Used book – Summer Nights in Brooklyn, Colombe Schneck

"Let's call him Frederick. He's 41, a literature professor specializing in Flaubert, married, father to 15-year-old Lizzie, and at the time of the events, the summer of 1991, lives in a lovely three-story brick house in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens neighborhood. Frederick is cheating on his wife. His mistress is named Esther; she is white, Jewish, Parisian, and obviously younger. She has just finished her journalism studies and is on a three-month internship in New York. This adultery is a minor event, but personal life is more important than the movements of the world, as long as one has the ability to escape them."

Yet, it is indeed the movements of the world that will catch up with Frederick and Esther.

In August 1991, in Crown Heights, a residential neighborhood in Brooklyn, a Jewish man accidentally runs over two Black children playing across the street. One of them is killed instantly. This neighborhood, where the two communities coexist uneasily, quickly becomes a scene of fire and blood; the streets echo with cries of "death to Jews" and "long live Nazis," stores are looted, and cars burn. While the police response is slow to arrive, rabbis, reverends, mothers, journalists, and ordinary citizens clash, seeking fault and violence in each other's eyes.

The love story between Esther and Frederick will not survive these events, which pit them against each other until their breakup. Esther will never recover and will spend 25 years dwelling on her lost love and trying to understand what happened during that summer of 1991. This book is the account of her quest to answer the question her lover once asked: Why can't we love one another?

The novel, written with a lively and always accurate pen, which Colombe Schneck draws from these very real events, transports as much as it questions on the unfortunately current themes of racism and anti-Semitism, but always speaking to us in the universal language of love and hope.