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The War at Home
A Novel by
Nora Eisenberg
A Washington Post Book World
Book Rave of 2002
Nominated Best Book of the Year, ForeWord Magazine
Lucy Lehman has a secret. Everybody loves her eccentric family but nobody knows what's really going on. Her mother is a beautiful dance teacher, whose creative movement classes can calm the most incorrigible Bronx delinquents. Her father, just returned from World War Two, is a working class hero. The trouble is, he’s still at war. More familiar with battle fields than a home with a wife and kids, he does combat with neighbors, his employers, his children, and above all his wife. A charming oddball in the straight-laced 1950’s, Tippy Lehman is overwhelmed by her husband's war, leaving the kids to hold home and family together.Told with wit, understanding, and remarkable pluck, The War at Home is part memoir, part novel, and all heart as it recounts the story of an inseparable brother and sister flourishing despite a household in which insanity is the norm. Every page summons the lost world of the outer boroughs 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.
"Nora Eisenberg's engaging debut novel takes place
in the years after the heroine's father has returned from World War II only to ravage his
own family. Eisenberg's "memoir-novel" recounts the savagery that family members
can and do dole out to one another… With her spiky, keening prose, Eisenberg depicts
the world from a child's point of view, deftly mixing nostalgia and knock-kneed
vulnerability."
"Nora Eisenberg paints an intriguing portrait of a red-diaper childhood in a
bygone middle-class Bronx...establishing through the wide-eyed point of view of 6-
year-old Lucy Lehman an unconventional, darker side of post-World War II America."
"Ralph and Tippy Lehman, the parents in this
touching autobiographical first novel of a Bronx childhood, give new meaning to the word eccentric
as they careen from one wild scenario to another. Ralph is the World War II-decorated
father whose "battle fatigue" so clouds his thinking that he sometimes mistakes
his wife and children for the enemy. In addition to the war in his mind, the war between
Ralph and Tippy flares up periodically and they inflict wounds on each other and on the
kids, Lucy and Nicky. No ordinary 1950’s mother, Tippy is a temperamental artist who
breathes drama and culture like oxygen and descends into pills and madness in the latter
half of the book. Lucy and Nicky mostly raise themselves, weathering storms, neglect and
abuse at home and, in many cases, caring for their parents. Their self-reliance and
fearlessness are remarkable. To smooth out the narrative’s rough edges, Eisenberg
(English, CUNY) weaves in patches of tranquility, moments of hope, and comic relief. This
poignant and unforgettable first novel deserves the widest possible audience."
—Library Journal, Starred
Review (January, 2002)
"Billed as a "memoir-novel," this book by
Bronx native Eisenberg is a tenderly written yet harrowing portrayal of a family’s
disintegration in the years after World War II. Lucy Lehman is just a child when her
father returns from the war. According to Lucy’s mother, Tippy, he was once a sweet
young man, but now he is angry and violent, his screaming rages most frequently directed
at Lucy’s rebellious older brother, Nick, and Tippy, a children’s dance
instructor (her real-life image graces the book’s cover). When Lucy is 10, whatever
tacit agreement the family had abruptly ends, and her father leaves the house and shacks
up with a mistress named Liberty in the first of several dalliances. This development
throws Tippy into a downward spiral of prescription drug abuse and bizarre, erratic
behavior that forces Lucy and 13-year-old Nick to fend for themselves. To escape the
"chaos of home," they rely on their self-sufficiency as volunteer gardeners at a
park and botanical garden and then at the family’s Camp Pohogo, where a parental
reunion occurs. The reunion, however, like most of Eisenberg’s book, remains joyful
only for a fleeting moment. By Lucy’s teen years, Tippy’s over-the-top rampages
(à la Mommie Dearest) force brother and sister to run away, and though Nick revels
in his independence, Lucy eventually returns and decides to face womanhood back in the
hopeless reality of life with Mom in the Bronx. There are no blue skies in
Eisenberg’s barely fictionalized and often excessively grim account, and this would
prove daunting if her prose weren’t so graceful. A powerfully somber meditation on
the indelible mark of familial strife on children, this impressive first novel is infused
with genuine compassion and sorrow."
—Publishers
Weekly (January 23, 2002)
"No punches are pulled in this gritty "memoir
novel" by Eisenberg, who draws on her own Bronx upbringing to depict a nightmare.
Eisenberg’s tale is so poignant that it’s…Painful to read, yet hard to put
down; a family drama akin to those of Eugene O’Neill."
—Kirkus Reviews (Dec.1, 2001)
"Lucy Lehman wins our hearts. She is resilient, she is smart, she is loving. No ordinary coming-of-age story…[this] is, in fact, a harrowing story, albeit one told with humor and compassion. One that, despite the pain that continuously breaks through like grass on an abandoned stretch of cement, ends triumphantly.
"—The St Petersburg Times (Feb. 17, 2002)
"The War at Home is one of those accidental gifts for which one feels grateful, a powerful novel, superbly crafted."
—Forward, America's Jewish Newspaper (Feb. 15, 2002)
"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
—Lynne Sharon Schwatrz "What an amazing book! I found myself laughing out loud at many of Eisenberg's beautifully crafted zingers and at other times swept away by the poignancy of the family drama and the brilliant recreation of the past. This memoir-novel—the triumph of a survivor—is essential reading for our times--rich in humor, understanding, forgiveness—and most of all—full of love."
—Julia Markus
Nora Eisenberg Answers Some Personal Questions
Check out Nora Eisenberg's New Novel
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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 with her family in Manhattan. Her new novel, Just the Way You Want Me will be published by Leapfrog in
August, 2003.
Available Now
CATEGORY: Fiction
PAGES: 217
TRIM: 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-9679520-4-2
PRICE: $14.95/ Paperback Original
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