KIRKUS REVIEW
Writing with crisp insight and dry humor, Israeli author Gavron (Almost Dead, 2010, etc.) tells a lively tale of life in an embattled Jewish settlement on an arid, rocky West Bank hilltop in this award-winning novel.
Gavron's sardonic yet
sage story, which earned Israel's prestigious Bernstein Prize, focuses on an
ever expanding community of observant Jews that populates the West Bank
settlement Ma'aleh Hermesh C. Bit by bit—a new mobile home here, a spare room
fashioned from a shipping container there, a new playground for the kids
(funded by a deep-pocketed Miami macher), maybe some improvements for the
synagogue or day care center (Jewish workmen only, please)—these settlers, who
consider themselves modern-day pioneers, gradually establish ever more
permanent footing as the government either looks the other way, threatens to
evacuate, or (despite the fact that the settlement may not officially exist)
boosts their infrastructure and provides protection, depending on the moods and
whims of those in power on any given day. Through it all, Ma'aleh Hermesh C's
motley assortment of residents contends with the stuff of life—babies are born,
marriages break up, business ideas bloom and die, teenagers come of age and
struggle to grasp where they stand. Within the vast cast of characters, two
brothers, Roni and Gabi Kupper, orphaned as infants, raised on a kibbutz, are
central. Gabi, the younger, has found his life derailed by uncontrollable rages—the
result of "a short-circuit in the brain," perhaps. Newly religious,
and fervently so, he has come to the hilltop to seek sanctuary, absolution and
maybe even, eventually, a sense of belonging. But what, precisely, is his elder
brother, Roni, a secular Jew who worked as a high-stakes trader at a Wall
Street hedge fund, seeking? Gavron lets Gabi's and Roni's stories unfold
gradually, and in the midst of this wise and waggish tale, we may find
ourselves feeling unexpectedly invested in these disparate brothers'
fates.
Slowly and incrementally, like those settlers on that craggy West Bank hilltop, Gavron's story gains a foothold in our hearts and minds and stubbornly refuses to leave.
