Two She-Bears
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists—the acclaimed author of A Pigeon and a Boy—gives us a story of village love and vengeance in the early days of British Palestine that is still being played out two generations later.
“In the year 1930 three farmers committed suicide here . . . but contrary to the chronicles of our committee and the conclusions of the British policeman, the people of the moshava knew that only two of the suicides had actually taken their own lives, whereas the third suicide had been murdered.” This is the contention of Ruta Tavori, a high school teacher and independent thinker in this small farming community who is writing seventy years later about that murder, about two charismatic men she loves and is trying to forgive—her grandfather and her husband—and about her son, whom she mourns and misses.
In a story rich with the grit, humor, and near-magical evocation of Israeli rural life for which Meir Shalev is beloved by readers, Ruta weaves a tale of friendship between men, and of love and betrayal, which carries us from British Palestine to present-day Israel, where forgiveness, atonement, and understanding can finally happen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A versatile writer of fiction, memoir, biblical studies, and children's stories, Shalev (A Pigeon and a Boy) delivers a stunning, Faulknerian novel about a family deeply rooted to the land. The setting is a moshava, or Jewish settlement, originally established in British Palestine by the Baron de Rothschild, whose community is marked by a rugged clannishness: "A different kind of people live here and every stone has its side of darkness and side of light." Referring to a biblical episode in which two she-bears emerge from the woods and kill 42 children, the title presages the acts of violent retribution to come. Heavy though it is, the book is leavened by a humane, comedic, and romantic spirit. A graduate student researching the moshava's history of gender politics gets more than she bargained for when she interviews Ruta Tavori, whose family has been at the center of the moshava's most notorious episodes. Ruta is an obliging subject, sharing the "terrible stories about the terrible things that were done by the terrible men I love" in her irreverent, tender, clear-sighted, and occasionally incensed voice. (Along with the interviews, the novel is comprised of Ruta's own written accounts of the Tavoris.) Her tale begins with Grandpa Ze'ev, the one-eyed patriarch of the clan, who in 1930 moves to the moshava with a "rifle, a cow, a tree, and a woman," all a man needed to start a life. A murderous domestic drama develops, the details of which Ruta divulges alongside an episode from her own life: the death of her six-year-old son. Exquisitely paced and effortlessly shifting in tone from jaunty to suspenseful to tragic, this morally complex novel leaves no stone unturned in excavating one family's past.
