Artistic works of the old masters illuminate stories of crime, family feuds, and acrid relationships in Barasch Rubinstein’s knotty stories.

The author prefaces each of these four tales with brief, scholarly pieces about Italian Renaissance artists, each hinting at the following story’s themes. In “On Perspective,” 14th-century painter Giotto’s innovations in perspective frame a narrative about a restaurant owner who hires a prisoner on work-release and is excited by the man’s accounts of his burglaries—until some money goes missing. “On Motion” pairs Leonardo da Vinci’s treatment of movement with a couple traveling around the world by train and plane, stewing in jealousy and the man’s resentment at being left out of his father’s will. “On Time” cites Michelangelo’s works to comment on a woman’s reconnection with an old flame who dredges up anguished recollections of her abortion and their breakup. “On Synthesis” moves from Raphael’s harmonious balancing of motifs to a woman whose sense of empathy sharpens as she writes a story about a painter and advises people on their conflicting desires for love and meaning. Barasch Rubinstein’s lucid, engaging art-history sections, which are illustrated by color reproductions of various masterpieces, establish an intellectual tone that bleeds into her fiction as her characters self-consciously brood over moral and epistemic conundrums. There’s much neurotic navel-gazing in the stories, and characters tend to sound like psychiatrists when they speak, as when the narrator of “On Synthesis” says, “Your search for the truth is a result of your curiosity. The child that didn’t want to find out what his father was doing preferred not to delve into human nature.” Fortunately, Barasch Rubinstein excels at visual, painterly imagery that opens up her characters’ inner worlds, as in “On Time”: “A hidden joy was forming, splashing golden slivers everywhere, illuminating the suffering, making it look almost attractive.” The result is a gallery of shrewdly drawn, deeply felt portraits.

Occasionally stilted but often luminous literary studies in which life imitates art.

In this novel, two Jewish childhood friends grow up together in Jerusalem after the Six-Day War, with their devotion to each other challenged by divergent cultural backgrounds.

Ben Haddad and Ofir Stern are best friends in Jerusalem during a politically tumultuous and uncertain time that accentuates cultural divides. Ben’s background is Sephardic and Ofir’s is Ashkenazi—the former group is known for its religious devotion and political conservatism, while the latter is famous for its intellectual sophistication and progressive liberalism. The two groups often find themselves at cultural loggerheads, with the Sephardi routinely feeling disenfranchised and discriminated against by the generally more financially well-off Ashkenazi. Ben and Ofir’s friendship weathers the typical boyhood rivalries over girls and academic honors, though each set of parents views the other with suspicion, a tension that particularly haunts Ben. In the wake of college—Ben becomes a computer scientist and Ofir, an economist—they found a company together, Handex, which produces robotic arms designed for medical purposes. But Ben can never cease to view Ofir not only with the envy of a competitive brother, but also with mistrust, and he begins to embezzle money from the company in order to support a lavish lifestyle. This crime becomes a profound source of shame for him and a catalyst that compels the two to embrace the distance between them, an emotional drama intelligently depicted by Barasch Rubinstein. The author announces her aim to capture the conflict between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic cultures in a prefatory note, and she achieves this with impressive lucidity and thoughtfulness. In addition, she does a marvelous job of bringing to vivid life the political and cultural landscape of Israel during terribly turbulent years. But the plot eventually becomes a bit desultory and sluggish—it seems to meander in search of more opportunities to display the cultural opposition that permeates the tale. Ultimately, the author seems more interested in didactically teaching readers about an element of Israeli life than crafting a compelling story.

An intelligent but rambling friendship tale set in Jerusalem.