Mid Air: Two Novellas. Fate is explored in the fall and rise of two twentieth-century American families.

Victoria Shorr’s remarkable gift for depicting the inner lives of complex characters shines in two powerful explorations of family, ambition, class, and status.

In “Great Uncle Edward,” a family gathers for dinner. At ninety-three, Great Uncle Edward commands the table in his three-piece suit; Cousin Russell attended both Harvard and Yale but is now reduced to selling off the family books; sisters Betty and Molly are caught between ghosts of a storied past and creeping destitution. These lives are signposts along the downward spiral of an old aristocracy. “Cleveland Auto Wrecking” introduces Sam White, an immigrant from eastern Europe. He cannot read but has a gift for math and an instinct for the value of junk. We follow his clan through the Depression to the postwar boom in the West, where their fortunes soar, creating new tests of loyalty.

Taken together, these two novellas might be the reverse images of the American dream in the twentieth century. They ask to what degree, in the face of such powerful forces as love, death, and social constraints, do any of us have control over our own lives.
[Norton, May, 2022]

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The Plum Trees: A poignant tale about one woman’s quest to recover her family’s history, and a story of loss and survival during the Holocaust.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, an American woman stumbles upon a family letter, sent from Germany in 1945. The letter contains staggering news: her great-uncle Hermann, who was transported to Auschwitz with his wife and three daughters, might have escaped. Spurred by the discovery and gripped with questions, she sets out to unravel the truth. Most of her family are dead, so she scours oral testimonies, historical records, and her own fleeting memories. Moving from their happy home in Czechoslovakia to Hungary, where they were captured, to their internment at the concentration camps, The Plum Trees reconstructs in astonishing, poignant detail the lives of Hermann, his wife, and their daughters from the days before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia through the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of World War II. Inspired by the author’s family history, The Plum Trees is a powerful, intimate reckoning with the past.
[Norton, March, 2021]

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