Leaving Eastern Parkway a novel

August 15, 2022
Daub debuts with a bruising depiction of a Hasidic Brooklyn teenager’s encounter with the outside world. Zev Altshul, 15, is raised in Crown Heights’s closed-off Lubavitch community, where he excels at handball. In the early 1990s, Zev’s father is killed in a hit-and-run and his mother subsequently dies by suicide. Then he finds more than $50,000 in cash in his father’s closet and takes the money to Urbana, Ill., where he moves in with his older sister, Frida, who’s already left the community. At first, Zev suffers from extreme culture shock; he doesn’t even know who Shakespeare or Darth Vader are. But he becomes somewhat normalized by watching Twin Peaks and Soul Train on television. He cuts off his sidelocks, but is still bullied at school for being Jewish until he learns to be a handball hustler and defend himself. Mysteries about his father’s life and the bag of cash continue to haunt him, though, and eventually draw him back to Crown Heights. Zev’s story is filled with memorable characters and hard-won wisdom, and the Yiddish and Hebrew that appear throughout lend authenticity. (A glossary will help those who don’t know a mitzvah from a mikvah.) It adds up to a surprisingly universal coming-of-age novel about being true to oneself in a world that demands otherwise.