In the King's Arms: A Novel
Nominated for The Sami Rohr Prize in Fiction by The Jewish Book Council"Sonia Taitz weaves a witty, literate, and heartfelt story filled with engaging characters and relationships. The reader is moved by and invested in Lily's realization of who she is, where she comes from, and her hopes for a more tolerant and healed world."— Renita Last,Jewish Book World"Taitz zigzags among her culturally disparate characters, zooming in on their foibles with elegance and astringency. She keenly pinpoints the ways children filter their parents' identities; embracing what works, discarding what doesn't and then moving on. Or not." —Sunday New York Times Book ReviewofIn the King's Arms"Mid-1970s London may be thirty years post-war, but New Yorker Lily Taub, who embarks for graduate studies at Oxford University, can't seem to neatly cover the territory between the Europe her Holocuast survivor parents remember&mdashand; burned into her own consciousness— and the bright, shining new world she longs to prove exists, and to inhabit....This novel is richly embroidered, each page a highly polished prose gem, rendered with a loving literary hand, a gift to readers, a mitzvah." — Lisa Romeo,ForeWord Reviews"Sonia Taitz weaves a witty, literate, and heartfelt story filled with engaging characters and relationships. The reader is moved by and invested in Lily’s realization of who she is, where she comes from, and her hopes for a more tolerant and healed world." — Renita Last, Jewish Book Council Review ofIn the King's Arms"Along the way, I thought often of Evelyn Waugh — the smart talk, the fey Brits, country houses, good clothes, lineage for centuries. And I thought how, as the decades rush by, Waugh increasingly seems to me as remote as…oh, Thomas Hardy.... What Sonia Taitz has done is, therefore, very appealing. She’s created a young, attractive, brilliant Jewish graduate student from New York’s Lower East Side — the daughter of Holocaust survivors, even — and, in 1975, tossed her into the rarified world of Waugh. This is no Philip Roth Jew who believes the goyim are, if not actually dumb, less bright: “She loved the strength of Renaissance brass, and the moody words ‘heath’ and ‘moor.’....And now we’re thrust into a love story, rich in complications, richer in echoes like her parents in the Nazi camps, Lily is out of her element. Happily, Taitz has a light touch; there’s no ponderous organ music underneath these moments, they’re just markers, sign posts of the distance traveled.' — Jesse Kornbluth on HeadButler"The daughter of concentration camp survivors suffering great personal pain and loss, Taitz finds hope for the future in the human capacity for compassion and change. In her engaging novel, the immature and irresponsible Julian rises to the occasion, becoming, we are led to believe, a truly noble man and mensch. It is in Lily, though, that Taitz shows us the most convincing transformation, from heroine to hero, with the courage to look back on a dark river of pain without losing the chance to proceed on her path." — Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet's review ofIn the King's Arms"In her gloriously rendered novel,In the King's Arms, Sonia Taitz writes passionately and wisely about outsiders and what happens when worlds apart slam into each other." —  Betsy Carter, author ofThe Puzzle King, The Orange Blossom Express, andNothing to Fall Back On."In the King's Armsis a deeply felt, lyrical novel, at once romantic and mournful, that brings to life the long tentacles of the Holocaust through the generations....The author's finely wrought observations about class structure in England, the vagaries of first love and the overriding possibility of redemption will stay with the reader long after finishing this book." — Emily Listfield, author ofBest IntentionsandWaiting to Surface.“ Sonia  Taitz’s  witty, sensuous  prose  enlivens  this  tale  of  two  cultures  converging  in  Oxford  in  the  1970s.  Lily  of  the  Lower  East  Side,  daughter  of  Holocaust  survivors,  falls  in  love  with  a  son  of  the  English  gentry  and  is  drawn  into  his  family  drama. Taitz  deftly  contrasts  the  lovers’  opposing  worlds — and  the  surprising  middle  ground where  they  embrace.” — Barbara Klein Moss, author ofLittle Eden"sPraise forMothering Heights:"Wise, witty, and often hilarious."—Publishers Weekly