Tar Beach

"Tar Beach" is a New York slang word for the roof where one sunbathes in the summer. Some of the naked sunbathers on the roof of their Brooklyn synagogue of 1947 in Richard Elman's lyrical & fantastic fiction imagine they are in Uganda, which, in place of Palestine, the British Government offered the Zionists at the turn of the century as a Jewish National Homeland. The Second World War has only recently ended; there's trouble in the Middle East & trouble as well for Izzy Berliner & Peter Pintobasco, & for Sam, Lillian, Big Sam Rostok, & the smart-talking feminist "angel" named Jezebel. Their sun-baked world of gossip & backbite bakes & rocks to an intoxicating babble of Yiddish, Swahili, & Brooklynese as they come to terms with each other & the meaning of their lives. Author Thomas Flanagan has praised this book: "This seems to me the finest of Richard Elman's fictions & the most ambitious. It is daring & successful in its structure, but more to the point, it is, in turn, sometimes all at once, hilarious, touching, gritty, nostalgic, & richly evocative of its time & place. He has created, within the enclosed world of his novel, the world, already long-gone, of the roofs of Brooklyn apartments in the late 1940s, suggesting the political, sexual, & emotional entanglements of that vanished time. Izzy, Lillian, & the appalling Rostock are great characters." Sun & Moon Press, 6026 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036, 1-213-857-1115.Elman, Richard is the author of 'Tar Beach' with ISBN 9781557131171 and ISBN 1557131171.