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The Gravedigger's Daughter

Joyce Carol Oates

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The Gravedigger's Daughter

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In 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 imaginative 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 true.

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Publisher
Harper Perennial
Year
2007
ISBN-13
9780061744723
Genre
Fiction
Topics
Immigrant experience and identityFamily trauma and resilienceSelf-invention and the American Dream

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