A Family’s Ghosts After the Holocaust

Richard Zimler’s novel ‘The Incandescent Threads’

Richard Zimler’s The Incandescent Threads is a long novel of nested, telescoping tales told from different perspectives in the same Jewish family, across time. It’s about escaping persecution and building a new life that’s made of bits of the past.

One of the Holocaust survivors is a joyously oversexed bisexual man, which makes the story in part about the intertwined forces of sex and death. He’s frequently inside others, and he’s also the character most likely to welcome a ghost inside himself.

He’s close with his cousin, who knows that “everything that’s ever happened was joined together by fine filaments of cause and effect that we can’t normally see.” These are “the Incandescent Threads,” emitting “a warm light, at least to those with mystical vision enough to see them.” The cousin knows these “filaments of cause and effect” from his personal encounters with them; “they linked people across centuries and millennia, and their light was caused by the heat that was generated at the time of Creation.”

It opens space for the question: “Is everything we do determined by a world inside us that we know almost nothing about?”