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New by Abraham Rothberg:
The Walls and the Gates Vol I and Vol IIVolume I:
509 pages, 6" x 9", perfect binding, cream interior paper (60#
weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (100# weight),
full-color exterior ink
Order Volume I
$19.95
Volume II: 511 pages, 6" x 9", perfect
binding, cream interior paper (60# weight), black and white interior ink,
white exterior paper (100# weight), full-color exterior ink
Order Volume II
$19.95
THE WALLS
AND THE GATES is a panoramic novel of four decades of modern life, from
the Great Depression of the 1930s to the upheavals of the 1960s, dealing
with the lives and fates of a varied group of fascinating human beings: An
Irish-American family of immigrants whose father works on the New York
City docks; a family of Tsarist refugees from the Soviet Union whose
father remains an activist anti-Communist political; still another family,
of immigrant Italians, who fled their native country after the
Risorgimento and have since prospered in the California wine country. Two
other families are also important, one of early anti-Nazi Germans, a
refugee doctor from an aristocratic Prussian family, now a distinguished
professor of medicine at Cornell, and an old Main Line WASP family of
bankers, deeply conservative and proud of a lineage that goes back to the
founding of the Republic.
The novel
not only portrays the fathers' loves and wars--World War I, the Garibaldi
Rebellion, the 1916 "Rising" in Dublin--but also their childrens' loves
and wars--the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and the
Vietnam conflict--exploring the clashes in their views of themselves and
their world. The action takes place during combat in Flanders and Dublin,
in England during the "Blitz," in Spain while Madrid is under siege, in
Italy as Americans fight their way up the peninsula to drive the Germans
out of Naples and Rome, through the bitter fighting in the Battle of the
Bulge, Heurtgen Forest and the Siegfried Line.
Throughout the novel, we see
the interlocking fates of the two major characters, best friends, as the
Irish American boy struggles to become a doctor, and the Russian American
boy, a musical genius, struggles to become an internationally known
concert pianist. We watch them in the relatively bucolic times before
World War II, during the war and thereafter, their conflicts with
themselves, with one another, and with their lives and times, their
successes and defeats, until, finally, they come to understand that "Tears
may open the gates, but joy will bring down the very walls. |