Masterful and Powerful Book

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	• The Gravedigger's Daughter Unabridged Cds Library Edition Joyce Carol Oates Books on Taple, 2007 average customer review:based on 1 review
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Masterful and Powerful Book

I first read Joyce Carol Oates' short stories and early novels back in Moscow when I was a teenager. In the 70s, she had been already a well established internationally renowned writer of a strong, passionate, lyrical, penetrating talent. Her books were translated to many languages including Russian, and she was popular among the intellectual readers. One of her short stories, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" has been among my favorites all these years. Much later, I found out that the story was adapted to the screen as the independent movie "Smooth Talk" where Laura Dern gave a star-making performance.

Recently, I have re-discovered Oates and was fascinated to find out that she never slowed down and has been productive in many literary genres - short stories, poems, big novels. She recently started a new project, the novels for young adults and as everything Oates ever written, they are talented books with deep understanding of human nature and with the characters alive and three dimensional. Her command of language is astounding. Her style is controlling and captivating; sometimes, she likes to repeat the sentence or the description more than once to make them imprinted in the reader's memory and to stay there.

Yesterday, I finished listening to "The Gravedigger's Daughter" (2007), her 36th published novel. It is a story of a woman, a daughter of Jewish immigrants from Germany who were lucky enough to leave Munich in 1936 before 6 millions of European Jews had perished in Holocaust, and arrived to the land of opportunities, the USA. Rebecca Schwart was born on the boat in the New York Harbor what made her an American by the birth right, the first American in the family. There were not many opportunities for a middle-aged immigrant with no roots and broken English in 1936 in the upstate New York where the family of Schwarts ended up; so, Jacob Schwart, the father of the family, former high school teacher had taken a position of gravedigger and cemetery caretaker in a small town on Millburn, NY. Rebecca, the gravedigger's daughter, "the little one", had faced a family tragedy at the age of 13 that left her all alone in the world. She went through the first marriage to a dangerous, possessive, and abusive man who almost killed her and their son. She survived by running off, changing her and her child's names, assuming the new personality, re-inventing herself and trying to forget her past and the shame which came with it. The novel tell us that we can try to run from the past, to pretend it never existed but we can't separate ourselves from it from our background, from ourselves. I read in one of the reviews that Oates began working on "The Gravedigger's Daughter" after she'd found out that one of her grandmothers was a Jew. Writing the book was her way to come to terms with the knowledge, to explore such difficult and compelling subjects as immigration, identity, and struggle for survival from a female prospective. In its best parts, including those written from Rebecca/Hazel Jones' point of view and the bittersweet epilog which is the correspondence between two cousins, the novel is one of the most compelling and compassionate pieces of literature I've ever read (or rather having been read to - which only added to the incredible experience). The story of a gravedigger's daughter's and her piano-prodigy son long road to "American dream" or what Oates herself called "the drama of immigrant succession", is a masterful and powerful book for all its 500+ pages (or over 21 hours of recording on 17 DVDs) which never for a moment disappointed me.

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Unabridged on 17CDs in hardbox, library edition by Books on Tape. In 1936 the Schwarts family escapes Nazi Germany. The father, a former teacher, can only find a job as a gravedigger. Prejudice and the family's own frailty result in unspeakable tragedy.