As Close to Us As Breathing

Elizabeth Poliner’s novel As Close to Us As Breathing (2016), is a story about loss and grief that spans multiple generations of a Jewish family. The title is taken from a Reform book of prayer: “You are as close to us as breathing, yet you are farther than the farthermost star.” Poliner has also written a poetry collection Sudden Fog, and her short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and others. She teaches creative writing at Hollins University.

The novel opens with the narrator, twelve-year-old Molly, laying out the tragedy that will alter her family forever: “The summer of 1948 my brother Davy was killed in an accident with a man who would have given his own life rather than have it happen.” The details are withheld until near the end of the novel. The question is not what happened to Molly’s family, but how it happened. Poliner jumps backward and forwards in time throughout the narrative, from Molly’s grandfather emigrating to America at the turn of the century to an adult Molly looking back on her past from the late 1990s.

Molly is part of a close-knit yet conflicted Jewish family. Every summer, the women and children head to a summer cottage on a strip of Connecticut coastline nicknamed “Bagel Beach” because it is a popular vacation spot for Jewish families. The men stay home in Middletown to run the family department store.



In the late 1940s, Jewish people and communities were insular and self-segregating. To marry outside the faith was unthinkable; the adult Molly refers to this tribalism as “part necessity, part comfort” following the cultural trauma of the Holocaust. Her family strictly observed Shabbos, and the men took the synagogue’s morning minyan service seriously—though Molly’s older brother, Howard, is sometimes late for service, disappointing their father, Mort.

Every summer, old family conflicts and patterns resurface as Molly’s mother and aunts reunite. Her mother, Ada, the family beauty, notoriously stole her husband, Mort Leibritsky from her older sister, Vivie. In 1948, Mort, still driven by guilt for rejecting Vivie, feels compelled to employ her often-ill husband at his department store. Vivie feels she has settled for second-best with her husband, Leo, and still resents Ada for taking Mort from her. Bec, Ada and Vivie’s youngest sister, is still unmarried. She has a fiancé, but he brutally rejects her, telling her he has found someone more like-minded and educated while away at college.

Every year, Ada blossoms at the cottage, away from the conventions and obligations of her everyday life the rest of the year. The conventionality of the patriarchal Mort is stifling. Only when Ada is alone at the cottage with her sisters—despite the old rift between herself and Vivie—does she seem to live fully.



Mort is a conservative man of faith but often fails to achieve the meaning behind the ritual of prayer. He strives for it but falls back into everyday anxieties and concerns as he repeats the words. As a child, he did not take his Judaism as seriously; he was an avid baseball player and once tried to skip Shabbat to play. His father, Zelik, tells him he was born Jewish and it is not something he can change. It is not a faith but an indelible part of his identity. Mort has long put aside his baseball dreams but now tries to live through his youngest son, Davy, who also plays.

Now that Bec has been jilted, she decides to find a job, becoming a ladies’ tailor. Her choice is considered unusual for the times, and though she finds meaning in her new career, she is also lonely. Marriage is considered an essential part of being a woman in her community. By remaining single, Bec struggles with the idea that she is somehow lacking.

More drama arises when Tyler McManus, Bec’s boss, begins to fall for her. The feeling is mutual, but Tyler is married and a gentile. She loves him, but cannot date him openly. The mere idea of bringing him, a Catholic and a married man, to a Shabbos dinner feels earth-shattering, world-ending. She sees him as an outsider to her family and their Jewish rituals; his presence would somehow defile them. So, Bec begins to see him in secret, skipping Shabbos dinners rather than invite him to them.



Davy dies after he is accidentally run over by a Good Humor truck. The Good Humor man is Sal Luciano, an Italian man who is kind and loves the neighborhood children. Ada fixates on his status as a gentile. He is an outsider, and to her, he becomes a killer, not a good man who made a terrible mistake. She becomes more insular, suspicious and paranoid of gentiles, and under her lead, the family draws in upon itself in the wake of Davy’s death.

Mort, on the other hand, struggles with his faith. His dreams of baseball glory die with Davy, and his faith suffers as well. He feels unable to reach God with his prayers. He blames Ada for Davy’s death, and himself for not instilling the importance of faith in Howard. Howard, in turn, becomes a doctor out of his own guilt at being unable to save Davy.

Bec, unable to deal with the rejection that would come with marrying outside her faith, stops dating Tyler even though she loves him. Instead, she settles for Mort’s brother, Nelson. She doesn’t love him, but he is acceptably Jewish.



The summers at Bagel Beach and the freedom the three sisters and their children feel end after 1948. Eventually, they sell the cottage because the memories are too painful. No one wants to return to that place.

An adult Molly revisits the cottage at the novel’s end, reflecting on Davy’s death and the ways it affected her family in the long term. She considers the impact a single life can have on the world—no matter how small, no matter how brief.

A New York Times review called As Close to Us As Breathing “a big-hearted roundelay of a novel that...performs the invaluable service of recovering a lost world.” It was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was voted an Amazon Best Book of the Year, and won the 2017 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.