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Book Reviews

Excerpts:

Coming Home to Jerusalem
by Wendy Orange
2000, Simon & Schuster, 304 pages

House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood         by Adina Hoffman
2000, Steerforth Press, 217 pages
reviewed by Nancy Friedman

       “Why, of all places, Jerusalem?” wrote the Hebrew-language poet Yehuda Amichai, who died in September of this year. “Why Jerusalem, why me? / Why not another city, another person?” I thought of Amichai’s anguished eloquence while reading these two very different memoirs by American Jewish women, each of whom became a modern-day pilgrim to this universal yet intimate city, where, wrote Amichai, “The dead pretend / to be resurrected, the living to be dead, / peace puts on a scary mask of war, and war / changes its ways to peace.”
     As she tells us in Coming Home to Jerusalem, Wendy Orange grew up a secular Jew in 1950s Long Island, where Israel existed only as the far-off object of fund-raising campaigns. Outwardly successful, she felt “a familiar alienation” all her life. In 1991, Orange, a single mother and psychologist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, saw a brochure for a peace conference in Jerusalem, “a city to which I’d never given three thoughts before.” Previously terrified of flying, she was strangely calm as soon as she boarded the El Al jet — a harbinger of the rapturous sense of belonging she experienced when she arrived in Jerusalem. By the end of the conference, she had impetuously decided to pull up stakes and move to Jerusalem with her five-year-old daughter . . .

. . .

. . . Orange’s memoir reads like a passionate news documentary. By contrast, Adina Hoffman’s House of Windows has a timeless, quietly contemplative quality. Hoffmann, a film critic for the English-language Jerusalem Post, is some 20 years younger than Orange, but had experienced a similar anomie in San Francisco before she and her poet-husband moved to Jerusalem. They settled in Musrara, a seedy neighborhood built under Ottoman rule at the start of the 20th century, now populated mostly by Moroccan Jewish families brought in by the Israeli government after the 1948 War of Independence.. . .

. . .

Asleep
by Banana Yoshimoto
2000 Grove Press, 177 pages
Reviewed by Celeste Henery

       While recent novels such as Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha and Liza Dalby’s The Tale of Murasaki tell of a traditional, older Japan, Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep awakens the reader to a contemporary society in which the need for change takes preeminence. Asleep consists of three novellas, each narrated by a young woman who reflects on the transformative experiences of her life. Yoshimoto’s writing is fresh and her stories unconventional. The reader might not find the characters’ experiences familiar, but will connect with the frankness of their emotion . . .

 


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