Swimming Toward the Ocean

Nineteen fifty-three, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Chenia Arnow is a petite, sensuous Betty Grable look-alike, a Russian emigre whose Old World fear of the Evil Eye and heavily accented English cannot mask her fierce intelligence and wit. Her husband, Ruben, is both a charmer and miserly, often absent, with a penchant for trumped-up lawsuits. He has a mistress. Chenia is pregnant. It is this child, Chenia's daughter Devorah, who tells the story of her parents' marriage: of how Chenia...
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Nineteen fifty-three, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Chenia Arnow is a petite, sensuous Betty Grable look-alike, a Russian emigre whose Old World fear of the Evil Eye and heavily accented English cannot mask her fierce intelligence and wit. Her husband, Ruben, is both a charmer and miserly, often absent, with a penchant for trumped-up lawsuits. He has a mistress. Chenia is pregnant. It is this child, Chenia's daughter Devorah, who tells the story of her parents' marriage: of how Chenia embarks on a love affair with the man in the green fedora, and how Chenia's initial shame and guilt are overcome; of how the affair threatens to end when Ruben suddenly moves his family closer to the home of the woman who is his lover. And Devorah tells us how the increasingly complex and comical deceptions that accompany her parents' infidelities come to infuse and dominate their lives, how the marriage finally ends, and how another marriage is made--a solid marriage, a different kind of marriage. But Chenia is Chenia, still sometimes longing for the pull of danger and the tumble of the Atlantic Ocean, for a glimpse of a green fedora. Swimming Toward the Ocean is a novel that both touches and entertains us with its portrayal of the human heart.