Publishers Weekly
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Reminiscent of a Hasidic tale in its deceptively quiet, gentle tone, this masterful debut offers up its darkest secrets with heartbreaking delicacy. The son of a rabbi in Windsor, Ontario, Aryeh Alexander ben Shelomo lives in a sheltered world tightly circumscribed by his parents' friendship with the family of Cantor Bernard Seidengarn, which includes his wife, Berenice, and his twin sister (and fellow Auschwitz survivor), Hannalore. This tight-knit family circle can't banish unspoken memories of the Holocaust, memories that debilitate Alexander and send him into escapist reveries. When his mother, Sarah, worries over his daydreaming ways, the three women consult a gypsy "prophetess"; later, when 16-year-old Alexander withdraws to his room for a year, his father consults a Hasidic rebbe. Thus buffeted between "my mother's uncontrollable fears and my father's unanswerable intellectual and spiritual pursuits," Alexander harbors a disturbing secret, a secret even he doesn't fully understand, about the horrors that the twins suffered in the laboratory of Auschwitz's mad doctor Josef Mengele. Though steeped in religious sensibility and learning, this warm, contemplative novel works on its readers' most visceral sympathies and fears. German rights to Kindler Verlag; Dutch rights to Meulenhoff. (Sept.) FYI: Stollman, the son of a rabbi, is an interventional neuroradiologist whose stories have appeared in Story, the Yale Review, American Short Fiction and Tikkun. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Library Journal
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Windsor, Ontario, is the setting for this mystical debut novel, a coming-of-age story about the lonely son of Holocaust survivors. Alexander's parents‘a rabbi and his fearful wife, along with the cantor and his wife, who live next door, try to protect the young boy, raising him in a tangle of "secrets and lies." But he learns that his mother has a brother in a mental institution and that the cantor and his sister were part of Josef Mengele's "medical" experiments on twins in Auschwitz. He tries to emulate his academic father and the grandfather he never knew by accumulating endless knowledge about the secrets of the universe. Alexander's small world is delightfully peopled by uncommon folk, and philosophical questions about the post-Holocaust world are probed through many of the boy's adventures. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.‘Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Alexander, the son of a rabbi living in Windsor, Ontario, is the protagonist of this riveting first novel. At age 16, Alexander, who mastered two languages while still in kindergarten, withdraws to his room for almost a year. His father, a would-be writer, spends his life working on a trilogy. His mother, verging on madness, retreats into isolation for nine months with an imaginary pregnancy. His mother's best friend is married to a cantor who--along with the cantor's twin sister--survived the unspeakable medical experiments inflicted on twins by Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. It is the cantor and his sister--and the horror they went through--that profoundly affect Alexander's life. In an author's note, Stollman says that the events in the book with regard to the fate of twins in Auschwitz are based on historical fact; his brilliantly written novel reveals anew the ferocious hold the Holocaust has on its survivors and their loved ones. --George Cohen

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A ruminative and wonderfully moving first novel about a sheltered boyhood and adolescence, tracing the confusions and pains visited on its sensitive protagonist by approaching maturity. Aryeh Alexander, a rabbi's son, grows up in the 1960s in Windsor, Ontario. His doting extended family is dominated by his mother's childless best friend Berenice and by Hannalore, the twin sister of his father's Cantor and a survivor whose long-repressed memories of WW II Europe comprise one of several disillusioning lessons Alexander is fated to learn about the complex freedoms and burdens of adulthood. From his scholarly father, Alexander learns that ``it's human nature to seek out patterns wherever they may present themselves''--and the novel proceeds to show his instruction in both the necessity and the limitations of discovering such patterns. The Cantor's patient tending of his potted palm trees cannot prevent the devastation wrought by a tornado. No amount of familial love or protectiveness can prevent the sufferings or deaths of the innocent. And the laborious research undertaken by Alexander's father into the geographical and spiritual origins of mankind in the valley of ``the far Euphrates with its source in Eden'' is destined to yield endless and unanswerable further questions in place of ultimate answers. Stollman expertly dramatizes both Alexander's inevitable fascination with the world outside his somewhat insular family (the mercurial personality of a ``deformed'' girl who simultaneously courts him and pushes him away; his sexual fixation on the briefly glimpsed figure of a handsome older boy); and the intellectual and moral momentum that draws him, despite himself, into the embracing orbit of the world of his fathers. A series of losses, and the acceptance of--and accommodations to--loss elevate the lyrical final pages into both a thoroughly satisfying elegy for all the things that cannot remain and an affirmation of our right and need to believe in the essential permanence of things and of the spirit.