Send for Me

December 21, 2020
Fox (Days of Awe) draws on old family letters for a poignant fictional memoir of her Jewish grandparents, who left Germany in 1938 with her mother and settled in Milwaukee. Annelise, the daughter of bakery owners in Feldenheim, Germany, is struggling with her own adolescence against the backdrop of rising anti-Semitism. In her early 20s, she finds true love with Walter Goldmann, a regular at the bakery, newly divorced and 10 years older. In the midst of increasingly vicious anti-Semetic cruelty—Annelise miscarries after a brick is thrown through their window—the couple has a child, Ruth, born in 1937, and seek asylum in America. Fox then intercuts scenes of the couple’s new life in the Midwest with flashbacks of more horrors in Germany. A brief scene after Annelise’s death at 85 has Ruth cleaning out her apartment with the help of Ruth’s daughter, Clare, who finds a cache of letters to Annelise from her mother, which make a deep impact on both women. Fox satisfyingly brings this story of love and desire full circle, as Clare and Ruth reflect on what it means to be both a mother and a child in the darkest of times. This tender and deeply inspired story will move readers. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group.

January 1, 2021
The enduring ties between mothers and daughters are at the center of Fox's intergenerational epic, which begins with Klara, a Jewish mother and wife living in Germany in the 1930s. Klara wants nothing more than to protect her daughter, Annelise, but that means letting her leave for America with her husband, Walter, and daughter, Ruth. As Annelise settles into her new life in Milwaukee, Klara's situation becomes dire, and Annelise struggles to find a way to bring her parents to the U.S. Years later, Klara's great-granddaughter, Clare, discovers Klara and Annelise's correspondence, which becomes a key to understanding her family's past and her own future as she decides whether to move to London with the man she loves. These letters, interspersed throughout the book, highlight the desperation of Klara's situation and the sacrifices she made to give her daughter and granddaughter an opportunity to survive. Fox deftly moves between generations as she illuminates the ways that choices echo through the lives of those who came after. This thoughtful, character-driven exploration of the unbreakable bonds of motherhood will appeal to fans of Alice Hoffman and Elizabeth Berg.

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Starred review from February 1, 2021
A Jewish woman escapes from Germany with her husband and baby daughter on the cusp of World War II. Decades later, can her granddaughter escape the lingering effects of her family's trauma? A terrifying knock on the door. A pounding heart. A woman clutches her baby in the dark, seeks out the "reassuring shape" of her sleeping husband, then thinks, "They will take him, too. They'll take all of it, everything and everyone she has ever loved. In an instant. A flash." Fox's partly historical novel about a German Jewish family riven on the cusp of the Holocaust begins with this nightmare. While readers are immediately reassured that, for the woman, Annelise, fear will recede and life will go on, a sense of foreboding shadows this bittersweet intergenerational tale of love and trauma, casting it in poignant chiaroscuro. Fox's novel--subtle, striking, and punctuated by snippets of family letters--tracks Annelise, who works alongside her devoted, kindhearted parents in their family bakery in a small German city, from first love to first heartbreak to marriage to motherhood. Against Annelise's warm, quiet, tasteful domestic existence swirl the anger, ugliness, and brutality of growing anti-Semitism, ultimately crashing into it in the form of a brick thrown through a window. Annelise is lucky to escape to America with her husband, child, and a close friend. But although she is able to find safety and start a life in a new place with her young family, her parents are not so lucky. Cut to modern-day Milwaukee: Annelise's granddaughter, Clare, is a young woman held fast by familial love, loyalty, and history as she struggles to move toward romantic love, independence, a sense of purpose. When Clare discovers a neglected cache of family letters and has them translated, she begins to see the invisible emotional scars she carries and to understand how the sadness and pain in her family's past may be impeding her own future happiness. Fox has imbued this deeply personal, ultimately hopeful novel, which she explains in an author's note is based on her own family's story, with emotion, empathy, and an essential understanding of the complicated bonds between generations and the importance of reckoning with the past in order to embrace the future. An intimate, insightful, intricately rendered story of intergenerational trauma and love.

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