Human Parts

A novel of ordinary, every day life in Israel during multiple plagues ― deadly flu, economic collapse, apocalyptic weather, and suicide bombings.

“It was an exceptional winter.” With understatement, Orly Castel-Bloom draws back the curtain on her disturbing, revelatory novel set in Israel during the Al Aksa intifada. This is a world already regularly interrupted by terrorist ambushes and suicide bombs. And now it is further plagued―by a Saudi flu that is decimating the population, and by weather that brings a ruinous winter after eight years of drought. The economy is shot to pieces. Hail stones as big as dinner plates are falling from the sky. And yet, against this backdrop of monumental affliction, ordinary people are still trying to lead normal lives.

Kati Beit-Halahmi, an impoverished cleaner, is snatched up by a community television program and given her full fifteen-minutes-of-fame. Iris Ventura, divorced with three children, is wondering how she can afford both to replace her broken washing machine and have some essential dental work done. And the Israeli president, Reuven Tekoa, travels from hospital to funeral, musing on the state of the nation from the back of his limousine.

First published in 2002, Orly Castel-Bloom spins a web of filament-fine connections between her characters. Death or disaster might intrude at any moment, but people still watch game shows on TV, go to the laundromat and train to be beauticians. Holding a mirror up to her country, Castel-Bloom shows us a society in microcosm, struggling for continuity and normalcy in a fractured world. Sardonic, topical and wholly engrossing, this is a novel capturing the maelstrom of contradictions that is life today.

Orly Castel-Bloom is the author of eleven books, including collections of short fiction and novels. Her 1992 novel Dolly City has been included in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, and in 1999 she was named one of the fifty most influential women in Israel. She has also won the Prime Minister’s award twice, the Tel Aviv award for fiction, and was nominated for the Sapir Prize for Literature.

Dalya Bilu is the translator of A. B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and many others. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Israel Culture and Education Ministry Prize for Translation, and the Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew-English Translation.