Leora took the slides, each one slipping into her hands like a day not yet lived. Bill Landsmann showed her to the door. She wanted to say something, even if only goodbye, but he didn’t find it necessary to speak with her any further. He slammed the door in her face. At first she thought it was an insult. Then she realized it was a blessing, a send-off.

Leora couldn’t leave the lost city through its gates, nor did she want to. Instead she sprang off the ocean floor and projected herself upward, pushing hard against centuries of rejected possibilities until she reached the surface, her head bursting out of the saline waters like a newborn child’s. The night was fading, caught between darkness and light, leaving the sky a blank, nameless color, an empty canvas. She swam to the water’s edge and pulled herself onto dry land, and woke up.

THERE WAS a time when she, too, felt like a tourist in her own life. But those days seem like a long time ago now, like looking into someone else’s window.

Landsmann Family Tree

LANDSMANN FAMILY TREE

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WOULD like to thank Henry Freeman, a world traveler whose stunning slide collection and fortitude in the face of Hurricane Floyd are well known in my home community. I am grateful to him for the initial inspiration for this novel. There are, however, no other similarities between him, or his family, and any of the characters in this book.

I thank the administrators, staff, and researchers of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City, who assisted me several years ago in preparing an article for American Heritage magazine that later inspired a part of this book, and Giulia Miller, who allowed me to read her University College London undergraduate thesis, entitled “Spinoza and the Amsterdam Jewish Community: Who Rejected Whom?” I am also indebted to Dr. Nathan Winter, who provided academic fact-checking on demand (any remaining mistakes are mine alone), and to the many other teachers in my life.

I am grateful to my agent Gary Morris, whose literary and business skills found this book a perfect home, and to my editor Alane Mason, who started reading it before breakfast one morning and did not put it down until she had lavished her attention on every line and led me to make it as good as it could possibly be.

But I am most grateful of all to my “in-house” editors: to my sisters Jordana and Ariel, who cared enough about the characters to think of them as if they were real people; to my brother Zach, because any humor in this book is actually his; to my father, who caught the smallest errors; to my mother, who solved the hardest problems; and to my husband Brendan—my in-house counsel, who never had any doubts.

Reading Group Guide

IN THE IMAGE
Dara Horn

READING GROUP GUIDE

IN THE IMAGE
Dara Horn