The Name [Hardcover]

Michal Govrin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 1998

Published in 1996 by the most prestigious literary imprint of Israel, The Name was awarded a leading Israeli literary prize in 1997. Within months of its publication, the book was seized upon by scholars who compared Govrin to the likes of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gide, and Beckett. The Name is the story of Amalia, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, named for her father's first wife who perished in a Nazi death camp and whose memory haunts Amalia's youth. In a decisive, rebellious break from the culture of remembrance in which she was raised, Amalia grows into a free-spirited, utterly secular young woman who attempts to remake her life, to change her identity, and to redefine herself as a woman stripped of history. But unable to escape her cultural legacy and plagued by troubling questions of faith, Amalia is drawn to a charismatic rabbi who preaches a fiery heterodoxy. Under his sway, Amalia moves into a tiny apartment on the fringe of the ultra-Orthodox community of Jerusalem and devotes herself to rituals of purification and redemption that are to culminate in a horrific, ultimate act of atonement. In Govrin's hands, the city of Jerusalem becomes a luminous, imposing character in the story--an entity whose complex religious, political, and social tensions mirror Amalia's confused and delusional state of mind. Govrin's style and dexterity are impressive, ranging from the liturgical to the confessional, from the erotic to the sublime, and marking this as a noteworthy literary debut.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The legacy of the Holocaust exacts another victim in this debut novel, which charts a woman's religious frenzy and descent into madness. The narrator, who variously refers to herself in the first and third person, has a fractured personality reflected by the names she has been known by and the metamorphoses she has deliberately pursued. Named Amelia by her father in memory of his first wife, Malinka, who died heroically in a concentration camp, the protagonist becomes emotionally unhinged in childhood because she feels possessed by Malinka's spirit. Attempting to rid herself of both the incubus of her namesake and what she sees as her own impure body, she changes her name several times, becomes Emily, then Amy, and flees from America to Europe to Jerusalem. Embracing ultra-Orthodox Judaism, she weaves ritual prayer shawls, hoping to earn redemption for the sin of living when talented musician Malinka died, and for promiscuously sharing her own body with men. Self-loathing Amelia starves herself, can't sleep, hears voices and sees visions, meanwhile pouring out her thoughts over the 49 days of the Omer Counting, a period of ritual mourning. Israeli writer Govrin conveys her tormented heroine's increasing dementia in a lush, lyrical monotone that mixes Amelia's frenzied prayers with biblical passages and Kabbalic lore. Amelia's betrothal to another yeshiva student, her deliberate sacrifice of the happiness that marriage with him could bring (instead, she will become the bride of God) and her encounters with various mystical rabbis are described in passages of suffocatingly sonorous prose. Though Govrin won Israel's 1997 Kugel Literary Prize and the 1998 Israeli Prime Minister's Prize for Writers, most readers may find it difficult to sustain interest in this essentially static and claustrophobic narrative in which the tragic end is foreordained and the narrow path there marked with a few revelations but no surprises.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this wrenching, painfully detailed work, Amalia is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, named for the beautiful pianist who was her father's first wife and who perished in the camps. The burdens of her family's past weigh heavily on Amalia?as a child, she can't even play the xylophone without angering her father, who evidently draws invidious comparisons with the playing of his lost wife?and she flees into a secular, hedonistic lifestyle. But in her hunt for spiritual renewal, she is drawn back to Orthodox Judaism, living in a tiny room in Jerusalem and trying to find herself worthy of weaving a prayer shawl. This debut by poet and theater director Govrin, who lives in Paris and Princeton, NJ, as well as Jerusalem, is the story of Amalia's long path to redemption. It's beautifully written but also slow-moving and ponderous and would work best for readers interested Jewish history or tales of spiritual rebirth.
-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 375 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (October 12, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573220728
• ISBN-13: 978-1573220729
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,160,976 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book that stirs your mind and body, October 26, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Name (Hardcover)

Reading Michal Govrin's "The Name" was a singular experience that turned into a powerful personal journey. My shock started with the first words of the book... a novel that opens with an ancient mystical prayer! And what an intimate and erotic prayer it is! I never knew Jewish liturgy and imagination had such and an overwhelming power. As I was carried by this capturing book, I could feel it in my body. Amalia's (the narrator's) voice and her ghosts inhabited me. It stirred in me the open question of how to remember a trauma - the Holocaust. Is it possible? Isn't any narrative trying to tell the horror doomed to failure? Woven into this experience were the stunning landscapes of Jerusalem by day and night, and the evocation of its crowded religious festivals. I recommend this book with all my enthusiasm. It's a spiritual, sensual, and philosophical discovery. One that marks both your soul and body.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important book of prayer, a meditation, sacred recital, July 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Name (Hardcover)

Michal Govrin is a poet, novbelist., theatre diector, with a philosophical sense of space and the sacred. She renders a dazzling narrative here like a fine sacred curtain. On the one hand, she gives us a literal and furious narrative of suspense concerning the Holocaust and history and a woman who must choose between ways of life, ways of ritual, paths of sacrifice. Govrin is full of finesse in renderiung the stones of Jerusalem and the sensuality of Soho in New York, the snapshot aesthetic of an artworld, and the densest counting of hallakah (Jewish law). Her writing rises to a symbolist precision in her dark momentum. She transdfigures the ordinary, so that we hear not a violin-tone but an entire relation through music. She has learned from the poets and the book has the forward motion of a Duras recit. But what Govrin adds is a resonance on the allegorical, even the final, anaogical, philosophical "plane.," in which her characters rep[resent both themselves and yet are typologies at once poilitical, poetic, and philosophical. Govrin attempts to resolve for us without false dissolution the nature of sacrifice. She attempts throughout this novel to stare at the plentitufde of Judaism as if it were the abyss. And plenitude is the nature of this novbel, where Govrinb finally achieves an immense pattern of forgiveness. A novel that emerhges from the strong weakness of Beckett casts itsshadows in a wider and wider cirucmference. I keep this book beside me, because it releases its life slowly and with charm. The reviewers do not do it justice, because our culture wants either merely a poror snapshot (naturalism) or is easily enraged by the sudden focus of such a snapshot (antinaturalism)./ In Govrin we have the full style of Proust: a memoir, not a diary, a novel, not a melody, phrases that haunt us, language that is golden, and always the human in trouble. How pleased we are that Barbara Harshav has completed this wonderful translation in living English, and that now readers in America can taste, if they want, a forbidden fruit: the radiant intelligence of one of Israeli's wise women.

1.0 out of 5 stars Impenetrable and Bizarre, March 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Name (Paperback)

... It's a murky, rambling, frustrating book. Though I suppose it might appeal to some people who can put up its dense style, keep in mind it's certainly not an easy read.

Besides the style, the content is also bizarre. As a religious Jew myself, I expected to identify with this book. Nothing could be further from the truth. The characters are obsessive-compulsive, unhappy and fanatical, and Judaism's appeal to the main character seems to be in providing a set of rules and prayers with which she can torture herself. The book's religious references seemed arbitrary to me - Govrin quotes a mish-mash of Jewish prayers at random - and her description of one of the rabbis goes totally against traditional Judaism. (Govrin doesn't seem to have a problem only with Orthodox Jews: her secular characters are equally odd and unbelievable.)

I can't believe this book won the Israel Prize - ... I also wonder if this translation is off.