The War at Home

A Novel by
Nora Eisenberg

 

Leapfrog Press
250 Pages - 5 1/2" X 8 1/2" - Paper

ISBN 0-9679520-4-2 Trade edition - $14.95
(Click here to order)

Lucy Lehman has a secret. Everybody loves her eccentric family but nobody knows what’s really going on. Her mother is a respected dance teacher, able to calm the most incorrigible delinquents in the Bronx. Her father, just returned from WW2, is a working class hero. On a good night they’ll eat pickles and marshmallows for dinner, do the dishes in the tub while the kids are taking a bath and sing old labor songs. But on a bad night, when dad comes home in one of his dark moods and mom retreats to her bed, surrounded by the empty bottles of pills she’s charmed out of neighborhood pharmacists, the insults fly along with the furniture.
             Told with wit, understanding, and remarkable pluck, The War at Home is an autobiographical novel in the tradition of The Liar’s Club, in which insanity is the norm and an inseparable brother and sister thrive in spite of the terrifying household created by their parents.
           The War At Home evokes the lost world of New York City in the 1950’s, where apartment houses tower over abandoned orchards, lonely kids roam the woods of Bronx Park unafraid, and the Bronx River ripples with the hope of Huckleberry Finn's Mississippi.

Reviews

"Remarkable. Thrillingly well-crafted. A brilliant novel."
              —Robert Olen Butler

"This is a profoundly moving and intelligent evocation of the magnificent terrors of family life, the ones that bind us to childhood forever: beautifully written, deeply felt."
              —Vivian Gornick

"The War at Home is a novel of a child's brave journey though family madness, war and peace. Nora Eisenberg suffuses this story with the haunting immediacy of a first-rate memoir. The time is the late forties and fifties. The landscape is the Bronx, whose parks and gardens are mythicized as romantically as Bronte's English moors. This is an original, startling, and compelling novel."
               —Helen Yglesias

Nora Eisenberg is a Professor of English at the City University of New York (LaGuardia). Her work has appeared in The Partisan Review, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, Choice and Tikkun. She is the co-author of four popular books on writing, most recently The Questioning Reader (Allyn & Bacon, 2001). She lives in Manhattan.