A thoughtful, provocative novel that artfully examines political obstacles to Jewish spirituality.
A fictional investigation of Jewish identity that tracks the parallel efforts of two men to live as Jews in an inhospitable world.
This is Avi-Hai’s (Danger: Three Jewish Peoples, 1997, etc.) first novel. His other books were nonfiction analyses of Jewish theological and political affairs. A Canadian-born journalist who immigrated to Israel in 1952 and an Israeli civil servant, his life seems to have revolved around the historically nettlesome question of Jewish identity. The novel itself is really two novellas, each meant to mirror and illuminate the other. Both follow characters named Avraham. Like the author, the first Avraham is a Canadian-born journalist who immigrated to Israel out of solidarity with the Zionist cause. From the very beginning, Avraham finds himself in peril. He has stumbled upon rampant corruption among the ultra-Orthodox rabbi extremists, the very same rabbis who “sanctioned” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination after he signed the Oslo Accords. These rabbinical ideologues are entangled in an embezzlement scheme, and Avraham has gathered enough evidence to prove it. Under threat of death, he flees to Greece, pays for an ersatz passport and makes his way to Italy. On his way, he is entrusted with a very old manuscript of undetermined provenance in order to determine its value and negotiate its sale. The manuscript turns out to be the story of another Avraham, an Italian writing circa 1600. As the shared names suggest, both narrators experience morally comparable challenges, attempting to maintain their Jewishness in the face of relentless persecution. The Renaissance Avraham runs from the Inquisition. The prose sometimes slides into the melodramatic, but the story remains a philosophically serious engagement with a historically significant theme: the tension between Judaism and a modern world “infected with ideological viruses.”
A thoughtful, provocative novel that artfully examines political obstacles to Jewish spirituality.Pub Date: July 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989416900
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Appletree Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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