Local author's book review: The Angel of Losses
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Feldman hails from Fort Washington.
It isn’t easy to pin down Stephanie Feldman’s debut novel. Part fairy tale, part family drama, The Angel of Losses swirls bits of forgotten folklore with ancestral gossip and relies on a heft of real and invented literary academia. What’s easier to say is it’s a good read. Feldman’s approach allows for an escape into cultural legend within the structure of a contemporary tale.
Academic researcher Marjorie Burke likes her family at a distance – she prefers the company of books to keep her sister’s abrupt marriage and her grandfather’s mysterious immigrant past at bay. When her research on the Wandering Jew starts to bear an eerie similarity to her favorite childhood tales, the story is set for a revealing confrontation between past and present.
The novel draws heavily on Jewish folklore, filling in the gaps with family history in a way that recalls the immigrant experience and questions national identity. Gender relations across time and culture also become a central theme implicit in the book’s shifting family dynamic.
Feldman’s novel is certainly ambitious. The research-driven plot twists and turns and at times threatens to break loose of the modern day storyline anchoring it. Feldman pulls it all together by the end, though, presenting us with thousands of years of myth neatly wrapped in less than 300 pages of contemporary fiction. Her imaginative style will be one to watch, hopefully with more inventive tales in years to come.
