THE COAT

Seth Feinberg grows up in a thoroughly Jewish home, but it's one defined by ceremony and custom more than an obviously deep wellspring of faith. Seth’s paternal grandfather and grandmother are both Polish survivors of the Holocaust. (The teenager calls them Saba and Savta, “their Hebrew honorifics.”) But they rarely speak of their World War II experiences, which remain “shadows in the twilight, barely perceptible in the fading light of memory.” When Seth turns 18 years old, Saba promises him a gift, a leather coat worn by a Nazi officer. But when Saba dies, Seth is deprived of the full story behind that coat—a “single tangible piece of my family’s history”—so he’s compelled to investigate his grandparents’ backgrounds and the tragedy that tormented them. In the process, he begins to write short stories, fictional vignettes that imaginatively explore the different roles the coat could have played, some sad and others redemptive. Grunspan delicately charts Seth’s search for some fuller sense of his family’s identity, and, by extension, his own, and his struggle to understand what his grandparents endured and how they carried on. He’s poignantly baffled by the optimism that seemed necessary but impossible for their survival: “When did optimism peek through the clouds of despair? When people found surviving family or friends? With the promise of three meals a day, even if those meals were small and unfamiliar?” The author chronicles Seth’s investigation with exceeding sensitivity and thoughtfully raises questions about the healing abilities of fiction. In addition, the embedded short tales are a surprising delight and make up for the plot’s occasional tendency to lag.

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