DavidApplefield's powerful first novel Once Removed, stirs memories from Krakow, Poland of the thirties and forties, with the banal reality of post-war America, where strange moments of personal epiphany occur in hospital waiting rooms, fast food restaurants, and hotel lobbies. The novel, skillfully set in present day Houston, Texas, shuttles us back and forth before and after the war, but never leaves the last 17 days of one man's life. In 1947, Polish camp survivor Jacob Simon and his identity-shocked eleven-year-old daughter, Dzidza, leave a devastated Europe and a haunted past. Forty years later, in the Intensive Care Unit of a prestigious American heart clinic, the horrors surface again as experiences are relived and the memory itself battles to recontruct the past. This deeply ironic and poignant story- while consumed by the superficiality of the dalliance in which it's being told- invited a comtemporary metaphor for experiencing a world once removed.
