APPLES FROM DESERT: SELECTED STORIES

Savyon Liebrecht's intense, lyrical, and emotionally complex stories have made her a best-selling writer in her native Israel. Her short fiction explores the everyday tragedies that emanate from strained relationships between Arabs and Jews, women and men, older and younger generations in present-day Israel. According to the Washington Post Book World, her "engrossing and skillful tales take you through the lives of real people, to the heart of their emotional and moral being." Liebrecht reveals the impact of larger social and political conflicts within the private world of the home with a precision and a subtle ferocity reminiscent of the work of Nadine Gordimer. "These finely wrought stories of private lives shed light on a terrifying political conflict", notes the New York Times Book Review. "[Liebrecht] takes you places you've never been before." The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Woman's Series

Though resonant with deep philosophical and social themes, this book teems not with images or ideologies but with rich, exciting, believable stories. Each has a beginning, a middle and an end; a deftly drawn locale; a cast of real, rounded characters; conflict and climax--though not always resolution. Liebrecht offers no literary tricks, ideological positions or special pleading, just engrossing and skillful tales that take you, through the lives of real people, to the heart of their emotional and moral being.

As Grace Paley notes in her foreword to the first English translation of popular Israeli writer Leibrecht's work, these dozen stories are "personal?but they are also fierce pleas for understanding and justice." Their themes are somber: the enmity between Jews and Arabs; the oppression of women in sometimes violently unhappy marriages; the lingering effects of the Holocaust. In "A Room on the Roof," a young Jewish woman finds herself drawn to the educated and sensitive leader of a group of Arabs she has hired?against her husband's wishes?to build an addition to her house, but prejudice, misunderstanding and fear overcome her attempts to connect with them. In the title story, a woman who has gone to a kibbutz to retrieve her runaway daughter comes to admire the egalitarian affair between the girl and a fellow kibbutznik, but returns to her own loveless marriage at the end. And in "Hayuta's Engagement," a woman tries unsuccessfully to mediate between her heartless daughter's desire for a smooth engagement party and her father's compulsive need to reveal the horrors of his long-ago concentration camp existence; though compassionate, she buckles under her daughter's insistence that the old man be silenced, with tragic results. Liebrecht's strong prose bears witness to conflict in powerful ways, and if her refusal to provide upbeat endings makes the tone of these tales unrelievedly dark, she is true to her subjects and their history.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Available in English for the first time, these selected stories from best-selling Israeli author Liebrecht cover a wide range of feminist themes. Liebrecht portrays the gulf between Israelis and Palestinians, macho Israeli men and their misunderstood wives, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, and the older generation who remembers the Holocaust and the younger generation, who would prefer to forget it. In "A Room on the Roof Salah," for instance, a strong-minded young Israeli wife and mother contracts to have a room built on the roof of her house while her husband is away. She feels ambivalent toward the crew of Arab workmen: could these hands be the ones that planted a booby-trapped doll at the gate of the religious school down the street? The workmen evoke both fear and compassion in her, and she achieves a kind of egalitarian rapport with one of them. An excellent collection of well-written reality checks on Israeli life; highly recommended.?Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"I want my child to hear stories about Cinderella, not Auschwitz," a young mother insists in one story in this moving collection originally published in Israel and translated from the Hebrew. Liebrecht is herself the child of Holocaust survivors, and many of her stories are about the conflict between a haunted older generation who cannot forget and an impatient younger set who don't want to know. The conflicts are also between Jews and Arabs, men and women, secular and religious groups, with unexpected individual moments of empathy that reach across the divide. One heartbreaking story is like the reverse of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story (1972): a woman goes mad when her husband leaves her for the first wife he had thought was lost in the camps. Sometimes the metaphors go on too long, and the plots are contrived to spell out the message, but in the best stories, the immediacy of the contemporary scene shows the power of history, of memory, in individual lives. Hazel Rochman