Wherever You Go: A Novel
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
“Timely and brave. . . . Leegant is a masterful weaver.”—Miami Herald
Yona Stern has traveled from New York to Israel to make amends with her estranged sister, a stoic ideologue and mother of five who has dedicated herself to the radical West Bank settlement cause. Yona’s personal life resembles nothing of her sister’s, but it isn’t politics that drove the two apart.
Now a respected Jerusalem Talmud teacher, Mark Greenglass was once a drug dealer saved by an eleventh-hour turn to Orthodox Judaism. But for reasons he can’t understand, he’s lost his once fervent religious passion. Is he through with God? Is God through with him?
Enter Aaron Blinder, a year-abroad dropout with a history of failure whose famous father endlessly—some say obsessively—mines the Holocaust for his best-selling, melodramatic novels. Desperate for approval, Aaron finds a home on the violent fringe of Israeli society, with unforeseen and devastating consequences.
In a sweeping, beautifully written story, Joan Leegant, winner of the PEN New England Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, weaves together three lives caught in the grip of a volatile and demanding faith. Emotionally wrenching and unmistakably timely, Wherever You Go shines a light on one of the most disturbing elements in Israeli society: Jewish extremist groups and their threat to the modern, democratic state. This is a stunningly prescient novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Leegant's debut novel, after her story collection, An Hour in Paradise, follows three Americans who long for definitive answers from their Jewish faith. Yona Stern returns to Jerusalem in an attempt to reconcile with her sister, Dena, from whom she's been estranged for 10 years after sleeping with Dena's husband. Dena has since married a man committed to the uncompromising Jewish settlements. Mark Greenglass, a scholar who has replaced his drug addiction with a religious addiction, leaves Jerusalem to return to New York for a teaching gig and to reconnect with his parents and the woman he loved but couldn't save from a dissipated life. And Aaron Blinder, a college dropout resentful of his father's success writing bestselling novels about the Holocaust, searches for a group to join in Israel to give his life meaning. While each individual tale has its urgency and pathos, the story becomes gripping only in the latter part of the book when the three paths collide in a frightening incident caused by an impetuous, irresponsible act by Aaron. Unfortunately, that is the shortest section, making the whole feel unbalanced, but Leegant's strong, sensory writing compensates.
