The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg

February 18, 2008
This debut bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Everything Is Illuminated
, both in plot—a Jewish American travels through Europe, gleaning secrets about his family and the Holocaust—as well as tone—comic to make the mystical, sentimental stuff go down—but Herbach largely manages to pull out something worthwhile. The book presents, via letters and suicide notes (compiled by a Green Bay, Wis., priest who thinks the narrator may have been involved in a miracle), the odd case of T. Rimberg, a “skittish part-Jew who grew up underachieving in a small Midwestern town.” T. has lost his wife, kids and girlfriend, but when a large inheritance check arrives from his long-lost Holocaust survivor father's estate, T. undertakes a quixotic voyage to Europe to... what? Find the truth about his dad? Kill himself? And what to make of his nightmares? A more secure T. emerges, however, as he discovers startling things about his father, the meaning behind his strange dreams and, on a Wisconsin highway, his own power to act heroically. While the tenor of the novel is comedic, Herbach infuses T.'s story with some serious inquiry into faith, inheritance and what makes a good life.