SOURCE: "A Young Man Tries to Reconcile Present and Past," in Tribune Books, June 22, 1997, p. 3.

[Wasserburg teaches writing at Northwestern University and has published poems, essays, and reviews in various publications. In the following review, he discusses the implications of Henkin's light touch in Swimming Across the Hudson.]

"If a Jew forgets he is a Jew," writes Bernard Malamud, "a gentile will remind him." In the case of Ben Suskind, the narrator of Joshua Henkin's first novel, that gentile is his birth mother. Swimming Across the Hudson tells the story of Ben, his brother Jonathan, and Ben's girlfriend, Jenny. Ben and Jonathan, the products of different parents, have both been adopted by a scholarly Jewish couple in Manhattan who have raised them according to Jewish law. The brothers (who know nothing of their birth parents) have been bar mitzvahed; they enjoyed celebrating the Sabbath while growing up; they...