In his fourth book, Rooms for Vanishing, Stuart Nadler creates a supernatural family saga that explores what it means to live in the aftermath of tragedy and loss.
At the center of the novel is the Alterman family, torn from their home in Vienna during the Holocaust. The Altermans shatter apart when Sonja, the daughter, is sent on the Kindertransport to Britain to escape the Nazis. Nadler weaves a narrative of survival for each of the four family members, following their separate stories for decades and across the globe to the places where they eventually land.
The novel opens in 1979, with Sonja’s narrative. Sonja lives in London, but travels in search of her husband who has disappeared. She believes the rest of her family was murdered soon after she left Vienna. At times, she appears to be unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.
Fania, the mother, Moses, the son, and Arnold, the father, follow as narrators, weaving their separate tales in what appear to be parallel, or equally possible or impossible, futures. All four of the family members are lost, in exile, and grieving, while also sensing or hearing each other’s at-times tantalizingly close yet isolated existences. Their stories have moments of joy and laughter but, overall, pulsate with heartache.
Nadler is a skilled writer who creates a fantastic, and yet somehow believable, world replete with Jewish mysticism or supernatural elements, including a doppelgänger, ghosts, and the Golem of Prague. Throughout the book, Nadler explores the nature of life and death, creating more questions than answering them. Are the narrators even alive? Are they living in parallel universes or haunting each other? Is this a novel about how grief can cause people to lose their connection to reality, a complex ghost story, or both? What does it mean to continue existing when those you loved most were taken from you?
Nadler also weaves multiple mini stories, or vignettes, into each narrator’s tale in order to deepen the themes of grief and the blurred boundaries between the living and the dead. In a particularly strange but moving moment, a murdered poet’s ghost recounts to Moses how it has been following a woman both the ghost and Moses know. The woman wants the ghost to go away and tells him that she is already haunted by the death that has engulfed her during her time in Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust. “[D]o you think you are the first ghost who has ever followed me?” she asks. “Do you think I have not been living with one foot in your world ever since I was a child?”
Through poignant moments of narration, Nadler expertly develops the complexity of Jewish survival, particularly after the Holocaust, when the dead can sometimes seem as alive as the living.
Anna Stolley Persky, a journalist and lawyer by background, writes fiction and creative nonfiction. She’s been published in The Washington Post, Mystery Tribune, Ellery Queen, and Pithead Chapel.
