Fiction - D

In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.

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The Circumcision

Gyorgy Dalos

Translated by Judith Sollosy

Marion Boyars ISBN 9780714531236 

Twelve-year-old Robi Singer and best friend Gabor Blum are the only boys in their class who have yet to be circumcised. Robi is worried.

‘What if the knife should slip? How will he show himself in front of the others in the showers? Will he find a wife? And is there plastic surgery to fix up damage of this sort?’

So should he have the circumcision? It seems everyone has an opinion – from friends and teachers at the Jewish School, to his eccentric grandmother and hypochondriac mother – but in the end, the finaldecision is down to Robi…

Gyorgy Dalos was born in Budapest in 1943. Arrested in 1968 for ‘activities against the state’, he was under a publication ban for the next 19 years. From 1995 to 1999 he was the head of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin and was the curator for Hungarian literature at the 1999 Frankfurt Book Fair. He now lives in Germany.

Book of Esther

Esther David

Penguin India ISBN 978067004093

2002

The Torah is the inspiration of Book of Esther, which also happens to be one of the most beautiful stories narrated in the old testament. Loosely based on family history, the novel is a treasure trove of stories. Mingling reality with a imaginary world, the novel begins in the nineteenth century with Bathsheba, as she waits for her husband to return from his long absence at their home in Danda village on the Konkan coast. The story weaves it’s way from the Konkan to Ahmedabad. Joseph and David inherit Bathsheba’s empathy for all things living, besides possessing a remarkable talent as a doctor in Ahmedabad, but is unable to rein in his exuberant son, in whom the ability to heal is directed towards lions, tigers, panthers and even crocodiles. He goes on to found a zoo and the stories of the pets he raises form a heartbreaking accompaniment to the human drama. Given this background, Esther’s own story acquires an unusual poignancy as she struggles to find her moorings. A search for roots takes her to Israel and France. The turmoils in the city of her birth, coalesce into a desperate search for answer and strength. Peopled by a host of memorable characters, some of them wonderfully eccentric, Book of Esther casts a fresh perspective on the Jewish experience in India as it chronicles the fortunes of a gifted family. Most of all, however, it is a celebration, intensely felt of love and attachment and the joys and sorrows that they bring.

The Walled City

Syracuse University Press ISBN 9780815607502
2002

The Walled City is about the narrator – a young Bene Israeli Jewish

girl growing up in India. A country where gods have bodies faces, eyes. She has to cope with her own god without eyes and many other unanswered questions about her religion, which is different from the rest. In a country of colour and festivities, she feels walled in, because of her Jewishness.

The novel is set in Ahmedabad - a city of walls, which become symbolic in context to the novel. Walls of the city, Walls of Indian communities, Walls of the Jewish community. Walls of the family, and the Wall of just being a woman.

The Walled City is also about a diminishing miniscule minority community, and all about the sterility, which is setting in the Jewish community. So, in a way it is about sterility, isolation and an immense cross cultural conflict of the narrator as she tries to preserve her Jewish roots – without understanding them. The Walled City is also about Ahmedabad, and how the city of Gandhi has been reduced to a city of violence. The walls are breaking, and the small Jewish community lives in a divided city and cannot place itself. Should they leave for the Promised Land or stay in India?
 The novel probes the entire concept of home and roots.

Book of Rachel

Penguin India ISBN 9780670058662  
2006

About the old who have been left behind in India by families, which immigrated to Israel. About synagogues and homes, which have been abandoned and are in ruins.

Set in Danda, on the picturesque Konkan coast, Rachel’s life revolves around her fight to preserve an ancient synagogue in her backyard with the help of the young lawyer Judah. She deals with the pervading sense of isolation, by trying out an ancient recipe every day. When her daughter Zephra returns from Israel for a short stay, she dreams of the day when she will get married in that very synagogue. Rachel’s story is woven around love, longing, recipes and the Jewish heritage in India, as the prophet Elijah conspires to make her dreams come true….

Shalom India Housing Society

Women Unlimited (Kali for Women) ISBN 818896509X

Set in a fictional society in Ahmedabad formed after the communal riots

of 2002, the novel weaves together the lives of its residents through a

series of stories that capture the dilemmas of the last Bene Israel Jews in India. The main hero of the novel is the prophet Elijah to whom the characters turn in

their troubles as the writer probes into the shifting layers of religious and national identity in prose that is understated but always engaging.

To buy this book, contact womenunltd@vsnl.net

Maynard & Jennica

Rudolph Delson

FourthEstate ISBN 9780007252220

October 2007

Maynard Gogarty is bored, with what he's not quite sure, but he's definitely bored. He's a tweed-suit-wearing, perennially glum thirty something living in a Manhattan flat secretly paid for by his crabby grandmother, and is nursing a short film career that shows no signs of development. Plus he's misanthropic and an unhappy dilettante – a real catch. But recently he's turned over a new leaf: he's decided, whatever befalls him, he's going to be happy.

Enter Jennica Green, who seems to have it all: a Princeton graduate with a high-paying city job and her own apartment. But then again, she's the kind of girl who spends two weeks organising a trip to a county fair, which might explain why she is single and looks like remaining so. When Maynard glimpses this Jewish Bridget Jones on a blazingly hot subway ride, what are the odds…?

Set either side of 9/11, Maynard and Jennica's courtship is narrated by our heroes and their many, many observers, among them all four parents (three living), a Russian-German-Israeli scam artist (and Maynard's current wife), a rapper with a linguistics background, a macaw, and an adolescent trumpeter. On the face of it, ‘Maynard & Jennica’ is about many things: a tree homicide, New York City's real estate boom, hip-hop sampling, the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, the Jewish intermarriage crisis, subway emergency brake etiquette, the tournament rules of scrabble, the naming of cats. At its heart though, this brilliant first novel with its menagerie of voices is a simple love story, as touching as it is hilarious.

Rudy Delson lives in Brooklyn, New York. ‘Maynard and Jennica’ is his first book. He forms part of a whole new generation of young and edgy New York writers on the rise. His work will appeal to fans of Joshua Ferris, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. The film rights were optioned by Scott Rudin, producer of The Hours, Wonder Boys, and The Queen.

The Foundling

Agnes Desarthe

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

Portobello Books ISBN 9781846274114

February 2012

Jerome is a calm man - at least, that's what he'd always believed. But when his daughter's boyfriend dies in an accident, he is overwhelmed by unexpected grief. As he struggles to make sense of the loss and his own reaction to it, he finds himself assailed by emotions and memories he has allowed to lie dormant: the residual feelings for his ex-wife; a baffling new attraction to a stranger; a precarious friendship with a retired policeman; and, above all, unsettling questions about his own past and the family he never knew. In returning to the forests of his childhood and the darkest nights of the second world war, Jerome gradually, painfully begins to piece together the truth of his own origins and the tragedy that his adoptive parents tried to bury.

Chez Moi

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

Portobello Books ISBN 9781846271021

April 2008

How hard can it be to run a restaurant when you've fed fussy children and been a circus caterer? The delightfully dreamy heroine of Agnes Desarthe's playful and piquant new novel is about to find out.

Myriam’s sudden, characteristically impulsive decision to open a restaurant transforms her life in a curious way. For six years, Myriam has been living in self-imposed exile, cut off from her cool, reserved husband and from the son she found herself unable to love, and the opening night of Chez Moi is typically desolate. But little by little, Myriam’s mouth-watering dishes draw people in, first the florist from across the road, followed by the schoolchildren tempted by a four-euro lunch, and then Ben, the most unflappable and devoted of waiters. As the restaurant sizzles towards success, figures and feelings from Myriam’s past also begin to emerge, gradually reawakening her appetite for life, both the bitter parts and the sweet.

Simmering with stories, recipes, observations and dreams, Chez Moi serves up a painfully adult story, with an irresistible sprinkling of wonder and magic.

Agnes Desarthe has written for children and teenagers as well as adult fiction. She has had two previous novels translated into English: Five Photos of My Wife, short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Prize and Good Intentions.

Day after Night

Anita Diamant

Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781847377074

September 2009

Atlit is a holding camp for "illegal" immigrants in Israel in 1945. There, about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant, with infinite compassion and understanding, tells the stories of the women gathered in this place.
Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch, a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz. Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear, these young women, along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit, begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience, as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.

The Red Tent

Pan ISBN 9780330487962

The Red Tent retells the story of Dinah, which is found in Genesis, Chapter 34. This episode, usually known as the "Rape of Dinah" has been a difficult passage for bible readers for centuries because of the murderous behavior of Jacob's sons. In Genesis, Dinah does not say a single word; what happens to her is recounted and characterized as rape by her brothers. In my retelling of the story, Dinah finds her voice. The Red Tent is told entirely from her perspective and the point of view of the women around her.

The Red Tent is historical fiction, but because it is based on a story in the Bible, many readers feel an extraordinary connection to its cast of characters, whose names and tales are part of our culture, and our families, too. After all, many of us have parents named Jacob or Rachel, and many of us have children named Joseph or Leah.

The amazing word-of-mouth support from readers and from book groups, has made The Red Tent a publishing phenomenon. First printed in 1997 with no advertising budget and few reviews in major newspapers or magazines, this book only found its audience through the loyalty of readers, the support of independent bookstores, and help from clergy, some of whom even preached about The Red Tent from the pulpit.

The Red Tent has been published in 25 countries with translations into 20 languages including Finnish, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese, and Swedish.

Trieste

Daša Drndić

Translated from Croat by Ellen Elias-Bursac

MacLehose Press ISBN 9780857050229

February 2012

Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her by the German authorities during the War as part of Himmler's clandestine 'Lebensborn' project, which strove for a 'racially pure' Germany. 

Haya's reflection on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, as well as witness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. A broad collage of material is assembled, and the lesser-known horror of Nazi occupation in northern Italy is gradually unveiled.  

Written in immensely powerful language, and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Daša Drndić has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of our twentieth-century history.  

Daša Drndić is a distinguished Croatian novelist and playwright. She also translates and teaches at the Faculty of Philosophy in Rijeka.

What Happens Now
Jeremy Dyson
Abacus  ISBN 9780349118154

When 15-year-old Alistair Black gets a part in the hit BBC series THEN AND NOW, everyone tells him it will change his life. But the malign historical events depicted in the TV play start to have an effect on the lives of its child stars, and Alistair's so- called 'opportunity' leads him into increasingly dark territory, culminating in a devastating event with far-reaching consequences.

Twenty years on and Alistair's co-star, Alice Zealand, is still struggling to live with what happened. Properly and gloriously in love for the first time - but on the verge of losing it - she too must lay her ghosts to rest to claim a life back for herself. With his flair for creating memorable characters and a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, Jeremy Dyson has written a gripping and often very funny debut novel about love, history, fate, fear and the perils and pleasures of the imagination.