An intelligent but rambling friendship tale set in Jerusalem.
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.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798887195056
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Imaginative, impressive, and illuminating.
A 12-year-old girl determines to unmask a serial killer in this extravagantly ambitious story of small-town Britain in 1979.
On the surface, Miv’s life seems to belong to an idyllic bygone era: She and her best friend, Sharon, walk to school every morning, passing a “snappy Jack Russell” and stopping to greet Omar, “the man in the corner shop,” who calls them the “Terrible Twosome.” But danger lurks around the edges of these familiar paths and faces; it’s been a few years since the Yorkshire Ripper began murdering nearby women, and the women and girls of the town have started taking a little extra care when they’re walking late and alone. Margaret Thatcher has recently been elected prime minister, pushing certain strains of misogyny and racism to the forefront of conversations and village life. For her part, Miv is trying to adjust to her mother’s complete withdrawal from the family due to depression. When she has the opportunity to make a wish, she wishes to “be the person to catch the Yorkshire Ripper,” and so begins a series of events that will forge friendships, expose bigots, and culminate in both tragedy and catharsis. The scope of the book is significant, and Godfrey shows a masterful control of the sprawl. This is a novel about a particular time that looks both backward and forward. For Miv and Sharon, straddling the gulf between childhood and adulthood and beginning to learn who they are, it’s a coming-of-age story; for Britain, struggling to hold space for a strong female leader alongside her conservative and xenophobic policies, it’s equally a story of reluctant yet inevitable change. Despite some chapters told from other characters’ perspectives, this is very much Miv’s tale, and hers is one of the most engaging voices in recent fiction, both heartbreakingly innocent and incisively intelligent.
Imaginative, impressive, and illuminating.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781464249051
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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