Two adopted brothers
Swimming Across the Hudson: Joshua Henkin
Two adopted brothers,
one straight and one gay,
and what happens
when one of them
is tracked down by his birth mother
and learns a shocking secret about his past.
Swimming Across the Hudson
by Joshua Henkin
Email Joshua Henkin at josherb@umich.edu
As a child, Ben Suskind wonders how his family came together. What if he hadn't been adopted by Jews, what if his brother, Jonathan, had been adopted by a different couple? He and Jonathan fantasize about being the secret sons of Sandy Koufax, of coming to earth in a spaceship. They make blood pacts and switch names. But while they imagine other identities, they search for ways to feel that they belong to each other, to their parents, to their home. As adolescents, even in the familiar and happy comfort of the Manhattan apartment where they live, their dreams of girls and rock stars are colored by these concerns.
We knew the words to all of Springsteen's songs. We cut out articles about him. He was from New Jersey, where everyone had sex. We couldn't imagine he had any rules at all, or that he even had parents.... We sat in the living room listening to him, staring across the Hudson at New Jersey.
"We'll swim there, " I said.
Jonathan agreed
Now Ben Suskind is thirty years old, living in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Jenny, and her daughter. He still reflects on the questions of his youth; Jenny often has to pull his head out of the clouds. So when he receives a letter from a woman claiming to be his birth mother, he is unprepared, panicked, but curious. He tells his adoptive parents about the letter, and they fly him home to New York and reveal a secret about his past, one that turns Ben's whole world upside down.
Without telling anyone, Ben embarks on a journey, risking his relationship with everyone-his girlfriend, his brother, his parents. He combs through the records of his family's past, trying to find the facts about who he and Jonathan really are, and in the process learns the price of the lies people tell in the name of truth and good intentions.
Narrated with relentless honesty and gentle wit, Swimming Across the Hudson is a moving tale about faith and sexuality, about the communities we're born into and the ones we choose, about the ties that bind us even closer than blood.
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Joshua Henkin
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- Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons
- ISBN - 0-399-14116-2
What People Are Saying...
"In this graceful and engaging debut novel, Joshua Henkin explores the defining questions of early adulthood with intelligence, good humor, and a wonderful economy. The delicate dance of two brothers, negotiating their relationships to each other and their complex families, is beautifully drawn."
-Andrea Barrett
"Swimming Across the Hudson is a book about the confusion of adoption and the complications of family that becomes a haunting affirmation of the sweetness and power of tradition, as well as the possibilities of new traditions. Joshua Henkin has written a first novel of unusual gentleness and dignity."
-Cathleen Schine
"Who are fathers and mothers? Who are brothers? Who are Jews? That all these questions reverberate throughout Swimming Across the Hudson without clogging the narrative is a real triumph."
-Max Apple
"Swimming Across the Hudson is a novel of uncommon grace and even more uncommon ooommmppphh. In adoption, Joshua Henkin has found a metaphor that calls into question all the conventions about identity and selfhood, betrayal and loyalty, history and faith that, when worse comes to worst, we cleave to in order to survive. Lordy, this is a book that haunts."
-Lee K. Abbott
"This is the sort of first novel that comes along only rarely: a poised and compelling tale of family dynamics as well as personal growth. Swimming Across the Hudson negotiates the issues of personal identity with great grace and narrative skill; its discoveries are powerful, its characters original, its intelligence compelling, and its humanity real."
-Nicholas Delbanco
"In its attention to various forms of conversion and transformation, Swimming Across the Hudson is consistently moving and wonderfully accomplished.
-Charles Baxter
Joshua Henkin grew up in New York City and holds a B.A. from Harvard and an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Mother Jones, The Nation, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He has received a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, Hopwood awards in the short story, novel, and essay categories, and, for this book, a James Fellowship for Novel in Progress from The Heekin Group Foundation.
JOSHUA HENKIN
(In His Own Words)
Email Joshua Henkin at josherb@umich.edu
When I was small, my father took me every Sunday to visit my grandfather on Manhattan's Lower East Side. My grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi -- a great Jewish scholar, my father said, someone people visited from all over the world to ask questions about Jewish law. Years later, I would find a picture of him at a bookstore in Berkeley, one of a set of "rabbi cards," similar to the baseball cards my brothers and I flipped, replete with statistics about his rabbinic achievements. But at the time he was just my grandfather, a blind man in his late eighties who knew the Talmud by heart, whose lips felt soft against my head as he bent over to kiss me.
My grandfather lived in the United States for forty-five years but didn't learn any English. I spoke no Yiddish, so I sat quietly next to my brothers while my father studied Talmud with him. We waited for him to bless us before we left. Then my father took us to the kosher delicatessen on Delancey Street.
Fifty blocks away, my other grandfather worked. He owned a hat warehouse in Manhattan's garment district. He'd begun selling hats when people still wore them, and he used to show up at our apartment with a bagful of hats and toss them one by one to his three grandsons.
I've always been fascinated by the past. l used to look at the photographs from my parents' wedding and see my grandfathers standing next to each other, two men whose children were getting married but who couldn't speak the same language. Every Sunday I paid close attention to my grandfather's voice, as if I knew what he was saying. I believed that if I listened hard enough, I'd be able to understand Yiddish.
I used to imagine I was someone different -- someone who spoke many foreign languages, who lived in a strange land or in a different century, who had another set of parents. I had a friend who was adopted. I decided I wanted to be adopted too. I longed for a mysterious, unimaginable past, yet I also feared it; what if someone came to take me away?
Over the years, I've had several close friends who are adopted. Perhaps this is a coincidence; perhaps not. To me, adoption serves as a metaphor, a distillation of my interest in memory and the past. What if? What if? What if? This is what my characters ask. They have trouble moving forward because they are always looking backward. They wish to choose what communities they belong to; they try to decide who they are, only to find out that it's less a matter of choice than they realized. What makes someone Jewish? What makes a mother or a father? What makes someone straight or someone gay?
People ask me if I always knew I'd become a writer. The simple answer is no; the "choice" was the result of a series of coincidences. But it's rooted, I think, in those childhood visits to my grandfather's -- in my fascination with language, specifically with Yiddish, and with a man I knew so well I felt I loved him, but with whom I couldn't communicate.
I was nine when he died. My family was in Woods Hole for the summer, and we drove back to New York City for the funeral. It was a hot August day. More than a thousand people were in attendance. It seemed to me that the whole Lower East Side was there. The eulogies went on for close to five hours All of them were in Yiddish. I sat quietly and listened as hard as I could, until I was sure I understood them. And when my attention waned, my father wrote out word jumbles for me to do. I sat next to him and unscrambled the letters. I listened to the sounds of the voices over the microphone, thinking of my grandfather with his long gray beard, silently making words.
Contact:
Eliza Sporn
Publicist
212-951-8470
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