18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gorgeous novel, replete and finest kind, August 25, 2005
This review is from: Edges: O Israel, O Palestine (Paperback)
When I finished reading "Edges" I whispered to myself -- whoa, I hope she's got another one in the hopper because I very much want to hear more from this particular and fine voice. Israel and Palestine -- they would seem to be our eternally counterpointed voices -- but maybe not. Kudos to Skolkin-Smith for her vision. The voices here are finest kind. It's a 4.5 rating for me.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
memorable novel, November 15, 2005
This review is from: Edges: O Israel, O Palestine (Paperback)
I'd like to tout Leora Skolkin-Smith's new novel, Edges: O Israel O Palestine It's about the adventures of an adolescent girl in Israel in the early '60s. Her character's mother had grown up in British Mandate Palestine, one of several factors making the memory bank of this book so rich -- appropriate for a place with almost too much history to bear and retain one's sanity at the same time.
What is most memorable to me is the sense of place that Ms. Skolkin-Smith has achieved -- the sunny and scary Jerusalem and countryside -- and the hope, love, hate and fatalism of the groups, Palestinian and Israeli, living amongst and apart from each other in a thin, rocky, brilliantly bright corridor too rarely shaded by old gray-green olive trees.
Perhaps above all, the novel, told with restraint and poetic precision, is about how we shoulder on (and wing it) under the weight of history -- family and public.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
YOUNG WOMAN ON THE EDGE, July 20, 2005
This review is from: Edges: O Israel, O Palestine (Paperback)
There's no end of subjects about which I believe--whether rightly or wrongly--that I know at least a little something. But, there's no subject about which I make less pretense to comprehension than women in general and young women in particular. Indeed, a mother, a sister, a wife, and a daughter have done little more than confuse the issue so thoroughly that I long ago gave up trying to figure them out. So I'm profoundly unqualified to judge the accuracy of Ms Skolkin-Smith's portrayal of a 14-year old American girl's coming-of-age in early 1960's Jerusalem. Liana Bialik's mother has brought her and her sister back to Israel, from Westchester County, NY, after the suicide of their father. There they are surrounded by the mother's past -- helping the Haganah to win Israeli independence from the British -- and by the mystery of the much-disputed ancient city. Becoming an adult is never a simple matter, but for Liana it's made no easier by the smothering affection and odd character of her mother nor the tense geo-political setting in which she finds herself:
My mother was in her element here, I thought, it was Israel and hot. Maybe she could be happy here, not need me so much. She could wear her tent dresses, and walk barelegged, with her kerchiefs tied around her neck. She could decide dressing any morning that she was not in need of underpants, or any other undergarment. No one would care or judge her as they did in Katonah.
The setting sun was a broad, magnified flame, widening and, staring outward towards the distant field and woods, I slowly summed up all the other obstacles in my way to going to Paris: my mother, the stifling, coarse country that would watch everything I did as if we were in a police state somewhere, the fact that I had no more than a hundred dollars and a few lira saved, and beyond the garden, the small pine forest and few Jewish houses, raw barbed wire made it impossible to skip off the property, and then go up further towards the Jordanian hills. And even though the wire was old now and weather-eaten, there were buried mines in the field beyond it.
The story of how Liana escapes this claustrophobic atmosphere and navigates those figurative and literal minefields scared the bejeebies out of me as a dad, but makes for a good moody read. Ms Skolkin-Smith does an especially nice job of evoking a Jerusalem where "the war" was still the triumphal one for statehood and the future seemed full of promise, even if looking back we can better discern the shapes of the shadows that lurk in the city streets.
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