First published 2023
Lawrence Weschler receives an unexpected phone call from Gravity Goldberg at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. She tells him about a recently discovered collection of photographs by Shimmel Zohar, a Lithuanian immigrant photographer from the mid-1800s who supposedly documented Jewish life on Manhattan's Lower East Side during the 1860s and 1870s. The work rivals that of Mathew Brady in its scope and detail. But Goldberg hints that something doesn't add up about the whole story. She wants Weschler to investigate. His search leads him to Stephen Berkman, a wet-collodion photography enthusiast who claims he found the collection. What follows becomes a twisted journey of detection and discovery that forms the fourth installment in Weschler's "Chronicles of Slippage" series. The investigation sprawls into extensive footnotes that consume more than half the book and reveal intimate details about Weschler himself.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, 21st-century, photography, 19th-century, art-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: investigation, unreliable-narrator
Setting: San Francisco, Manhattan, Lower East Side
Period: 1860s, 1870s, Mid-1800s
212 pages · Hardcover · Hat & Beard Press