“…tipped the contents of  of the pouch into his plan. He caught hold of the gold chain. The gold-filgreed pendant dangled. It bore the image, in vitreous enamel, of a peacock, a perfect gemstone staring from the tip of each painted feather.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (MAR 31, 2014)

Ayelet Waldman’s new book begins in Red Hook, Maine, the setting of her novel Red Hook Road, but the two could hardly be more different. For whereas she had previously confined herself to two families in the same setting over a period of a very few years, she travels in this one to Salzburg, Budapest, and Israel, at various periods over a hundred-year span. By the same token, though, it is a stretch to call Love and Treasure a novel; it is essentially a trilogy of novellas, each with different characters, but linked by a single object and common themes. The object is an enameled Jugendstil pendant in the shape of a peacock. Although only of modest value, it plays an important role in the lives of the people who people who possess it, and provides a focus for the novelist’s enquiry into the lives of Hungarian Jews both before and after the Holocaust.

In the prologue, Jack Wiseman, an old man dying of cancer, entrusts the pendant to his recently-divorced granddaughter Natalie. Immediately, we plunge into the first and by far the best of the novellas, set in Salzburg, Austria, in 1945. Jack, as a young lieutenant in the US Army, is entrusted with the administration of the box-car loads of valuable goods brought out of Hungary on the “Gold Train” — items that he realizes have all been “donated” by Hungarian Jews prior to their exile or extermination. I have no doubt that this is based on truth — not only the train itself, but the horrifying revelation of what happened to its contents, and indeed the exposure of continuing anti-Semitism on both sides even after the War was over. Set in a jurisdiction almost overrun by the sheer numbers of refugees, survivors, and other displaced persons, the story was disturbing, informative and gripping. Even more so as Jack falls passionately in love with one of the survivors, a fiery redhead named Ilona Jakab. It is a surprisingly muscular piece of writing building to a powerful finale. Had I stopped the reading then, I would have given the book five stars.

The other two sections are not quite of this standard. The second novella returns us to the present day when Natalie is in Budapest, keeping her promise to track down the original owner of her grandfather’s pendant. It is less interesting because the laborious process of searching archives is inherently less compelling, but also because it is more difficult to buy into the romance story in this episode. Natalie pairs up with an Israeli art dealer named Amitai Shasho, virile, polished, and wealthy — everything a hero should be — except that he is essentially a Holocaust profiteer, and thus a difficult man for me to trust. He will change towards the end of the novella, but I never really got over my initial disapproval.

The third section is rather more successful, taking us back to Budapest, but now in 1913. It works because Waldman has so perfectly captured the narrative voice of a Freudian psychoanalyst, Imré Zobel, describing his work with a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl named Nina S. It is a perfect parody of Freud’s own literary style, with the added deliciousness of a narrator who, if not actually unreliable, is certainly self-deceiving. But it takes us away from any of the characters whom we have met earlier, and although it fills in some interesting back-story, it is essentially a stand-alone piece.

I mentioned Waldman’s themes. Chief among them is anti-Semitism, seen in an historical context and in some unexpected places; Waldman both makes a strong case for Zionism, and reveals disturbing patterns of discrimination within the Zionist ideal. Almost equally strong is her concern for women’s rights and the historical suffragist movement. And as always, she writes very freely about sex. I was reminded of two other novels in particular. One is The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, which also looks at the twentieth century in Eastern Europe through the history of a single artifact. The other was The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, in its multi-sectional structure and use of psychoanalysis, though Waldman’s book is neither so adventurous in its writing nor so strongly focused on the Holocaust. But you might call it a peri-Holocaust novel, and this I did find interesting. If only it had maintained a stronger focus.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ayelet Waldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Red Hook Road Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

Bibliography:

• Daughter’s Keeper (2003)
• Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006)
• Red Hook Road (2010)
• Love and Treasure (April 2014)

Mommmy-Track Mysteries:

• Nursery Crimes (2000)
• The Big Nap (2001)
• A Playdate with Death (2002)
• Death Gets a Time-Out (2003)
• Murder Plays House (2004)
• The Cradle Robbers (2005)
• Bye-Bye Black Sheep (2006)

Also:

• Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves (2005)
• Bad Mother: A Chronical of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009)

“Zionism, as I understand it, originated not only in the deep Jewish dream of escaping the danger of insularity and the cruelties of social injustice and persecution but out of a highly conscious desire to be divested of virtually everything that had come to seem, to the Zionists as much as the Christian Europeans, distinctively Jewish behavior — to reverse the very form of Jewish existence. The construction of a counterlife that is one’s own antimyth was at its very core. It was a species of fabulous utopianism, a manifesto for human transformation as extreme — and, at the outset, as implausible — as any ever conceived. A Jew could be a new person if he wanted to. In the early days of the state the idea appealed to almost everyone except the Arabs. All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once universally so popular — no more Jewy Jews, great!”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 07, 2011)

Long though it is, this quotation sums up just about everything about Roth’s magnificent novel of 1976: its strange title, its grand theme, its somewhat simplistic view of history, and its humor that jumps cheerfully into offensive self-mockery. A long section of the novel takes place in Israel shortly after the Yom Kippur War, when the stereotypes were indeed being turned on their heads, and conversely significant criticism of the state was beginning to be heard from the West. But Roth’s principal subject is not the engaged Jews who assert their selfhood either through Zionism or religion, but the countless secular Jews like himself, living securely in a distant country; how do they establish their identity, especially in mid-life when the question of “Is this really all I am?” typically arises. And of course, being Roth, he handles this quest for the total makeover — the counterlife — also at a much baser level, in terms of the male need for female conquest as the final proof of potency.

I am writing this review also as a follow-up to my recent piece on Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, the most recent Man Booker winner. By coincidence, a friend gave me her copy of the Roth on the same day that I bought the Jacobson; neither of us connected the two. But now, having enjoyed both books immensely, I am amazed at how closely Roth anticipates Jacobson 34 years earlier. Both authors treat the same subjects (male libido and Jewish identity), in the same context (Roth’s book is set partly in England, Jacobson’s entirely so), and with the same sardonic humor (except that Jacobson would spell it “humour”). As far as contemporary events go, the three-and-a-half-decade time gap seems as nothing: Roth alludes to Western condemnation of Israel’s actions in the Yom Kippur War; Jacobson’s characters agonize similarly over Gaza. Both writers invade the no-man’s land between antisemitism and paranoia; Roth is the more neurotic of the two, but he has more bite to his satire, and is to my mind the greater author.

Roth has had two abiding subjects in his oeuvre: Judaism and sex. The Counterlife explores both, though from an oblique perspective, in that his principal characters are neither committed Jews nor always sexually potent. The book opens with Henry Zuckerman, a successful Newark dentist, not yet forty, suffering from impotence caused as the side-effect of his heart medication; sex is what he used to enjoy (with both a mistress and a wife) but can now no longer have. He takes the extreme step of having a risky bypass operation, in order to make a radical change in his life. In the next section, Roth offers a different outcome to Henry’s story, in which he abandons his comfortable American secularism and moves to Israel as a fervent Zionist, living in a militant West Bank settlement and studying Hebrew and Torah. In each of these scenarios, Henry is visited by his elder brother, the successful novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several other Roth novels and is clearly the author’s alter ego. Roth (or Nathan) has several other variants in store, but each involves an attempt at radical life change, moving into the heart of an issue from its fringes — the Counterlife of the title.

Writing through an alter ego who is one of the characters in the book enables the author to play narrative tricks that used to be called Pirandellian but are now labeled post-modern. One, as I mentioned, is the ability to change the story at will. The five sections of the book — labeled respectively Basel, Judea, Aloft, Gloucestershire, and Christendom, although these are not in every case their settings — contradict one another in several significant ways, as though emphasizing the author’s ability to manipulate a story at will. The Gloucestershire section (a skeleton key to the whole) even changes tack three times in eighty pages; it begins with the author describing his own funeral and ends with a preview of the final Christendom section, discussed by two of the characters who are to appear in it! While more literal readers may find this confusing, I found it remarkably easy to buy into the parameters of each section, as the only realities at the time. These switches not only added intellectual excitement, they also deepened the perspective and the seriousness of the issues being addressed, albeit in Roth’s characteristically flippant voice.

While Judaism and sex continue to battle for the spotlight, the sexual aspects will in the end be secondary. The answer to the question “Is this really all I am?” may be sought in adultery or divorce, but conversely by the former playboy settling down and starting a family; both are found in this novel. What makes the book so much more than soap opera is that Roth also poses the who-am-I question as a matter of ethnic and religious identity: What does it mean to be a secular Jew in a largely assimilated society? Is it the role of Israel to serve as what he calls the American-Jewish Australia, taking misfits attempting to find themselves as a people? His Judea section is brilliant in its portrayal of many different views of that extraordinary society, many of them extreme, few of them compatible, but all in essence true. He has one striking passage (a single sentence) describing a Sabbath meal in the settlement that, though probably intended with slight condescension, also brings a light to Zuckerman’s eyes: “Singing in the Sabbath, Ronit looked as contented with her lot as any woman could be, her eyes shining with love for a life free of Jewish cringing, deference, diplomacy, apprehension, alienation, self-pity, self-satire, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness, nervousness, inwardness, hypercriticalness, hypertouchiness, social anxiety, social assimilation — a way of life absolved, in short, of all the Jewish “abnormalities,” those peculiarities of self-division whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.”

But Ronit is a minor character; all the principal women in the novel are Gentile. Roth’s men need non-Jewish wives for camouflage and, as it becomes clear, as opposites against whom to define themselves. Nathan returns from Israel to the suave dining-rooms of Mayfair and meadows of Gloucestershire. In turning these also into ethnic battlegrounds, he exaggerates hugely (though with a germ of truth). Yet he speaks strongly to the need of so many of us, Gentile as well as Jewish, to validate ourselves in opposition to the world around us, rather than settling for the quiet beauty of the ordinary.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (August 6, 1996)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Philip Roth Society Wikipedia page on Philip Roth
EXTRAS:	The New York Times review of The Counterlife (1987)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nemesis The Plot Against America Indignation Exit Ghost Everyman

Bibliography:

• Goodbye, Columbus: Novella and five stories (1959)
• Letting Go (1962)
• When She Was Good (1967)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
• Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends) (1971)
• The Great American Novel (1973)
• My Life as a Man (1974)
• Deception (1986)
• The Conversion of the Jews (1993)
• Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)**
• Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
• The Plot Against America (September 2004) **
• Everyman (April 2006)
• Indignation (September 2008)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

** Philip Roth appears in novel

Zuckerman Novels:

• The Ghostwriter (1979)
• Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
• The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
• The Prague Ogry (1985)
• The Counterlife (1985)
• American Pastoral (1997)
• I Married a Communist (1998)
• The Human Stain (2000)
• Exit Ghost (October 2007)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

David Kapesh Novels:

• The Breast (1973)
• The Professor of Desire (1977)
• The Dying Animal (2001)

Nonfiction:

• Reading Myself and Others (1975)
• The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988)
• Patrimony: A True Story (1990)
• Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001)

E-Book Study Guide:

• Study Guide for Goodbye, Columbus (2002)
• Study Guide for The Conversion of the Jews (2003)

Movies from books:

• Goodbye, Columbus (1969)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (VHS only) (1972)
• The Human Stain (July 2004)

“No, the thing was that sex – and this is what they were trying to show in Last Tango in Paris, which no one understood – was redemption, and Roni had an urgent need for redemption. Redemption with boys her own age was impossible, because they just hadn’t suffered enough to know anything about it yet, and so since the age of fourteen or so she’d been looking for someone to fuck her like Marlon Brando did Maria Schneider: angrily, passionately, pouring all his loneliness into her, because she could contain it, she could; it would be her real matriculation. And it would be someone she could return the favor to by also saving him from something, it didn’t matter what, maybe from himself.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (NOV 29, 2010)

Yael Hedaya was a screenwriter for the acclaimed Israeli TV drama series Betipul (In Treatment), which was adapted for the United States and currently airs on HBO. This background shows in her novel, Eden,  with her attention to the emotions, human interactions and the inner workings of the characters’ minds. Eden’s translator, Jessica Cohen, does a stunning job. The book flows without awkwardness or hesitation.

This is a book about the intertwined lives of the people of Eden – the good, the bad, the indifferent and the morally ambiguous. Until tragedies hit, they go about their lives in a very insular way. Even with tragedy, they are more apt to talk about it than to take action.

Eden is a community in Israel’s Moshav. Part rural and part suburban, the people who live here are yuppies. Most are well-heeled financially and concerned with their own lives and interests. It is the rare Edenite who reaches out to larger causes or concerns. The book delves into the lives of the main characters and the novel flows from there, exploring the inner lives and actions of Eden’s populous. What is specific to this sense of place is the constant fear that the Israelis have of terrorism and intifada.

Dafna and Eli have desperately been trying to get pregnant for the past seven years without success. Despite fertility treatments, each month Dafna hears the nurse tell her “I’m sorry.”  Eli is a corporate attorney who commutes to Jerusalem every day for work. He would like to halt the fertility treatments and get on with their lives, perhaps adopt a child but Dafna won’t hear of this. Dafna works for a mostly ineffective non-profit agency intent on making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Dafna is depressed most of the time, disheartened about her infertility and unfulfilled at her work. She feels like she and Eli are drifting apart.

Alona and Mark have been separated for two years but their lives are still very intertwined with their children. Mark runs an Italian restaurant in Eden and Alona is an editor for a high end literary publisher. Currently, she is editing a book by an author named Uri who is driving her crazy with his insecurity and dependence. She and Mark have two children, Maya and Ido. Alona worries that Ido is suffering from depression but Mark thinks Ido, a bright and inquisitive little boy, is just fine. Mark has a daughter, Roni, from a previous marriage. When the book opens Roni is almost 16.

Reuven is a bureaucrat who takes delight in turning down customers’ requests. He is also a lech, given to staring at women’s breasts and and butts. He has a son Dudi who is in the Israeli army and lives with Reven and his wife when he is at home. Reuven would like nothing better than to hook up with Alona. When Reuven discovers a very disturbing secret about Dudi, it appalls him but he takes no action.

A great deal of the book focuses on Roni who is sexually involved with several men many years her senior. As the book commences, she is having affairs with Eli, Uri, and her driving instructor , all of whom are 12 to 25 years her senior. The driving instructor disgusts her but that doesn’t stop her from having sex with him. She thinks she is in love with Uri but Roni is emotionally stalled, searching for a life that mirrors the sex scenes in Last Tango in Paris. For Roni, “pain was redemption.” Her emotional life thrives on pain and she is not able to access pleasure. Her emotions are black and white and she does not see any grey in what she does. Her father and Alona are unable to set boundaries and this leads Roni even further astray.

When Roni suffers a tragedy, her family is brought together and it appears, for the first time, that Roni may be starting to mature. This is a book about people and their day to day lives. In Treatment is about individual psychotherapy and this book reads like it could be the basis for a group therapy show. All the people have their issues, they repeat their mistakes without insight about change and the lives of Eden are opened up to the readers eyes, not unlike a soap opera.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Metropolitan Books (October 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Yael Hedaya
EXTRAS:	Excerpt NY Mag interview with Yael Hedaya
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another you might like: Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjilian This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

Bibliography:

• Dramatis Persona (1994)
• Housebroken (1997; 2001 in US)
• Accidents (2001; 2005 in US)
• Eden (2005; October 2010 in US)

“As she talks, she distractedly quickens her pace, pulled along by the living memory — Ofer on the beach, a bold puppy bristling with the future, she behind him, hiding at times, although there was no need because he never turned to look back. She wondered how far he would go, and he answered her with his steps: forever. She saw […] how the day would come when he would leave her, just get up and go, as they always do, and she guessed a little of what she would feel on that day, a little of what now, without any warning, digs its predatory teeth into her.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 21, 2010)

This is Ora, a fiftyish Israeli woman, thinking about her younger son, Ofer, who has not merely left home, but done so in a way that fills her with fear. On the day of his discharge from military service, when he is already on leave at home, he volunteers to join the forces fighting some unspecified action in Southern Lebanon, signing up for a further month. Terrified that at any moment a notification team will turn up at her house to inform her of Ofer’s death, Ora flees to the Galilee mountains, beyond the reach of any news. As her husband Ilan has left her several months before, taking with him their eldest son, Ora is all alone. On impulse, she calls on Avram, a former lover who has fallen on hard times, seeking his company, his listening ear, and perhaps his restoration to mental and physical health, along with her own. The whole novel is essentially her “Month of Magical Thinking,” in which the past combines with the present, folding her personal history and that of her country into an almost mystical union.

It would be magnificent if the book were not so confoundedly long; even so, there is a lot in it I can praise. I was impressed, for instance, by the phantasmagorical prologue, in which Ora, Avram, and Ilan, sick with high fever in the wake of some epidemic, meet each other in night-time visits to each other’s wards in a darkened Jerusalem hospital that has been almost evacuated in anticipation of casualties from the 1967 Six Day War. The bonds forged between the three of them will last a lifetime. I was impressed at first, too, by the immediacy and tension of the story when it jumps ahead to 2000. As Ora has lost her license, she is forced to ask their Palestinian driver Sami take her and Ofer to the army rendezvous point, a strangely insensitive mission to ask an Arab to undertake. But Grossman himself is not insensitive, balancing this extraordinary event against a long background of apparent friendship between Ora’s family and Sami, who in turn exacts his own price, leading to a fascinating glimpse of Palestinian culture in the Israeli underbelly, a scene that directly reflects the nightmare mood of the novel’s prelude. After so much polemical writing set in the Middle East, this political frankness was heartening; Grossman is clearly a writer whom one can trust.

But this too is only prelude. It is not until page 116 that the main part of the novel begins, when Ora and Avram arrive in the Galilee. Now we begin to look back as much as forward. Avram’s connections with Ilan, Ora and her children will be explained gradually over the course of the next 460 pages, if the reader can be persuaded to ignore the many other reviews that will certainly give the key facts away. In a narrative that seemingly occupies three or four different time-frames at once, we will learn of Avram’s traumatic experiences during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the testing of the close bonds between him and Ilan, and the strains in Ora’s marriage, caused in part by his presence offstage. We will also learn — at length — of Ofer’s childhood; it seems that Ora’s prime motive in this hike is to talk about her son (even at one point digging a pit and screaming into the belly of the earth), in the shadow of her fear for his death. Even as we follow Ora and Avram in their hike through wild and beautiful country, their trail is dotted with memorials to Israeli soldiers killed in defence of their land, exactly the kind of memento mori that Ora is hoping to avoid.

Were these elements in better balance, the book might be superb. But Ora’s magical thinking dominates all; it is almost though she is exorcising a premature grief. Imagine a mother going through every picture in every family album, and telling you exactly what her child was doing when it was taken, the clever things he said, the phases he went through, the small worries he caused. The obsessive detail is excruciating. When Grossman describes the actual hike, he can be superb; there are marvelous incidents such as a meeting with a peripatetic messiah of mirth, or a terrifying encounter with a pack of wild dogs, but these are too few and far between. My interest picked up towards the end, which describes the desperate fighting in Sinai just before the change of fortunes in the Yom Kippur War. And on an almost metaphorical level, Grossman offers an insight into Israeli psychology that strikes me as being deeply authentic. But when everything has to be filtered through the mind of a warm but obsessive and often hallucinating woman, it can be hard going to get there — though the very ending is grace itself. (Translated by Jessica Cohen.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 129 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 21, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Grossman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Israeli woman tells her story: My Michael by Amos Oz

Bibliography:

• Duel (1982; 1998 in English)
• The Smile of the Lamb (1983; 1990 in English)
• See Under: Love (1986; 1989 in English)
• The Book of Initmate Grammar (1991; 1994 in English)
• The ZigZag Kid (1994; 1997 in English)
• Be My Knife (1998; 2001 in English)
• Someone to Run With (2000; 2003 in English)
• Her Body Knows: Two Novellas (2003; 2005 in English)
• To the End of the Land (2010)
• Falling Out of Time (March 2014)

Nonfiction:

• The Yellow Wind (1987; 1988 in English)
• Sleeping on a Wire: Conversation with Palestinians in Israel (1992; 1993 in English)
• Death as Way of Life: From Oslo to the Geneva Agreement (2003)
• Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson (2005; 2006 in English)
• Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics (2008 in English)

“It was the slowest Kaddish Zorah had ever heard, every syllable weighted by groans and sighs. Pious women on either side of her covered their eyes with their fingers, soundlessly mouthing the words.”

“‘Glorified and celebrated,’ they recited. ‘Acclaimed and honored, extolled and exalted beyond all tribites that man can utter.'”

“Zorah knew that most of the people around her did not understand what they were saying. For them, the ancient prayer was a kind of lullaby, a balm for the afflicted. She wondered if they would be standing there if they realized that they were praising the God who had decreed the murder of their families; that they were expressing gratitude and affection for the One who had annihilated everyone and everything they had loved. ‘We need a new Kaddish for 1945,’ she thought. An honest Kaddish that would begin, ‘Accused and convicted, heartless and cruel beyond anything the human mind can understand.'”

“They chanted, ‘God who brings peace to his universe.'”

“Silently Zorah translated, ‘God who brings Nazis to His universe.'”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (MAY 30, 2010)

As WWII loomed, and Hitler continued to tighten the noose around the Jews of Europe, Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” took place throughout Germany on November 9th and 10th, 1938. Almost 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, 200 synagogues were destroyed, and 91 Jews were beaten to death.

The British, which ruled Palestine after WWI, were aware of the importance of Arab oil to successfully fight the coming war. They published a White Paper on May 17, 1939, that reduced Jewish immigration to Palestine to a trickle, severely limiting the number of Jews permitted to enter the country in an effort to pacify the Arab leadership’s demand for a halt to Jewish immigration.

Thus, in the late 1930’s, when the Jews of Germany and Austria were in great danger, Palestine was closed to them. The rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1933 and the later military conquests by Germany gave Hitler’s antisemitic government control over most of the populations of Europe. As the realization grew that the Nazi’s were intent on the extermination of European Jews, there was an urgent need for them to emigrate. However, most countries closed their doors to immigration. Only Palestine held out the hope of new settlement where Jews would be welcome. Or rather, that would be the case if it were not for the British restrictions.

The Jews already living in Palestine were determined that their trapped brethren in Europe who managed to escape the coming conflagration, must be brought to Palestine. Thus, the movement for “illegal immigration,” which its proponents preferred to call “clandestine immigration,” was launched.

Ships, most of them unseaworthy, were hired and set sail from various European ports toward Palestine. The British, who had at their disposal battleships, radar and airplanes, managed to intercept most of them, and sent their Jewish passengers back to certain death in Europe. From 1934 until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, some 3,000 “illegal immigrants” met their deaths while struggling against the British to enter Palestine. Also, many of the Jews who attempted to immigrate to the Mandatory Palestine during the 1940s were caught after a struggle while arriving by any and every route. They were interned in detention camps – British concentration camps – only differing from the German camps in that the inmates were not starved, gassed or cremated. Over time 50,000 people were imprisoned in these camps during and after WWII, and several thousand children were born there. One such camp was “Atlit,” which is the setting for Day After Night.

The Atlit detention camp, located near Haifa, was constructed by the British Mandate in Palestine, at the end of the 1930s, as a military camp on the Mediterranean coast. It was converted by them between 1939 -1948 to a detention camp for illegals who found themselves, yet again, incarcerated behind barbed wire. The novel takes place over the course of a few months and is based on the true story of the rescue of the inmates from the Atlit camp in October 1945.

The narrative focuses on four Jewish women, all Holocaust survivors, all Atlit inmates, all from extremely different backgrounds, who wait for their release from the camp and the freedom to, hopefully, begin new lives as pioneers on kibbutzim, (collective farms or settlements). Anita Diamant writes, “Not one of the women in Barrack C is twenty-one, but all of them are orphans.”

Leonie is a lovely, sophisticated Parisian who was forced into prostitution. She slept with Germans in order to survive. Many of “her men” found their pleasure by causing her physical and emotional pain. The experience has crippled her psychologically. At first, her three new friends at Atlit condemn her and she is told by one, “When they do find out about you, they will shame you in public. They will send you away. Maybe they will even stone you to death, which would be very biblical, don’t you think? And so appropriate.” Leonie clearly remembers the times when she faced situations when refusal would have meant death. But she is not the only woman in the group who did whatever necessary in order to survive. “Many were reluctant to tell their own stories because all of them began and ended with the same horrible question” ‘Why was I spared?'”

Zorah is a survivor of Auschwitz where she lost everyone she loved. She utilized her gift for languages there and added Romanian, German, some Italian and French to her native languages, Yiddish and Hebrew. This unusual linguistic education, learned from fellow inmates, was her method of survival although her life is still so haunted by atrocitites that she has become numb. When Atlit inmates pray and praise god, Zorah silently chants to a “God who brings Nazis to his universe.”

Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought with the partisans during the war. She is a modest, humble woman, who works with the Palmach, the Jewish military forces, in Atlit. Her job is to find out which Jews, if any, had been Nazi collaborators.

Tedi, a Dutch Jewess, tall and blonde, was once told by a friend in Amsterdam that she was lucky – she looked like a poster child for Hitler Youth. She “passed” as an Arayan until she was captured near the end of the war. Tedi escaped from a boxcar in route to a concentration camp and was found by British soldiers who sent her to a displaced person’s center in Landsberg. After more barbed wire, endless barracks and waiting in more lines than she could count, she wound up in Atlit.

These four women’s shared horrors surrounding the Holocaust bond them in friendship. They give each other love and support in order to get through each day and try to recover some semblance of “normal” life.

Obviously Day After Night is not a pleasant read, although the novel is well written and the characters are extremely lifelike. I think the author’s point of view is extremely optimisic. I was haunted by the story long after finishing it. One of the consequences the survivors face, besides their wartime experience and survivors guilt, is the challenge of building new lives. Many are just not up to it. The pain they live with saps their energy and will to live. However, the four friends, Leonie, Zorah, Shayndel, and Tedi seem to have hope for a future and the strength to overcome their suffering and fight for redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 83 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; First Edition (September 8, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anita Diamant
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Holocaust stories: Lovely Green Eyes by Arnold Lustig The Kommandant’s Girl by Pam Jenoff Day for Night by Frederick Reiken

Bibliography:

Fiction:

• The Red Tent (1998)
• Good Harbor (2001)
• Last Days of Dog Town (2005)
• Day After Night (September 2009)

Nonfiction:

• The New Jewish Wedding (1985, revised 2001)
• Living a Jewish Life (1991, revised 2007)
• Pitching My Tent: On Marriage, Motherhood, Friendship and Other Leaps of Faith (1995)
• Bible Baby Names: Spiritual Choices from Judeo-Christian Tradition (1996)
• The New Jewish Baby Book (1998, revised 2005)
• Choosing a Jewish Life: A Handbook for People Converting to Judaism and for Their Family and Friends (1998)
• Saying Kadish: How to Comfort the Dying, Bury the Dead and Mourn as a Jew (1998)
• How to Be a Jewish Parent: How to Raise a Jewish Child (2000)

“Watching roads can be a way to look at history, to measure human progress and limitation.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (FEB 15, 2010)

Ted Conover won a National Book Critics Circle award for his last work of non-fiction, Newjack, a narrative about the Sing Sing prison. One can imagine that after such an endeavor he went after freedom—the essence of it personified by a wide stretch of empty road.

In his new book, The Routes of Man, Conover takes a look at different roads all across the world and takes us along for the ride.

The book is fascinating not just because of the diversity of places represented but because each chapter so beautifully depicts a road’s role in one of the many of the problems facing humanity today: war, disease, pollution, rampant development.

Our first expedition traces the path of mahogany from New York to its origin in the rainforests of Peru. Most of it is set in Peru where Conover takes a precarious ride along small roads through the Andes mountains to a logging camp deep in the forest. Conover shows how the country’s residents stand to both lose and gain from a more permanent, wider road that would cut through the forest and facilitate more commerce between Peru and its economic powerhouse neighbor, Brazil.

Conover is a master of narrative and this and other chapters in the book are full of wonderful descriptions and interesting asides. His talent is on full display here. Never to miss the smallest of details, he finds humor and irony in the most unexpected of places. For example, the monument to biodiversity in the state of Madre de Dios in Peru, he notes, is made of concrete.

Conover’s travels also take him into remote regions in other parts of the world. He visits Zanskar, a part of Ladakh—the eastern, Buddhist part of the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir. Zanskaris are cut off from the rest of the world from October to May when it snows but once the ice settles, young Zanskaris travel the frozen road called the chaddar and leave for higher studies at a set time every year. It’s a rite of passage described beautifully by Conover. Here too the Indian government has promised a more permanent road in to Zanskar—it’s of vital geopolitical importance to India, Zanskar being very close to the border with Pakistan.

The best chapter in The Routes of Man details the place of roads in war—a never-ending one. Conover visits the Israel-Palestine border and sees the situation through the eyes of both Israeli soldiers who have to staff checkpoints daily and the Palestinians who have to suffer these indignities every day. One hears news about the region practically every day but this impartial account of the war especially in its daily humdrum, is spectacular. The Routes of Man is worth reading just for this segment alone.

His description of a walk through an Israeli checkpoint is moving: “As I fell into step with the dozens of people heading past the guard tower, past concrete road dividers spray-painted with graffiti (“Israel Out”), past the cameras mounted atop poles, toward a low structure ahead with a corrugated roof, a red light next to the single lane for cars, and cyclone fencing and loops of razor wire on the sides, Fares’s reluctance to leave the town made more sense: this was starting to feel like prison.”

The road as vector for disease is described by Conover’s visit to Kenya—he travels the truck routes infamous as facilitating the rapid spread of AIDS in the country.

Each chapter in the book makes for great reading; Conover’s latest is a fascinating read.

The problem with The Routes of Man is its subtitle: “How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today.” It’s misleading and worse, promises a grander historical treatment of the subject than what we get. This is not to say that The Routes of Man is a mediocre read—it’s actually a fantastic one. But too often, some chapters feel like extremely good travelogues—and just that. It’s not quite what the subtitle promises. Conover does try in brief asides to inject some more heft into the book by discussing other road-related topics—like the history of Broadway Street in New York and the evolution of speed—but these don’t work. Their objective—to stitch the overall project together—is too transparent.

“One of the great challenges in writing a book about roads is to avoid the inadvertent use of road metaphors,” Conover writes. Yet you wish he would actually make these connections more evident. The last two chapters describe a driving expedition undertaken by nouveau riche in China and an ambulance driving around the roads of one of the starkest cities in the world—Lagos, Nigeria.

It is these two chapters, especially, that feel removed from the larger essence that Conover is trying to communicate. The chapter on China shows how money is turning the country around and how the disposable income many urban Chinese now have is giving them new kinds of opportunities for recreation—including a “self-driving” (as opposed to being driven by a chauffeur) trip. Yes, this chapter too takes place mostly on the road but the overall effect is disjointed—the lines between the new roads and the new China made out less clearly.

This same problem applies to the last chapter in Lagos, Nigeria. Again, it’s a compelling travelogue but exactly how the road is the central feature in the story—it’s hard to tell.

But The Routes of Man should be read for the wonderful narrative Conover injects into all his travels. The diversity of the places chosen makes it even more fun to go along for the ride.

Two yeas ago, our family decided to vacation in a small town at the foothills of the Himalayas—Mussoorie. Our hotel room was so high up in the mountains that it was regularly invaded by clouds that swept in when we left the doors open. On our way back down to the plains, we took a taxi down an extremely narrow, ribbon-like road that in most places didn’t have any barriers separating our tiny car from the steep vertical drops. I was convinced we were soon going to meet our end. As our crazy cabbie took one more sharp turn around one more precarious hairpin bend we suddenly came across a huge sign: “Speed Thrills but Kills.” The irony of the situation was not lost on any of us.

Looking back, I think the sign that Conover saw in Lagos, Nigeria, would have driven home the point better: Drive Soft—Life Get No Duplicate.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AMAZON PAGE:	The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ted Connover
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More “road” books: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford

Bibliography:

• Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes (1984)
• Coyote: : A Journey Across Borders With America’s Illegal Migrants (1987)
• Whiteout: Lost in Aspen (1991)
• Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000)
• The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today (February 2010)

“Why do you write?  Why do you write the way you do?  Are you trying to influence your readers, and, if so, how?  What role do your books play?  Do you constantly cross out and correct or do you write straight out of your head?  What is it like to be a famous writer and what effect does it have on your family?…And by the way, how would you define yourself?”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (APR 19, 2009)

When the Author, the otherwise unnamed main character of Amos Oz’s newest work, arrives at a literary evening at the Shunia Shor Community Center in Tel Aviv as the special guest, he expects the usual sorts of questions from his audience.  What his audience never suspects is that the author, while answering their sometimes intrusive questions about himself, is secretly inventing names and imaginary lives for them, connecting them to each other, and even continuing his musings about them well into the night after the meeting is concluded.  Approximately thirty-five characters, either in the audience or peripheral to the stories the Author is creating, dominate the Author’s interior life, even as the real humans behind these stories are talking with him about his work.  When the audience leaves the community center, they are unaware of their continuing lives in the Author’s imagination.

Among these characters is Tsefania Beit-Halachmi (also known as Avraham “Bumek” Schuldenfrei), an elderly poet who is the author of a collection of poems called Rhyming Life and Death.”  The poems themselves echo throughout the book—mostly doggerel—as both the narrator/Author and the book’s author, Amos Oz, explore serious questions of life and death, and eventually some less serious questions of sex and death.

Following the meeting at the community center, the Author escorts the unattractive and painfully shy Rochele Reznik, home after the meeting, hoping for an evening of passion.   His failure leads him to explore of the ideas of another invented character, Arnold Bartok, a part-time philosopher who has noted that “It is not life and death that came into the world as a pair, but sex and death.”  Death, Bartok believes, “appeared aeons later than life,” when sexual reproduction was created, and it is sex that has led to aging and death.  “We simply have to find a way of eliminating sex,” he says, “so as to rid our world of the inevitability of death, and of so much suffering as well.

Taking a modernist approach to writing, Oz plays with the form of the book, creating a wide cast of characters who exemplify the themes which he (and, of course the Author) wishes to explore, issues both serious and tongue in cheek.  The attractive waitress at the café where the Author has coffee becomes “Ricky,” whose football-playing boyfriend “Charlie” has also enjoyed the favors of “Lucy,” runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest, who married the son of Ovadya Hazzam, who won a lottery and is now dying of cancer in a miserable hospital room.  Miriam Nehorait, a middle-aged culture lover at the meeting, may have had a relationship with a sixteen-year-old, unhappy and hypersensitive young poet in the audience, who is anxious to have the Author read his poems, and they may have been observed by yet another woman, a neighborhood snoop.  Arnold Bartok’s mother, age 86, and paralyzed from the waist down sleeps beside him at night, while Yerucham Shdemati is dying of a blood disease.  The lecturer Bar-Orian, widowed twice and living alone, has been abandoned by his only daughter.  Life is difficult and usually painful; death is inevitable—and also painful.

Life and death and love and sex echo throughout the novella, as the Author wends his way through the city after his literary evening, thinking about his characters and not always willing or able to differentiate between his imaginative life and his real life.  Twice divorced, he himself is returning to an empty apartment at four a.m.  When he arrives, the alarm system of a car is screaming because it “can no longer bear its loneliness.”  The man on the other side of the Author’s apartment wall is weeping, and a nightbird is shrieking.   When the Author opens the local newspaper before going to bed, he discovers that Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, the author of Rhyming Life and Death, has just died.  “Once in a while it is worth turning on the light to clarify what is going on,” he declares simply.

Though the “novel” blurs the boundaries of reality and imagination and leaves a number of loose ends and undeveloped ideas, Oz provides an unusual and creative meditation on his themes and on the transience of happiness, life, love, and fame.  Often darkly humorous and ironic, the author offers few glimmers of hope for the future, however.  Life is what it is, and though we can escape from reality through dreams and our imaginations, Oz lets us know that sooner or later we must all “turn on the light to clarify what is going on.”  It is not much to look forward to.  “Tomorrow,” he tells us, “will be warm and humid, too.  And, in fact, tomorrow is today.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (April 14, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Amos Oz
EXTRAS:	Paris Review interview with Amos Oz
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest A Tale of Love and Darkness My Michael

Bibliography:

• Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories (1965; 1982 in US)
• Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966; 1985 in US)
• My Michael (1968; 2005 in the US )
• Unto Death: Crusade and Late Love (2 Novellas) (1971; 1978 in US)
• Touch the Water, Touch the Wind (1973; 1991 in US)
• The Hill of Evil Counsel: Three Stories (1976; 1991 in US)
• A Perfect Peace (1982; 1993)
• Black Box (1987; 1989 in US)
• To Know a Woman (1989; 1992 in US)
• Fima (1991; 1994 in US)
• Don’t Call It Night (1997)
• Panther in the Basement (1995; 1997 in US)
• The Same Sea (1999; 2001 in US)
• Rhyming Life and Death (2007; 2009 in US)
• Scenes from Village Life (2011)
• Between Friends (September 2013)

Youth:

• Soumchi (1978; 1995 in US)
• Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest (2005; 2011 in US)

Nonfiction:

• Under this Blazing Light (1979; 1996 in US)
• In the Land of Israel (1983; 1993 in US)
• The Slopes of Lebanon (1989; 1992 in US)
• The Silence of Heaven (1993)
• Israel, Palestine and Peace (1995)
• Don’t Call It Night (1997)
• The Story Begins: Essays on Literature (1999)
• The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God (2000)
• A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004)
• How to Cure a Fanatic (2006)
• Jews and Jews (2012)

Other:

• The Amos Oz Reader (2009)

“My husband and I are like two strangers who happen to meet coming out of a clinic where they have received treatment involving some physical unpleasantness.  Both embarrassed, reading each other’s minds, conscious of an uneasy, embarrassing intimacy, wearily groping for the right tone in which to address each other.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (APR 19, 2009)

Hannah Gonen is only thirty when she makes this observation about her husband Michael.  A young woman living in Jerusalem in the late 1950s, she has been married for ten years to a man she pursued and married when she was in her first year at the university and he was a graduate student.  Michael, who describes himself to Hannah as “good…a bit lethargic, but hard-working, responsible, clean, and very honest,” eventually earns his PhD. degree in geology and begins work at the university, but Hannah, who has given up her literature studies upon her marriage, soon finds married life—and Michael himself—to be tedious.  Her only child resembles Michael in personality, a child rooted in reality, who “finds objects much more interesting than people or words.”

Writing in short, factual sentences, which come alive through his choice of details, author Amos Oz, often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, recreates Hannah’s story of her marriage, a marriage which may or may not survive.  Hannah and Michael married in 1949, shortly after Israel gained its independence, and the author often uses Hannah’s battles for independence and control of her life to reflect the growing pains of a new land, determined to defend itself and protect its integrity.   As their family backgrounds unfold, the personalities of Hannah and Michael and their behavior within the marriage are seen in a wider context.  Hannah, who yearns for excitement, draws on her rich store of childhood memories and often escapes into a dream world.  Michael, hard-working and pragmatic, remains a geologist, firmly connected to the earth.

After their child is born, a year after the marriage, it is Michael who usually takes care of him and washes his diapers.  Hannah, mired in depression, says she is “contracted, withdrawn into myself as though I had lost a tiny jewel on the sea bed.”  Gradually, she becomes more and more unstable, more and more depressed and hysterical, until she makes herself ill, a condition which she sees, ironically, as offering her some freedom.  “I had lost my powers of alchemy, the ability to make my dreams carry me over the dividing line between sleeping and waking,” she explains.  Despite Hannah’s self-pity and hysteria, Michael, the logical, reliable, unexciting husband retains his composure, so much so that Hannah wonders, “When will this man lose his self-control?  Oh, to see him just once in a panic.  Shouting for joy.  Running wild.”

As the marriage and Hannah’s sanity deteriorate, the author’s use of symbols gives depth and universality to the story.  Hannah often imagines a glass dome over herself and her family, and wishes only that it remain transparent, not cloudy.  She remembers the childhood games she played with Arab twins in her neighborhood, bossing them around, and she now fears they will wreak their vengeance on her.  She imagines warships, a search for Moby Dick on the Nautilus, and a forcible rape.  Her relationship with an innocent Orthodox teenager turns into a power struggle, and she creates a new personality, that of Yvonne Azulai, a young woman who leads an exciting life.  Even the changing seasons parallel Hannah’s state of mind, with much of her story taking place in the autumn.

Rich with imagery and dense with symbols, this novel, first published in 1968 and recently republished in paperback, depicts two characters who deal in different ways with crises in their lives and marriage.  Though the novel is set in Jerusalem about fifty years ago, the issues with which these characters are dealing are as pertinent today as they were then, and the emotional implications are as affecting .  Psychologically true, the novel achieves rare universality, even though the reader may not empathize completely with Hannah, who is so often self-indulgent, or Michael, who, though reliable and honest, has so little imagination.  Beautifully realized, My Michael, which shows Hannah’s possessiveness and need for control even in the title, depicts an immature woman who does not know who she herself is when she joins her life to that of someone else.  In this case, two hearts continue to beat as two.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 reviewers
PUBLISHER:	Harvest Books (November 2005)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Amos Oz
EXTRAS:	Guardian interview with Amos Oz
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of A Tale of Love and Darkness Rhyming Life and Death Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

Bibliography:

• Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories (1965; 1982 in US)
• Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966; 1985 in US)
• My Michael (1968; 2005 in the US )
• Unto Death: Crusade and Late Love (2 Novellas) (1971; 1978 in US)
• Touch the Water, Touch the Wind (1973; 1991 in US)
• The Hill of Evil Counsel: Three Stories (1976; 1991 in US)
• A Perfect Peace (1982; 1993)
• Black Box (1987; 1989 in US)
• To Know a Woman (1989; 1992 in US)
• Fima (1991; 1994 in US)
• Don’t Call It Night (1997)
• Panther in the Basement (1995; 1997 in US)
• The Same Sea (1999; 2001 in US)
• Rhyming Life and Death (2007; 2009 in US)
• Scenes from Village Life (2011)
• Between Friends (September 2013)

Youth:

• Soumchi (1978; 1995 in US)
• Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest (2005; 2011 in US)

Nonfiction:

• Under this Blazing Light (1979; 1996 in US)
• In the Land of Israel (1983; 1993 in US)
• The Slopes of Lebanon (1989; 1992 in US)
• The Silence of Heaven (1993)
• Israel, Palestine and Peace (1995)
• Don’t Call It Night (1997)
• The Story Begins: Essays on Literature (1999)
• The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God (2000)
• A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004)
• How to Cure a Fanatic (2006)
• Jews and Jews (2012)

Other:

• The Amos Oz Reader (2009)