THE WORLD BETWEEN

A Jewish woman wades through memory and dreams at the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition Hospice in Jaffa.

Our narrator was once a prominent actress of the Yiddish theater, bewitching New York audiences with her playwright husband, Max. In her words: “For five minutes we were the darlings of the Yiddish theater, which is really quite something, considering it’s been dead for seventy years. All we’d been doing for decades was keeping the corpse warm.” Before New York was Tel Aviv and a home with her friend Rothman, a childhood companion and fellow survivor of a Siberian labor camp during the Second World War. Her shared past with Rothman looms large across her marriage to, and later divorce from, Max. The story unspools like a mystery, the narrator guilelessly unreliable as she’s caught between past and present, grief and rage, reality and dreams. The nature of her infirmity is likewise unclear, whether it’s the diffraction of age or a more abrupt break with reality sparked by the dissolution of her marriage. Themes of mothers and children abound, the early loss of a 9-month-old son, Asher, layered over the lost children of the camp and her sense of having failed them all. In the hospice, the nuns and doctors are as prison guards, the connections between her time in the war and her current circumstances sharply evident. The novel is slender and easy to fly through in pursuit of the clues that will reveal the context of the narrator’s present. Some sense emerges but is quickly swallowed again by the tumultuous waters of the narrator’s roving consciousness. Altogether a puzzle of a book, an abstraction studded with powerful sensory images.

A brief, beguiling plunge into a woman’s consciousness.