Tangled Family Traumas: Long Island Compromise
I wanted to read this because I’d absolutely loved Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s first novel, Fleishman is in Trouble, but I didn’t like Long Island Compromise nearly as much. Long Island Compromise starts out with the direct warning that this is a story with a terrible ending, and then explains how the the father of a wealthy family is kidnapped and held for ransom. But the book’s not a thriller or a mystery, it’s the story of how this kidnapping creates a trauma that ripples out through the family, and also how this trauma is the result of the previous generation’s traumas and the previous generation’s choices.
Must Jews be defined by trauma? Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s sharp new novel offers a surprising answer
Surely, here in 2024, decades after the Holocaust and pogroms of Eastern Europe, American Jews are no longer defined by trauma and neuroticism. The epigenetic inheritance must wear off eventually — right? For a time, Jewish literature, film and TV was dominated by the likes of Philip Roth and Woody Allen and even Larry David,...