Second Language

by Ronna Wineberg

From Sonia Chernoff, an elderly widow looking for closure, to Elaine, a therapist with a vengeance for her husband’s lover, Second Language is home to a charmingly eclectic collection of characters who share one thing in choices. The humor, despair, and triumph of Wineberg’s characters find the reader alongside Lucy, who tries to deal with her mother’s illness while navigating her way through an adulterous affair. We also meet a doctor’s wife, Sofia, whose happenstance relationship with the doorman at their new apartment building imprints her life in ways she could never have imagined. These characters face life-altering decisions, and when confronted with such adversity, they choose varying directions, ranging from forgiveness to revenge.

175 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2005

About the author

Ronna Wineberg is the award-winning author of four books of fiction: ON BITTERSWEET PLACE (Relegation Books), a novel, winner of the Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Competition; and a debut collection, SECOND LANGUAGE (New Rivers Press), which won the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project Literary Competition and was the runner-up for the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. She is also the author of NINE FACTS THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE (Serving House Books), a story collection; and ARTIFACTS AND OTHER STORIES (Serving House Books), a new story collection, winner in Short Story Fiction for the 2024 American Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Colorado Review, South Dakota Review and elsewhere, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio. She has been awarded a scholarship in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and residencies to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ragdale Foundation. She has written blogs for Psychology Today and is the founding fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review. Ronna lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Ronna Wineberg's wonderful collection of short stories, “Second Language,” we are present with her characters in crucial moments; we join most of them at the crux--the exact time where they've come to realize that choices they've made led them to unexpected places, and that the path backwards is now covered over and irretrievable. Their very histories come into question. So what to do, when one is removed from safety, from the known?

It is the danger, emotional danger especially, for each of her main characters that provide the reader's excitement here; in story after story, characters ponder how to make excruciating decisions; they also make some rash and impulsive ones. They act against what they have always perceived to be their true natures, and find that they have perhaps mistaken what they truly were meant to be.

And in her surgical examination of how relationships fracture, Ronna Wineberg provides moment after moment of deep, deep heartache; pain that is palpable on the page. She leavens this with other moments of triumph, of real, honest connection, all with the hard-won knowledge that each victory comes with a cost, and our mortality, expressed in the beautiful stories here of parents and children, wives and husbands, lurks to remind us never to waste the day.

Ronna Wineberg is the kind of writer, who, when reading her work, immerses you so deeply in the story that you forget you are indeed reading fiction; that there is a gifted hand guiding you, the characters, the story…forward. It's a masterful trick, where the recipient of the illusion is grateful for being fooled.