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Four excerpts from Rachel Shihor's novella Yankinton have been
selected, and translated from the Hebrew for this cahier. These
poignant and humorous tales are as much about the act of
recollection as they are about the remembered Tel Aviv of the
1940s. In a playful and yet muted style, Shihor tells of the
everyday life of a child beginning to grasp her surroundings. Six
works by the painter David Hendler further explore the city.
In this playfully designed dual-language edition, Rachel Shihor's
stories-published here for the first time in the original
Hebrew-appear alongside Ornan Rotem's English translation. Shihor
offers a medley of aphorisms, flash fiction, and short stories,
carving out a slice of a world in which Kafka would feel at home.
The characters that inhabit this world-reckless she-goats, morose
fish, somnambulistic theologians, and poignant old ladies, not to
mention dying dictators and dead poets-have nothing in common save
for the fact that they instruct us on the human condition. In her
introduction, Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love,
confirms, "Only a master could make such originality feel
inevitable. The only question is why so few people have had the
chance to read her." These edifying stories, with all their sadness
and humor, are a writer's tour de force and a reader's delight.
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Yankinton (Hardcover)
Rachel Shihor; Translated by Sara Tropper, Esther Frumkin
bundle available
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R545
Discovery Miles 5 450
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Set in the early days of the Jewish state, Yankinton tells the
stories of refugees from the Holocaust and antisemitism who
struggled to build new lives in Israel. Through the eyes of a young
Orthodox Jewish girl growing up in Tel Aviv, we watch a colorful
mosaic of characters from Soviet revolutionaries to weapons runners
during the War of Independence. Faced with the difficulties of the
traumatized adults around her, from panic attacks to suicide
attempts, the girl seeks moments of wonder among the struggle and
tragedy. We join her as she moves through the Tel Aviv streets,
avoiding the spots exposed to Arab sniper fire; seeks literature of
the wider world in a city awash in translations of Soviet
propaganda novels; and navigates the idiosyncrasies of the adults
around her. With her, we listen in on political discussions,
reminiscences of Russia and wartime Eastern Europe, and Soviet
revolutionary songs accompanied by balalaikas. We track the lives
of the couple for which the novel is named. Mrs. Yankinton smuggled
grenades in her baby’s carriage during Israel’s War of
Independence; for years after, she would end every day standing at
attention, alone in her living room, when the national anthem came
over the radio. Mr. Yankinton, whose arrest as a revolutionary in
Soviet Russia foiled his plans to study medicine, became the proud
curator of the Zionist visionary Jabotinsky’s complete works. In
this rich mosaic of scenes and characters from postwar Tel Aviv,
Shihor muses on the vital significance of the act of remembering
and of the search for flashes of magic in the darkness. Â
Jerusalem in the early 1990s, just before the Israeli prime
minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Peace Accords and was
assassinated by a rightwing ideologue shortly thereafter. Naomi, a
former architect from secular Tel Aviv, has just married Jochanan,
a religious doctor who emigrated from Sweden. Days of Peace follows
Naomi through Jerusalem as she meets a rich cast of characters,
from an Arab beggarwoman in a park on a Sabbath afternoon to a
professor of biblical archaeology on a life-long quest to produce a
hand-lettered edition of the Bible. Kaleidoscopic scenes of the
city pass before our eyes: a ritual bath, a wedding hall, carpentry
workshops, bookstores, Hadassah Hospital, a former leper colony and
more. As Naomi's marriage deteriorates, she travels to Poland,
where the sorrow over those lost in the Holocaust intertwines with
her nostalgia for the early romance of her now-faded marriage. But
while the drama unfolds in the divorce court back in Jerusalem,
Naomi is on her ultimate search--to find her place in this
historical city. Written in deceptively simple, almost
conversational prose, Rachel Shihor's latest novel is a poignant,
layered portrait of a city and a young woman's quest to find
herself.
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