ragen does not show us what is unique about this family and why their story is worth telling. "Chains Around the Grass" is little more than a very bleak story about a very unhappy family.

I LOVED THIS BOOK.It made me laugh outloud and it made me cry.Mostly it made me think.

This is a story about real life and not the usual immigrant founding a dynasty cliche.

All of the characters are well devoloped and I found myself loving them and hating them as if they were members of my own family.And of course they could have been.

The universal message of what the measure of a man is is profoundly moving especially in our materialistic world.

I agree with another reviewer who said that the obviously autobiographical nature of this book would have been better as a memoir than disguise of fiction. Ms. Ragen treats the entire book as fiction until the last chapter, when she clearly reverts to autobiography; the switch is somewhat out of place for someone who has written such concise fiction in the past. I was disappointed.

Naomi Ragen is an international bestseller novelist, a writer of and about the core of human life. Chains Around the Grass (The Toby Press, USA, 2003) is the book Ms. Ragen says that she became an author to write. Setting the story of a poor Jewish family in the heart of America, Naomi Ragen calls for a revision of attitudes shaped by the sickness of reckless capitalism and its people who have turned into machines fuelled with business.

The novel's prologue is captivating. Through the eyes of the moment, little Sara Markowitz is shown sitting in humility in her rich uncle's house with her mother Ruth and brother Jesse out for the funeral of her father David Markowitz. Pursuing the old American dream of a well-off future, David never realizes the greater need of familial love that is showering him all along and the lives of his family chug along the uncertain paths of the business world. With the loss of David the family slumps into an indefinable channel of struggle against the demands of the society and its own integrity.

Chains Around the Grass is one of the semantically richest works carrying a number of issues. Sick capitalist values are questioned in the suffering of widowed Ruth and her children with several close, rich, relatives. The dilemma of a poor minority's identity under social pressure speaks in Ruth's resentment of changing Jesse's family name to `Marks'. What underlies insanity is illustrated cogently in Jesse's character. Sara's character embodies the process of personality development under early childhood traumas. The best explored is, perhaps, gender inequality prevailing in the social world, best instantiated in Sara's feelings of hatred towards her own brother.

Naomi Ragen's striking symbolism in her novel's situations is the quality of her work that best complements other merits. The heaven of idealized life is shattered to `chips flying away under time's relentless chisel'. When they were united and beautiful like young lush grass, they were out of reach on account of `chains' around them. One set of `ropes' is replaced with another and the dream of catching your life's beauty is never actualized until you see your life's time ending abruptly like a dream. Naomi Ragen is at her best in justice with her characters. Reality comes to them as they finally learn to `measure their life with the right yardstick'. Through Ruth's faith, we all know that a purely humanistic relationship is possible if we know the beauty of our inner self. It is an illustration of Eric Fromm's humanistic psychoanalysis; a story as real as reading one's own mind.

With all its beauty of language and elements of realistic fiction, Chains Around the Grass carries a problem as a book. The title and the prologue are suggestive of Sara as being the protagonist. It is through Sara's eyes that the tenderness of life and monsters of fear are revealed to us but Sara's character is treated scantily as compared to that of her parents and her brother Jesse. Essentially it is the story of Ruth's life. Her figure could have given a better illustrative title and prologue.

I've read other books by this author and couldn't even finish this one. It was an extremely depressing story and there was far too much philosophical mumble-jumble. Read her other books instead.

I am a huge fan of Naomi Ragen's earler books, but this one was a real disappointment! Except for the few rays of hope at the books' beginning and its end, I found it to be extremely depressing. If Ragen wanted to share her life story with her devoted fans, a memoir may have been a better genre than fiction; we would have had much more compassion and sympathy for the pitiful and pitiable family. Her new writing style is awkward and contrived...she seemed to be grasping for too many metaphors and descriptions. I am afraid that her readers will be disappointed!

I absolutely would NOT recommend this story, listed as a novel but actually an abominably written memoir. Talk about heavy-handed. Naomi Ragen has written with this with a SLEDGE-HAMMER! Nothing is remotely subtle or nuanced, as it should be in any reflection on one's past. She also drives home too many points to begin with, does so with maddening repetition, and employs excruciating melodrama. The story also lacks a consistent voice, weakening it even more. Ragen jumps blindingly from herself as a frightened little girl, to her mother as a completely overwhelmed homemaker, to her father as either a risk-taking marvel or a pitiful, fool-hardy madman, to her own (badly drawn, totally cliche-ridden) spiritual awakening, and finally, to the painfully forced-sounding "wisdom" she's supposedly gained when she's around 50 and writes the book. And that's just a sampling of the cacophony of voices that hurt the book to no end.

As a fellow Jew, I was also truly offended by her blithe, flippant, unflattering descriptions of both profoundly religious Jews and/or recent immigrants on one hand, and secular Jews (painted as oner-dimensional monsters) on the other. I recognize that part of Ragen's own decision to move to Israel stemmed from the love and peace she eventually found in a synagogue, but that fact, ironically, is lost in all the offensive, over-the-top descriptions. I shiver to think what a non-Jewish person who was reading such a book for the first time would come away thinking!

I was drawn to her precious cover photo and decided to stick with this book, however more dreadful the writing became, because at the root did lie a compelling tale. But my perseverance did not pay off. Perhaps my disappointment was heightened by having just finished Jhumpa Lahiri's BRILLIANT collection of short stories, "Unaccustomed Earth," whose characters experience similar pathos, disconnect, fears and longing as those in "Chains Around the Grass." However, the difference in quality was so startling I felt compelled to write my first review (and a negative one at that) after finally completing Ragen's book. She had fascinating material to work with; what a shame the end result was embarrassingly poor.