A sympathetic tale of love, loss and loneliness highlighting a largely underrepresented community.
A latticework of personal tragedies and cultural history underpins Shiri-Horowitz’s debut novel about immigrant lives in Israel, translated from the Hebrew by Shira Atik.
Violet and Farida Twaina, the youngest daughters of a Jewish Iraqi family, find their lives upended during “The Exodus” in the 1940s, when Jews fled the country to escape retaliation during the creation of Israel. Abandoning a sprawling house in Baghdad, the family arrives as refugees at an Israeli transit camp and then scatters to far-flung kibbutzim. Violet and Farida remain inseparable through this time of hardship, and subsequently through marriage and the births of their children. Their lives slowly return to normalcy, but other sorrows await—the death of their beloved former playmate, Eddie; early widowhood and its attendant loneliness for Farida; and an untimely diagnosis of terminal cancer for Violet. In her final months, Violet writes a diary for her children, Noa and Guy, to ensure the family’s past stays alive. The journal forms one part of the triptych of shifting points of view that illuminate this generational saga. Farida and Noa, meanwhile, offer insight into the family’s present and future. If political betrayals scarred the older generation, Noa grapples with betrayals of a more personal nature. Her emotional journey offers a counterpoint to the family’s earlier journey from persecution. Despite its somber narrative arc, the novel is leavened with passion (above all else, for food, which is almost a fourth protagonist). The Twaina sisters’ zest for life, despite setbacks, is seen in the dying Violet’s rich evocation of the culture of Iraqi Jews and in matronly Farida’s spirited foray to a beauty salon to have her hair cut, colored and styled. Such moments offset occasionally stodgy prose and some heavy-handed exposition. These are minor flaws, however, in a novel that brims with love for a community that no longer exists, and for the women who ensure that this lost community will not be forgotten.
A sympathetic tale of love, loss and loneliness highlighting a largely underrepresented community.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615460796
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Horowitz
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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