ALIVE AND BEATING

The intersecting lives of six people living in Jerusalem and in need of organ transplants are chronicled in Wolf’s emotionally charged novel.

Twenty-one-year-old Leah Weiss is one of eight siblings, all of whom grow up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem. She suffers from chronic kidney disease and as a result regularly undergoes dialysis, exhausted and demoralized by her rapidly worsening condition. Her former fiance, Moshe, leaves her to wed Leah’s best friend Bassie. Leah’s mother Hindy obsessively tries to find her a husband, even hiding the fact that she’s “damaged goods” to increase her prospects. Another character, Yael Glassman, suffers from chronic lung disease—as a single mom, she frets anxiously about the future of her young daughter, Tikva. Here, she reflects melancholically on the profound allure of leading a normal life: “How lucky she was to have gotten a double lung transplant nine years ago, and to have lived for a few years magically believing she would always be a healthy person. To have traveled, fallen in love, had a baby. And yet…how cruel it was, to tease her with those years.” Now, she needs yet another transplant, a predicament shared by five other characters whose lives become entangled in various ways despite their diverse backgrounds (some are Jewish, some Muslim, and one, Father Severin McConnell, is a Catholic priest). Israel is a uniquely difficult country in which to obtain a new organ, given the prohibitively strict religious rules against the desecration of the body; these restrictions affect all of the protagonists. In the background of the medical drama is the eruption of extraordinary political violence, which serves to terrify some characters and send others into despair—but it also furnishes a measure of redemptive hope, since the death of some could mean the survival of others waiting for organs. Here and there, Wolf comes perilously close to a lachrymose sentimentality but never fully commits that literary sin, always maintaining an impressive authorial restraint. The result is a deeply poignant narrative.

An affecting novel about the duality of hope and despair.