Night Flight

School Library Journal

Gr 5-8-In 1957, 12-year-old Jeff and his best friend, Max, have a falling out when their dogs are poisoned, and Max blames local Jews. Jeff, unknown to Max, is half-Jewish; Max's father, Jeff discovers, was a Nazi. Over the summer, Jeff struggles with mixed feelings toward his friend and confusion about his own identity. By the book's end, he has established a self-image that he feels comfortable with and that even Max admires. Night Flight is a potentially intriguing story that goes sadly awry. The two boys are so diametrically opposed that their friendship is implausible (this is compounded by their curious ignorance of one another's families). Hausman's writing is overwrought with excessive description, introspection, and symbolism. He is preachy and relies on stereotypes (Max and his father are the ultimate Nazis, while the Jewish community is so idealized that it becomes comical). There are unexplained gaps in the story line, as well as historically inaccurate language. Finally, the book is too contrived; people, places, memories, and experiences are tidily assembled to help Jeff mature. Night Flight just doesn't take off.-Ann W. Moore, Guilderland Public Library, NY

Hazel Rochman

Jeff's cool friend Max is anti-Semitic: What would he do if he knew Jeff was half-Jewish? In this first-person narrative, based on a real event in the author's childhood, 12-year-old Jeff Hausman confronts his identity. Max blames the Jews for poisoning the dogs in his lakeside community, and reluctantly, Jeff is drawn into Max's plans for revenge. To his shame, Jeff is haunted by a secret, a nightmare he can't forget, involving a time when Max shot a burlap bag full of live kittens, and Jeff stood by passively. The plot creaks with contrived parallels and heavy metaphors, including a patched-on episode about burned books and a Gypsy librarian-poet who spells out wise messages. The history will confuse kids: the story is set in the 1950s; Jeff's father left Hungary long before World War II; Max's father, however, was a Nazi. Still, Hausman writes with poetry and immediacy about coming to America ("We left farms and family and turned our faces to the faceless sea" ) and about the moral conflict of a boy who finally finds the courage to identify with his Jewish father and know himself.

Kirkus Reviews

A deeply disturbing novel, based on an incident from the author's childhood. The 12-year-old narrator, Jeff Hausman, has a recurring nightmare during the summer of 1957: He watches his best friend, Max Maeder, fire his .22 into a burlap sack of rats; Jeff, burying the sack, finds kittens inside it. This horrible incident is not a nightmare but a memory of an actual event, and unfolds around the main plot: The neighborhood dogs are being poisoned, and Max asserts that "Jews" must be responsible, without knowing that Jeff is half-Jewish. When the friends are punished for victimizing some Jewish neighbors, Max, now aware of Jeff's heritage, threatens vengeance. Jeff saves Max from drowning, in a tidy ending that intimates that Max and his crypto-Nazi father will abandon their prejudices in gratitude.

A welter of half-developed themes overwhelms the book's considerable literary merit. Hausman (Doctor Moledinky's Castle, 1995, etc.) provides evocative, convincing descriptions of the outdoors and makes elements of the plot and setting resonate as symbols, but the book is more a series of intensely dramatic set pieces than a seamless whole, and often implausible. The age of the protagonist and the length of the book mark it for middle- schoolers, but the brutality of much of the subject matter and the many ambiguities, intentional or not, demand an older readership.