Literary Generations
Yael Goldstein’s debut novel, Overture (Doubleday), tackles a classic theme—life versus art—from a female point of view.
By Jen A. Miller

"I was really interested in the life vs. art questions,” says Goldstein from her home in Princeton, N.J. “How much life does one sacrifice for the sake of art? For a woman, it’s more likely that you’re always worrying about all the other people whose happiness is affected by you.” She shows this through tasha Darsky, whom we first meet as a woman bored during an interview. She’s a world-famous violinist, and after talking to hundreds, if not thousands, of reporters, how much concern should she have for one more interview? But when this journalist asks pointed questions about her past love life, Tasha freezes up. Tasha’s daughter, Alex, hears the interviewer ask her mother about one particular former lover, and Alex storms out of the room.

From there, the narrative brings us back to meet tasha as a girl on the cusp of
fame. We follow her journey from a youth obsessed with an older man (a running
theme in tasha’s life), to college, to her first love and heartbreak, and to her catapult to fame, all working its way back to that opening interview. tasha has to make choices, as do other artists in the book, between living her life or closing out the world to further her art. In tasha’s case the art is composing music—something she would like to do, but which does not come naturally to her.

Overture is a sweeping tale of love, fame and power in the world of classical music, although Goldstein admits that the most musical experience she’s had is singing in a choir.

“I never really doubted that it was going to be a book about music,” says Goldstein. “Right at the beginning, I thought it would be either about musicians or mathematicians. My mother had already written about mathematicians and it was a lot less sexy than musicians.”

Goldstein’s mother is famed novelist rebecca Goldstein, whose book the Mind-Body Problem caused a sensation when first published in 1983. Overture readers might conclude that the rocky relationship between Tasha and Alex is modeled on Goldstein’s relationship with her mother: two extreme talents butting heads and one daughter looking for freedom. Goldstein insists this is far from the truth.

“I learned everything I know about writing from my mother,” she says. “She raised
me on stories. Each day when you came home from school, she’d tell you more about what she was writing. you felt you were growing up beside these characters.”

Her mother also taught her to appreciate what being a writer means. “There’s this real sense of how rich something needs to feel and how seriously you can take these characters,” she says. “I really learned that it’s okay to let yourself be-
come obsessed with this sort of thing.”

Goldstein counts Henry James and Franz Kafka as two of her favorite authors, and Overture takes on the same grand scale. It’s a wonderful debut from a promising author.

If Overture is a first novel about music and family, Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum’s A Day of Small Beginnings (Little, Brown) is a first novel about family secrets and faith. Late one night in 1906, 14-year-old Itzik Leiber makes a fatal mistake. While trying to protect three small, innocent boys from a brutal whipping, he causes a townsman’s horse to rear and kill its owner. this accident could kill Leiber, too—he is a Jewish boy in a beyond-anti-Semitic Polish town. So he runs to a graveyard, where the spirit of Friedl, a childless woman, rises from her grave to guide him to safety.

Like Overture, A Day of Small Beginnings is a sweeping novel. However, it is more rooted in the past and focuses on a larger picture. At its core, the book is a story about three generations of one family, but this family could stand for any Jewish family whose roots are across an ocean. It’s an effective narrative tool that rosenbaum uses wisely in a rich, dense debut novel.