by Rafi Zabor
First published 2005
Rafi Zabor begins writing about 1986, the year he traveled across two continents in a used Mercedes to buy a gravestone for his deceased friend Mahmoud Rauf. He also seeks to escape the weight of his parents' recent deaths. The narrative pulls him backward through time as he recounts his father's flight from Nazi persecution and his own childhood in Brooklyn among the extended Zabor and Zaborovsky families. His spiritual quest takes him from Brooklyn to Turkey through an unlikely series of encounters with John Coltrane's music, the medieval mystic Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi, political campaigns, Gurdjieff's teachings, a shoe salesman called Gogol, and transformative months spent whirling with Sufis in the English countryside. This first volume of a planned four-part series weaves together family history, spiritual seeking, and cross-cultural wandering into a singular coming-of-age story that stretches the boundaries of personal narrative.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, coming-of-age, autobiography, memoir, biography-memoir, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, found-family
Setting: Brooklyn, England, Turkey
Period: 1986, Nazi Persecution
480 pages · Kindle Edition · Farrar, Straus and Giroux