At its heart, The Immortalists is a story about fractured family life that weaves together each of the Gold siblings’ unique perspectives. Throughout much of the siblings’ adult lives, Varya, Daniel, Klara, and Simon are estranged from one another, frustrated with each other’s choices and flaws. Despite the estrangement, though, the siblings and various members of their family often reconnect after long periods of time to share memories or overcome grief. In this way, the novel suggests that family can be a source of conflict and disagreement, which can pull a family apart, but that family members nonetheless remain connected to one another other because of their shared history and experiences.
The siblings view their family as a constant source of tension, and as a result they try to find ways to escape it. Simon, the youngest sibling, is frustrated by the fact that his parents, Saul and Gertie, expect him to inherit the family tailoring business. These expectations are a source of great anxiety for Simon, particularly because he worries that he will waste his life by conforming to them. He decides to run away to San Francisco with Klara to pursue his dreams of living openly as a gay man, illustrating how the burden of family literally repels him from it. Simon and Klara’s decision to run away causes further rifts and tension in the family. Daniel is furious with his siblings because he has to leave his semester at college partway through to tend to their mother after they run away. He then refuses to talk to or visit Simon and Klara for years, even when Simon is battling AIDS. For Daniel, the frustration that Simon and Klara cause makes him want to separate himself from them even further. Varya pulls away from the family for different reasons. Armed with a fortune teller’s prediction that she will outlive all of her siblings by at least 40 years, she simultaneously frets over the fact that she might be the cause of their deaths and also wants to stave off the potential grief that she might feel. As a result, she avoids her siblings for years at a time.
Despite all that keeps them apart, the Golds find comfort in supporting each other through shared grief or in recounting their memories—their common experiences are what bond them as a family and bring them back together. After Simon dies in 1982, the three remaining siblings gather in New York City to mourn. Klara is particularly nervous because she hasn’t seen her family since she moved to San Francisco with Simon years earlier. When she arrives, however, Klara immediately flings herself into Varya’s arms and thinks, “the time apart did not matter, not yet. They were sisters.” The embrace happens immediately, before the effects of the time apart can interfere. In this way, the novel depicts how the bonds of family come first and endure, despite any individual tensions that might buffet them. Further, the novel shows how this power of family comes to the forefront in moments of shared grief, and how that shared grief itself affirms the power and reality of family. One of the reasons that Simon’s death is so painful for Klara is because his death robs her of some of these shared experiences. She thinks that with his death, she is losing “whole chunks of life that only Simon had witnessed.” After Simon’s death, Klara partially gives up her estrangement and for a few years Klara returns home to share the High Holy Days with her family. She, Varya, and Daniel talk about Simon, and she expresses how it is “least agonizing to be with people who loved Simon, too.” They also laugh about a time when their mother wanted to perform a religious ritual at their father’s funeral, which involved swinging a chicken over her head. As the siblings draw on common memories and experiences, Klara realizes that “she had not felt so close to her siblings in years.” It is the feeling of solidarity that pulls them closer together and prompts her to keep visiting despite their many differences.
Shared family history can even bring together family members who don’t know each other well. Years after Klara commits suicide in 1991, Daniel connects with Klara’s husband, Raj, and teenage daughter, Ruby, over Thanksgiving. Daniel finds solace in talking to Ruby, who looks a lot like Klara. Ruby, too, grows excited when Daniel is able to show her pictures of Klara—who died when she was a baby—that Ruby has never seen. Daniel feels “so contented” sitting and looking at the pictures with Ruby, and Ruby is grateful for the opportunity learn more about her family. Even though they don’t really know each other, they take comfort in communing over shared history and bond further as a result. At another point in the novel, Varya also discovers how insuppressible the bond of shared history is. When Varya is 53, a young man named Luke interviews her at work, but she soon discovers this is a ruse and that he is actually her biological son, whom she gave up for adoption when she was 27. Luke seeks her out because he wants to understand his origins. He asks Varya about his father and how he looked as a child. Varya is moved by his questions, thinking of the “memory of the nine months they shared a body and the breathtaking, anguished forty-eight hours that followed.” Even though the memory of putting her son up for adoption is a painful one, Varya is nonetheless glad to share this experience with Luke, and she becomes more involved in Luke’s life afterward. Though The Immortalists is full of examples of the conflict and differences of opinion that naturally pull family members apart, it also shows how the shared memories and experiences of family nonetheless endure, and offer connection that the conflicts can never destroy.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family and Shared History ThemeTracker
Family and Shared History Quotes in The Immortalists
All the while, something loomed larger, closer, until Simon was forced to see it in all its terrible majesty: his future. Daniel had always planned to be a doctor, which left one son—Simon, impatient and uncomfortable in his skin, let alone in a double-breasted suit. By the time he was a teenager, the women’s clothing bored him and the wools made him itch. He resented the tenuousness of Saul’s attention, which he sensed would not last his departure from the business, if such a thing were even possible.
Still, Klara could not explain to anyone what it meant for her to lose Simon. She’d lost both him and herself, the person she was in relation to him. She had lost time, too, whole chunks of life that only Simon had witnessed: Mastering her first coin trick at eight, pulling quarters from Simon’s ears while he giggled. Nights when they crawled down the fire escape to go dancing in the hot, packed clubs of the Village—nights when she saw him looking at men, when he let her see him looking.
At dinner that evening, he told the story of the near-drowning with pomp, but inside, he glowed with renewed attachment to his family. For the rest of the vacation, he forgave Varya her most sustained sleep-babbling. He let Klara take the first shower when they returned from the beach, even though her showers took so long that Gertie once banged on the door to ask why, if she needed this much water, Klara did not bring a bar of soap into the ocean. Years later, when Simon and Klara left home—and after that, when even Varya pulled away from him—Daniel could not understand why they didn’t feel what he had: the regret of separation, and the bliss of being returned. He waited.
After all, what could he say? Don’t drift too far. You’ll miss us. But as the years passed and they did not, he became wounded and despairing, then bitter.
