Amazon.com Review
It's difficult to tell time in Israeli author Ronit Matalon's first novel translated into English,
The One Facing Us; the narrator, Esther, slips as easily across eras as she does through the water of her Uncle Sicourelle's pool in Cameroon. Beginning with 17-year-old Esther's arrival in Central Africa to live with her uncle's family, and ending in Tel Aviv many years later, Matalon weaves a complicated saga of several generations in an Egyptian Jewish family. Though the novel begins in Cameroon, the story actually stretches back several decades to the years before Israel was declared an independent nation. Interlaced between chapters chronicling Esther's visit with her uncle, who hopes to marry her to his stepson, are the stories of her parents and grandparents: Her mother, Inés, and father, Robert; her grandfather Jacquo and grandmother Nona Fortuna; her uncles, aunts, and cousins--all members of a once-grand Jewish family in Cairo, now scattered to the four corners of the earth in the wake of political upheaval and personal tragedy.
Matalon marks her characters' passage through time with photographs: a snapshot of Uncle Sicourelle with his workers at the port of Douala; another of Sicourelle with his young stepson and Esther's father in Gabon in 1956; a picture of a 5-year-old Esther with her mother and grandmother. Some of the photographs are "missing"--all that's left is the caption Looking at a faded photo of her Uncle Sicourelle's wedding day, Esther remarks, "It is no longer possible to separate what the photographer saw from what time has done to the photograph. The future has wormed its way back into the past, tugging at the instant of the photograph's becoming." She might be describing her own efforts at family history. In The One Facing Us, Ronit Matalon has created a collage of memory, image, and narrative that is remarkable not only for the complexity of its vision but also for the lyricism of its prose and readers who enter Matalon's world won't want to leave one moment before they have to.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Illustrated with 17 snapshots from an imaginary photo album, the English-language debut from Israeli writer Matalon is a kaleidoscopic family saga chronicling the disintegration of an Egyptian-Jewish clan as, after WWII, its members fan out from Cairo to Israel, New York and Africa. Their wildly divergent fates are filtered through the ironic eye of troubled 17-year-old Esther, dispatched from Tel Aviv by her headstrong mother, In?s, and her cynical grandmother, Nona Fortuna, to Cameroon, where her maternal Uncle Jacques Sicourelle, a stoic factory owner, and her parsimonious French Aunt Marie-Ange may be plotting to marry her off to Marie-Ange's sullen son from a previous marriage. Colorful shards of Matalon's quirky, sharply observed mosaic include Esther's peripatetic, pan-Arabist father, Robert, who dabbles in Israeli leftist politics and explores central Africa; her maternal uncle Moise, a Zionist who leaves Egypt in the late 1940s to found a kibbutz in Palestine; his brother Edouard, tyrannical head of Israel's secret service interrogation team in Gaza, and Robert's sister Nadine, a suicidal New York City librarian and Emily Dickinson scholar. Matalon's subtle decoding of her photomontage adds a postmodernist flavor to this study of cultural displacement, which sensitively probes postcolonial Africa's plight as well as the clash between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
