This is a book about identity, about coming to terms with your past and being who you are. About family, battered women and their husbands. About the immigrant experience.

Oates details the story of Rebecca Schwart's life from her earliest childhood and on. Rebecca is the third child of poor, immigrant Jewish parents who arrived in the States in the 30 and Rebecca was actually born in New York Harbor, making her a US citizen as the only one in the family.

The book starts with Rebecca thinking back on her parents - and we learn that her father came to a violent end, but not how - I was instantly hooked. Then the book follows Rebecca in her life as a wife to Niles Tignor and mother of little Niley (Niles Jr.) with flashes back to her childhood with a father being more and more mad and feeling like it was them against the others. He forbade Rebecca's mother to speak German and in that way stripped her of her ability to communicate and be an individual and he controlled everything in the house. In Germany, he was a teacher and a cultured man - in the States he works as the gravedigger doing manual labor and is not respected at all - he and his family are actually victims of some anti-semitic 'jokes', both real and imagined.

In Rebecca's current life, she is married and a mother - but her husband perhaps isn't all he claimed to be and Rebecca has to escape with Niley and she starts a new life - as Hazel Jones. She chooses that name because she meets a man one day who thinks she's Hazel Jones and she stars believing she could be.
The truth of that encounter is revealed towards the end of the book - in a way, only Oates can pull off.

But Hazel manages to - cunningly - create a new life and two new identities for her and her little boy, Zacharias who turns out to be a wonderful piano player - a skill he inherited from his maternal grandmother.

In the end, Rebecca comes full circle and face to face with her past.

As always, I love the way Oates writes. She seems so in control of her language and her story and characters and everything works together beautifully. Her way of letting a person's thoughts and imaginations being part of the text but written in cursive, makes the characters have so much depth and this was another wonderful book by her.

I always say - and write - that Oates write about the American dream gone bad. In this book, she doesn't. Rebecca actually achieve the American dream - she creates a great life for herself and her son. But she does so at a cost - no one knows who she actually is (except Niley/Zacharias who grows detached because of this shared, but hidden, knowledge) and she constantly wears a facade as the perfect woman, always smiling, always pleasing her man. She pays a huge price for this, her chosen way of life - and even though she had to go into hiding to get away from her abusive husband, the question remains whether the way she chose to do it was worth it in the end.
And she learns the wisdom of her father's advice: In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of. So you must hide your weakness, Rebecca. We must.. And she does.