Crossing the Border [Hardcover]

Kim Chernin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1994

"Once again, Kim Chernin has provided a beautifully written account of the darkened regions of the female psyche. Chernin's unique gift is her ability to illuminate how the intimately personal and vastly political intersect in the details of everyday life. Kim Chernin gives a new dimension to the ongoing project of reclaiming the stories of women's lives."
Naomi Wolf
More than twenty years ago, Kim Chernin set out on a journey, leaving behind a husband and young daugher. The story of this journey, which took her to a border kibbutz in Israel, becomes a mysterious tale of erotic awakening. Rich and multilayered, and as suspenseful as fiction, CROSSING THE BORDER is a tale of passion lived to its extreme. As lyrical as the writing of Marguerite Duras and as daring as the work of Jeanette Winterson, CROSSING THE BORDER is certain to provoke and captivate.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Leaving behind her 8-year-old daughter and the child's father in Berkeley, Calif., rebellious, idealistic Chernin ( In My Mother's House ) joined an Israeli border kibbutz in 1971, hoping to dissolve her loneliness in collective solidarity. Instead, she formed a loose romantic triangle involving moody fellow kibbutz member Simon ben Zvi and a soldier, Dov Aviad, who reminded her of her father. This menage was ruptured by Chernin's furtive, passionate lesbian affair with her married Hebrew teacher Sena, which led to jealousy, betrayals and a knife struggle with Simon in the dark. Written in the third person, a device that often seems strained, this poignant memoir is sprinkled with wry self-deprecating humor and freewheeling ruminations on eros, gender, memory and Jewish history and destiny. Chernin is now a psychotherapist in Berkeley.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Throughout this four-part memoir, Chernin always mentions herself with first and last names--a device, she explains, "to ward her[self] off in case she figures out how to get back from the grave to possess me." In the fairly straightforward part one, Chernin leaves her young daughter in California to visit an isolated Israeli kibbutz and recounts her friendship there with a younger woman she knew back in the States, her affair with a man she meets there, and her struggle to be accepted and allowed to stay after her visit was supposed to end. The second, much more impressionistic part deals with Chernin's passion for Dov, a young soldier; after they break up, she takes refuge with friends in Scotland, where, she says, Kim Chernin dies. In the third part, she recalls the events that drove her from the kibbutz and finds her memories preoccupied by the question of whether Dov left her for another woman. What gradually emerges is that she fell in love with that very woman. In the final section, 20 years later, Dov visits Chernin, which helps her become reconciled to her younger self. A powerful exploration of identity. Mary Ellen Quinn

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Fawcett; 1st edition (March 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449905225
• ISBN-13: 978-0449905227
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,221,475 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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