Customer Reviews

When I Lived in Modern Times

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Idealism and disillusionment, the collisions of past and future are recurrent themes in this novel set in 1946 and 1947 Palestine, where identity is a haphazard commodity. The narrator who chronicles what she calls living history is 20-year-old Evelyn Sert, sometimes called Eve, sometimes Mrs. Priscilla Jones. Unlike many tales of Jewish refugees reclaiming their homeland, Evelyn is not a refugee, but she is a displaced person of sorts. It is right after the war and Evelyn and her mother have survived the long years of the London blitz and rationing.

Growing up in England, the daughter of a woman who has cut ties from her own immigrant family and a shadowy American father only glimpsed through one old photograph, Evelyn is always reminded that she is second class, and the only thing that fiercely endures is her Jewish identity. When her mother dies an early death, her mother's lover, "Uncle Joe", who has fed and clothed them all these years, and fed Evelyn as well on Zionism, encourages her to go to Palestine, and basically pays her off to do so. One senses that it is not entirely out of conviction but a convenient way to get Evelyn out of the way of his real family.

A frustrated artist, she goes to work at the only way she knows how to make a real living, as a hairdresser. In her hairdresser's capacity, she is recruited for mundane underground assignments by the mysterious sexy "Johnny", who becomes her lover. Eventually caught out by the British and forced to leave the country, Evelyn's idealistic dream disintegrates, and that is the tie-in to the book's title, but it does not end there. A mature and wizened Evelyn returns to Israel to live out her twilight years.

The great thing about this story and its strength will probably also cause offense to those expecting heroic characters and lofty moral platitudes. This is an unsentimental description and examination of life under the British Mandate. It is not always a pretty or hopeful picture, although not completely dim. The Jewish characters and the British are equally put under a harsh spotlight. As each tells his or her story, argues over the old and the new world order, and prediction of what will happen when the British leave (the only thing that all parties agree will happen), a picture of a society and a people in transition emerges. The author's research has been done with care and I believe that we get an honest and accurate portrayal.

Finally, this is as much a story about the building of Tel Aviv as it is about the State of Israel. Not surprisingly, it is this city and not Jerusalem that captures Evelyn's imagination. The young shining Tel Aviv, not only stands as a nostalgic historical and cultural remembrance, but also as a fitting metaphor for the modern Jewish city and therefore a new definition of the Jewish people.

Linda Grant's "When I Lived In Modern Times (WILIMT)" is not a political treatise on the epoch making event of the creation of the Jewish nation state of Israel but it captures perfectly the sense of excitement and urgent anticipation that gripped the hearts and minds of the Jewish diaspora when they saw and seized the occasion that presented itself after the Second World War. Evelyn Sert (aka Priscilla Jones) suffers an identity crisis whilst living unhappily in England. She is torn between her Englishness and her own ethnicity, so when she decides to pack her bags for Tel Aviv to make her small contribution to the Cause, she comes face to face with an uncomfortable life in a kibbutz before finally emerging in Tel Aviv, where she works as a hairdresser. It is through her surprising encounters with characters as varied and diverse as Meier, Blum, Mrs Lintz, Mackintosh and her lover Johnny - most of them leftovers from the recent historical past - that we enter the minds of the various ethnic communities (including the colonial English), some declining, others rising, but all experiencing a deep turbulence in their consciousness. Just as the English weren't shedding their colonial mentality or adjusting to their declining influence on the world stage quite so quickly enough, the German Jews who had survived the Nazi era weren't ready to shed their prejudices about the Arabs and so forth. But Grant isn't out to make a political statement. Her aim is to entertain, so what she has in store for us is an adventure story, with all the ingredients of political intrigue, spying and kidnapping, etc, as we follow Evelyn in her narrow escapades and search for her own soul and identity in her burgeoning fatherland. She tastes the complexity of it and emerges the wiser and ready to give counsel to her daughter, Naomi, who asks the same questions. Grant may have made her name as a journalist but she has proven herself to be equally adept as a novelist. She has written a keenly observed, deeply relevant and highly impressive novel that will stand the test of time. It should also make compelling reading for those like me who are keen to fill the gap in their knowledge of how it was for the Jews who built Israel. WILIMT richly deserved the Orange Prize in 2000. Read it.

Linda Grants' story was captivating. It reminded much of my own experiences of living as an immigrant in Tel Aviv. I learned a great deal from her story about the early immigrants to the city and their unique characters and ways of behavior. The story follows a young English women who leaves England for Palestine in the years before the establishment of the State of Israel. One learns of the kibbutz experience and its hardships, of the difficulties of adjusting to life in a new country with its different cultures and norms. The descriptions of the British and the many different immigrant groups in Tel Aviv were insightful. As someone who has lived in Tel Aviv many of Linda Grants' descriptions run true to this day. This is book worth reading. As a side note Ms. Grant recommends a book on Tel Aviv by J. Schlor which I recently purchased which is fantastic. It offers historical insights into the creation of the city of Tel Aviv

Linda Grants' story was captivating. It reminded much of my own experiences of living as an immigrant in Tel Aviv. I learned a great deal from her story about the early immigrants to the city and their unique characters and ways of behavior. The story follows a young English women who leaves England for Palestine in the years before the establishment of the State of Israel. One learns of the kibbutz experience and its hardships, of the difficulties of adjusting to life in a new country with its different cultures and norms. The descriptions of the British and the many different immigrant groups in Tel Aviv were insightful. As someone who has lived in Tel Aviv many of Linda Grants' descriptions run true to this day. This is book worth reading. As a side note Ms. Grant recommends a book on Tel Aviv by J. Schlor which I recently purchased which is fantastic. It offers historical insights into the creation of the city of Tel Aviv

Great account of a part of history that is very much neglected. Also a coming-of-age story and a bit of a spy story as well. Grant is an absorbing writer, at her best, in my opinion, when developing a plot around a compelling character at a particularly interesting point in time. This fine book reflects her talent, I did not want the book to end.

I just saw the film The Search again, after many years. It is a terrific movie about a mother looking for her son in Germany after the war. There are several scenes of young children who had been in the concentration camps leaving for Palestine. Grant's book is the fictionalized tale of where they ended up. As opposed to one of the reviewers, I found the protagonist's description of Palestine in the 1940s absolutely fascinating---the characters, the description of the land, the history. It is a story that cannot help but increase understanding of the heartbreaking history of the land. Couldn't put the book down---this is the second of Grant's that I've read over the past couple of weeks. I'm hooked....

"Scratch a Jew and you've got a story," Evelyn Sert, the main character, tells us on the opening page. The time is April 1946, when "victory hung like a veil in the air, disguising where we might be headed next." The place is Palestine.

Evelyn herself is a mere two generations away from a Latvian shtetl. In England, she feels more Jewish than English. She gets to Palestine pretending to be a Christian tourist. In Palestine, she's continually being mistaken for being English. In Tel Aviv where Evelyn settles, German Holocaust survivors sit in the beachside cafes, wearing black suits, discussing German literature, music, art and culture, trying to recreate the life they knew in Germany. As the pressure for a Jewish state builds and the British evacuate nonessential personnel, an older British woman wails that Palestine has been her home since childhood. "They're sending me back to England. I hardly know it. I'm going into exile, but you people know all about that." Behind her back, a Jewish baker laughs.

This is a beautifully written book. Toward the end of the book, Evelyn says, "Look at it this way, we are the people of the Book. It is the first thousand years of Jewish history and, though we have no second volume for the next two thousand years, each story a Jew tells is part of that book. We have no choice but to listen."

I am British and I now live in Israel having emmigrated here (albeit in 1999 and not 1946). And I love Tel Aviv and its history.

To be honest I was quite surprised by the reviews that this book got since I was underwhelmed by truth in the writing. The book's description of Israel just strikes me as very flat and though there are portraits of inhabitants and characters (ie Yekkes, refugees, British soldiers, activists) the writing does not take you to what is the real Israel.

The writing style is good but as should be clear here not in my view prose fitting to describe Israel.

I am leaving aside socio- views - take it from a Londoner, what is overwhelming about Irael is the heat, the humidity, the vitality of the people. This absolutely does not come across in the book, to my mind. I realise 1946 was different when you are mixing amongst Yekkes and camp surivors but the still the description of the Kibbutznikim in the book did not describe the energy that jumps out of peoples'skin here.

The smells in israel, the colour of the sky, the heat, nature, the sea - all these things are overwhelming to a native Londoner and certainly a cosseted girl circo 1946 but none of this comes in the book. If you have never been to Israel and want to understand what I am talking about a good start are Israeli painters of this century such as Kalishman, Shalom Reisner, Aharon, Agam, Nahum Gutman.

The professional cricital reviews to this book that I have seen are very positive, To be honest I don't know why. Perhaps because they are written by people who are looking inside the lines of the book for some kind of cathartic English literature explanation for the State's Establishment and whatever they think they should read is contained within?..

This is one book that should bear out my personal experience to an extent but disappointingly I did not find that it did capture the lust and intensity of this land and instead was a tale of a Londoner who finds herself in the Middle East and just muttered "öh."

Riveting narrative. I knew nothing about Israel before reading it, but Grant's story, at once personal and epic, is breathtaking without losing touch of the human elements. Grant also presents a balanced view of Israeli/Arab conflicts.

Altho the story line is a bit disjointed, the book provided an interesting look into prewar Palestine. A time and place I was not famililar with.