The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin - Hardcover

Rosie Kamin is first seen through a blur of mundane activities on the streets of Paris as she walks home. But something feels "off," distorted. A tension pulses underneath the surface of these details (French pastry; a broken shoe strap; the metro station), and when Rosie enters her apartment building, she sees a man sitting on the steps. "How did you find my address?" she asks. His name is Benyoub, a past lover. He announces that he needs 20,000 francs. In this compelling first chapter, the reader glimpses a Paris rarely seen.

A kind of no-nonsense style characterizes Richard Teleky's storytelling. There is no lingering over the feelings sustained through hardship or tragedy. The riveting sorrows of Rosie Kamin's life are held up like flash cards: her parents' internment in Auschwitz, where her father was killed; her mother's resolute silence and eventual suicide in Pittsburgh, where she'd gone to raise her two daughters. Haunted by the suicide and her mother's unrevealed life in the concentration camp, Rosie nonetheless falls into the vicious lethargy of taking care of her obtuse, demanding stepfather. Finally breaking the spell, she heads off for Paris, there to carry on her family legacy of denial and escapism for another 20 years.

This is a novel about breaking the spell of secrets and denial. Rosie remains as disconnected in Paris and adrift in her life, even at the age of 40, as she was after graduating from college in the U.S. The reappearance of Benyoub, however, forces her to begin to integrate her past sorrow and to commit to a journey, with her eccentric sister, of a reconciliation with the past.

The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin is full of unusual characters, tersely drawn, and Teleky's minimalist style builds satisfyingly toward Rosie's self-realization. But occasionally the parading of crises unattended by reflection, varying pitch, or emotion ("In the spring of her graduating year, six months after Elza's funeral, Rosie was raped") annoys. In this regard, the novel, largely unfelt, does not extract sympathy from the reader. --Hollis Giammatteo

A tender and insightful first novel by Toronto-based short-story writer Teleky (Goodnight Sweetheart, not reviewed) offers a quietly compelling view of a young American Jew in Paris who's driven to seek an identity that will sustain her when her longtime lover suddenly dies. Rosie Kamin, born and raised in Pittsburgh, had a repressive but otherwise uneventful childhood and adolescence. But when her mother, who had survived Auschwitz, kills herself, Rose, now in college, unthinkingly steps into the breach and runs the family household and tends to her demanding father. When she finally realizes that her life is going nowhere, she flees to Paris, vowing never to return. Several fleeting relationships with Algerians reinforce her outcast status, but her subsequent ten years with Serge, a Frenchman, offer a hitherto unknown degree of normalcyno matter that he's a diehard Communist, an alcoholic, and estranged from his own family. Rosie gladly gets what she needs from him, asking no questions and generally savoring her time together with himuntil his sudden hospitalization makes her aware that he may have problems she's unaware of. No sooner does she come to this realization than Serge's liver fails and he dies. Neither a trip with her sister Deb to their mother's home city of Budapest nor the advances of Serge's best friend help: Rosie is alone again. She crudely stitches a yellow star on her raincoat, wearing it everywhere, and plans to take her own life at Serge's grave; but when she arrives to do the deed, she discovers that she cant. Slowly, painfully, she finds something tentative yet real within herself, an increasingly firm sense of character and purpose that brings her back from the edge. The full measure of Rosie's suffering and estrangement is exquisitely conveyed, together with gemlike scenes of Paris life on the fringe; her story is a small but remarkable triumph. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.