Chains Around the Grass

by Naomi Ragen

Book Overview

After David Markowitz, a first-generation Jewish immigrant, is conned into making a bad investment that leaves his family bankrupt, he dies suddenly, leaving his wife, Ruth, to find a way to survive... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1902881532
• ISBN13: 9781902881539
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Toby Press
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

"Chained up"

I stumbled upon this book while browsing and had it not been for my own personal experiences growing up likewise in a Queens Housing Project, I never would have purchased the book. After reading the first few intense pages of "Chains aound the grass" that's when it had a grip on me and I was then sold. Still, one need not have been raised poor and living in the projects to experience the fright and sheer terror little Sara felt while venturing out in a new neighborhood filled with bullies, perverts and strange boys. One of the most powerful chapters written by Naomi Regan that will have you in tears. You will surely absorb the emotional impact of one diaster after the other of ones family life encounters. A story of a family's uphill struggle for the American dream followed by a downward trend of personal tragedies and defeats. No doubt that your heart will go out to the characters in the story. An exciting read for enthusiasts of nostalgia and of past times with a hint of spiritualism.

beautiful in every way

I LOVED THIS BOOK.It made me laugh outloud and it made me cry.Mostly it made me think. This is a story about real life and not the usual immigrant founding a dynasty cliche. All of the characters are well devoloped and I found myself loving them and hating them as if they were members of my own family.And of course they could have been. The universal message of what the measure of a man is is profoundly moving especially in our materialistic world.

Measuring Your Life with the Right Yardstick

Naomi Ragen is an international bestseller novelist, a writer of and about the core of human life. Chains Around the Grass (The Toby Press, USA, 2003) is the book Ms. Ragen says that she became an author to write. Setting the story of a poor Jewish family in the heart of America, Naomi Ragen calls for a revision of attitudes shaped by the sickness of reckless capitalism and its people who have turned into machines fuelled with business. The novel's prologue is captivating. Through the eyes of the moment, little Sara Markowitz is shown sitting in humility in her rich uncle's house with her mother Ruth and brother Jesse out for the funeral of her father David Markowitz. Pursuing the old American dream of a well-off future, David never realizes the greater need of familial love that is showering him all along and the lives of his family chug along the uncertain paths of the business world. With the loss of David the family slumps into an indefinable channel of struggle against the demands of the society and its own integrity. Chains Around the Grass is one of the semantically richest works carrying a number of issues. Sick capitalist values are questioned in the suffering of widowed Ruth and her children with several close, rich, relatives. The dilemma of a poor minority's identity under social pressure speaks in Ruth's resentment of changing Jesse's family name to `Marks'. What underlies insanity is illustrated cogently in Jesse's character. Sara's character embodies the process of personality development under early childhood traumas. The best explored is, perhaps, gender inequality prevailing in the social world, best instantiated in Sara's feelings of hatred towards her own brother. Naomi Ragen's striking symbolism in her novel's situations is the quality of her work that best complements other merits. The heaven of idealized life is shattered to `chips flying away under time's relentless chisel'. When they were united and beautiful like young lush grass, they were out of reach on account of `chains' around them. One set of `ropes' is replaced with another and the dream of catching your life's beauty is never actualized until you see your life's time ending abruptly like a dream. Naomi Ragen is at her best in justice with her characters. Reality comes to them as they finally learn to `measure their life with the right yardstick'. Through Ruth's faith, we all know that a purely humanistic relationship is possible if we know the beauty of our inner self. It is an illustration of Eric Fromm's humanistic psychoanalysis; a story as real as reading one's own mind. With all its beauty of language and elements of realistic fiction, Chains Around the Grass carries a problem as a book. The title and the prologue are suggestive of Sara as being the protagonist. It is through Sara's eyes that the tenderness of life and monsters of fear are revealed to us but Sara's character is treated scantily as compared to that of her parents and her brother Jesse

Poetry, truth and life

I read Naomi Ragen's weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post religiously. But I could not understand when she said this was what she had lived her whole life to write. Then I read the book.This autobiographical novel of family resilience distills many truths that obviously took a lifetime to learn--truths that melt bitterness. The book weaves several layers together--a of a family's travails, its near ruin in a tangle of poverty, bad decisions and relationships gone sour; a soul's awakening; and family renewal. The poetry of all three resonates throughout in a voice as subtle and profound as it is sensible. Ragen has given few details when she notes that readers will all feel sure that their "own knowledge would have kept you safe," and then warns, "Of course, you'd be fooling yourself."Poetry comes in what follows: "It is a false security, that feeling of superiority we have listening to someone else recount the steps to personal disaster because all of us are so very similar--we humans. We feel safe only because the teller is untalented, the truth unconveyed. And so, you must consider the soft building dust underfoot, the newness of the place."One can only relish Ragen's description, some time later, of a child discovering the value of her own life. "She dropped to her knees, breathless, aware of her own heart pounding like some stranger begging to be let in.... She lay down in the sand. First she wiggled her toes, feeling the air pass through them like the cold touch of metal. She felt a strong sudden consciousness of her ankles and the firm muscles of her calves, the long wonderful stretch of skin, so smooth and soft, that ran from her toes to her hips. She felt aware of her stomach and the softly beating heart in her chest and her mouth and her nose and eyes and ears. "A nameless joy began to rise inside her, wavelike. She felt it spread, as a wave of breaks and spreads, touching the far-off shore, flooding the sand in a quick deliberate flood. A sudden searing light, like the sun, pierced what had been dark and cold and filled with fear." 'I'm alive!' she thought, and was comforted."Have we not all been in that place? The same child still later astonishes herself and readers with her discovery of her soul and place in the universe. The sense of discovery alone makes this wise novel worth reading. But the book also rewards readers with intense optimism, even when its characters are at their lowest.With the same poetry that the book opens, it closes: "The echoes moved out of the corners, beating like wingless birds around the room." I cannot recommend this book or author highly enough. Alyssa A. Lappen

Love and faith...

This beautifully written tale brings the impoverished Markowitz family to life as their American Dream turns into a nightmare. Set in the 1950's in the projects in The Bronx, those "chains around the grass" are metaphoric as well as physical for little Sara. Her strength of character comes from the strength of her faith and is a wondrous thing to behold. The autobiographical nature of this novel makes it a heart wrenching and compelling read.