About Us

Try as we might to deny it, we are in part what our families have made us. Set under the shadows of the Great Depression and World War II, About Us follows Benny Kahn, youngest of a Jewish family living in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, from his first great disappointment to the moment when he faces the choice of who and what he will become. It is a story of joy and grief, of love and anger, and of a boy who grows to manhood while the world he knows crumbles and falls. In his first novel, reprinted now after nearly three decades, Chester Aaron's clear eye leaves hidden neither the triumphs nor the tragedies, the sense nor the madness that are inevitable when human dreams and fears collide.