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The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel…
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The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel (P.S.) (original 2007; edition 2008)

by Joyce Carol Oates

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1,6804810,331 (3.62)124
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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 bittersweetâ??but very "American"â??triumph. "You are born here, they will not hurt you"â??so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true.

In THE GRAVEDIGGER'S DAUGHTER, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individ… (more)

Member:storyaddict
Title:The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel (P.S.)
Authors:Joyce Carol Oates
Info:Harper Perennial (2008), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 624 pages
Collections:Your library
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The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates (2007)

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» See also 124 mentions

English (38)  Swedish (3)  Spanish (2)  Finnish (2)  French (1)  Norwegian (1)  Italian (1)  All languages (48)
Showing 1-5 of 38 (next | show all)
The book started slow but improved. ( )
  Melwilk | Mar 19, 2020 |
A good historical perspective on the struggles of an immigrant family, but a bit of a slow read. ( )
  TSBresser | Dec 29, 2019 |
I read this for a book club. I felt like it was 500 pages that went no where. The crass language was also very hard to deal with. I understand that it was to make the characters "real", but I hate reading a book that my kids can't read over my shoulder. Every time something exciting might happen, it was just glossed over. I need someone to cheer for, and there wasn't much (if any) of that in this book. ( )
  Lisa5127 | Jun 2, 2018 |
Review: The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates. It was a very good read. It was a story of an immigrant family escaping Germany in a refuge boat sailing into New York Harbor in 1936. The family now known as the Schwart’s was last to leave the boat because the mother was giving birth at the time of their arrival to a baby girl they named Rebecca. Anna laid uncomfortably in labor in a cramped cabin on the boat with her husband and two small sons. The two young boys were Herschel and August. After the birth they went on land and took a bus to a small town called Milburn in upstate New York. The father, Jacob Schwart found a small place to live with his family rent free with a job connection included. He was going to be the caretaker of Milburn Township Cemetery. The two young boys were Herschel and August.

The story went on to tell how they survived living in this town and how terrible their lives became. The mother became anxious and sick and Jacob became irritated and insane as the years went on. The two sons had problems making friends and being abused by their father that one day they just ran away. So, Rebecca was the only child left to be brought between her mother’s anxiety and her father’s rage. Then Rebecca went through the most horrible experience no child should go through….

Once Rebecca was old enough to be on her own she jump from a dark past into another abusive relationship that only led her trying to survive with a new baby boy until she had the chance to escape the raging gutter she found herself in once again. She changed her name, took her son and moved around like a gypsy. She didn’t dare to settle in one place in fear of her so called husband/lover would find them.

She had high hopes for her son (Niley) Zack now, to become a great pianists. She did what she could to take care of her son and to look out for their future. She was sweet but not that innocent when talking about her past. She became a whole different person by name, rank and dishonesty..snicker…

She did finally decide to settle down but only out of concern for her son and herself. Like I said she was a nice person but she schemed her way to the very end of the story. However, she found out what lonely felt like……

I enjoyed the novel and recommend it as a great book.
( )
  Juan-banjo | May 31, 2016 |
Huh? It just ends? Oates tortures us for 500 pages and it just ... ends. I wouldn't have read it a all except for book club. Back in the mid 1970s I read a lot of JKO but then I just got tired of her. I won't be reading another (even if my book club selects another of her works). ( )
  BookConcierge | Feb 3, 2016 |
Showing 1-5 of 38 (next | show all)

At the beginning of Oates's 36th novel, Rebecca Schwart is mistaken by a seemingly harmless man for another woman, Hazel Jones, on a footpath in 1959 Chatauqua Falls, N.Y. Five hundred pages later, Rebecca will find out that the man who accosted her is a serial killer, and Oates will have exercised, in a manner very difficult to forget, two of her recurring themes: the provisionality of identity and the awful suddenness of male violence. There's plenty of backstory, told in retrospect. Rebecca's parents escape from the Nazis with their two sons in 1936; Rebecca is born in the boat crossing over. When Rebecca is 13, her father, Jacob, a sexton in Milburn, N.Y., kills her mother, Anna, and nearly kills Rebecca, before blowing his own head off. At the time of the footpath crossing, Rebecca is just weeks away from being beaten, almost to death, by her husband, Niles Tignor (a shady traveling beer salesman). She and son Niley flee; she takes the name of the woman for whom she has been recently mistaken and becomes Hazel Jones. Niley, with a musical gift, becomes Zacharias, "a name from the bible," Rebecca tells people. Rebecca's Hazel navigates American norms as a waitress, salesperson and finally common-law wife of the heir of the Gallagher media fortune, a man in whom she never confides her past. Oates is a novelistic tracker, following the traces of some character's flight from or toward some ultimate violence with forensic precision. Many of the passages are a lot like a blown-up photo of a bruise—ugly without seeming to have a point. Yet the traumatic pattern of the hunter and the hunted, unfolded in Rebecca/Hazel's lifelong escape, never cripples Hazel: she is liberated, made crafty, deepened by her ultimately successful flight. Like Theodore Dreiser, Oates wears out objections with her characters, drawn in an explosive vernacular. Everything in this book depends on Oates' ability to bring a woman before the reader who is deeply veiled—whose real name is unknown even to herself—and she does it with epic panache.
added by kthomp25 | editPublishers Weekly
 

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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Joyce Carol Oatesprimary authorall editionscalculated
Dunne, BernadetteNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
Dedication
for my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern,
the "gravedigger's daughter,"

IN MEMORIAM

and for David Ebershoff,
by a circuitous route
First words
"In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of."
Quotations
He was of an age when new words thrilled him as if they were gaily feathered birds flying about his head.
Because there is meanness in the world. And we are in the world.
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Fiction. Literature. HTML:

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 bittersweetâ??but very "American"â??triumph. "You are born here, they will not hurt you"â??so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true.

In THE GRAVEDIGGER'S DAUGHTER, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individ

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Book description
Beautiful Hazel Jones and her young son Zach are liked and admired by all they meet — but they inspire curiosity too. Why is Zach forbidden to mention his father, and how did Hazel get the scars on her forehead which she takes such pains to hide? Why do they roam from place to place, settling nowhere and confiding in no one?

Because Hazel Jones wasn't always Hazel Jones. Once she was Rebecca Schwart, the dark-eyed daughter of German asylum seekers who fled to the US to escape the Nazis. Her father, hampered by language and chained by poverty, could only find work as a gravedigger, and Rebecca and her family lived in a hovel on the edge of the cemetery.

Driven mad by subjection to daily humiliation and destitution, Rebecca's father committed a horrific crime which changed the course of her life forever. But can you ever re-invent yourself in the aftermath of murder — or is history destined to repeat itself?
Haiku summary
Hazel fuit son père,
son mari, avec son fils,
qui sera pianiste
(Tiercelin)

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