Customer Reviews

Messiah of Laguardia, The

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In "The Messiah of LaGuardia" one meets a simple auto-body worker and reserve soldier who tries to save his country from itself. "At the Little Bridge Below Ufana" presents a poignant love triangle complicated by the mysterious military death of the husband. "The Three Stages of Perfection" portrays the efforts of a commune (kibbutz) member to enthuse his comrades with his own quixotic idealism. The protagonist in "The Guardian of the Fields" finds brief happiness with a foreign woman yet cannot transcend the traumas of his East European childhood and Israel combat youth. The principal figure in "The Farming Instructor" struggles to keep both his wife and his land. And "the aging poet" in the story of that same title behaves, alas, as so many of us do, and must reconsider and accept the realities.

In sum, brevitatis causa, Porat's collection of stories is engaging, poignant, sensitive, thought-provoking writing.

Elisha Porat is one of the best kept secrets of Israeli literature. He is one of its best poets, dealing with the attrocities of war and the despair and agony of memory, and a very fine storyteller. I hope a publisher will decide to publish his poems in English, so that english readers will be able to read them (in the meantime you can find him all over the web, in ezines and other sites, worth searching). This book is a very good translation of some of his best stories. Read it and spread the word...

Elisha Porat's collection of stories, The Major of LaGuardia, is a bit uneven, but the very accomplished stories tend to redeem those which work less effectively. By far the most powerful story is "At the Little Bridge Below Ufana." There, Porat seems to marshal most of his literary talents, creating a story about memory, loss, love and hope that is both gripping and a compelling. The Farming Instructor is also powerful; Porat renders the main character in stunning detail. His life and lack of love is a sad contrast the moving and vibrant world around him. The rest of the collection is a bit flat. Porat does not end his stories effectively or evenly, and this often scuttles an otherwise well crafted piece.

Over the last three years I have read over a dozen of Elisha Porat's stories. The depth of his Realism is akin to that of American novelist Henry James. Porat shows James' concerns for what lies beneath the human surface, through an intense interaction with character behavior and its underlying motivations. Yet what Porat contributes through his own particular style is a certain freshness and pungency, offsetting much that is plainly languid in today's market of so-called 'literature'.

Moreover, the complexity of his stories with their psychologically compelling narratives make Porat's fiction eminently viable to our dangerous modern age. Running the gamut from soldiers to deceivers, false messiahs to ghosts, Porat is more than suited to the intricate themes he handles, bringing readers into unseen worlds, allowing them to view life from expanded parameters. There is nothing predictable in his plots.

Elisha Porat is an enthralling writer, and the haunting portrayals one finds in his fiction also run throughout his equally excellent poetry. He deserves a much wider reading, to be on the forefront of literature, not relegated to the background, underground, or some musty bookshelf in a university. His literature is the kind that will endure. Alan Sacks has done English readers a great service through this high-quality translation. Porat comes with my highest recommendation.

In The Messiah of LaGuardia, the first collection of short stories by Israeli writer Elisha Porat to be translaed into English, we see men whose lives have been fractured, who have found - in a manner often surprising to themselves - little spiritual fulfillment in helping to build the State of Israel, and little pleasure or comfort in sex, love, or friendship.