Circling Eden
A Novel of Israel in Stories
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
Weeks before she's set to depart for her junior year in Paris, Rebecca Harrison announces her intention to spend the year in Jerusalem instead. What appears to be capriciousness, however, is really a clear-eyed recognition of discontent with the neatly hedged path her life has followed until now. Once in Israel, Rebecca finds her yearning for acceptance thwarted at every turn. The society she had vaguely imagined as the embodiment of everything missing from her own experience seems to offer no place of entry for a single woman, an amerika'it, an assimilated Jew. But the barriers she encounters, the emotional dead-ends that confront her in relationship after relationship, turn out to be signposts on a frantic journey of self-discovery. Creating a dual perspective of the "insider" looking back on what she feels to be the "outsider", Rebecca's story proceeds with ruthless honesty, avoiding both romanticism and despair. Circling Eden is a poignant rendering of how it feels to be a woman in modern-day Israel. The action is set in 1973, the year of the Yom Kippur War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Rebecca Harrison leaves her Yalie boyfriend behind in 1973 to spend her junior year abroad in Jerusalem, hoping to define her Jewish identity, she envisions Israel partly as an all-green biblical eden, partly as an idealistic, egalitarian utopia. Inevitable disappointments and misunderstandings, and her gradual awakening to modern Israeli realities and a new sense of self, form the substance of this frank, humorous, sharply observed debut novel. To some of the Israelis she meets, Rebecca is an amerika'it, an assimilated Jew who confirms their notions that Americans are either selfish individualists or romantic seekers. Rebecca's affair with her Hebrew tutor Ethan, son of a Las Vegas rabbi, a deeper romantic entanglement with Avner, a Yemenite Jewish student, her volunteer work on a new settlement in the Golan Heights and the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, which snatches Avner from her, are signposts on an affecting, sensitive voyage of self-discovery. Magun, who lived in Israel for nine years, palpably evokes daily life in that country and captures the tensions between Israeli and American Jews.
