San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he's distracted by voices from next door - his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient's troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive, avowedly WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother. The professor is not just absorbed but enraptured. And the further he is pulled into the patient's recounting of her dramas - and the most profound questions of her own identity - the more he needs the story to move forward.
The patient's questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But confronted with this new self - "I have no idea what it means to say 'I'm a Jew'" - the patient finds her search stalled. Armed with the few details he's gleaned, the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient's mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can't let on that he's been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient has contacted and drops it in the mail.
Through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by the news, and so is he. He unearths more clues and invests more and more in this secret, fraught, triangular relationship: himself, the patient, and her therapist, who is herself German. His research leads them deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, of postwar Zionism, and - most troubling of all - of the Nazi Lebensborn program.
With ferocious intelligence and an enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman weaves a dark and brilliant, intensely personal novel that feels as big and timeless as it is sharp and timely. It is an ambitious work that establishes her as a major writer.
The overall dark, eerie atmosphere also serves to accentuate the realization that one's identity can be as much a yoke as a release - whether that identity is forged by external circumstances or simply, by blood. (Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
Publishers Weekly
Though this is an irresistible Hitchcockian page-turner, brooding and solipsistic, it lands too softly and feels unfinished...
Library Journal
The suspense builds slowly but surely in this engrossing tale, while resolution remains hanging in the balance. Recommended for fans of intellectual psychological fiction.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. A first-rate literary thriller of compelling psychological and philosophical depth.
Booklist
Starred Review. ...By Blood is a poetic and masterful story that takes some unexpected turns. The prose suggests Poe and Kafka, which heightens the mysterious tone that surrounds both the professor and the client and gives the novel a timeless feel.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by reillydog Wow story..Ugh ending This book was fascinating? I couldn't put it down.
Now someone needs to explain the ending to me. It appears to...just stop. Thinking I missed something, I reread the last few pages.
Help!!!
Shortly before the Second World War ended and the horrors of the Holocaust slowly came to a close, Jews from all over Europe were housed in "displaced persons" camps. These camps gave refuge to Jews who no longer had a place to call home - not Poland, not Austria, not Germany, and not even the new home state created for them, Israel.
One such camp, Bergen-Belsen, was originally established in 1940 as a POW camp, but in April 1943 was converted into a concentration camp by the SS Economic-Administration Main Office. On April 15, 1945, British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen and "British occupation authorities established a displaced persons camp that housed more than 12,000 survivors."
Just a few days after liberation, a BBC reporter visited the camp on a Friday - the Jewish Sabbath. His report, heard in the video below, is soul-stirring and captures a particular momentous incident that took place that day at the camp.
As Ellen Ullman describes in By Blood, despite the horrendous conditions in which they lived (close to 40,000 corpses had just...
Lit by passion, fear, guilt, memory, and hope, the characters in Everything Is Illuminated mine the black holes of history in this exuberant and wise, hysterically funny and deeply moving debut.
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British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
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