Temim Fruchter, who earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, College Park, is uber-talented, and she proves it in her debut novel, City of Laughter, an amalgam of sapphic love, family secrets, and Jewish folklore. The action begins when the protagonist, queer Jewish woman Shiva Margolin, develops an identity crisis at 31. To quell her quandary, she decides to go back to school for a master’s degree in Jewish folklore.  

Strained relationships, unfortunate circumstances, and 100-year-old family secrets propel the plot. In the beginning, we learn that Shiva’s father died of cancer, and that Shiva came out as queer toward the end of his life. Shiva’s father wanted to hear more about her lover, but her mother, Hannah, needed time to process the news, which is not a surprise because “things between [them] were not good,” Fruchter writes. In fact, “her relationship with her mother had largely come undone.” 

This tension is crafted perfectly throughout the book. It’s her father’s death, her tenuous relationship with her mother, and her devastating breakup with her first love that causes Shiva to slide into stasis. Her solution—to focus all her energy on studying Jewish folklore.

After Shiva is accepted into New York University’s program, her adviser, Mel Rosen, explains that she must narrow her scope of study, so she lands on the mysterious Russian Jewish writer S. An–sky, author of The Dybbuk, a play Shiva discovered through her father. She is obsessed with the mysterious author and his 100-year-old story: “She’d wanted to follow An-sky wherever he led her, and here he was, leading her directly and emphatically to Warsaw.” 

She receives a grant to travel to Poland. Leaving her life in Brooklyn behind, she updates her location on her dating app profile and begins texting with a woman called G, whom Shiva hopes to meet in Warsaw. 

Preoccupied with G and An-sky, Shiva travels to Warsaw. There she meets El and attends a gay porn party. She emails updates to Rosen while continuing to try and meet the elusive G. With El, Shiva departs for Ropshitz where she hopes to get a better understanding of her great-grandmother Mira. Though Shiva’s mother and grandmother rarely discuss Mira, we learn about the matriarch before Shiva arrives in Poland through haunting 100-year-old epistles Mira wrote to an “L,” which describe a horrific attribute she possessed. 

In one dispatch, dated Dec. 6, 1920, Mira wrote: “My name is Mira Wollman, I live on the Jewish street in Ropshitz, Poland … I am afflicted, and also in danger.” 

In March 1921, Mira warned L that her laugh “is no regular laugh. It is a piercing thing, a screaming witch’s cackle straight from [her] gut.” 

In May 1921, she wrote that her laugh “had teeth and fur, a sound that bit and caught at the air.” 

Mira, with her witch’s cackle, is one of the many fascinating women in City of Laughter. Another enigmatic character Fruchter creates is Shiva’s grandmother, Syl, who believed she could communicate with birds. It’s Syl who dubbed Ropshitz the City of Laughter—paying “homage to the proud line of badchanim, or Jewish wedding jesters, who’d come from that place.”

As she explores her family history, Shiva also develops a deeper understanding of An-sky. She uncovers 100-year-old reviews of The Dybbuk and we learn—through Shiva’s research—that dybbuks “were often restless male spirits that entered the bodies of women … with unfinished business,” ready to disturb a community. The reviews say “Warsaw … was possessed.” She, and us with her, also learn that An-sky’s sexuality was never known.

The author uses Mira’s letters, emails from Shiva to her professor, and text messages between her and G to create a multivocal chorus of voices—past and present—to engage the reader and it works.

Fruchter’s ingenuity is on full display when she writes about a Jewish myth, the ritual of which Shiva’s mother performed 39 years ago on her 16th birthday. Teenage Hannah believed that if she slept with her window open, hid a piece of challah bread under her pillow, heated a piece of challah with a candle’s flame, and with her candle looked into her mirror at midnight, she would see her future husband. When she performed the ritual, Hannah saw not a man but a green-eyed lady staring back at her. Subsequently, both mother and daughter encounter mysterious green-eyed women, similar to that original image in Hannah’s mirror, throughout the story. 

Throughout City of Laughter, Fruchter entices her readers by creating formidable and interrelated forces. With her intergenerational debut novel, uniquely blending queerness, Jewish spirituality, and generational silence, Fruchter manages to captivate us on every page.

City of Laughter, the debut novel from former D.C. resident and University of Maryland, College Park, grad Temim Fruchter, will be published on Jan. 16 by Grove Press.

Fruchter will discuss her novel at 7 p.m. on Jan. 24 at Loyalty Books’ Petworth location. temimfruchter.com.