Just Enough to Start Over

254-page paperback / 5.5" x 8.5" / ISBN 9781589882089
Publication Date: 12/2/2025 (available for preorder)

“A deeply moving novel with so much soul on display that one can only rejoice.”
—Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Borges and Me

A pianist, an artist, and a poet, the three Dubrovsky sisters have grown up in comfort in Mannheim, Germany. As the threat of the Nazi party looms ever larger, the family packs their lives into two crates and flees to China. Just Enough to Start Over follows their experiences as refugees in Shanghai (and London, and Toronto); their crash-landing with a cousin in New York; the slow effort to build a life in a new country; and, later, the struggle of the family’s American daughter to find her own identity outside of their difficult history. 

Echoing the Dubrovskys’ odyssey is the story of their three valuable paintings. First stolen, then transported through wartime Europe and the Soviet Union, these artworks and the lives they encounter on their journeys deepen the book’s perspectives. Meanwhile, historical figures including Max Beckmann, the Austrian Expressionist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, and members of the Soviet Trophy Brigade all play their parts in this wry and poignant novel of loss, resilience, and the saving grace of creating art.

Advance praise for Just Enough to Start Over:

“This beautiful and deeply moving novel by Sara Gothelf Bloom takes us through a very hard time in history, but there is so much soul on display that one can only rejoice. Hanna is among the vivid characters in contemporary fiction, and she—with the Dubrovsky sisters from the earlier generation of this marvelous family—will stay in my mind. Just Enough to Start Over is an impressive achievement, one that reminded me at various times of I.B. Singer. A vivid chronicle, told with poetic specificity and hard-won elegance.”
—Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Borges and Me

"A gorgeously written novel, all at once profound, relatable, and wry. Something narratively miraculous is going on in this realistic, unsaccharine telling of the people, places, and talents that saved three beautiful sisters fleeing Nazi Germany. Woven throughout is the mystery of their stolen art—its plunderers and its fascinating journey. Just Enough to Start Over wowed me. Brava, Sara Gothelf Bloom!"
—Elinor Lipman, author of The Inn at Lake Devine

"Luminous with surprising detail, the lives here are powerfully inhabited. Very short chapters, glowing, gem-like, reminiscent of flash fiction, bring the war years to life, particularly the Jewish refugee community of 1940s Shanghai. The art world of the time is also thrillingly evoked, along with brilliant musings on the power of the self-portrait to shape the artist’s understanding of the self: 'We paint with cold-blooded authenticity. That is the gift of old age, a blessing really.'"
—Grace Dane Mazur, author of The Garden Party

“Three generations of an extended family are driven from Mannheim to Shanghai to Brooklyn as their plundered art collection is dispersed from Amsterdam to Berlin and Moscow. Each episode of their story is sharply, poignantly focused on a single, telling event, like light glinting on a shard of shattered glass. Sara Gothelf Bloom’s deeply informed, keenly observant, alert heart, attuned to danger and irreparable loss, yet also unfailingly aware of the comical aspect of things, cherishes what is left, which is just enough, ‘the incomparable solace of ordinary life.’”
—Sarah Kafatou, translator of With My Shadow: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin


Sara Gothelf Bloom was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and spent much of her adult life in Germany, working at the Heidelberg Opera and as a freelance concert singer. For more than twenty years, she toured the country as a soloist with a small ensemble doing concerts of Yiddish songs for German audiences. Today, she lives in Brooklyn, and Just Enough to Start Over is her first novel.