The Rebinder Effect

The Rehbinder effect is when something seemingly small and insignificant suddenly breaks or bends something solid. Like a drop of tin bending a steel plate. Such things happen with people all the time. The heroes of Elena Minkinay-Taycher’s novel “The Rehbinder Effect” bend under the pressure of the harsh twentieth century: an atomic physicist; a village “burnt-out” woman; a gifted musician of the postwar era; a proper schoolgirl of the mid-1950s with a storm of passions in her soul; a witness of the Gulag; the son of a repressed commissar… Each chapter of the novel is a self-contained story about one of the characters, whose happy and tragic fates turned out to be closely intertwined with the history of our country. “The Rehbinder Effect” is a gentle and deeply moving novel about strong, charming people—and above all, about hope.