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    As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel
    Unavailable
    As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel
    Unavailable
    As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel
    Audiobook12 hours

    As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel

    Written by Elizabeth Poliner

    Narrated by Janet Metzger

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    An Amazon Best Book of the Year A multigenerational family saga about the long-lasting reverberations of one tragic summer by "a wonderful talent [who] should be read widely" (Edward P. Jones).

    In 1948, a small stretch of the Woodmont, Connecticut shoreline, affectionately named "Bagel Beach," has long been a summer destination for Jewish families. Here sisters Ada, Vivie, and Bec assemble at their beloved family cottage, with children in tow and weekend-only husbands who arrive each Friday in time for the Sabbath meal.

    During the weekdays, freedom reigns. Ada, the family beauty, relaxes and grows more playful, unimpeded by her rule-driven, religious husband. Vivie, once terribly wronged by her sister, is now the family diplomat and an increasingly inventive chef. Unmarried Bec finds herself forced to choose between the family-centric life she's always known and a passion-filled life with the married man with whom she's had a secret years-long affair.

    But when a terrible accident occurs on the sisters' watch, a summer of hope and self-discovery transforms into a lifetime of atonement and loss for members of this close-knit clan. Seen through the eyes of Molly, who was twelve years old when she witnessed the accident, this is the story of a tragedy and its aftermath, of expanding lives painfully collapsed. Can Molly, decades after the event, draw from her aunt Bec's hard-won wisdom and free herself from the burden that destroyed so many others?

    Elizabeth Poliner is a masterful storyteller, a brilliant observer of human nature, and in As Close to Us as Breathing she has created an unforgettable meditation on grief, guilt, and the boundaries of identity and love.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateMar 15, 2016
    ISBN9781478905301
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for As Close to Us as Breathing

    3.5/5

    59 ratings9 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      A truly rewarding Jewish family saga, reaching from 1948 to present day. Three sisters - Ava, Vivie, and Bec - find their way through minefields of traditional Jewish wife-life and try to keep their children on track. Their inherited summer home on "Bagel Beach" on the Long Island Sound in Woodmont, CT serves as the relief valve for the strict Sabbath standards set by their husbands. The novel captures the segregated lives along the shore perfectly, with each ethic group savoring their own enclave. The only person crossing the boundaries is Sal, the Good Humor Man, who plays a critical role in the summer that changed everything.The portrayals of the children, caught up in the rituals of their parents but yearning to push into new territories, are most vivid and the multiple points of view enrich the story beautifully. Those readers unfamiliar with Jewish rituals will feel like they are entering new turf, and Jewish readers will feel like they have the chance to connect with their recent ancestors. Beautifully executed, like lean corned beef, bursting with flavor with no fat.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this -- I thought the characters were all compelling and the story drew me in quickly. A bit soapy, perhaps, but definitely a great weekend read.
    • 4/5
      This is a multi-generational novel about a Jewish family and a how a tragedy affects all of their lives through the years. The novel begins in 1948 as the women and children of the family go to their cottage at the beach in Connecticut for the summer - their husbands only come up on weekends. The family consists of three sisters and their children. The reader is told very early on that a tragedy occurs that summer that affects everyone but it isn't until very late in the book that the tragedy is totally explained. The book switches back into history when the sisters were young and then into modern day when the children are grown up and we see how everyone dealt with the tragedy that happened that summer. I had a little trouble following all of the time changes and different stories but once I finished the book and saw the entire story and it all made sense, I appreciated the story and what the author was trying to do. I enjoyed the book and would read this author again.
    • 4/5
      Good book, Liked the time line issues.
    • 5/5
      Told by Molly, as she looks back on her life as a member of a large extended Jewish family. The central event of their lives is the accidental death of her younger brother Davey, which we learn on the very first page. Then she takes us back to learn about and understand Molly's mother, and her mother's sisters, as well as a cast of cousins and friends. But the story keeps circling back to the death, and how it affected various family members, at the time, and for years afterward. Well written with well-developed characters, this is a deep study of a family, their lives and loves, and well-meaning steps and mis-steps.
    • 4/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and look forward to discussing it at bookclub. The development of characters, relationships, and settings made it easy for me as the reader to envision all that was happening. I was particularly taken with the relationship between Molly (the narrator) and her Aunt Bec, who early in the book advises Molly "...you have to be yourself. You have to. Or something in you dies." If you enjoy family sagas, this is one that will suck you in early on and keep you fully engaged until the last page...
    • 4/5
      family tragedy set on a beachtown in connecticut with Jewish families on summer vacation
    • 4/5
      In some ways the Jewish family at the centre of this novel are almost as wacky as the Mormon family at the centre of the previous book I read. In both cases, there is a heavy burden (my word) of religious rules and practices imposed on the family. Outsiders are shunned and even almost dehumanised. Of course, the setting of this story just after WW2 would surely also have given Jewish people a particularly strong sense of needing to stick together to ensure their own survival. There's another theme interwovan with this - the story of feeling reponsible for others in the family and the way it particularly impacts on the siblings of a boy who dies in an accident. Further, there are issues of sexual identity and coming of age - again, being 1948, there are very different perspectives than would be expected today. I'm more interested in grief, death and personal relationships than Jewish religious experience, but Elizabeth Poliner writes in such a way that I found myself being somewhat sympathetic to the narrator's (& author's) religious perspective.
    • 3/5
      This book concerns a dysfunctional family, the Leibritskys, reminiscent in ways of the one in the movie “August: Osage County.” The focus of the family, narrator Molly's mother Ada, is a narrow-minded, bitter, and truculent woman, whose attitudes and choices have a disproportionate and negative effect on the rest of her extended family. As the story, told in flashbacks, begins at the start of the summer in 1948, we learn that Molly's little brother, ten-year-old Davy, died late that summer in an accident. The family was at their summer beach house in Woodmont, Connecticut on "Bagel Beach," an section predominantly inhabited by Jews, because of their exclusion from many other areas. The rest of the book goes back and forth in time (to 1999), revealing the perspectives of different family members, as we find out what happened to Davy and how it changed the lives of all of the family members thereafter.The father, Mort, is quite religious, and insists that the rest of the family meet their obligations as Jews, at least in terms of observing the letter of ritual acts if not the spirit. Some of these rites, it should be noted, play a large part in the story, but inexplicably for an author that presumably would like a wide audience, are never explained, such as the minyan, the separation of foods, and the particulars of the Sabbath meal.In another parallel to “August: Osage County,” the family members all gather after the death, and their hostilities toward one another are unleashed. Conflict and chaos rip the family apart, and even years later, the destructive effects are palpable.Discussion: I didn’t really get why all the family members carried around so much guilt that should have rightly belonged only to the matriarch, Ada.In addition, in my opinion the author spent a lot of verbiage on details not really essential to the story. Most of the characters were too pathetic for me to feel anything for them except pity or contempt. Moreover, nobody in the family had any backbone except when it came to decisions that didn't really matter.Evaluation: There really isn't much pleasant about this story of ruined lives without redemption, and I wasn't much taken with the writing. But the book does provide a look at the ethnic prejudices that prevailed in post-WWII America, especially against the Jews, who experienced restrictions in employment, housing, and other areas.