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Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) Author: Savyon Liebrecht $12.56 |
Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) |
Editorial Review:
Savyon Liebrecht's intense, lyrical, and emotionally complex stories have made her a best-selling writer in her native Israel. Her short fiction explores the everyday tragedies that emanate from strained relationships between Arabs and Jews, women and men, older and younger generations in present-day Israel. According to the Washington Post Book World, her "engrossing and skillful tales take you through the lives of real people, to the heart of their emotional and moral being." Liebrecht reveals the impact of larger social and political conflicts within the private world of the home with a precision and a subtle ferocity reminiscent of the work of Nadine Gordimer. "These finely wrought stories of private lives shed light on a terrifying political conflict", notes the New York Times Book Review. "[Liebrecht] takes you places you've never been before." The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Woman's Series
"Months afterwards she would remember that morning with dismay, when she had sat with them for the first time, as though they were at home there: drinking from cups like welcome guests ... and only the part of her, the part that didn't laugh with them, thought: Could these hands, serving coffee, be the ones that planted the booby-trapped doll at the gate of the religious school at the end of the street?"
In the stories of Israeli author Savyon Liebrecht, personal relationships can't help but become political. In "A Room on the Roof," an unnamed Jewish woman hires three Arab workers to build an addition onto her house while her husband is out of the country. So paralyzed is she by her fear of Arabs, she is unable to recognize the essential decency of these particular men; on the rare occasions when she is able to see past her own blind bigotry, the realization that her workmen are human beings with their own set of hopes, fears, and prejudices is so terrifying that she becomes even more strident in her intolerance.
Though a few of the stories in Apples from the Desert are directly concerned with interactions between Jews and Arabs, the collection is, in fact, more about how Israelis deal with each other. The Holocaust is the unmentioned elephant in the drawing room, for Liebrecht, herself the daughter of concentration camp survivors, is particularly interested in the impact that tragedy has had on the children of survivors. In "Hayuta's Engagement Party," everyone fears that Grandpa, a Holocaust survivor, will ruin this festive occasion (as he has many others) with his grim recitals of death-camp atrocities. The protagonist of "'What Am I Speaking, Chinese?' She Said to Him" returns to her childhood home in Poland in order to stage a sexual encounter in the same room where her parents--again Holocaust survivors--once argued about sex.
If the Holocaust is one theme running through most of these stories, the position of women in modern Israeli society is another. Many of the women--especially older ones--in Liebrecht's stories are in oppressive marriages with men who neglect, ridicule, and sometimes physically abuse them. In "Compassion," a Jewish woman who was hidden from the Nazis in a Catholic convent as a child marries an Arab man who eventually imprisons her and takes a younger wife. Victoria, the mother of a rebellious daughter in the collection's title story, only recognizes the depths of her own marital misery when she sees the loving relationship her child has formed outside the legal bonds of matrimony.
There is nothing subtle about Liebrecht's stories, and readers accustomed to the finely tuned ironies of an Ann Beattie or Alice Munro may find these stories a trifle emphatic. However, anyone interested in the literature coming out of Israel today will find Savyon Liebrecht's window on the land and the people illuminating, if sometimes uncomfortable reading.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 
a sense of doom and hope: 
Savyon Liebrecht's collection of short fiction, Apples from the Desert, here culled from three short story collections, and here translated from the Hebrew, is extraordinary in its range and depth. Liebrecht takes on a variety of issues which confront modern Israelis: the divide between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, the oppression, both subtle and profound, of women in Israel's patriarchal society, the Arab Israeli conflict, the long shadow of the Holocaust. Reading these stories, it becomes quickly...
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very deliberate allegories: 
These stories are the equivalent of being hit on the head with a literary sledgehammer. The points that they make (the Arabs as The Other, the Holocaust as having an impact on modern Israeli society, etc.) are pretty obvious to anyone who has any knowledge of Israel or Jewish history. They occasionally read like writing class exercises, actually.That being said, the stories are a good window into Israeli society and show elements which you don't see on the news. For excellent Israeli literature, though,...
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Feelings expressed so well in mere words!:
This is a wonderful book of short stories which contradicts the sterotypical picture of Israelis so often portrayed in the nightly news. It shows (mostly from the female point of view) the nuances of many types of Israelis, from religious to secular, from Ashkenazi to Sephardic, from Arab to Jew. In particular, it brings out the human side of each of its characters and demonstrates that feelings change from time to time and situation to situation. These are beautiful studies of human interaction.I have...
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Great writing about the things that really matter:
Great, tight, vivid, exact writing about the Important Things (universal concerns, issues, and feelings) in the mood of a calm and astute observer/chronicler -- with soul. Perfect. Although these stories are primarily concerned with Israelis, I encouraged an East Indian friend to read "The Homesick Scientist"; it spoke to him so deeply of his own private experience that he immediately ordered the book (from Amazon, of course).
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