The Stuttering Kitchens: A Novel

In a novel both intimate and expansive, World War II comes to a farm through a crew of Nazi prisoners, and each of the family members must reckon with the legacies of violence and the imperfections of love and forgiveness.

It is the summer of 1944, and the war has come to Maine.

Ever since her father was killed overseas and her brother enlisted, Melanie Kitchen has been doing all she can to run the family’s potato farm. So when the army opens a prison camp in town, she signs up for a crew of Nazi prisoners to work the fields. Their arrival brings back her older brother, Leigh, now a guard with the Military Police whose stutter—a family trait on their mother’s side—somehow disappears when he speaks German.

War is not the only shadow darkening the farm. Leigh’s return disrupts the strained peace that has settled on the family. Melanie is the only child called to the work, but she won’t inherit the farm. Leigh and their younger brother, Joseph, have suffered terribly at their father’s hands. So has their mother, Dorothy, who alternates between periods of paranoia, calm, and despair, and excludes Melanie from her family legacy: that the Kitchens are the only Jews in town is a closely guarded secret.

The Nazis draw out the family’s tensions and fears around the farm, their father, their past, and their future. Then a string of mysterious deaths hit the camp, and Leigh is drafted to investigate. His discoveries will force another reckoning.

Intimate and expansive, Jake Wolff's The Stuttering Kitchens explores the many ways in which we are harmed and yet called to the necessity of forgiveness. Clear-eyed and moving, it brings World War II into the broken, beating, yearning heart of a family.