Set against the backdrop of New York City in the 1950s, After the War captures those exciting years when everyone was trying to make up for lost time. It was a time for experimentation, and returned to World War II veteran Richard Stone deliberately erected a wall of “disconnectionism,” pursued a rootless, Rilkelike existence in borrowed apartments, hocking the belongings for eating (and drinking) money. It was a time for intense living, and love: Richard’s love affair with bewitching and bewildering Jemmy Gordon, only child of a celebrated war correspondent, is a masterpiece of enigma and surprise.
But the years after the war were more than a time to revel in youth and love—they were haunted by the omnipresence of death—in the war and in the tragic legacy of the six million. Daniel Stern has the rare ability to probe the most serious subjects deeply, without compromise, while keeping his reader entertained. Out of the shared experience of Americans determinedly convalescing after the war, he has produced a memorable novel.
DANIEL STERN is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of English in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. He is the author of nine novels, two collections of sort stories, a play and several screenplays. He has won the Paris Review's John Train Humor Award, and the International Prix du Souvenir Award for Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die.
What Readers Are Saying:
One of the first novels in the United States to deal with the Holocaust, After the War is set in the intense social atmosphere of New York in the 1950s. "Less elegant, more disarmingly human, Stern is a species of Jewish Graham Greene . . . his war veteran hero, Richard Stone, . . . reflects that life is not so much a battlefied as an enduring aftermath of battle. The most attractive thing about Stern’s book is its ground-base of—commentary is too forbidding a word—moral poetry." --Washington Post
“One of the most moving portraits of lost youth and lost love.” --The Saturday Review