Between the Menorah and the Fever Tree

by Eldred Chimowitz

Overview

Between the Menorah and the Fever Tree

‘‘…Fear has not been kind to me. It has stalked me from the time I first remember, making no due allowance for the enthusiasms of youth nor tempering its ways in adulthood. But being of an exacting nature and trusting of rational thought, I was determined in the days and nights ahead of me to understand how disquiet had come to find such comfortable residence in my person. I would have to think long and hard if I was to do so…’’

This opening paragraph establishes the framework for a bildungsroman set in the Rhodesia and South Africa of the 1960s and 1970s. We are listening in on the thoughts of the main character, a scion of Russian Jewish immigrants, whom we eventually come to know as Chungle. He is reflecting upon things while sitting on a wooden bench facing the wind and the Atlantic Ocean spray. Now an adult, Chungle is on a visit to Cape-Town after a long exile in America and he is wondering about the tribulations of youth spent in these parts. He is soon about to undertake a car journey through the vast Karoo desert to surprise his former best friend Jake, whom he has not seen in decades, and who is mourning a recent tragic loss. He recalls how Jake once possessed the ability to charm the wind out of its heavenly lair with his simple crooked grin and fears that time might now have changed all of that.

Alternately uproarious and touching Between the Menorah and the Fever Tree follows the story of Chungle and friends who find themselves permanent outsiders in the world around. It weaves a narrative with universal appeal, about family, identity, friendship and love, set against a backdrop of political and cultural upheaval.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012175298
Publisher:	Makovani Press
Publication date:	07/10/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	235
File size:	275 KB

About the Author

Eldred Chimowitz was born in Gatooma, a small farming town in Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe, when that country was still a self-governing British colony. His grandparents on both sides of the family were Russian Jewish immigrants who came to settle in that part of Africa during the early part of the twentieth century. Eldred completed high school at Prince Edward High School in the then capital city of Rhodesia which was called Salisbury. In the early 1970s he completed undergraduate degrees in mathematics and engineering at the University of Cape-Town, South Africa. Upon completing his undergraduate studies he came to the United States where in 1982 he completed a doctoral degree in chemical engineering at the University of Connecticut, while studying jazz piano and composition with the late John Mehegan of New York City and Westport, Connecticut. He has been a visiting professor at MIT and the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and is now a faculty member in the chemical engineering department at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. He has previously authored a physics textbook titled: Introduction to Critical Phenomena in Fluids which was published by Oxford University Press in 2005 and the novel Between the Menorah and the Fever Tree is his first work of fiction. He now lives in Rochester, New York with his wife, cat and three pianos.

Editorial Reviews

Between the Menorah and the Fever Tree shows that the youthful rebellion of the 1960s was almost a global phenomenon, and that racial tensions in some places were even more extreme than those in the U.S. Part comimng of age story, part elegy for a lost time and place, Chimowitz's first novel, set in Rhodesia, South Africa, and finally, in America, is told with understated beauty and uncompromising honesty.

Allen Peacock

A memoir of white privilege written from the unsettling perspective of a Jewish teenager growing into manhood in a time of turbulent change. Poignant, witty, evocative - a sepia image out of the African colonies brought to life. It transported me back to a time of innocence shot through with shards of anger and fear carried in the slipstream of a burgeoning political awareness.

Mark J. Kaplan