City of Laughter

"A rich and riveting debut marrying centuries-old folklore to twenty-first-century queer literary fiction, City of Laughter spans four generations of Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years. Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an eighteenth century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to bring laughter to the celebrants at a Jewish wedding, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger, triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century. In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first queer love and grieving the death of her father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her spare time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family's mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks. What she finds in Poland will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present, a life shaped by ancestral forces that originated long before she was born. Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter tangles beautifully with queerness and spirituality, zigzagging between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind"--