The Paris years of Rosie Kamin

by Richard Teleky

Rosie Kamin was in her last year of college when her mother, an Auschwitz survivor, committed suicide and Rosie fled Pittsburgh, her extended family, and her critical, demanding father to take up a life of self-imposed exile in Paris. As the novel opens we find Rosie at the age of forty tending her gravely ill lover of the past ten years, Serge, a French intellectual and communist. When a former lover, an Algerian, suddenly reappears, Rosie begins to reflect upon her early years in Paris and slowly comes to confront the patterns of escapism and denial that have always shaped her life. But it is with the arrival of her eccentric sister Deb from America, and after the two of them have traveled to Budapest to search out their mother's childhood home, that Rosie begins to face and understand her legacy and to find a kind of redemption.