I found this book interesting as it covered a time and place I'd not really read about before - life in Tel Aviv in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Evelyn is a a chameleonic character, adaptable to her circumstances, so able to float between different parts of society. I could probably have used a bit more historic context to get more out of this book, I don't know much about the history of Tel Aviv, but enjoyed it regardless. ( )

Golly, I just love this book. ( )

This book won the Orange/Women's Prize for fiction and it is easy to see why. The writing completely drew me in to a world that I never would have visited before. There are stories out there about Israel and Palestine, but few have had the power to pull me to one side of the issue without making me wonder what happens to the other side. That, of course, sounds bad, as if this book isn't well rounded or is one sided, but it is the type of story that really has to be one sided in order to be properly told.

I don't know that there is a way for me to properly describe the writing or how it was so powerfully true that you felt as if you honestly were the main character, going through life in a new country, fighting a struggle that she wasn't quite aware of until the end. When I put the book down I felt as if I had traveled to Israel in the time of the story, which is something that is sometimes very hard for writers to do. Getting the reader to a country is easy, getting them to that country through time itself isn't always as simple as it sounds. This book truly felt like a time machine. It is something that everyone should experience. ( )

I loved this book and recommend it whole-heartedly. I think it should take its place among the classics of English-language Jewish literature. It’s written beautifully: thoughtful, wry, occasionally poetic.

It’s the story of a young British woman coming to Israel after the war, before it was called Israel, before it was a country, when the British were running around in khaki shorts trying to govern it. The heroine, Evelyn Sert, is young, orphaned, and used to being different from the people around her. She’s not only Jewish, but illegitimate, with no clear family history. In order to reinvent herself, she goes to a country which is also in the process of inventing itself.

The atmosophere in this book is so powerful that you feel that you’re eating, drinking, smelling and touching Tel Aviv. Besides being a love song to the city, this novel has a gripping plot. And the author has a way of sketching a character in just a few words and making the person come alive.

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Is there any end to the history of which I am completely unaware? Linda Grant’s evocative and fascinating coming of age story of both 20 year old Evelyn Sert as well as the state of Israel, had me furiously turning pages as I learned, at the feet of a masterful storyteller, about one year (1946) in the history of the country carved out of British-run Palestine after WWII.

Sert leaves Britain posing as a Christian tourist, visiting the Holy Land, because it’s the only way she can get a passport as the UK has severely limited the number of passports available to Jews headed for Palestine. After finding the grueling life on the kibbutz not to her liking, she ends up in the teeming metropolis of Tel Aviv where she takes on a job as a hairdresser utilizing the only skills she possesses. To appeal to the British nationals who frequent the shop, she assumes the identity of Priscilla Jones, and gives up her Jewish identity. Meanwhile, after work, she is Jewish Evelyn Sert and she hooks up with a Jewish man who is not exactly what he seems and soon involves Evelyn in providing information about the salon’s British customers. Her role as a spy in this underground army, fighting for the nation that is about to be born, results in circumstances that put her life in danger.

Grant is so adept at evoking this time and place in history that it proves to be quite breathtaking. Her description of Tel Aviv suggests the birth of a brand new city:

”I saw apartment buildings of two or three or occasionally four stories, all white, dazzling white, and against them the red flowers of oleander bushes. Flat-roofed white boxes, I saw, though sometimes their corners curved voluptuously like a woman’s hips and two buildings facing each other like this, on a corner, reminded me of a pair of ship’s prows sailing out into the dry waters of the street. They were houses like machines, built of concrete and glass, not houses at all, they were ideas. I saw walls erected not for privacy but as barriers against the blinding light; windows small and recessed, each with a balcony and each shaded by the shadow cast by the balcony above it; stairwells lit by portholes, reminding me that we were by the sea.” (Page 71)

Grant has written a book, in luminous prose, that is first and foremost a pursuit for understanding---of culture, of race, of patriotism, of sexuality---and has placed it side by side with a setting of raging chaos that grabs you by the throat and drags you along to witness the birth of Israel under a fading British regime. The fact that I knew so little about this bit of history was just icing on the cake. Very highly recommended. ( )