...it seems as if the decision to spread out geographically allowed her to look at the fragile connections that exist between people in and out of couples and families. The stories are as satisfying as individual novels. They often keep going right past the point where you thought they would end. And spreading them out geographically lets Antopol look at fragile connections between people in couples and in families ... They'll make you nostalgic, not just for earlier times, but for another era in short fiction.
It sometimes put me in mind of Allegra Goodman’s work; both writers are adept at auditing the emotional lives of frazzled Jewish intellectuals. At other times, the Old World lefty politics in Ms. Antopol’s stories summoned the memory of Grace Paley, for whom every joke came wrapped around a bony fist of meaning ... Political awareness is a birthright for Mr. Antopol’s characters. So is latent paranoia ... It’s one of the achievements of Ms. Antopol’s stories, though, that her men and women seem to be questioning everything, all the time ... The details in these stories are consistently fresh and offbeat without being showy ... By the final third of The UnAmericans, I began to feel that I was returning to places I’d been ... If this impressive book sometimes makes the sound of a writer still figuring it all out, Ms. Antopol’s soulfulness and wit make even holding actions memorable and promising.
Antopol dissects idealism and cynicism in equal measure, and shows the effects of each on the lives of those around her protagonists. History and culture loom, but never for the same person in the same way, and loneliness and confusion result ... Whether its familial or economic, Antopol does a good job of channeling her characters’ anxieties, and she shows the aftereffects of seismic political decisions on daily striving worldwide.
Molly Antopol’s debut story collection, is powerful, well written, thought provoking, and very impressive. Because of the depth of character development in the stories, many of Antopol’s tales possess the richness of a novel, but are also still effective, beautifully constructed short stories that cohere well as a collection ...Molly Antopol is an astute, insightful observer of human relationships, which is evidenced in her psychologically complex, well-developed characters and narrators. She is particularly adept at illustrating grief and loss ... Each story stands on it own but also ties in thematically with the rest of the tales in the collection. There isn’t a single mediocre or even lesser story in the bunch.
Reading through the engaging stories in Molly Antopol’s debut collection, The UnAmericans, feels a little like flipping through a pile of assorted family snapshots found in a thrift store. Some of the photos might be wilted; some might have creased edges; some might be black-and-white Polaroids; some might be full-colored and grainy. The settings and figures and backgrounds might all, for the most part, be different too. But an underlying connection bridges them, linking the images together into a beautiful and haphazard assemblage, a narrative with no clear beginning, middle, or end ... Antopol’s carefully crafted stories demand our attention, as they remind us to stop, look, and listen.
Molly Antopol challenges her readers’ willingness to simplify bygone times and read into them easy moral rights and wrongs. Characters’ idealized pasts in distant lands butt up against the mundaneness and dissatisfaction of the actual. No one is a hero, no one is a victim ... The Unamericans is graced with an unpretentious prose style and plainspoken humor and insight ... The stories...inevitably recall Nathan Englander’s wry undercutting of Jewish stereotypes and the Yiddish-inflected cadences of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Antopol has an ear for the kind of off-diction that can set a character in a certain time and place and round him out better than any physical detail ... There is a mordant simplicity to these characters’ foibles, which are never judged by the author or even particularly mourned by the characters themselves ... A vital text for us today.
She is a wonderful storyteller who knows how to create flawed yet sympathetic (and amusing) characters ... Whether writing from the perspectives of Israeli brothers ('Minor Heroics'), grandmothers, fathers, mothers or young women, Antopol writes convincingly and with great empathy. The stories in The UnAmericans expose complex family dynamics, yearnings and age-old secrets. Antopol's characters are haunted by experiences of failed love - but throughout, there is the sense that a happier life, somewhere, is just around the corner.
Most of The UnAmericans, Molly Antopol’s first collection of short stories, reads like a series of writing exercises. With one exception, the stories are about lives that fail to happen ... The point of view shifts between men and women, though everyone in these stories seems to speak and think in the same voice ... It is not an unpleasant voice — it is erudite and occasionally thoughtful and belongs unmistakably to a young, well-educated American woman ... There is more to life than the one wrong turn — and that there ought to be more to fiction as well.
Historical incidents made vivid by eyewitness accounts inform Antopol’s fluent first collection of stories: a contemporary study of assimilation, the past and the uneasy relation to it – often in the form of deliberate amnesia – of subsequent generations ... Antopol crosses America, Europe and Israel in these tales. The energy of Tel Aviv contrasts with the unruffled serenity of Vermont, the grey elegance of Kiev against frenetic New York. She uses lovely, unusual metaphors: hair is the colour of cola; a voice 'clear as a ballad' ... The final piece, 'Retrospective', is one of the book’s most poignant.
Spanning a large swath of the 20th century, these are stories about the older generation of Jews who fled Europe and saw their courage tested ... There are no happy endings, nor does Antopol people her stories with heroes. What draws the reader to her deeply flawed characters is their keen self-awareness, and their consequent ability to act with a semblance of moral, sometimes even selfless, integrity.
The impressive debut collection by Antopol...features a variety of settings—Israel, Belarus, California, Poland, Maine—and characters, but it also has an unusual cohesiveness for a first collection ... Most of the characters here are Jews of Eastern European extraction; most are grappling, in one way or another, with issues of estrangement: from home, from family members, from the big ideological/idealistic causes they once espoused, from themselves ... Antopol offers complex, psychologically subtle portraits of her often regretful characters ... A smart, empathetic, well-crafted first collection.
