A wise, masterfully understated work by one of Israel's towering literary figures.
With both Christmas and her bat mitzvah approaching, a 12-year-old Italian girl is awakened to the contradictions and complications of her mixed identity.
An only child born into a family of Jewish lawyers (her Catholic-raised mother switched to Judaism), Rachele Luzzatto attends a church school in northern Italy while regularly taking Hebrew lessons from a rabbi imported from Israel for that purpose by her parents. Trouble brews when this bright and inquisitive girl is happily assigned the part of the Mother of God in a seasonal school play. While her Catholic grandfather encourages her to embrace her Roman Catholic origins, her father (who is being treated for a brain tumor) rants at the school's insensitivity: "You already destroyed enough of us Jews, so don't try to steal one of the few left over." The theme of double identities runs through this short novel. During the war, Rachele's Jewish grandfather disguised himself as a priest. At a masquerade party in Venice during Carnival, Rachele wears a yeshiva boy mask, but she's concerned that with the mask's blond sidelocks, wearing one of her own dresses would show "frivolous contempt for religion and identity." As it is, her Catholic grandfather is fuming about the inclusion of the Aleinu prayer (controversial for its dismissal of non-Jewish gods) in Rachele's bat mitzvah ceremony. Inspired by a children's story, she decides to replace it "with something gentler and more human." A departure in not being set in Israel, the late Yehoshua's penultimate work (another novella awaits its English translation) is one of his more understated books. Even in depicting antisemitism, he finds humor in the strained relations between Jews and gentiles. You'll read it here first: "Skiing by Jews on Christmas is a tribute to the birth of a divine child in the Holy Land."
A wise, masterfully understated work by one of Israel's towering literary figures.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780358670445
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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