Short War

It’s hard for the light liberal satire of Nina’s story to compete with the immediacy of Gabriel’s, or the life and color around him ... And that may be the point. The question at the core of Nina’s story is whether she can ever have a life separate from her father’s, something that isn’t small in comparison.

While focusing on events several decades in the past, the resulting novel represents a new branch of the American Jewish canon — reflecting the community’s ongoing transformation from strangers at the gate to insiders who share fully in responsibility for America’s ruinous interventions abroad ... What these novels (and many others) share is a belief that the privileges that come with being American are won with great difficulty — and must always be carefully safeguarded. With Short War, Meyer situates herself within this canon — if only to pick a fight ... Meyer doesn’t bother answering the question of whether Jews can truly belong in America. By ending the novel on the insurmountable divide between the American and Chilean members of the Lazris family, she reframes the debate, asking instead whether belonging in America is worth the cost of complicity in its disastrous foreign policy ... That small shift — the imagining of Jewish characters not as outsiders in the United States, but as privileged Americans abroad — allows Meyer to take the proposition Roth dismisses very seriously, and marks a significant departure from previous eras in Jewish-American literature. Perhaps her questions are the ones that will guide the tradition through its next century.

What initially unfolds is a moving, if ingenuous, tale of first love set against the backdrop of imminent war. Ms. Meyer attacks the premise with a great deal of energy, befitting her youthful characters, until the moment the coup begins ... A cinematic romance is thus replaced by a bloodless meditation on trauma and guilt.