The Gray Lover
Three Stories
Carl Friedman

Friedman proves herself a master of the short story in these three moving, beautifully nuanced tales which explore Holocaust themes but also branch out in new directions.
In the title story, a fable set between the wars, Gershom Katz, a widowed 100-year-old Polish Jew, becomes the boarder of a wicked, greedy couple who work the old man to exhaustion.
“Holy Fire” charts the metamorphosis of an average Dutch Jewish teenager into a fanatical fundamentalist who moves to Brooklyn, joins a militant Hasidic sect and ultimately, as a settler on the West Bank, kills a Palestinian boy.
In the agonizing final story a Dutch woman cares for her terminally ill mother, Bette who is dying of cancer two years after she nursed her husband, an Auschwitz survivor, while on his deathbed. Now Bette's impending death should draw together her three children, but they remain strangers to one another, constantly at odds and bitter about their legacy.

“Among the emerging voices of the second generation of Holocaust survivors Carl Friedman deserves the highest rank.”
—Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe

Carl Friedman was born in 1952, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She is the author of Nightfather  and The Shovel and the Loom. Ms. Friedman lives in Amsterdam and is working on a new collection of short stories. 

Paperback / $12.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-296-2 / 176 pages / Fiction