Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) [Paperback]

Savyon Liebrecht (Author), Grace Paley (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series | Publication Date: April 1, 2000

   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

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Months afterwards she would remember that morning with dismay, when she had sat with them for the first time, as though they were at home there: drinking from cups like welcome guests ... and only the part of her, the part that didn't laugh with them, thought: Could these hands, serving coffee, be the ones that planted the booby-trapped doll at the gate of the religious school at the end of the street?"

In the stories of Israeli author Savyon Liebrecht, personal relationships can't help but become political. In "A Room on the Roof," an unnamed Jewish woman hires three Arab workers to build an addition onto her house while her husband is out of the country. So paralyzed is she by her fear of Arabs, she is unable to recognize the essential decency of these particular men; on the rare occasions when she is able to see past her own blind bigotry, the realization that her workmen are human beings with their own set of hopes, fears, and prejudices is so terrifying that she becomes even more strident in her intolerance.

Though a few of the stories in Apples from the Desert are directly concerned with interactions between Jews and Arabs, the collection is, in fact, more about how Israelis deal with each other. The Holocaust is the unmentioned elephant in the drawing room, for Liebrecht, herself the daughter of concentration camp survivors, is particularly interested in the impact that tragedy has had on the children of survivors. In "Hayuta's Engagement Party," everyone fears that Grandpa, a Holocaust survivor, will ruin this festive occasion (as he has many others) with his grim recitals of death-camp atrocities. The protagonist of "'What Am I Speaking, Chinese?' She Said to Him" returns to her childhood home in Poland in order to stage a sexual encounter in the same room where her parents--again Holocaust survivors--once argued about sex.

If the Holocaust is one theme running through most of these stories, the position of women in modern Israeli society is another. Many of the women--especially older ones--in Liebrecht's stories are in oppressive marriages with men who neglect, ridicule, and sometimes physically abuse them. In "Compassion," a Jewish woman who was hidden from the Nazis in a Catholic convent as a child marries an Arab man who eventually imprisons her and takes a younger wife. Victoria, the mother of a rebellious daughter in the collection's title story, only recognizes the depths of her own marital misery when she sees the loving relationship her child has formed outside the legal bonds of matrimony.

There is nothing subtle about Liebrecht's stories, and readers accustomed to the finely tuned ironies of an Ann Beattie or Alice Munro may find these stories a trifle emphatic. However, anyone interested in the literature coming out of Israel today will find Savyon Liebrecht's window on the land and the people illuminating, if sometimes uncomfortable reading. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558612351
• ISBN-13: 978-1558612358
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #437,156 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great writing about the things that really matter, March 10, 2001

By 

Scribe "Scribe" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) (Paperback)

Great, tight, vivid, exact writing about the Important Things (universal concerns, issues, and feelings) in the mood of a calm and astute observer/chronicler -- with soul. Perfect. Although these stories are primarily concerned with Israelis, I encouraged an East Indian friend to read "The Homesick Scientist"; it spoke to him so deeply of his own private experience that he immediately ordered the book (from Amazon, of course).

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely set of short stories, October 13, 2000

By 

Esther Nebenzahl - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) (Paperback)

This is a collection of 12 lovely short stories published in Israel between 1986 and 1992. Savyon Liebrecht is a child of survivors from the Holocaust and like many other children from parents who underwent the same experience, she had to deal with the trauma of the past which most often meant trying to understand and live with the "silence" from her forbears. Not only is this fact reflected in her stories, but she also addresses the problems in the interaction between Israelis and Arabs, as well as between Israelis themselves. Her stories reflect the influence of political and social conflicts in daily life and family structure. The author has a very honest approach to those conflicts, with a direct and simple style, most outstanding for its feministic and humane touch.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unusual understandings of peoples and their motives, March 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) (Hardcover)

This author presents experiences in the lives of of people that show her intuitive understandings of their fears, loves, hates and motivations. In the process she presents a valid picture of Israel and some of its people.