Synopses & Reviews
When her archeologist father died, Loya Kaplan left Israel seemingly for good, severing all ties to her past. Twenty-five years later, she's a flight attendant without friends or family, happiest in the temporary and artificial world of airports. Sleepwalking through life, Loya is summoned back to Israel following the death of Davidi--her father's friend, or rival, or lover, or nemesis?--who has named Loya as his heir. Returning now to a country that has become alien to her, and the house where she was raised, filled with relics not only of her own past but of her family and even ancient history, Loya's story splits, deliriously, in two: the life she once led in an improvised neighborhood, filled with concentration- camp refugees and secrets, colliding with the antiseptic, well-fed present day.
Review
"An ambitious, complex, superbly written novel." Dalia Karpel
Review
"One of the ten Hebrew novels of the past decade which I would take with me to a desert island." Haaretz
Synopsis
An extraordinary lyrical novel about a culture seeking to bury its origins, which date to the Holocaust, preferring the biblical to the recent past . . .
About the Author
Gabriela Avigur-Rotem was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1946 and came to Israel in 1950. She holds a degree in Hebrew and English literature. She has taught literature at high school and directed writing workshops at Haifa and Ben Gurion Universities. She works as an editor at Haifa University Publishing House. Her novels include Mozart Was Not a Jew, Heatwave and Crazy Birds, and Ancient Red.Dalya Bilu lives in Jerusalem and has been awarded a number of prizes for her translation work, including the Israeli Ministry of Culture Prize for Translation, and the Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew-English Translation.