Book Summary and Reviews of City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

Book Summary

A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years

An ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence, City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family's origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.

Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century. In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family's mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks. What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present.

Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. Early on, Shiva considers the role of the messenger: "Even as a kid, she'd somehow understood: the Messenger was at once the one who haunted the story and also the one who'd managed to catch the haunting in story form, to tame it as though with a butterfly net" (pp. 20-21). How does the presence of the messenger braid together the various stories at play across space and time, New York to Maryland to Warsaw to Ropshitz, in City of Laughter? Catch the haunting? Tame it as though with a butterfly net? What do you make of the narrator? How they change shape throughout the story?
2. The concept of the census appears consistently throughout Jewish texts: in Numbers, a census of the Jews in the desert; in Exodus, a census for the sake ...