The Lost Family by Jenna Blum – 432 pages
Book Blurb:
In 1965 Manhattan, patrons flock to Masha’s to savor its brisket bourguignon and impeccable service and to admire its dashing owner and head chef Peter Rashkin. With his movie-star good looks and tragic past, Peter, a survivor of Auschwitz, is the most eligible bachelor in town. But Peter does not care for the parade of eligible women who come to the restaurant hoping to catch his eye. He has resigned himself to a solitary life. Running Masha’s consumes him, as does his terrible guilt over surviving the horrors of the Nazi death camp while his wife, Masha—the restaurant’s namesake—and two young daughters perished. Then exquisitely beautiful June Bouquet, an up-and-coming young model, appears at the restaurant, piercing Peter’s guard. Though she is twenty years his junior, the two begin a passionate, whirlwind courtship. When June unexpectedly becomes pregnant, Peter proposes, believing that beginning a new family with the woman he loves will allow him to let go of the horror of the past. But over the next twenty years, the indelible sadness of those memories will overshadow Peter, June, and their daughter Elsbeth, transforming them in shocking, heartbreaking, and unexpected ways.
My Review: 4.5 stars
The Lost Family is a novel I’ve been waiting for since the minute I heard the author began working on it. Ms. Blum is a master storyteller that creates richly crafted characters, while developing complex layers to her story. Proof in point, her first novel Those Who Save Us was a New York Times bestseller.
This novel centers on Peter, a man who has lost his family in WW2 and finds himself in love, married and a father again, twenty years later. He is a wounded soul who suffers greatly from his memories of all he has lost, thus the title, The Lost Family. The scars he carries both emotionally and physically prevent him from giving all of himself to his new family. He is closed down in a way that causes everyone in his family to suffer. Who or what can compete with the ghosts of his past that continue to haunt him?
He put most of his love, passion and emotion into his restaurant, called Masha for his deceased wife and yet is also where he meets his new wife, June. This irony does not go unnoticed to the reader. The restaurant is its own character whose traits stem from the delicate yet intricate meals prepared here. As a foodie, I particularly enjoyed this addition to the novel.
Each of the three main characters represented a different decade, which gave the reader distinctive perspectives. We see their emotional baggage and what each of them was trying to confront or escape from. There is so much to chew on from this book: marriage, food, food issues, morality, holocaust, infidelities, family, survivor’s guilt, owning a restaurant, small towns girls, modeling, synesthesia and hopefully moving on. Book Clubs will love this!
FYI: The author’s next book continues with Peter’s story and I will be the first in line to read it.
Quotes I liked:
…when you found yourself alive at the end of it, you were no longer sure whether that was a good thing.”
– “…it was the blessing of scars: the deeper they were, the more you couldn’t feel anything in them at all.”
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