Synopsis
Vowing to never grow up and enter the brutality of the adult world in Jerusalem, the imaginative Ahron, once the ringleader of his friends, ignores the growing regimentation that they call patriotism as Israel approaches the Six-Day War. 25,000 first printing.
Reviews
Again displaying the special insights into adolescent psychology previously seen in See Under: Love , Israeli novelist Grossman has fashioned a powerful, emotionally devastating novel that chronicles a young boy's fears, anguish and breakdown. Aron Kleinfeld is 11 and a half when we meet him and his crass, ill-bred parents in a seedy Jerusalem housing project. Sensitive and imaginative, he is a great dreamer and ringleader of escapades among his circle of friends, though they are beginning to scorn his childish fantasies. Other signs of stress soon appear: his parents' anxious references to Aron's slow growth and his own awareness of his short stature and scrawny physique, coupled with his observation of the signs of puberty in his pals, make Aron acutely self-conscious and arouse feelings of humiliation and self-hatred. Aron, reluctant to mature socially, psychologically and physically, becomes so revolted by the adult world of hairy armpits and sex and complex, mediated feelings that he eventually feels that "having a body is itself a defect." Yet the reader's sympathy for this naive, gauche nebbish grows in proportion to Aron's suffering, as Grossman brilliantly creates Aron's agonized stream of consciousness. Painfully lonely, feeling rejected by family and friends, to Aron ". . . words had come to be utterly inward, whispering a grammar so intimate and tortuous they could never break forth into the light." Grossman's portrait of Aron will stand as a classic study of adolescent turmoil set against the muted backdrop of his country's imminent, violent and compromised coming of age in the Six-Day War of 1967.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Leitmotifs rather than scenes rule in a new novel of Israeli life by the author of The Smile of the Lamb (1991), etc. Aron Kleinfeld, 12, lives with his mother, father, and older sister in Jerusalem in the months leading toward the Six-Day War. He's waiting for pubic hair, for the mysteries of girls to become clear, for the key to friendship with one particular boy, Gideon, to turn more manageably. He worries about just about everything, alternately shocked by adult amorality (how could his parents warehouse his old grandmother, who'd been living with them, just because she was less than tightly screwed-in upstairs?) while at the same time seeking its advantage. He finds his father's pornographic postcards in a closet and becomes the audience for a real drama of attraction when an unmarried female neighbor asks Aron's father to do some demolition work in her apartment for pay. Aron's canny, fierce mother will not allow the work to occur unchaperoned, and thus Aron spends afternoons dreaming to the sound of his father's sledgehammering and the neighbor's delighted squeals of horror. Like a number of other Israeli novelists, Grossman is, stylistically, Faulkner-haunted (``He followed him up to the school gate, unsure whether to go over and show his face and talk to him as if nothing had happened, so what had, and if God forbid it had, Aron wasn't the one who ought to feel guilty, and there would no longer be any need to ask or hope, but he didn't go over and show his face, he slinked behind from tree to tree...''), but here the adolescent magma mixes with the run-on sentences to produce mostly sludge. Stagy symbolism--the sledgehammering, a section in which Aron's father fashions a girl out of challah dough for his embarrassed son--slows rather than quickens the book. Earnest, but largely a portentous, formless slog. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
With his latest novel, this outstanding Israeli writer delivers an intensely realized, consummate portrayal of a youth reluctantly coming of age amid the charged climate enveloping close friends and family just before the Six-Day War. As both Gideon, whose friendship Aron Kleinfeld most cherishes, and Yaeli, the first girl he has ever cared for, become involved in the Zionist youth movement, Aron agonizes over finding himself outside the fray. And by refusing to accept the many disruptive changes bombarding him, this gentle, hesitant boy falls deeper and deeper into a no-win predicament of his own making. Grossman's densely cadenced prose fairly bristles with the profound energy of Aron's adolescent conundrum in this impressive and compelling story. Alice Joyce
Grossman, one of Israel's premier young novelists (e.g., The Smile of the Lamb, LJ 1/91), presents an Israeli rite de passage worthy of comparison with Salinger and Golding. Twelve-year-old Ahron, the ring-leader of the boys in his Jerusalem neighborhood, counts the minutes in class in anticipation of the games and adventures to be played after school. But when his buddies start leaving their childhood pranks behind, Ahron is devastated. He tells his friend Gideon that he will go it alone: "he would never stop, he would break into strange houses, and escape out of boxes and trunks and cars, he would stay as he was himself forever." With sublime skill, Grossman conveys the enormous pain involved in the loss of the world of childhood. As the Six-Day War approaches, Ahron imitates his hero Houdini in an attempt to escape adulthood and like Peter Pan vows never to grow up. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.
Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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