The War at Home, A Memoir-Novel

Nora Eisenberg is a Professor of English at The City University of New York (LaGuardia) and Director of the University Faculty Publications Program.  Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals such The Partisan Review, The Village Voice Literary Supplement and Tikkun.  The War at Home is her first novel.

Lucy Lehman has a secret.  Everybody loves her eccentric family but nobody knows what's really going on.  Her mother is a beautiful dance teacher, whose creative movement classes can calm the most incorrigible Bronx delinquents. Her father, just returned from World War Two, is a working call hero.  The trouble is, he's still at war. 

More familiar with the battle fields than a home with a wife and kids, he does combat with neighbors, his employers, his children and above all, his wife. Charming oddball in the straight-laced 1950's , Tippy Lehman is overwhelmed by her husband's war, leaving the kids to hold home and family together.

Told with wit, understanding, and remarkable pluck, The War at Home is part memoir, part novel, and all heart as it recounts the story of an inseparable brother and sister flourishing despite a household in which insanity is the norm.  Every page summons the lost world of the outer boroughs of New York City in the 1950's, where apartment houses tower over abandoned orchards, lonely kids roam the woods of Bronx Park unafraid, and the Bronx River ripples with the hope of Huckleberry Finn's Mississippi.