Tar Beach (New American Fiction Series)

Tar Beach is New York slang for the roof where one sunbathes in the summer. Some of the naked sunbathers on the roof of their Brooklyn synagogue in 1947 in Richard Elman's fantastic novel imagine they are in Uganda, which, in place of Palestine, the British Government offered the Zionists at the turn of the century as a Jewish National Homeland. The Second World War has only recently ended; there's trouble in the Middle East, and trouble as well for Izzy Berliner and Peter Pintobasco, and for Sam, Lillian, Big Sam Rostok, and the smart-talking feminist "angel" named Jezebel. Their sun-baked world of gossip and backbite bakes and rocks to an intoxicating babble of Yiddish, Swahili, and Brooklynese as they come to terms with each other and the meaning of their lives.