Customer Reviews

Edges: O Israel, O Palestine

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's the early 1960s, Liana Barish is fourteen years old and her family is coming unglued. She grew up in a normal suburb of Westchester County, New York, but then her father committed suicide. Liana longs for her father but her mother warns her never to bring his name up for discussion. Her sister, Ivy separates herself from the family whenever possible, even refusing to sit near or look at them in public.

Her mother, Ada, had grown up in Israel but never spoke of her past. Suddenly, she decides to drag Liana and her sister back to visit her homeland.

Liana and her mother are very close, too close as her mother's large presence sometimes embraces her too hard, almost merging with Liana, taking over. Once they get to Israel, Liana begins to step out of her mother's overwhelming shadow. As she understands snippets of her mother's still very secret past and examines the strange customs of the people living in Israel, Liana begins to open her eyes and ears to the world surrounding her. Two important news items on every Israeli's mind at the time is the fight for water between Israel and Jordan and the story of an American Diplomat's missing son, a young man in his twenties.

As Liana begins to painfully feel the need to separate from her mother, she plans her escape and secrets clothing and loose change aside for a quick run to Paris, a place her father loved. One day, right outside her aunt's home, Liana is witness to the shooting of an innocent Arab boy in a skirmish between sides. Coming to the child's rescue is the missing American Diplomat's son who had simply set off on his own to travel the Middle East.

Before she quite understands what she's doing, Liana runs away with the Diplomat's son across the Israeli border. Even though she's only fourteen, he guides her through her sexual awakening and they wind up living together in abandoned places in lonely areas, surviving with the help of the poorer Arab people. As Liana experiences more of life outside her mother's influence, she truly begins to grow up.

EDGES is a beautifully written, highly introspective novel that involves the readers senses to the fullest. We can feel, touch, taste, smell and experience the emotions on every page. How the new, unaccustomed life and world in Israel affects Liana is made both poignant and painfully real. Liana's relationship with her mother, Ada, is presented to the readers in all its complexities and the author, Leora Skolkin-Smith, holds nothing back in permitting the readers to live through every moment with the characters within its pages.

EDGES is a book not to be missed.

Leora Skolkin-Smith's "Edges" shouts metaphorically. When her father suicides, fourteen-year old Liana leaves her protected (if torturous) N.Y. suburb with her mother...and sails right into our world. An edgy world of tense borders, barbed wire. A world where soldiers and children are endangered species. In the mother;s old home in Jerusalem the family lingers around the traditional Friday evening meal. Liana watches this marooned island of love and civility, each one damaged in their own way--an uncle with a stump where there had been a leg, the mother giggly with memories of runnng bullets in her bras and and panties when she was fourteen.
"Edges" has been called a coming-of-age novel. But I consider it not just as the struggle of one fourteen year old's girl for identity but the artist's stuggle to comes to grips with gender and violence. Skolkin-Smith offers us something human and whole: fourteen year old Liana leaving the dense-with-war Jeurusalem to make of its dangerous borders a glade, the forest primeval, the Mediterranean-flicked hillside of her own "personal". She soon learns that she is her own country,

It took me only a few days to read Edges,this book blew me away. It is hypnotic, frightening--the feeling of danger never let up, not for a second. It is beautiful, visceral--I think of it and smell oranges and desert (I grew up in a desert), and oh--the author so nailed that terrible longing that I remember feeling at 14 or so. The scene in Palestine with the mother, all those shops, colors, smells--I was in heaven reading that, and scared to death at the same time.

To be able to write somebody like this mother, horrible and beautiful all at once, takes great talent. I also loved that it was smooth-- one second, or more than a second, then raw as hell the next. I think this is why the unexpected moments worked so well, why a Jewish mother, worried about safety, would suddenly drag her youngest daughter into a place that turns out to be not safe at all (those boys, after night fell, in Palestine), and why I bought, completely, Liana's taking off to find William, to find Paris, to find that something she longed for.

It's absolutely not perfect, but that's a good thing,

In Edges Leora Smith skillfully tells the story of a girl of fourteen in the wake of her father's suicide, brought abruptly by her distraught mother from a comfortable suburban Westchester to the harsh terrain of a young State of Israel. The girl is caught in the maelstrom of political claims between Israel and a West Bank, still part of the Kingdom of Jordan. The turmoil both of the girl and her mother is graphically detailed as they struggle to define themselves in the light of a haunted past and present. The poetry of the girl's sexual awakening ripples through many pages, softening the fierce realities of the conflict between Arab and Jew. The pages evoke as well the memories of a shared land, and the mother's childhood growing up in an old Jerusalem before the city was separated by physical barriers, the religious, cultural, divide between Arab and Jew easier to bridge. The author's vivid sense of landscape, her gift for identifying with both mother and daughter, Arab and Jew, gives the novel a unique sense of balance and brings the reader, regardless of political conviction into sympathy with this portrait of a vanished Jerusalem.

I just finished this brilliant book Edges. One of the best I've read in a very
long time! This book got inside me, and books these days rarely do. It's the way
Skolkin-Smith wrote of the land, the repetitiveness of place, the sensuality in the land there and how it took the character Liana over and transformed her. That dug into me like a spade to the heart. It's a book that left an after-taste in my mouth, both bitter
and sweet.

The past merges with the present, mother vs. daughter, in this haunting and lyrical debut. Glad Day Books is Grace Paley's imprint, and the talent of Skolkin-Smith shines, shines, shines.

Leora Skolkin-Smith has given us the gift of a beautifully crafted novel set in a time and place of change and turmoil. Every scene pulled me further into the story and held me captive. The author is as much poet as novelist, with each lilting phrase somehow revealing an entire story. Tight writing, nothing wasted, the purest form of literature. I was sure that I knew where the story was headed...and I was wrong. Every page will surprise.