Harriet Rohmer

Last of the Refuge Cities

Last of the Refuge Cities, a novel, traces 97 years in the family of Aurora Petersky, where survival has replaced love as the family legacy. Aurora is an irreverent Jewish tale-teller whose boundaries––between what is real and unreal, who is dead and who is alive––are very thin and highly mobile. She yearns to know her family’s past, but her father has run off to Paris, her mother is consumed by her legal career, and everybody else has committed suicide.

So with a little help from the first five books of the Bible, she invents the ancestors she never knew, endowing them with all the outrageous, tender, and passionate qualities she figures a family should have. When she’s finished crafting her past (and getting trapped by it), Aurora struggles to escape from the mess she’s created.

I’ve always been fascinated by survivors, not so much by how they survive, but by how their survival experience affects the rest of their lives, and the lives of their children and grandchildren. In Aurora’s family, the very same strategy that enables Grandma Pearl to survive the trauma of her childhood becomes a source of tragedy when she tries to pass on her “wisdom” to the next generations.

Aurora plays out her story in the places where hard core realities coincide with myth and legend. What is tragic and “real” in one moment can become hilarious and absurd in the next. My influences include Chinua Achebe and Jessica Hagedorn, Etgar Keret and Cristina Garcia, Sandra Cisneros and I.B. Singer, August Wilson, and the writers and commentators of Torah.

Read the opening scene.

Alligator Work

There’s something unusual going on in the next trailer over. The man’s got snails—lots of snails. I watch how he takes them out of little striped socks. How he sets them, one by one, on the shiny trunk of the tree that grows between his trailer and ours.

Fifteen-year-old Lou Ann has found refuge in the Everglades with her favorite Uncle Louie, a law enforcement ranger recently returned from Iraq. Her attorney mom is off in China, saving endangered alligators, and Uncle Louie is practically her only family. But when he is called away on urgent business, leaving Lou Ann alone in the trailer, she falls in with Peter, the handsome middle-aged anthropologist next door.

Peter is secretly harvesting endangered Florida tree snails (Liguus fasciatus) and transforming them into his personal works of art. Lou Ann feels a bond with Peter. They are both outcasts, and he nurtures her in a way no one ever has. But she is repelled by him too, suspicious of his motives with the snails—and with her.

When Uncle Louie returns with his friend, Ranger Pam, Lou Ann finds out they are investigating the mysterious disappearance of valuable natural resources from the park, including the snails. Lou Ann discovers that she and Peter are playing out a bizarre 70-year-old drama—and that Peter’s life is now in danger.

Lou Ann wants to save Peter. She becomes the nurturing one—and the seducer. For a brief few days, their love becomes the sanctuary they have both been seeking. But in the end, Lou Ann must decipher Peter’s motives and decide whether to save him or save herself.