Gussie Feldman didn’t enjoy swimming.” She is only seven years old, but in many ways is the most attractive of the eight characters in this debut novel by American writer Rachel Beanland.
The others are her grandparents Esther and Joseph, her parents Fannie and Isaac, her aunt Florence and that young woman’s swim coach Stuart, the only non-Jew in the cast.
If you were counting, you will realise that we need one more: that is 19-year old Anna, a refugee from Germany.
The story is set in Atlantic City New Jersey in 1934, a time when the Nazi party in Germany were making clear their attitude to their Jewish citizens.
Joseph, himself a refugee from an earlier time, manages to get a US visa for Anna, so that she can enrol in a US college.
At the moment she is sharing a room with Florence who is a champion swimmer at the final stages of preparing to swim the English channel.
Unfortunately, in one of her practice swims, she gets into difficulty and even an hour of “thumping her back” by medical staff and lifeguards fails to revive her.
At the time that this is happening, Florence’s sister Fannie is in the final months of pregnancy. She had lost her second child, after a premature delivery, possibly the result of a spin with her husband Isaac in fairground dodgem cars.
Now her mother Esther decides that she should not be told about her sister’s death, lest it bring on a similar early delivery.
Read the review by Frank O’Shea in The Canberra Times.