Rubble Children: Seven and a Half Stories

In seven-and-a-half interlinked stories, Aaron Kreuter’s Rubble Children tackles Jewish belonging, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Zionism, love requited and unrequited, and cannabis culture, all drenched in suburban wonder and dread. Sometimes realist, often satirical, and with a dash of the speculative, the book introduces readers to a startling world of character and place, a world which orbits Kol B’Seder, a fictional Reform synagogue in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill. In these stories, the locked basement room in the home of the synagogue’s de facto patriarch opens onto a life-altering windfall. A retiree walks the suburban streets, wracked with uncertainty whether he should vote to include a Palestinian scholar in Kol B’Seder’s upcoming speaker series. Teens stay up all night at a youth ＂shul-in,＂ navigating hormones, drugs, and nightmares of the third temple. Reliving the same day over and over again, a couple reckons with both the end of their relationship and a series of ever-changing permutations of Israel/Palestine. In the story that gives the collection its name, a group of Jewish girls obsessed with the Holocaust discover that they are far from the only people who live in the rubble of history. Engaging, funny, dark, surprising, Rubble Children is a scream of Jewish rage, a smoky exhalation of Jewish joy, a vivid dream of better worlds.

Aaron Kreuter is the author of four books, including the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award shortlisted poetry collection Shifting Baseline Syndrome. He lives in Toronto and teaches at Trent University.