A story collection confidently and intriguingly connecting
relationships to their locations. All but the title story in
Israeli author Liebrecht's collection (A Man and a Woman and a Man,
2001, etc.) bear the name of a city or a country. In the opener,
"America," the narrator describes her mother's departure for the
U.S. with another woman's husband and his newborn baby daughter.
The two girls, allies and enemies, meet a handful of times, but
only after most of the parents are dead does a truth emerge that
rearranges the entire emotional landscape. This rich scenario
introduces themes that will reappear elsewhere: orphaned and
damaged children, long-contained anger and pain, family bonds.
"Hiroshima" also makes fertile use of a delicate set-up, Idit's
move to Japan when her relationship with Natan stalls. In a foreign
city, she learns lessons about another Holocaust and about the
opacity of cross-cultural involvements. Liebrecht's choices of
location often carry historical and emotional baggage, and several
of her protagonists are the offspring of Holocaust survivors.
"Munich" depicts neo-Nazi violence against Muslims, drawing
political parallels with Kristallnacht. "Jerusalem" tellingly moves
between the present, with Idit tensely returning from Hiroshima to
her old home and love, and the past, in which a historical figure
gives voice to the city's spiritual aspect while signaling the
imminent destruction of the Temple. A warm and empathetic
intelligence informs this book, fluently translated by Silverstein.
Only a taste of melodrama occasionally mars its sensitivity, as in
"Kibbutz," which shows kibbutzniks abusing two mentally disabled
members of the group. The concluding, post-apocalyptic title story
is set in a nameless place where new family connections are being
painfully forged and tenderness exists alongside a more brutal
pragmatism. Accessible, perceptive fiction from a talented writer.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Thematically linked stories about Israelis in love and in trouble
far away from home--by the author of the acclaimed "Apples from the
Desert,"
Savyon Liebrecht, one of Israel's most distinguished and popular
authors, has won an avid readership in the U. S. for her rich,
believable fiction about affairs of the heart. Her newest
collection includes seven long stories named for places--Munich,
America, Tel Aviv, Hiroshima--and features Israelis abroad, women
and men in love and in trouble far away from home. A woman living
congenially in Hiroshima for nine years becomes involved in a love
triangle with an American and a Japanese, and learns with chilling
finality that she can never be at home in this city of the Japanese
holocaust. The tables turn on an Israeli journalist, in Munich to
cover the trial of a Nazi war criminal, when he becomes a witness
to anti-Arab violence and to the murder of a beautiful Muslim woman
he has secretly desired. In these searing stories setting becomes
an accomplice to fate, and history intrudes into the heat of
passion. In the end, "A Good Place for the Night" makes us realize
that we are all wanderers, and the safe haven of "home" is only an
idea.
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