Books
Heirlooms: Stories
Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Marge Piercy. Heirlooms begins in the French seaside city of Saint-Malo, in 1940, and ends in the American Midwest in 1989. In these linked stories, the war reverberates through four generations of a Jewish family. Inspired by the author's family stories as well as extensive research, Heirlooms explores assumptions about love, duty, memory, and truth.
In addition to the G.S. Charat Chandra prize, Heirlooms was awarded the Phillip H.McMath Post Publication Prize and was runner up for the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize
ISBN-13: 9781886157910
Publisher: BkMk Press of the University of Missouri-Kansas City
Publication date: 09/16/2016
Praise for heirlooms
“Heirlooms is a fascinating series of interconnected stories about members of an extended family of Jews before, during and long after the holocaust, in France, in Israel, in the United States. Different women and men define themselves in resistance, denial and ignorance of history through four generations… In some ways the entire book is a meditation on the meaning of family and history.”
— Marge Piercy, author of Woman on the Edge of Time, Gone to Soldiers, Braided Lives“Heirlooms is an exquisite and thrilling collection. In fearless and incandescent prose, Rachel Hall traces the fragile resilience and quiet horrors of those displaced by war. She happens to be writing about the Second World War, but these are stories that speak to the essential human experiences of exile and loss and survival. Heirlooms captures what it is to be a refugee, and an immigrant, with a delicacy and precision that delights and haunts.”
— Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World, Candy Freak, God Bless America“Heirlooms is a masterful collection, infused with devastating beauty. Focusing her precise artistry on the chaos of war, Rachel Hall succeeds in animating loss, preserving memory, and adding powerful imaginative truth to the historical record.”
— Joanna Scott, author of careers for Women, DePotters Grand Tour, Tourmaline“This volume is a treasure box of interconnected short stories tracking a saga of a Jewish family’s survival, starting in Holocaust-era France. ... Hall’s writing style is minimalist perfection, each chapter a self-contained jewel. She manages to project intense sympathy without a hint of sentimentalism, and her multi-perspective sense of pathos is rare for the genre. Even Nazi officers and abusive French police are given multiple dimensions and some level of human frailty, which only makes the facts of wartime life more starkly real. As the settings progress to Israel and America, the story resonates deeply with the modern refugee experience and seems all the more fresh and timely. Definitely a welcome and beautiful voice in wartime historical fiction. Enthusiastically recommended.”
— Joanna Scott, author of careers for Women, DePotters Grand Tour, Tourmaline“Heirlooms is an exquisite and thrilling collection. In fearless and incandescent prose, Rachel Hall traces the fragile resilience and quiet horrors of those displaced by war. She happens to be writing about the Second World War, but these are stories that speak to the essential human experiences of exile and loss and survival. Heirlooms captures what it is to be a refugee, and an immigrant, with a delicacy and precision that delights and haunts.”
— Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World, Candy Freak, God Bless America