Divorce

Sophie is dead; she drifts in a phantasmagorical limbo of memories, fantasies, and dreams. She has much to accomplish. Get from Paris to New York in her coffin to attend her own funeral. Obtain a divorce from Ezra Blind – a brilliant scholar, rabbi, charming manipulator, whose selfishness is only comparable in destructive power to his libido. Finish the book about her family and sort out her relationship with her parents, who divorced long ago, before the war, before the death trains, back when they lived in Budapest, postponing their inevitable immigration. And finally – understand who Sophie Blind is without a husband and an academic career, without paternal psychoanalysis and the Jewish rituals of her Hungarian relatives. Sophie has never felt so free and alive.
Susan Taubes (1928–1969) was a Hungarian-American writer, philosopher, and religious scholar. Her experimental prose, forgotten until recently, was highly praised by Samuel Beckett and Susan Sontag. "Divorce" – a confessional, caustic novel about paralyzing misogyny and the ghosts of the Holocaust – remained her only book published during her lifetime. A week after its publication, the writer drowned in the Atlantic Ocean.