{"product_id":"not-me-isbn-9780812973327","title":"Not Me","description":"\u003ci\u003eNot Me \u003c\/i\u003eis a remarkable debut novel that tells the dramatic and surprising stories of two men–father and son–through sixty years of uncertain memory, distorted history, and assumed identity.\u003cbr\u003eWhen Heshel Rosenheim, apparently suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, hands his son, Michael, a box of moldy old journals, an amazing adventure begins–one that takes the reader from the concentration camps of Poland to an improbable love story during the battle for Palestine, from a cancer ward in New Jersey to a hopeless marriage in San Francisco. The journals, which seem to tell the story of Heshel’s life, are so harrowing, so riveting, so passionate, and so perplexing that Michael becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about his father.\u003cbr\u003eAs Michael struggles to come to grips with his father’s elusive past, a world of complex and disturbing possibilities opens up to him–a world in which an accomplice to genocide may have turned into a virtuous Jew and a young man cannot recall murdering the person he loves most; a world in which truth is fiction and fiction is truth and one man’s terrible–or triumphant–transformation calls history itself into question. Michael must then solve the biggest riddle of all: Who am I?\u003cbr\u003eIntense, vivid, funny, and entirely original,\u003ci\u003e Not Me\u003c\/i\u003e is an unsparing and unforgettable examination of faith, history, identity, and love.“What a daring, even dangerous, act of the imagination this novel is! Not Me challenges one emotionally and intellectually. It’s that rare phenomenon: a philosophical thriller that will draw you in and leave you arguing furiously with yourself after you’re done.” \u003cb\u003e—Ron Rosenbaum, author of \u003ci\u003eExplaining Hitler\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“A novel with a powerfully unsettling moral conundrum at its heart: Is radical evil indelible; can anything undo it? But what philosophy cannot resolve, storytelling triumphantly can. Lavigne’s radiantly imagined portrait of human possibility never obscures the blackest abyss of real history, and his Heshel Rosenheim emerges with all the complexity of a modern Raskolnikov.” \u003cb\u003e—Cynthia Ozick, author of \u003ci\u003eHeir to the Glimmering World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Michael Lavigne has an immensely powerful story to tell of guilt and redemption. Beyond its riveting plot, Not Me is a novel about the loss and recovery of love. In this sense it reminded me of Dickens’s Great Expectations: Heshel Rosenheim is as mysterious and haunting as Magwitch, and the lesson that his uncanny life imparts to his son, and to Lavigne’s readers, is on a grand human scale, and unforgettable.” \u003cb\u003e—Jonathan Wilson, author of \u003ci\u003eA Palestine Affair\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Family secrets, awful historical truths, the nature of good and evil, and the bond between a son and his father are woven seamlessly into a page-turning plot. Michael Lavigne writes with generosity of heart and he leaves the reader with an abundance of hope. Not Me is a powerful debut novel.” \u003cb\u003e—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of \u003ci\u003eAn Almost Perfect Moment\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“A disturbing yet surprisingly tender read that grips the reader from page 1 and never lets go. Michael Lavigne tells his intriguing story with intelligence, sensitivity, and flashes of scintillating wit. What more could you ask from a novel?” \u003cb\u003e—Aaron Hamburger, author of \u003ci\u003eFaith for Beginners\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eMichael Lavigne was born in Newark, New Jersey. He began seriously writing fiction only at midlife and was a participant of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Not Me is his first novel, and he is currently working on his second, set in Moscow, where he once lived. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Gayle.Chapter 1    The last person in the world I wanted to know about was my   father. I did not want to know if he had lovers. I did not   want to know if he took diuretics. I certainly did not want   to know if he liked to masturbate, or if, even occasionally,   he fantasized about teenage boys. It was of absolutely no   interest to me if he cheated at bridge, or if his secret   ambition was to become a ballet dancer, or if he had an   obsession with women’s shoes, or if he washed his body with   lemon, or if he hit my mother (especially, God forbid, if   she liked it). So when I was presented with twenty-four   volumes of journals, each bound with a rubber band so old it   was as brittle as the leather cover it held together, and   was told, “These are your father’s, take them,” I was less   than enthusiastic. Especially since it was my father who   gave them to me.    “These are your father’s,” he said, “take them.”    “Dad,” I said, “you are my father.”    He looked at me quizzically. His eyes were like aspic.   Cloudy. Beneath which something obscure, unappetizing.    “Where’s Karen?” he asked.    “Karen is dead,” I reminded him.    “That’s not true,” he said. “She was just here. I was   speaking to her. Take these.”    With his feet, he pushed the box of journals toward my chair.    “All right,” I said, “I’ll take them. But I won’t read them.”    Then he turned away, and looked out the window.    “I’m waiting for Frau Hellman,” he said.    “Okay, Dad,” I said. I had no idea who Frau Hellman was.   Maybe someone from his childhood, or maybe his name for the   lady who washed him.    After a little while I realized he had forgotten I was in   the room. The space between us seemed to grow as if I were   standing on a dock, and he were sailing away on the Queen   Mary. I say the Queen Mary because he once actually did sail   away on her, and I really was left behind, waving. Still, it   was unthinkable that I would have a troubled relationship   with my father. If I was not the perfect son, he was   certainly the perfect father.    I reminded myself of that as I sat there looking at him   drooling, his head lolling back like a toddler’s asleep in   his car seat.    “He’s doing just great, isn’t he?” the station nurse said.   “We just love him!”    I held out the box to her. “Where did he get these? They   weren’t in his room before.”    “I don’t know. I think someone brought them.”    “Who brought them?”    “He has so many visitors.”    “He does?”    “You know how popular he is!”    Actually, I didn’t know he knew anybody. I thought everybody   he knew was dead. I thanked Nurse Clara—her name was   emblazoned on her ample, nurturing breast—and walked out   into the brutal Florida heat. The car was only a few steps   away, but I might as well have been crossing the Amazon   River. By the time I got there, my shirt was soaked and my   legs were sticking together. I turned on the   air-conditioning in the Caddy, but had to wait outside for   the temperature to drop—the car was an oven. In my arms was   the box of journals. They weighed me down painfully. Finally   I sank into the plush leather seat and let the frigid jets   cool my face, my underarms. I tugged my shirt away from my   body to let the air caress my stomach with its icy fingers.   I sighed in relief. I put the shift in reverse, and pulled   out of the spot. It’s amazing how long a Caddy will last,   particularly if you never drive it. Dad bought his in ’78. I   looked down at the odometer. It had twenty-two thousand   miles on it. And I had to admit it was comfortable, bobbing   down the road on those marshmallow shocks, riding on tires   of Jell-O. Like the kiddy-car rides he used to take me on   before I graduated to the bumper cars and roller coasters. I   recalled how I used to be embarrassed being seen in it,   especially when my dad drove twenty miles an hour in a   forty-mile zone. But not anymore. His Caddy was now the   coolest thing going, only he would never know it. As far as   he was concerned we still had the 1952 Studebaker. If he   kept regressing on schedule, in another couple of weeks he’d   be curled up with a bottle in the back of his father’s ’23   Daimler.    I pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto Military   Trail. All the roads in West Palm Beach County look the   same. Six lanes. No curves. Fast food. And every few feet   the entrance to some development. The Lakes. The   Bonaventure. The Greens. Everything had a The in it. They   liked the word The. They also liked the word at. The   Villages at The Palms. The Fairways at The Willows. I turned   left at The Turn at Lake Worth Avenue.    The box of journals was sitting there beside me, sort of the   way Mom used to sit next to Dad, waiting for an accident to   happen. But unlike her, they smelled bad—musty and moldy,   decayed. Well, maybe she smelled that way now, too, I   thought. But I shook that away. I didn’t know why my mind   let such thoughts sneak in. I hated when that happened. But   it was just part of being a comic. You always think funny.   For instance, the box they were in—I noticed it was a Cheez   Whiz box. This made me laugh. This is what Father chose to   contain his life’s writings? I also noticed the logo was   different than it is now. So it was a really old box. He’d   been working at this a long, long time. Saving this stuff   up, just for this moment. His patrimony. Since he had no   money, maybe he thought I could get it published or   something. Why would he think that? He ran a wallpaper store   all his life. Who would want to read about that?    I was jolted suddenly, by someone honking the horn. I looked   up and the guy passed me, making a fist. I glanced down at   the speedometer. I was doing twenty in a forty-mile zone.   For some reason this did not strike me as funny—and I   stepped on the gas.    I pulled up to his building at The Ponds at Lakeshore and   turned off the engine. There were only American cars in the   lot, primarily Cadillacs and Buicks, and most of them had   American flags on them. A gaggle of women were standing near   the entrance. They were all small. How did they get so   small? I wondered. They had to be less small once upon a   time. Will Ella be that small one day? She’s five-eight   now—could she end up four-ten? I stepped out of the car,   thinking I would just leave the journals in the front seat   for a while, but I knew I couldn’t. I would have to take   them upstairs. But I thought: Wait. How come they weren’t in   the apartment in the first place? I didn’t remember ever   seeing them there. I didn’t remember him ever speaking about   them. I didn’t remember him ever working on them, for that   matter. Why would they suddenly appear at the nursing home?   Why wouldn’t he just say, there are journals in the closet   at home—I want you to read them?    The box suddenly looked even more dangerous to me.   Poisonous. Like a scorpion that had crawled into my sleeping   bag. I went around the other side and picked it up. It had   to have been stored in a basement or attic—it had that smell   to it, like damp earth. I thought: shouldn’t I remember   something about this? How could he have written twenty-four   volumes without my ever having noticed? Maybe they were   someone else’s journals. Maybe he only thought they were   his. That was possible. Totally possible. Sometimes he   thought I was some cousin or someone named Israel—so why not?    I walked past the little ladies, and they all said hello. I   said hello back and got into the elevator. I heard someone   say, that was Gladys’s son. No, someone else said, that’s   Rose’s.    They never mentioned the men. The men had no children. Only   the women. And anyway, my mother’s name was Lily.    The elevator smelled like an indoor swimming pool. It   crawled slowly up the side of the building like a dying man   clawing his way out of a hole. It was only four floors, but   in San Francisco I’d already be at the top of the   Transamerica Pyramid. At least it was air-conditioned. But   then the door opened onto the hall—which was no hall, it was   actually a kind of gangway stuck on the outside of the   building like an exposed rib—and the heat hit me again. I   could feel rivers of moisture forming on my arms where the   box rubbed against them. As always, it was a struggle to   open the door. Finally, though, I stepped inside, shut the   heat behind me, and put the box down on the dining room   table. I went to the refrigerator and made myself a seltzer.    Then I picked up the phone to call Ella, but then I didn’t.    You call because you want to connect, but you don’t connect,   you can never connect, you can’t wait to hang up, you hang   up, you feel utterly alone—like you’re stuck in the bottom   of a swimming pool and can’t hear anything except your own   breathing. The thing is, you see, it’s the words. It’s just   like a stand-up routine, or a sermon maybe. You work hard on   the words, and you think the words say it, but actually it’s   the delivery, and the delivery is in your body, your eyes,   the fact that someone is right there in front of you and   even if you can’t see them as individuals, it’s that you   smell them, you sense their bodies there, it’s physical,   it’s visceral.    But then why do comedy albums work? And radio? Not to   mention things that are written, like, say, the Talmud? My   theory was hopeless, and I knew it.    Anyway what would I say to her?    She was oddly vexed that I’d come out here again. “If you’d   pay as much attention to your son as you do your father . .   .” she said when I first told her, but then she just let   herself drift into silence. “By the time I get there he   might not even recognize me,” I’d tried to explain. But I   doubted she heard me, since she’d already hung up.    I supposed I could tell her about the box. I could ask her   if she remembered anyone named Frau Hellman. Then I could   ask her what she thought I ought to do.    “I don’t know,” she would say. “I’m not sure.” She didn’t   like to make decisions for me. At least not since the divorce.    If I told her I didn’t think I wanted to read them, she   would say, “That’s fine.” If I said I was going to read   them, she’d say, “That’s fine too.”    Really, when you think about it, you don’t have to have   actual conversations with people you know well.    Also if I called, what if Josh answered? I couldn’t face him   just then. I wasn’t sure why. And why was my own father   suddenly so desperate to talk to me—now when he didn’t even   know what year it was. I looked over at the Cheez Whiz box.   All its little advertising slogans seemed more like curses   and portents than inducements to slather some spread on a   cracker.    I finished my seltzer, marveling at the tenacity of that   generation of Jews to hold on to its old habits. How many   places in the world could you still get seltzer delivered to   your door?    I fixed myself a little sandwich and sat down at the dining   room table. On the wall directly above my head was a   tapestry of the Old City of Jerusalem—bright, tacky colors,   somewhat abstract, and obviously made in Israel. In the   living room just beyond, the walls seemed festooned with   Judaica—fiddlers on roofs, flying goats, old, bearded men   wrapped in prayer shawls, framed calligraphic paper cutouts   of Hebrew letters. On the bookshelves were innumerable   tchotchkes—cloisonné ashtrays in the shape of menorahs,   ritual spice boxes, candlesticks, commemorative Israeli   coins set off in black velvet, a sterling silver–covered   Passover Haggadah (also made in Israel), and on the top   shelf, standing like the guardian of all that is Jewish, the   Hanukkah menorah—which in fact was surrounded by four lesser   menorahs, all of which were given to my father in honor of   some achievement for the Temple Men’s Club, or the B’nai   B’rith, or AIPAC. There were photos stuck among the books,   too—of Mom on the Hadassah Executive, the Sisterhood, and   the ladies from ORT. Of Dad shaking hands with Elie Wiesel.   Of Dad shaking hands with Natan Sharansky. Of Dad shaking   hands with Golda Meir. (That was his favorite—it hung on the   wall in a big frame, right between my sixth-grade school   portrait and Karen, two months old, naked on a blanket.)    I think it got worse once they moved down to Florida. In New   Jersey it was more prints of famous paintings—Rembrandt, van   Gogh, Picasso. The books on the shelves didn’t seem so   relentlessly Hebraic. A Stephen King novel or two. Valley of   the Dolls. And all the things we kids brought home that had   to be displayed: drawings, ceramics, term papers, birthday   cards. But even then, the Jewish paraphernalia seemed to   swallow up everything like kudzu, and by the time I left for   college, my parents’ house could have been mistaken for the   temple gift shop. It was funny, really. I used it as   material for one of my best routines.    But now as I sat there regarding the Cheez Whiz box of   leather-bound diaries, and hearing somewhere not too far   away the laconic song of a bull alligator emerging from the   canal that cut through the eighth fairway of The Ponds at   Lakeshore golf course, and picking up the aroma from next   door, or perhaps from the floor below, of brisket simmering   in the Dutch oven, and noting as well that Mrs. Eagleberg,   several doors down, had reached that point in the day when   she spoke to her daughter in Chicago as if there were no   telephone line connecting them, so loudly did she elucidate   the machinations of her bowels and the tribulations of her   swollen ankles—all these things filled me with a terrible   longing.[quote] --Baltimore Sun","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300922413285,"sku":"NP9780812973327","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812973327.jpg?v=1767733898","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/not-me-isbn-9780812973327","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}