From Publishers Weekly
Leopold Vogel, who changes his first name to Manfred when his parentsfearing a future under Hitlersend him from Frankfurt to Baltimore, is a charmer. He is also linguistically and musically gifted and enough of an aristocrat to deplore the narrowness of his foster-parents, Max and Florence Gordon, and to sneer, sometimes openly, at his undereducated, pompous teachers and at the teenagers in the neighborhood. Some solace is provided by Adele, the Gordons' daughter, a sexually advanced 17-year-old, and by a pair of rich Gordon relatives who share Manfred's musical tastes. Seized by homesickness nonetheless, Manfred tries to stow away on a German liner, is caught immediately, and is brought home shamefaced, with a diminished sense of his own powers, by a bewildered Max Gordon. From here the story leaps a couple of decades to disclose a fully mature Manfred, married, prosperous and a father, and to round out the chronicle of the Gordons, enriched now by an expanded business and a son born in their middle age. Despite its length and the banality of its earnest and interminable interfamilial conversations, Kotlowitz's (Somewhere Else third novel is filled with endearing and believable characters.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In 1935 a German Jewish family, the Vogels, arrange to have their 15-year-old-son Manfred adopted by the Gordons, an American Jewish family in Baltimore. Manfred's attempts to grapple with his new life and his almost unconquerable homesickness are recorded with a sensitivity that is eloquent and never mawkish. Manfred adapts to his new school, where he must deal with a bizarre assistant principal who views the boy as an educational experiment. In addition Manfred's normal developing sexual awareness is complicated by the proximity of his new sister, Adele, the Gordon's teenage daughter. This finely drawn portrait of an adolescent forced to cope with the adult world has a depth and authenticity that will appeal to most fiction lovers. Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
