Coming Home by Laurence Brown; ISBN: 978-1477591819; 431 pages plus appendices, retail price unlisted
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — This is Australian novelist Laurence Brown’s second novel. Previously he published Sicarri, a set of stories dealing with zealots and thugs who ruled through intimidation. Coming Home is broader in scope, tracing a family through four generations from the time of the Kishinev pogrom up to the modern era.
Wounded in the pogrom, a father and elementary school-aged daughter get away from the scene where most of their family was brutally murdered by Cossacks, leaving behind an infant daughter, whom the father placed with his kindly, gentile neighbors, to raise.
He also entrusted with them a letter and an engraved wedding band, which he urged his neighbors to present to his daughter on her wedding day. The letter revealed to the girl the facts that she had been left behind, that she was a Jew, and that she had an older sister who was in possession of an identically engraved band. The father pleaded to both daughters that they somehow find each other by comparison of their two rings.
With that as a premise, we follow multiple generations of the two branches of the family — one branch to Lithuania, South Africa, and Israel; the other to the highest echelons of the Soviet Union’s ruling Communist party. In the telling, author Brown inserts his characters —Forrest Gump style — into world events, not just as incidental characters, but as important actors in world affairs. This stretches credulity.
A serious flaw in the book is the fact that it was apparently rushed to the printer, without sufficient time for fact and typo checking. There are wrong dates, and enough wrong facts to discourage readers who demand verisimilitude in their historical novels. For the record, the United States, not the Soviet Union, was the first country to extend diplomatic recognition to Israel. And it can hardly be said that Egypt won the 1956 Sinai War, even if the United States did demand that Great Britain, France and Israel withdraw their victorious troops.
I hope that these flaws can be corrected in a second edition of the book, leaving behind the essential story of two families linked by a tragedy searching for each other.
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com