Totempole (NYRB Classics)

by Sanford Friedman

Peter Cameron (Afterword)

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Book cover for Totempole

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Totempole is Sanford Friedman’s radical coming-of-age novel, featuring Stephen Wolfe, a young Jewish boy growing up in New York City and its environs during the Depression and war years. In eight discrete chapters, which trace Stephen’s evolution from a two-year-old boy to a twenty-four-year-old man, Friedman describes with psychological acuity and great empathy Stephen’s intellectual, moral, and sexual maturation. Taught to abhor his body for the sake of his soul, Stephen finds salvation in the eventual unification of the two, the recognition that body and soul should not be partitioned but treated as one being, one complete man.
  • ISBN10 1590177614
  • ISBN13 9781590177617
  • Publish Date 2 September 2014 (first published 1 January 2014)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher The New York Review of Books, Inc
  • Imprint NYRB Classics