You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Shifra Horn's beautifully imagined novel tells the story of five generations of women in one family against the backdrop of one hundred years in Jerusalem. The story begins with the birth of the family's first boy to Amal, the last generation. Her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother are overjoyed, because the birth of a healthy boy means that the curse against the women of the family has been broken. They tell Amal the story of those "foremothers": Mazal, the orphan, whose ill-fated marriage initiates the curse; her daughter Sara, whose golden hair is a symbol for her power to heal; Sara's daughter Pnina-Mazal, the unwanted child whose talent for knowing others' thoughts brings both joy and sorrow; and her daughter Geula, Amal's mother, whose sharp intellect is her gift and her burden.
Following a terrorist explosion on a bus in Jerusalem, Yael, a married mother who narrowly escaped the attack, is haunted by the last image she recalls before the horror: a little blonde child waving to her from the window of the bus, and the sound of Beethoven's Ode to Joy, which was playing on her car radio. Yael's husband, Nachum, seems unable, or unwilling to understand what she has been through, and although her friends and colleagues are sympathetic, they cannot share her pain. Still traumatised, she feels compelled to seek out the blonde child's grieving father, the enigmatic and mysterious Avshalom. Drawn to him through their mutual suffering and fascinated by his unusual background, Yael begins to fall helplessly in love with him. Avshalom too, cannot deny his own feelings, but his belief that the loss of his wife and child is divine punishment for past sins overshadows any glimmer of hope for their future.
A second Israeli bestseller from Shifra Horn, The Fairest Among Women, tells the life story of Rosa, fabled to be the most beautiful woman in all Jerusalem. Rosa's life coincides with the fifty years of the state of Israel--she was born during the War of Independence in the 1940s and disappears on a cold winter night in the 1990s--and her absorbing tale is part history, part fairy tale, and part legend. The novel combines generational family stories with folklore and magical realism into a unique literary accomplishment.
A beautifully written, sensual and evocative book, in the tradition of Amy Tan and Isabelle Allende, rich in magic realism and folklore. 'To understand the end you have to look for the beginning'. As a little girl in Jaffa, Israel, Tamara has an insatiable desire for stories, constantly asking questions of those around her, and demanding explanations. However, no-one ever seems to give Tamara the whole story, so instead she must piece together the various narratives herself in what will become a lifelong attempt to unravel the hidden secrets of her tangled family history, and so bring some meaning to her own life. Raised by her fiercely independent maternal grandmother, Simcha, who jealously guards her from others, in particular her paternal grandmother, Rashella, Tamara's love of stories develops into a voracious appetite for life itself. An impulsive, passionate seeker of knowledge in all its forms, nothing prepares her for the thrilling intensity and the danger of falling deeply, madly in love for the first time
When Shifra Horn traveled across the world from her native Israel to join her diplomat husband in Japan for a five-year stay, East met West in remarkable and often humorous ways. Writing with warmth, charm, and unflagging humor, "Shalom, Japan" offers a window into Japanese daily life and culture and captures the many moods and unique spirit of Japan. of photos.
Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled t...
Filled with behind-the-scenes stories and revelations about the youngest Israeli prime minister ever, "Netanyahu" provides a biography of a man both loathed and admired. of photos.
When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in Futurity that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the past that opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities—what he calls futurity. Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Eshel traces a...
"Dagmar’s Daughter feels as much an epic poem as a novel. Echlin uses old forms of storytelling, blending myth and lyrical language to translate music into words. So much beautiful language and fantastic imagery at first seem self-conscious, but when the narrative picks up speed, drawing readers into the strange world of Millstone Nether, the power of the story takes hold and doesn’t let go." --Quill & Quire Mystical, seductive, and brimming with music and magic, Dagmar's Daughter follows three generations of passionate women. Norea emerges from the destitute Irish village of her childhood and stows herself on a ship bound for a remote island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Her daughter, Dagmar, is born with an uncanny ability to control the weather, and Dagmar's daughter Nyssa is as musically brilliant as her father and as struck with wanderlust.
Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz presents a new perspective on the multifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested in contemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation. In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prose written between 1987 and 2007, relating mainly to the first and second intifadas, written by well-known authors such as Yehoshua, Grossman, Matalon, Castel-Bloom, Govrin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendelson-Maoz raises critical questions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and ...