A first novel sets the youthful ordeals of Maya, an idealistic and somewhat imperceptive American student at Israel’s Hebrew University, against both the historical and contemporary struggles of Western Jews. The “sealed room” of the title refers both to the gas-proofed area in Israeli homes created during the Gulf War and to Maya’s uneducated heart. Her Israeli relatives Tami and Nachum, with their soldier-son Dov and daughter Ariela, offer domestic comfort as they struggle with the reticent Dov, who has recently lost an Army buddy. Shortly after her arrival in Jerusalem, Maya moves in with Gil, a passionate artist who was discharged from the Army under a cloud. She becomes the submissive recipient of his love and of his sudden, violent rages. Meantime, a neighbor, disoriented Holocaust survivor Shifra Feldstein (something of a mystic), believes Maya to be a kind of savior and presents her with gifts and cryptic messages. Along the way, the story is occasionally interrupted by Shifra’s grief-clouded ruminations on the course of her life, though the verbal drift of her musings deprives them of much solid resonance. Maya goes camping with Dov and his friends, is beaten and raped by Gil, and receives word of her mother’s impending death from cancer. Shifra’s own sudden demise precedes Maya’s return to America, where her mother reminisces, then becomes reconciled with her daughter, in the process clarifying some of the emotions and experiences Shifra had shared with her. Maya returns to Israel, dumps Gil, and vows to try to see Israel as it really is. The portrait of Maya is compelling, and her confusions and doubts are persuasive, but comparing her experiences with dangerous boyfriends and an ill mother to the Palestinian peace talks is a stretch. The tale doesn’t need, and can't sustain, the larger geopolitical and historical implications that are added to it.
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14300-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A darkly evocative work about young girls, grief, and the unsettling, aching need to belong.
A newcomer to an all-girls orphanage invents a violent game for the other children to play each night.
Marina is in the back seat of her parents’ car during the accident that kills them both. “My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital,” is the refrain she hears, over and over again, from the doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists at the hospital. It’s the same refrain she repeats to the adults at the orphanage to which she is soon taken. Barba’s (August, October, 2015, etc.) fourth novel to appear in English describes the haunting, mysterious world of prepubescent girls. He switches back and forth from Marina’s perspective to the collective point of view of the other girls. They’re a kind of unified body, and Marina, who is new and freshly beset by grief, is not unlike a virus in their midst. One day, Marina impales a caterpillar on a stick, and the other girls gather round to watch. Not long after, Marina invents a “game” for the girls to play each night. “It’s easy,” she tells them. “Each night, one of you is the doll. I put on her makeup, and she’s the doll. And the rest of us look at her and play with her. She’ll be a good dolly, and we’ll be good to her.” It’s a dark, insoluble game, both erotic and violent. Barba’s descriptions of the furtive, nearly cabalistic world of children are wonderful and disturbing. The border between what is real and what isn’t has been fogged over. His writing is both lyrical and spare, and the slim volume, which can be read in a single sitting, carries a heft far outweighing its physical presence. Barba’s girls, and their game, will linger in the minds of his readers.
A darkly evocative work about young girls, grief, and the unsettling, aching need to belong.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945492-00-6
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A little-known story that will have special resonance for today’s resisters.
Based on an actual incident in Nazi-occupied Belgium, Ramzipoor’s debut is a tragicomic account of fake news for a cause.
Structured like a heist movie, the novel follows several members of a conspiracy in Enghien, Belgium, who have a daring plan. The conspirators do not intend to survive this caper, only to bring some humor—and encouragement for resisters—into the grim existence of Belgians under Nazi rule. To this end, the plotters—among them Marc Aubrion, a journalist and comic; David Spiegelman, an expert forger; Lada Tarcovich, a smuggler and sex worker; and Gamin, a girl masquerading as a male street urchin—intend to...publish a newspaper. And only one issue of a newspaper, to be substituted on one night for the regular evening paper, Le Soir, which has become a mouthpiece for Nazi disinformation. Le Faux Soir, as the changeling paper is appropriately dubbed, will feature satire, doctored photographs making fun of Hitler, and wry requests for a long-overdue Allied invasion. (Target press date: Nov. 11, 1943.) To avoid immediate capture, the Faux Soir staff must act as double agents, convincing (or maybe not) the local Nazi commandant, August Wolff, that they are actually putting out an anti-Allies “propaganda bomb.” The challenge of fleshing out and differentiating so many colorful characters, combined with the sheer logistics of acquiring paper, ink, money, facilities, etc. under the Gestapo’s nose, makes for an excruciatingly slow exposé of how this sausage will be made. The banter here, reminiscent of the better Ocean’s Eleven sequels, keeps the mechanism well oiled, but it is still creaky. A few scenes amply illustrate the brutality of the Occupation, and sexual orientation works its way in: Lada is a lesbian and David, in addition to being a Jew, is gay—August Wolff’s closeted desire may be the only reason David has, so far, escaped the camps. The genuine pathos at the end of this overdetermined rainbow may be worth the wait.
A little-known story that will have special resonance for today’s resisters.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0815-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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