The Family Morfawitz

From the embers of the Second World War rose a family as ruthless as the forces that sought to destroy them. Guided by its indomitable matriarch, the Morfawitzes seek to build their own Olympus on the New York City skyline, in this engrossing tale from a winner of the Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel.

After fleeing from Nazis in Germany–just as her parents fled from Cossacks in Russia–Hadassah Morfawitz arrives in New York to begin her own dynasty, spreading glamorous lies about her modest family’s European past and securing desirable marriages for her attractive younger brothers. For her own marriage, Hadassah chooses the orphan Zev Kretinberg, a cold and difficult young man who has survived the concentration camps and ravages of war.

Together, they mercilessly pursue their fortune, displacing even families who helped them in their early years. But for a curse uttered by a vanquished rival, which leads Hadassah to abandon their firstborn son, their ascent is rapid, setting them among the upper echelons of the Park Avenue Synagogue high society.

That abandoned son, Hezekial, is our narrator. Through machinations worthy of his mother, he has been entrusted as the family’s chronicler. He sits with the aging Zev as the older man reminisces upon his great acts of cruelty, indifference, and lust. These stories, told for the first and only time, chart Zev’s life from his time as a kapo at Gusen, to his fathering of many illegitimate children, and to his blood-bound commitment to Hadassah.

Whether the Morfawitzes deserve awe or shame, the final word lies with Hezekial, who has a chance to repay his mother at last.

The Family Morfawitz is a retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Greco-Roman myth as a multigenerational Jewish family saga.