Just Enough to Start Over

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

Three German-Jewish sisters must “start over” (and over) in Sara Gothelf Bloom’s vivid novel of historical displacement and the knotty and abiding nature of familial bonds.

A newly-married pianist, a painter, and a budding poet, respectively, sisters Bertha, Annelene, and Hilde Dubrovsky have grown up in comfort and prosperity in Mannheim, Germany, but 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 an unknown cousin in New York; the slow effort to build a life in a new country; and, later, the struggle of Bertha’s American daughter to find her own identity outside of her family’s difficult history.

Echoing the sisters’ odyssey is the story of the family’s three valuable paintings. First stolen, then transported through wartime Europe and the Soviet Union as plundered art, the journeys of these artworks and the lives they intersect with deepen the book’s perspectives. Meanwhile, the novelist’s versions of the Austro-English Expressionist painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, the German painter Max Beckmann, 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 making 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

"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

“Each episode of this 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, 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.