A confrontational meditation on feminism and Israel’s place in history.
A young woman finds inner strength in a desert that would become Israel.
Israeli novelist Lapid offers English-language audiences a grim historical set in the late 1870s, with a fiery Baltic heroine at its center. Originally published in Hebrew in 1982, it follows the plights and rare joys of Fania Mandelstam, a Ukrainian survivor of a violent pogrom, who flees to a settlement in Galilee. “There was a kind of insanity in this journey to the Land of Israel; she, a 16-year-old girl, saddled with an elderly uncle, a lunatic brother, and a baby. If she were to read of such a foursome in a novel, she would seriously doubt the good taste of the writer,” Lapid offers. To protect her wounded relations, Fania enters into marriage with Yehiel Silas, a widowed settler with two children. The story covers seven years of their lives in the remote settlement of Gai Oni, a backwater desert and forerunner to the town of Rosh Pinnah. Fania makes for a lively protagonist, donning regional garb to ride alone through the desert, pistol by her side. Far from docile, she struggles to support Yehiel’s burgeoning farm and defend her community, and enters the business world to operate her own trade in pharmaceuticals and help launch a cigarette factory. She also has strong words for her husband and her community, even as she grows to love them both. “So you men are going to sit, while we stand outside like Bedouin women and wait for you to eat your fill and throw us the scraps?” she asks during a summit between Jews and Arabs over a legal dispute. The story loses pace at times when its focus leaves Fania, but Lapid’s lush saga should appeal to readers interested in Jewish lore or pioneer fiction.
A confrontational meditation on feminism and Israel’s place in history.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59264-230-4
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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