The Gravedigger's Daughter

Joyce Carol Oates

eBook - 2009

"The daughter of a Holocaust survivor (the gravedigger of the title) who commits an incredible murder...But she is able to reinvent herself as a peppy salesclerk with a jazz-musician lover and become 'a living, breathing, complex presence on the page" - New York TimesIn 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Nazi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imagin...ative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet—but very "American"—triumph. "You are born here, they will not hurt you"—so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be... more