A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of
Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets and the
fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100
years.
City of Laughter follows a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of
generational secrets back to her family's origins, where ancestral clues begin
to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.
Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens,
an 18th-century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests
laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger - bringing the laughter
the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events
that will reverberate across the coming century.
In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first
big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to
connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local
funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to
visit Poland, hoping her family's mysteries will make more sense if she walks
in the footsteps of her great-grandmother, Mira, about whom no one speaks.
What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but
also her present. Electric and sharply intimate, City of
Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented
Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised
us without leaving them behind. [from fantastic fiction]
Fruchter, Temim. (2024). City of Laughter. New York: Grove Press.
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