THE ONLY DAUGHTER

With both Christmas and her bat mitzvah approaching, a 12-year-old Italian girl is awakened to the contradictions and complications of her mixed identity.

An only child born into a family of Jewish lawyers (her Catholic-raised mother switched to Judaism), Rachele Luzzatto attends a church school in northern Italy while regularly taking Hebrew lessons from a rabbi imported from Israel for that purpose by her parents. Trouble brews when this bright and inquisitive girl is happily assigned the part of the Mother of God in a seasonal school play. While her Catholic grandfather encourages her to embrace her Roman Catholic origins, her father (who is being treated for a brain tumor) rants at the school's insensitivity: "You already destroyed enough of us Jews, so don't try to steal one of the few left over." The theme of double identities runs through this short novel. During the war, Rachele's Jewish grandfather disguised himself as a priest. At a masquerade party in Venice during Carnival, Rachele wears a yeshiva boy mask, but she's concerned that with the mask's blond sidelocks, wearing one of her own dresses would show "frivolous contempt for religion and identity." As it is, her Catholic grandfather is fuming about the inclusion of the Aleinu prayer (controversial for its dismissal of non-Jewish gods) in Rachele's bat mitzvah ceremony. Inspired by a children's story, she decides to replace it "with something gentler and more human." A departure in not being set in Israel, the late Yehoshua's penultimate work (another novella awaits its English translation) is one of his more understated books. Even in depicting antisemitism, he finds humor in the strained relations between Jews and gentiles. You'll read it here first: "Skiing by Jews on Christmas is a tribute to the birth of a divine child in the Holy Land."

A wise, masterfully understated work by one of Israel's towering literary figures.