Abraham Rothberg  - Author

 

 

New by Abraham Rothberg:
The Walls and the Gates Vol I and Vol II

Volume 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.

 

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