The Kaufmanns: A Novel

A tragicomedy following one upper-middle-class Jewish-American family across two continents, soon to be reunited at a wedding, as each member reaches for a love, life, or self beyond their grasp

Thirty-two-year-old Alex Kaufmann leaves behind his studio apartment in New York and moves to Berlin to be with a German woman he met seven years earlier, after an obligatory trip to Auschwitz. Their reunion is passionate yet strained: He’s never felt this close to another person and would do anything to keep her, but something feels off.

Back in America, Robert, the family’s patriarch, lives on the southwest coast of Florida with Julie, his wife of several decades. Though by all accounts it’s a successful marriage, neither can bring themselves to confess to the other their secret desires: for Robert, raucous group sex with other couples; for Julie, a more worldly and artistic life than their provincial existence can offer. Meanwhile on the Atlantic coast, their younger son, Bryan, engaged to be wed, anticipates his marriage with an ambiguous sense of dread while nurturing a crush on a coworker. With the wedding just months away, all four Kaufmanns spend the summer hurling themselves against the limitations of their lives, desperate to find fulfillment at last.

The Kaufmanns is Alec Niedenthal’s masterful debut novel about a family fighting to transcend their neuroses and repressions amid the misplaced optimism of the Biden years. Briskly entertaining, highly comic, and quietly moving, it weighs the tender humiliations of the Kaufmanns’ private lives against the scale of history, showing them burdened by the catastrophes of the past and unable to alter the future they feel coming.