“Steeped in rich detail about the challenges of coming to a foreign country and constantly guessing at the intentions of those offering help, this is a nuanced narrative that uncovers the harsh realities of uprooting your life, even if you reach your destination. It’s impossible not to cheer on Pearl, whose keen observations and desire to be her own boss push her through setbacks and trauma in a riveting journey to find her own freedom in an unjust world.”
— Booklist
“Aaron Hamburger’s stunning new novel Hotel Cuba imbues the immigrant story with love, sadness, and compassion, breathing new life into the classic genre.”
— Electric Literature
“In his resonant and rich novel, Hamburger reimagines his family’s experience with the widely restrictive laws and quotas of early 20th-century America that blocked immigrants, including Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution on the Polish-Russian border, and drove them to seek refuge in Cuba. Hamburger places resilient Pearl and her flighty younger sister, Frieda, at the emotional center of his empathic, satisfying saga. Hamburger, who was recently awarded Lambda Literary’s Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, evokes the colorful, sultry Prohibition-era Havana, as both young women make their way in the world.”
—The National Book Review “5 Hot Books”
“The immigration stories of Hamburger’s Jewish grandparents fleeing persecution in Russia post-First World War inspire this tale set in 1922 in which practical Pearl Kahn and her younger lovestruck sister, Frieda, sail on the S.S. Hudson, hoping to join their sister, Basha, in New York City. The ship is diverted to Havana where the two live and work for a year in a hat shop run by the Steinbergs, a welcoming Jewish couple. Cuba then is a playground for tourists and a sweatshop for the poor, a place where they depend on music, Pearl says, “like a folk medicine.” The Kahn sisters save enough money to continue their plan to immigrate to America where Frieda’s fiancé, Mendel, and his older brother, Ben the Oak — from their Lithuanian hometown — await. Their journey is fraught with obstacles both physical and emotional. Wholly immersive, this tale brings the time and its struggles vividly to life.”
—The Toronto Star
“Inspired by the immigration story of author Hamburger’s grandmother, this historical novel follows a pair of Jewish sisters who flee their shtetl on the Russian-Polish border in the hopes of immigrating to America. Instead, they are diverted to Cuba. The award-winning novelist richly captures the atmosphere of Cuba in pre-Castro times as well as the sisters’ distinctive sensibilities and their emotional journeys. It’s a story of displacement, creativity, and hope.”
—Hadassah Magazine
“Aaron Hamburger’s Hotel Cuba is a masterful use of historical fiction by the acclaimed author to dig into his real-life grandmother’s story. And it reveals an oft-unspoken aspect of Jewish-American immigrant stories: that such journeys are anything but linear.”
—Moment Magazine
“A unique and engrossing story of Jewish immigration inspired by Hamburger’s grandmother’s own immigrant experience…extraordinary.”
—Times of Israel
“Deeply moving, compulsively readable, HOTEL CUBA chronicles the early twentieth century immigrant experience with a profound understanding and crackling urgency I’ve not previously encountered. I could not put it down and I could not stop thinking about it long after I’d reached its stunning conclusion. In short: You need to read this book. Right now.”
— Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
“I cannot overstate my love for HOTEL CUBA. With expert perception and a capacious heart, Aaron Hamburger weaves together the daring tale of Pearl and Frieda, refugees from Poland who journey to Havana to start a new life. Carrying little but their own unstoppable vitality, their discoveries in this strange land will dazzle readers on every page. Thrilling and magisterial, the twists and turns of their story will break your heart and fill it up again with light. With every sharp and generous line of this exquisite novel, Hamburger creates dazzling worlds within worlds that I’ll be thinking about long after turning the final page.”
— Kristopher Jansma, author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards
“Aaron Hamburger takes the reader on Pearl’s circuitous journey through Cuba to the U.S., keeping us close to the visceral feelings of hunger, displacement and loneliness as well as the blossoming that Pearl undergoes in Cuba as she begins to assert her creative identity. Set between the two world wars, HOTEL CUBA explicates the past while presaging the future in an excellent historically-based novel.”
— Breena Clarke, author of River, Cross My Heart
“Aaron Hamburger’s deeply compelling new novel HOTEL CUBA takes us to Havana in the 1920s where it weaves a beautiful story of sister-love and leave-taking. The book is syncopated by Hamburger’s signature, perfectly-timed humor, his generous storytelling and agile prose. What a wise and knowing and big-hearted story of belonging and the lasting imprint of place, written by a writer at the height of his craft. There’s a feast for the eyes and ears and tastebuds here, so find a very comfortable chair and settle in. You won’t be able to put it down.”
— Susan Conley, author of Landslide
“With HOTEL CUBA, Aaron Hamburger sees the poignant gravity behind the ongoing search for home and the battle that can ensue between family obligations and the weight of history. With great empathy, this rich, engrossing novel lets us see that no place is ever transitory and that even the briefest of stays forever affects us, no matter our last horizon.”
— Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences
“Aaron Hamburger’s HOTEL CUBA is a beautiful, gripping story of immigration, hope, and personal fulfillment. Pearl, its protagonist, is one of my favorite characters in any recent novel; she is complex, wounded, occasionally ferocious–and always engaging, as she follows a long, fraught path from Russia to America via a vividly-rendered Prohibition-era Havana. Pearl seeks what we all do: safety, family, and, ultimately, a place in which she can be her best self. I loved this book.”
— Christopher Coake, author of You Would Have Told Me Not To
“HOTEL CUBA is a stunning and captivating read. It can be easy to show a cast of characters crossing such great distances, can be easy to show an immigrant’s story, but it is another thing entirely to make a reader feel that distance and the love, sadness, forgiveness and triumphs these people experience. There is so much love and compassion in this neatly detailed and moving novel. HOTEL CUBA joins the ranks of some of my favorites like Geraldine Brooks’s Caleb’s Crossing and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.”
— Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez
“In this vibrant and engaging novel, we join Pearl—practical, adaptable and constantly underestimated by those around her—as she turns her mind to the task of learning the baffling arithmetic of a new culture, a new language and new freedoms. How do you tally the price of a mango, or the price of a dockworker’s strategic silence? How far can the distance between two sisters stretch without breaking? And how to calculate the most delicate variable of all, the value of Pearl’s potential and future worth as she finds her place in a new, unknown world?”
— Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel
“HOTEL CUBA is warm, witty, and mournful, a hopeful and clear-eyed chronicle of roads both taken and not. Aaron Hamburger has a wonderful ear for the tenderness and loneliness of memory, and though his book travels continents, its most potent territory is the impossible idea of home. Pearl is miraculous and unforgettable, and so is her story.”
— Hilary Leichter, author of Temporary
“HOTEL CUBA, the story of two sisters—one a sociable beauty, the other an independent thinker—and their journey toward the American dream, is terrific. From the harrowing opening voyage as sheltered Russian Jewish refugees on their way to 1920s Havana, to the final pages set in an up-and-coming Detroit, Aaron Hamburger vividly reveals all the places and choices the sisters must navigate as they forge their way in a rapidly changing world. This is historical fiction at its best.”
— Jessica Francis Kane, author of Rules for Visiting
“In HOTEL CUBA, Aaron Hamburger brings a humane intelligence to the story of two sisters searching for home following the devastations of the First World War. Every finely observed detail resonates with hope and loss.”
— Rebecca Donner, author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
“Like everything Hamburger writes, NIRVANA IS HERE is compulsively readable, charming, and suffused with deep humanity. The title is truth in advertising, folks: this novel is nirvana indeed.”
— Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
“Hamburger is tender and provocative in his examinations of sexual abuse, racial strife in ’90s Detroit, and the way that discovering Nirvana changes everything about Ari’s world. The complexities of this novel are deftly handled by Hamburger, whose sensitive and observant prose is a pure joy to read on every page”
— Electric Literature
“A tender self-reckoning, Nirvana Is Here brings the past full circle. Hamburger deftly reveals how incidents recede—even if they leave their mark—to bring new hopes into focus.”
— Foreword Reviews
“If your idea of Heaven is sitting down with a beautifully written book full of complex, compelling characters, then get ready….Nirvana Is Here! This is a drop-everything, stay-up-way-too-late, unputdownable novel written by an amazingly talented author. Funny, sexy, wise, and thought-provoking, NIRVANA IS HERE is a book that has it all, speaks to our times, and is an absolutely necessary read.”
— Lesléa Newman, author of October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard and Heather Has Two Mommies
“A yearning, generous, coming-of-age journey. Captures both a decade, and those scary, vital moments we reveal who we are, inside. Aaron Hamburger’s prose is alive: what’s here is funny, painful, heartbreaking. If you miss (or missed) the 1990s, read this book – Nirvana Is Here.”
—Brando Skyhorse, author ofThe Madonnas of Echo Park and Take This Man
“Aaron Hamburger’s Nirvana Is Here signals a return to some of his favorite themes and narrative gestures: strong characters clouded by a slight sense of unease about where they have landed in life; nimble, smart dramatizations around important moments that move toward inevitable disclosure; and a formidable commitment to thinking about how a religious upbringing shapes our spiritual and ethical lives, whether or not we remain accepting of those views in adulthood.”
— Lambda Literary Review
“With rich, real characters and an evocative sense of time and place, Aaron Hamburger movingly explores the ways our pasts accompany us into our future lives. NIRVANA IS HERE is tender, wise and deeply affecting.”
— Tova Mirvis, author of The Book of Separation
“A touching, finely wrought portrait of secrets lying like buried ordinance beneath ordinary lives. The delicacy and observational wit of Aaron Hamburger’s prose are a marvel.”
— Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln
“Aaron Hamburger’s NIRVANA IS HERE is a wonder of a book, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and always enormously honest about what it means to be young and in love. As a Jewish Gen-Xer, the novel reminded me exactly of who I once was—and all that I still want to be. NIRVANA IS HERE is a brilliant accomplishment.”
—Lauren Grodstein, author of Our Short History
“Every once in a while, a book comes along that blows me away and “Nirvana Is Here” is one such book… Quite simply, this is a coming of age story but it is also so much more; it is a story of recovery and dealing with both past and present as set against the band Nirvana. . . . Hamburger beautifully captures the decade of the 90s and his characters who come of age then.”
—Reviews by Amos Lassen
“Nirvana is Here is told with irony and a pleasing lightness. . . . Nirvana songs and adolescent musings about Kurt Cobain pepper the book, giving it a gritty, sardonic edge.”
—Jewish Book Council
“Almost impossible for me to put this book down, which is rare for me these days… a beautiful, sad, coming-of-age story that is a heartily welcome addition to the LGBTQ literature pantheon.”
—I Like to Read
“An expertly written, bold, funny, serious novel.”
—The Rupture
“Weaves the elements of growing up in the 1990s, addressing race/privilege/sexuality, confronting awful truths and realizing consequences have meaning throughout your life… A very good read indeed.”
—Queerguru
“In his debut novel, FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, Aaron Hamburger offers a hilarious spin on the ancient travel-as-self-discovery formula in the shape of a family trip to Israel. Along the way, Hamburger directs his sharp satirical eye at a wide range of targets, and any Jew who has embarked on a package tour of the “original Old Country” will laugh out loud at the details. And, without ever compromising his gift for comedy, he also manages to introduce profound questions at every stage – about the morality of the Israeli occupation, about the demands (and attractions) of conformity and about the difficulty of finding faith in a nonsensical world.”
— Newsday
“As the Michaelsons endure “Millenium Marathon 2000,” a prepackaged trip through the Holy Land in air-conditioned buses, the sadder, grimmer sides of Israel slowly overwhelm both them and Jeremy’s new lover. The novel is consistently amusing, particularly when Hamburger offers barbed observations about the banalities of tourist culture.”
— The New York Times
“Precise, finely observed.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
“A knockout of a novel… The author’s shrewd and satirical look at Judaism, and American and Israeli style, is in the great tradition of Philip Roth, and makes for an absorbing read.”
— Frontiers Magazine (chosen as one of the top five books of 2005)
“A woman hopes a family trip to Israel will help her reclaim her confused, rebellious son in Hamburger’s entertaining, irreverent first novel (after the collection The View from Stalin’s Head). Jeremy’s been at NYU for five years, but he’s still just a junior, and Helen Michaelson, 58, thinks he might have a much-needed spiritual awakening on the “Michigan Miracle 2000″ tour. But while Jeremy’s more interested in cruising Jerusalem’s gay parks, Helen herself is primed for revelation, as she finds that her connection to Judaism and her family is more complicated than she’d thought. Hamburger has an exacting eye for mundane detail and suburban conventions, and in Jeremy he’s created the classic green-haired, pierced college student ranting about social injustice. But beneath Jeremy’s sarcastic, moralizing banter, there’s a convincing critique of Americans’ way of being in the world. In Israel in 2000, the Michaelsons are like Pixar creations trapped in a movie filmed in Super 8—the Middle East may be fraught with political tension, but their biggest problem is the heat outside their air-conditioned bus. Hamburger goes further than witty satire, though, and when the plot takes a dark turn he demonstrates that he’s capable of taking on global issues, even if his characters aren’t.”
— Publishers Weekly
“With humor and insight, Hamburger explores the cultural tension between the nation of Israel and American Jews through the story of the Michaelsons. Helen, the daughter of Russian immigrants, is married to a psychologist suffering from a slow-burning cancer. They have two gay sons. The youngest, Jeremy, is an NYU student and recent suicide-attempt survivor. Helen decides a trip to Jerusalem is what her family needs. With high hopes, she signs them up for the Michigan Miracle 2000. However, they soon feel as if they are in a tourist trap. Helen and Jeremy are driven by a connection to faith to escape the prepackaged experience, albeit in bizarre ways. Helen has an affair with the hirsute rabbi leading the tour group, and Jeremy falls in love with a deaf Palestinian named George. Hamburger engages the reader with wonderfully flawed characters and through the history, legend, and propaganda of modern Jewish life. This novel is highly recommended for anyone who is drawn to stories of family affected by the global political context of everyday life.”
— Booklist
“Aaron Hamburger takes a deceptively simple situation–an American family visiting Israel–and spins a rich, complex, often profound comedy about religion, sex, politics, and love. He has an excellent eye and ear for the absurd, but more important, genuine sympathy for the hopes and confusions all people share under our cartoon surfaces. And nobody has written a better mother and son.”
— Christopher Bram, author of The Lives of Circus Animals
“Aaron Hamburger elucidates a truth about the search for faith: that the journey forward is seldom blissful. In FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, Hamburger peoples a volatile political setting with a handful of characters pursuing transcendence—through culture, through mortality, through the spirit, through the flesh. For Hamburger’s seekers, what transpires is risky, chaotic and surprisingly tender. For his readers, exhilarating.”
— Dave King, author of The Ha-Ha
“Aaron Hamburger’s first book, THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD, contains 10 attractive short stories set mostly in Prague… what’s striking about Hamburger’s singular choice of identities isn’t the identities themselves so much as their common assertiveness… they face the same problem: not just how to know who they are, but how to seem to know. Which is a different task entirely. Among this singular collection of people, the ones who stand out are the strange and unassimilable, those who are commanding presences or simply unique: the lovable Czech giant, Jirka; the unfathomably earnest Lubos… This is the stuff of a Czech fairy tale.”
— Daniel Soar, The New York Times Book Review
“This brilliant debut collection of stories, set in Prague in the 1990s, manages at once to express scorn, confusion, and affection for the careless disarray of Czech society… wryly observed.”
— Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe
“Perversely funny… reminiscent of David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day – laugh-out-loud funny.”
— L. A. Times
“The opening up of the Czech Republic to the West after the Iron Curtain came down is charted in American writer Aaron Hamburger’s winning collection of ten stories, THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD. Hamburger’s tone is downbeat but wry… Each story offers snapshot-precise visual impressions of the city while hinting at tensions stemming from its post-Communist status.
In one of the strongest stories, “The Ground You Are Standing On,”… Hamburger achieves a perfect balance of moral conundrums shared between accusers and accused… The tales featuring young Jewish gays on the make are raunchier and more comical… Hamburger’s Czechs are, if anything, relentlessly Judeophilic but in a way that can sound mighty anti-Semitic at times. This delicate ground is navigated deftly.”
— Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
“Poignant. [These stories] tickle and they poke. This happens thanks to the cadences of a candidly, cordially realistic narrative voice… enough at ease with itself to gaze outward and also to peer inward.”
— Molly McQuade, The Chicago Tribune
“Funny and sometimes touching stories… Colorful, provocative, and rewarding.”
— Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News
“In this debut collection, THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD, Hamburger coats his characters with layer after layer of estrangement, resulting in engrossing expat lit.”
–The Village Voice
“In language that’s both understated and visceral, Hamburger skillfully distills those moments when his characters experience crucial identity shifts, not just in wild, foreign encounters but more often while eating, bathing, and tending to the animal needs of love and safety that link us all.”
— Booklist
“A promising first volume.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“With subtlety and insight, Hamburger shows how people move in and out of labels and identities and how they clash and collide because of them, as well as how they cling to and claim each other because of them… Mostly what’s in Hamburger’s THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD is the pulsing sensation of youth.”
— Chicago Free Press
“Hamburger’s sketches of oddball Prague natives are sharp and affectionate and his evocation of Prague in the 1990s is vivid and unexpected.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A collection that perfectly encapsulates the awkward beauty of expatriate living. Hamburger’s Eastern Europe channels the suffocating landscape of Milan Kundera, but, more remarkably, his Americans channel us, blemished and silly, stuck in jobs and relationships that make as little sense to them as the strange place in which they live.”
— GENEVIEVE ROTH, GQ
“In this fine debut, Hamburger has crafted 10 stories of Prague in the post-Cold War 1990s. His melancholy tales are peopled with well-developed characters–American, European, gay and straight, Jewish and gentile.”
— Genre Magazine
“Gritty and engrossing… the wham-bam West meets the reticent old world of Eastern Europe… fantastic.”
— Instinct Magazine
THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD is a view of life and loss, desire and despair, coming of age, and running away. In short, this stirring debut is a view of everything that matters, accomplished by a brilliant young writer with tremendous gifts.
— Ben Marcus, author of Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String
Set in Prague, these stories explore the lives of the American expatriates, tourists, and drifters who found their way to that city in the post-Cold War era. Hamburger’s characters are generally young, Jewish, and often gay and tend to be struggling with questions of identity and faith. In “A Man of the Country,” an American falls for a straight Czech youth, with all of the misunderstandings and false starts of their relationship interpretable both symbolically and literally. “Garage Sale” concerns a gay Canadian English teacher who finds himself slowly, and surprisingly becoming involved with a Czech woman despite his misgivings and self-doubt. “Exile” involves an American artist drawn to an unusual synagogue that caters to non-Jews and to the mysterious Evzha, who may or may not be a prophet. “The Ground You Are Standing On” probes the reactions of two middle-aged Jewish tourists who board with an elderly woman in a house that had been Jewish-owned before the war. A provocative and often striking first collection.
— Library Journal
“With a sharp eye for outlandish details, absurd turns of phrase, and quiet but monumental moments of realization, Aaron Hamburger lures you into the most intimate worlds of young Czech schoolboys and jaded ex-pats alike. This is a marvelous and honest collection of stories about people searching for identity in a country searching for the same.”
— Jessica Shattuck, author of The Hazards of Good Breeding
“Hamburger’s debut is thoughtful, poignant, and sharp, a welcome package of emotionally resonant yet enigmatic tales.”
— Lambda Book Review
“To be American, Jewish, Gay, teaching English in Prague: this is the situation limned by Aaron Hamburger in his marvelous collection THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD. Artfully crafted, funny, poignant, sharply observant of realities and anguishes, these stories introduce a voice as original and engaging as his subject matter. This is a succulent meal indeed!”
— Mary Gordon
“We’re definitely not in Paris anymore. THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD is a triumphant collection of storing chronicling the loves, the losses, and the dreams of denizens of Prague. With charm and wit and force of life, Aaron Hamburger takes us deep inside the city walls. Poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, these stories are as good as they come.”
— Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of HESTER AMONG THE RUINS
“10 short tales that delicately explore the Prague experience with a sometimes sad, sometimes farcical, always artful touch…I impatiently await his next work.”
— The Metro Times
“THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD is just a wonderful collection. One of the loveliest surprises is that things actually happen–there are plots in here! Funny, satisfying and genuinely engrossing, Aaron Hamburger knows how to tell a great story. This book will be good to you.”
— Victor LaValle, author of THE ECSTATIC
“In ten short stories, Aaron Hamburger renders the stark emotional realities of expatriate living against Prague’s densely layered streets, squares, synagogues, and subway cars… The ensuing culture clashes are often alienating, confusing, even painful–but, like the most rewarding travel experiences, they’re always invigorating.”
— Out Traveler
“A sensitive and funny portrait of the city and its inhabitants. Hamburger’s talent for both writing and observation is obvious…with the portrait of Prague he has lovingly and believably created, and with this debut collection promises a strong career ahead.”
— Small Spiral Notebook
“Ten short stories that unfold in post-Cold War Prague of the 1990s, a magnet not only for artists and writers but also for American tourists and college grad deadbeat. The story about the self-appointed rabbi who runs a synagogue for non-Jews is worth the price of the book alone.”
— Jewsweek