Family Stories

Every family has its own lore. Maybe in your family, it’s how your parents met, a long-ago lucky break, or the turning point that brought your ancestors to America. In most families, these stories are rooted only tangentially in fact. More likely, they reflect their storytellers’ viewpoint, and they change with every telling.

In The Story of the Forest , award-winning British author Linda Grant’s most recent novel, the family story begins with Mina, the young daughter of a prosperous flour merchant, who goes alone into the woods at the edge of the Baltic Sea to collect mushrooms. Instead, she encounters a gathering of rowdy teenage Bolsheviks. Although the incident is portrayed with a folklore-like overlay of menace, she emerges unscathed — albeit after experiencing her first kiss and learning about the exploitation of workers. To her family, however, the unseemliness of it all prompts action. Thus, on the eve of WWI, Mina and her older brother Jossel leave Riga on a boat bound for a new life.

Their trip launches a multigenerational family saga, loosely based on Grant’s own family history. It brings us into the Jewish Liverpool neighborhood where Grant grew up, where, over the decades that follow, the lives of Mina, Jossel, their families, and neighbors are shaped by the changing world around them. Grant tells their stories, including the tales they tell each other, with sensitivity, satire, and a touch of writerly humor.

The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern is a joyful romp by Lynda Cohen Loigman. It also has family stories at its core, along with a touch of what might be magic.

It’s 1987 and with mixed feelings, newly retired pharmacist Augusta Stern moves from New York to a senior-living community in Florida. There, poolside, she unexpectedly finds herself face-to-face with Irving Rivkin, who broke her heart decades ago.

From there, the book weaves in the stories of Augusta’s and Irving’s past. In 1920’s Brooklyn, teenaged Augusta works behind the counter in her father’s pharmacy and Irving handles neighborhood deliveries. (Don’t miss the author’s note at the end about her research on corner drugstores.) We meet Augusta’s dad Solomon and her Great Aunt Esther, who, upstairs from the pharmacy, secretly offers customers less conventional methods to heal what ails them.

Around the Florida pool, Augusta and Irving (who are played by Meryl Streep and Martin Short in my entirely imaginary movie version) are compelled by a cadre of new friends to unravel their very different versions of what happened in their shared past.

Betsy Gomberg reads (and sometimes writes about) Jewish books.