Edges: O Israel, O Palestine (Paperback)

by Leora Skolkin-Smith (Author), Grace Paley (Editor) "I flicked on the passenger light above my head..." (more)
Key Phrases: Dota Esther, Metadulah Street, Dot Yakov (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"With EDGES, Leora Skolkin-Smith earns her place among the most gifted of contemporary American authors. The novel is a reminder that works of fiction can offer the depth, color, texture, passion of a fine painting and a great symphony. This is more than a coming-of-age story; it is a powerful and beautifully wrought account of passion and hope...for a girl and for a country." -- Victoria Zackheim, anthology, "For Keeps", "The Other Woman," writer, "The Bone Weaver"

"....Skolkin-Smith does a superb job... tells Liana's story in a style so lyrical it takes my breath away..." -- Duffie Bart, Storycircle Reviews, May 10, 2005

"...Skolkin-Smith, in clear, burnished prose, fuses personal and political rifts into an exhilirating debut novel."

--Philip Graham -- from blurb, August 2004

"...explores the very edges of the protagonist's psyche... Jerusalem comes alive.. sensual, visual ... exotic, no longer foreign." - Carolyn Howard-Johnson -- BookPleasure.com

"Edges is an elegant and moving novel. A provocative debut." —Katharine Weber -- from blurb, August, 2004

"Edges manages to be political and serious and to tell an intimate story... between politics and the imagination...." -Emberly Nesbit -- GRACE SALON READING SERIES RECOMMENDATIONS

"Skolkin-Smith's brilliant debut novel is a hypnotic meditation on the ever-changing boundaries of love and need." —Caroline Leavitt -- from blurb, June, 2004

... a captivating story ...wonderful images and evocative writing...one that will stay with me for a long time. -- Bookgirl's Bookstand

...an intimate and compelling portrai... Grace Paley's new imprint is a promising debut. -- Robert Gray, Bookseller's Journal

...memorable....is the sense of place Ms. Skolkin-Smith has achieved -- told with restraint and poetic precision -- Providence Journal. Robert Whitcomb

Product Description
After selling out of two successive print runs, Leora Skolkin-Smith's intoxicating novel about a young girl's personal and political discovery in 1960's Israel and Palestine is being re-released in a new edition by Glad Day Books. This new incarnation will include the author's afterword and dedication to her mentor Publisher and Editor of Glad Day Books with Robert Nichols, Grace Paley.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

"Edges" is set in a pre-1967 Israel, during the Cold War. Characters are drawn from Israel's long-forgotten past, members of the 1940's Haganah and Jewish underground who find themselves displaced amidst the chaotic and complex tensions of an Israel just beginning to modernize and expand.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Glad Day (May 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930180144
• ISBN-13: 978-1930180147
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #347,531 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous novel, replete and finest kind, August 25, 2005

By	KatPanama "katpanama" (Readerville) - See all my reviews

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.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars memorable novel, November 15, 2005

By	Robert Whitcomb "'The Providence Journal' Wri... (Rhode Island) - See all my reviews

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars YOUNG WOMAN ON THE EDGE, July 20, 2005

By	Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.