CANR
WORK TITLE: Waking Lions
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1982
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Israeli
LAST VOLUME:
http://www.ithl.org.il/page_14989 * http://site.houseofanansi.com/a-qa-with-ayelet-gundar-goshen-author-of-one-night-markovitch/ * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/13/ayelet-gundar-goshen-israel-waking-lions-interview * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/30/waking-lions-ayelet-gundar-goshen-review
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1982, in Israel.
EDUCATION:Tel Aviv University, M.A.; studied screenwriting at Sam Spiegel Film and Television School.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Clinical psychologist and writer. Tel Aviv University, Israel, faculty member; Holon Institute of Technology, faculty member; former journalist and news editor.
AWARDS:Berlin Today Award, and New York City Short Film Festival Award, for film scripts; Gottlieb Screenplay Prize, 2010; Sapir Prize, 2012, and Adei-Wizo Prize, 2016, both for One Night, Markovitch; Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize, 2017, for Waking Lions.
WRITINGS
Waking Lions is being adapted for a TV series in the United States.
SIDELIGHTS
Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen has won numerous awards for her screenplays and fiction. A clinical psychologist who teaches at Tel Aviv University and at the Holon Institute of Technology, she worked as a reporter and news editor during her college years. Asked by an interviewer for Anansi about her decision to shift from journalism to fiction, the author stated: “I had enough with reality, all those things that you write about in the news. I wanted to use the same material–words–to try and make something new, rather than report what really happened.”
Gundar-Goshen’s fiction debut, One Night, Markovitch, which won the prestigious Sapir Prize, is set against the backdrop of the creation of the state of Israel and is based on fact. The time is just before World War II, when the Palestine Territory was under British control. Jews in Europe were desperately trying to flee the Nazis, but were often denied entry to another country. As the novel begins, twenty Jewish men sail from Palestine to Europe and return with twenty Jewish women who, as their brides, are able to bypass British restrictions and enter the Territory legally.
No one expects the new spouses to remain together. The marriages had been arranged solely as a means to smuggle the women out of Germany. But one husband, Yaacov Markovitch, finds himself so smitten with his bride, the stunningly beautiful Bella Ziegerman, that he vows to make his fake marriage real. He sets out to do whatever it takes to make Bella love him. She, however, is equally determined to remain free. Over many decades, which encompass war and upheaval, hope and despair, life and death, Yaacov and Bella attempt to work out their differences.
Writing in the London Guardian, Jane Housham observed that the novel weaves elements of magical realism into a story based on Israeli history and culture. The result, said the reviewer, is a story of passion and upheaval, told with confidence and sympathy. Big Issue contributor Jane Graham found One Night, Markovitch remarkably assured for a first novel, observing that the book is rich in insight, complexity, humor, and poetic language.
Waking Lions, Gundar-Goshen’s second novel but her first to be published in the United States, is a political and psychological thriller. Its protagonist, Eitan Green, is a physician who has been forced out of his job at a Tel Aviv hospital after he uncovers corruption there. Now working at Soroka Hospital in the desert town of Beersheba, Eitan suffers a brief lapse of attention while driving home one night and hits an Eritrean man. The victim’s injuries are so severe that Eitan can do nothing to save the man’s life; panicking and guilt-ridden, he flees, not realizing he has dropped his wallet at the scene. The next day, to his horror, the victim’s wife shows up at his door with the incriminating evidence. He eventually buys her silence by agreeing to set up a secret night clinic in his garage to treat the medical needs of her fellow Eritreans, who do not have legal immigrant status. Making the situation even more complicated is the fact that Eitan’s wife, a police detective, has been assigned to investigate the hit-and-run case.
The novel received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, where a contributor observed that its “psychological complications match the plot ones and will please Ruth Rendell fans.” A writer for Kirkus Reviews described Waking Lions as an “intense moral thriller” with an intriguingly twisted plot, and concluded that the book’s “multiple narrative perspectives and dizzying reversals” are the stuff that “connoisseurs of this genre adore.” Financial Times contributor Ann Morgan, on the other hand, was troubled by the novel’s “fluidity of perspective,” which in her opinion creates “a nice ambiguity” but also can make characters appear “disconcertingly articulate about their self-deceptions.” Even so, Morgan found the novel basically “brave and startling.” London Guardian reviewer Ruth Gilligan also noted some “tonal inconsistencies” in the novel and said that “moments of drama are overwritten.” Despite these criticisms, Gilligan admire much in the book and stated that “this novel proves it’s not every day a writer like this comes our way.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Guardian (London, England), February 20, 2015, Jane Housham, review of One Night, Markovich; March 30, 2016, Ruth Gilligan, review of Waking Lions.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2016, review of Waking Lions.
New Statesman, April 1, 2016, review of Waking Lions, p. 45.
Publishers Weekly, December 19, 2016, review of Waking Lions. p. 102.
ONLINE
Anansi, http://site.houseofanansi.com/ (March 15, 2017), interview with Gundar-Goshen.
Big Issue, http://www.bigissue.com/ (March 15, 2017), Jane Graham, review of One Night, Markovitch.
Bookbag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (March 15, 2017), Lewlie Mason, review of Waking Lions.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (February 6, 2015), Rebecca Abrams, review of One Night, Markovitch; (March 4, 2016), Ann Morgan, review of Waking Lions.
Guardian Online, http://www.theguardian.com/ (March 30, 2016), Hanna Beckerman, “Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: ‘We Israelis Tend to Forget That We Are a Nation of Refugees.'”
Haaretz, http://www.haaretz.com/ (March 15, 2017), Giulia Miller, review of One Night, Markovitch.
Herald Scotland Online, http://www.heraldscotland.com/ (March 15, 2017), review of Waking Lions.
Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature Web Site, http://www.ithl.org/ (March 15, 2017), Gundar-Goshen profile.
Jewish Chronicle Online, https://www.thejc.com/ (February 26, 2015), David Herman, review of One Night, Markovitch; (February 11, 2016), David Herman, review of Waking Lions.
Jewish News, http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/ (March 15, 2017), review of One Night, Markovitch.
National Public Radio Web Site, http://www.npr.org/ (March 1, 2017), Maureen Corrigan, review of Waking Lions.
Pushkin Press Web Site, http://pushkingpress.com/ (March 15, 2017), Gundar-Goshen profile.
Telegraph Online, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (April 9, 2015), Philip Womack, review of One Night, Markovitch.
Times of Israel Online, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ (February 28, 2017), Ellis Shuman, review of Waking Lions.*
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
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Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (Hebrew: איילת גונדר-גושן; born 1982) is an Israeli author.
Contents [hide]
1 Life
2 Novels
3 References
4 External links
Life[edit]
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel. She has a master's degree in psychology from Tel Aviv University. During her studies, she worked as a journalist and news editor in the leading Israeli news paper, Yedioth Ahronoth. She also studied screenplay in Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem. She is a clinical psychologist and teaches psychology in Tel Aviv University and the Holon Institute of Technology.
For her short story "Shkia'a" she was awarded 2nd prize at the IEMed European short story competition (Barcelona, 2010) and the Gottlieb Sceenplay Prize (2010).
She writes screenplays for short films in Israel, and won the Berlin Today Award from the Berlinale Talents (Berlin, 2012) for her short film "Batman at the Checkpoint".
Her first novel, One Night, Markovitch (2012),[1] won the Sapir Prize in 2013 for debut novels. The Hebrew novel was translated to German, English, Italian, Dutch and Romanian, and published in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, United Kingdom and Canada.
Her second novel, Waking Lions (2014),[2] was translated to German, Turkish and English.
Novels[edit]
One Night, Markovitch; London, Pushkin Press, 2015; new pback ed.: 2015; Toronto, Anansi, 2015
Waking Lions; London, Pushkin Press, 2016; pback: 2016; New York, Little, Brown
AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHEN
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Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel in 1982 and holds an MA in Clinical Psychology from Tel Aviv University. Her film scripts have won prizes at international festivals, including the Berlin Today Award and the New York City Short Film Festival Award. Her debut novel One Night, Markovitch won the Sapir Prize for best debut and is being translated into five languages.
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel in 1982. After completing an MA in psychology at Tel Aviv University, she studied film and screenwriting at the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. Gundar-Goshen has written a number of screenplays, and has produced short films which were screened at film festivals in Israel and abroad. She has also written and co-written a number of TV series, and her second novel, Waking Lions, is being adapted for a TV series in the US.
Gundar-Goshen has been awarded 2nd prize at the IEMed European Short Story Competition (Barcelona, 2010), the Gottlieb Screenplay Prize (2010), the Berlin Today Award for the screenplay of the short film Batman at the Checkpoint (Berlin, 2012), the Sapir Prize for Debut Fiction (2012), the Adei-Wizo Prize (Italy, 2016) for One Night, Markovitch and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize for Waking Lions (UK, 2017).
Books Published in Hebrew
One Night, Markovitch (novel) , Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, 2012 [Layla Echad, Markovitch]
Waking Lions (novel) , Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, 2014 [Lehaʹir Arayot]
The Liar and the City (novel) , Achuzat Bayit, forthcoming [Ha-Shakranit Ve-Ha-Ir]
Books in Translation
One Night, Markovitch
German: Zurich, Kein & Aber, 2013; pback: 2015
English: London, Pushkin Press, 2015; new pback ed.: 2015; Toronto, Anansi, 2015
Italian: Florence, Giuntina, 2015
Dutch: Amsterdam, Meridiaan, 2015
French: Paris, Presses de la Cité, 2016; pback: Paris, 10/18, forthcoming
Spanish: Buenos Aires, Libros del Zorzal, 2016
Romanian: Bucharest, Nemira, 2016
Russian: Moscow, Sindbad, forthcoming
Portuguese: Lisbon, Gradiva, forthcoming
Waking Lions
Czech: Prague, Garamond, forthcoming
English: London, Pushkin Press, 2016; pback: 2016; New York, Little, Brown, 2017
German: Zurich, Kein & Aber, 2015; Frankfurt/ Zürich/ Vienna, Book Club Gutenberg, 2015; pback: Zurich, Kein & Aber, 2016
Italian: Florence, Giuntina, 2017
Turkish: Istanbul, Koton, 2016
French: Paris, Presses de la Cité, forthcoming
Dutch: Amsterdam, Meridiaan, forthcoming
Romanian: Bucharest, Nemira, forthcoming
Russian: Moscow, Sindbad, forthcoming
Slovak: Bratislava, Artforum, forthcoming
Spanish: Buenos Aires, Libros del Zorzal, forthcoming
The Liar and the City
English: London, Pushkin, forthcoming
German: Zurich, Kein & Aber, forthcoming
A Q&A WITH AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHEN, AUTHOR OF ONE NIGHT, MARKOVITCH
May 14, 2015
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Author of One Night, Markovitch
We asked author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen a few questions about her debut novel One Night, Markovich, the challenges of writing a screenplay based on her own book, and which authors have had the most influence on her writing. Here’s what she had to say:
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Author of One Night, Markovitch1. You work as a news editor by day, and also work in film. What made you decide to take the plunge into writing a fiction book with One Night, Markovich?
I worked as a news editor during my BA studies. When I started my MA in psychology, I needed a change. I had enough with reality, all those things that you write about in the news. I wanted to use the same material—words—to try and make something new, rather than report what really happened.
2. The film rights for One Night, Markovich have been bought and you’re already writing the screenplay. Are you finding any challenges in trying to adapt a book you spent nearly two years writing to a format (screenplay/film) in which details might have to be removed (or new details added altogether)?
It’s a very hard work. After spending so much time with your characters while writing the novel, suddenly they change. In order to do it, you have to understand that you don’t own your characters, they have their lives. And that’s a hard thing to realize.
3. What are the major differences between writing a script for film and television versus writing a novel?
The smell. The taste. In the novel, a woman can smell like an orange. It works with words, much harder on screen. In a novel, you can dive as deep as you like into the mind of your characters. You can skip between past and present, fantasy and reality, inner thoughts and outside actions. In film, you are much more tied up to reality. And, of course, 200 readers can sit in the same room, each one meeting a different Bella – because the words are sharpened in their mind according to their individual fantasies. While in the cinema, all 200 viewers watch the same Bella.
4. Do you find that your M.A. in Clinical Psychology helps you write characters that are more in-depth and intricate—more real—as compared to what your characters would be like if you pursued an M.A. in a more “traditional” writing field (e.g. an M.A. in Literature)?
i don’t know how other studies would have effected my writing, just like I don’t know how changing any other biographical fact would effect it. A writer is always rooted in his own past. Of course, I feel there’s a strong connection between literature and psychology. In both cases we deal with the human mind, the pain, the loss, the hope. As a psychologist, instead of judging automatically you’re supposed to ask “Why?”, and that’s what I tried to do in the novel as well.
5. Is Yaacov an anti-hero, villain, or simply a real person?
I don’t think villains or heroes exist. It’s always people, real people, who do the most terrible and wonderful things.
6. Since writing One Night, Markovich, you’ve also written Walking Lions. Can we expect to see that in English and in Canadian bookstores soon?
Waking Lions is being translated these days, so I hope next year will be the year of the lion.
7. Which authors would you say have had the most influence on your own fiction writing?
Mario Vergas LIosa. There are good writers that make you cry, and there are good writers that make you laugh, but only excellent writers make you do both. Vergas LIosa is one of them. Reading him makes you want to write.
Romain Gary is also one of my favourite writers. In Kites he manages to deal with his characters with both irony and compassion. I tried my best to learn.
8. Are there any translated works by Israeli authors you would recommend our audience to read?
Anything by David Grossman.
One Night, Markovitch by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin meets The Marrying of Chani Kaufman in this cinematic novel about the birth of Israel and the true story of the marriages of convenience that were arranged to smuggle Jewish women out of Nazi-occupied Europe.
On the eve of World War II, a ship bearing twenty young men sets sail from the Palestine Territory toward Europe. Eagerly awaiting them on the other side are twenty young women, whom the men have never met. They have been set up in arranged marriages to enable Jewish women to escape Nazi Germany and enter Palestine without being turned back by the British.
But when Yaacov Markovitch, a thoroughly unremarkable man, finds himself married to Bella Zeigerman, the most beautiful woman he has ever set eyes upon, things start to get complicated. Yaacov’s fake marriage is the beginning of a lifelong obsession, as he vows to make his beautiful bride, Bella, love him, despite her determination to break free. Their changing fortunes take them through war, upheaval, terrible secrets, tragedy, joy, and loss.
Vital, funny, and tender, One Night, Markovitch brilliantly fuses personal lives and epic history in an unforgettable story of endless, hopeless longing and the desperate search for love.
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: ‘We Israelis tend to forget that we are a nation of refugees’
The novelist and psychologist on the incident that inspired her new book, the impact of cultural boycotts and why she can’t leave her homeland
Novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: ‘It’s hard to have empathy with people who don’t look like you.’ Photograph: Bild © Katharina Lütscher
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Hannah Beckerman
Sunday 13 March 2016 05.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.29 EST
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is an Israeli novelist, screenwriter and psychologist. Her debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, won the Sapir prize for debut fiction – Israel’s Man Booker – and her second, Waking Lions, is already a German bestseller. She has also worked for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
The catalyst for the drama in Waking Lions is a rich, Jewish doctor running over an Eritrean refugee and deciding to flee the scene. Where did that idea come from?
When I was backpacking in India, I met an Israeli guy who’d run over a local Indian and didn’t stop. When he told me this I thought there’s no way he wouldn’t have stopped if he’d hit me – an Israeli woman, the same age as him. But when somebody looks different and you’re certain nobody has seen – I wanted the reader to ask if they’re sure they wouldn’t do the same.
There’s a biblical sensibility to Waking Lions; it reads like a modern morality tale about guilt, penance and displaced people.
Absolutely. The refugees who are walking from Eritrea to Israel these days are walking the exact same road that the people of Israel walked when they left Sinai for the promised land. But now we, the Jewish people, are the gatekeepers. This is something that haunted me as I sat down to write the novel.
There’s a sense in the novel that the Eritrean refugees are almost invisible to the privileged Israelis.
Exactly. These refugees are completely unseen. The people who take your bags in the supermarket, the people who clean your table in the restaurant: they’re next to us but we don’t bother to look at them. And this is really the story of Jewish history: of being unseen.
Right now, Israel gives the definition of a refugee to less than 1% of people knocking at our door from Eritrea
One of the novel’s themes is that there are no cultural differences in human suffering. Do you think that empathy is missing from contemporary debates around immigration?
I think it’s hard to have empathy with people who don’t look like you. And I think we [Israelis] tend to forget that we are a nation of refugees. I think we see them as an economical threat, but we don’t really see them as people escaping for their lives.
What changes would you like to see in Israeli government policy towards refugees?
Right now, Israel gives the definition of a refugee to less than 1% of people knocking at our door from Eritrea. And what they usually say is that we can’t have all of Africa coming here. But there are a lot of numbers between 1% and 100%. It has to be more than 1%.
You’ve said previously that for people to have kept praying for the establishment of Israel, they needed “a big hope or a big insanity”. Which do you think it was?
You can’t long for something for 2,000 years and then suddenly have it and not go a little bit crazy. I still have hope but I think it’s insane to raise my kids here.
But you wouldn’t want to raise your kids anywhere else?
I wouldn’t be able to leave Israel, even as much as I hate the current government. I’m too rooted in the culture and in the language. And I also feel it would be irresponsible. People in Israel call leftwing people like me traitors and I don’t think we’re traitors at all. I think that to really love your country is to stand there and to fight when you think what it’s doing is wrong.
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As a psychologist, if Israel were your patient, what would be your professional diagnosis?
Severe post-traumatic stress disorder. When you have a patient with PTSD, it’s the trauma that still colours everything.
So how would you help Israel recover?
Continuously and patiently remind Israel where it is now. That the present and the past are not the same thing. But then again, I think Israel is a much more stubborn patient than any patient I ever met.
There’s been a lot of debate in Britain around cultural boycotts of Israel. Do you think boycotts are effective?
I think cultural boycotts are a catastrophe; first, they give privilege to ignorance. It’s ignoring the complexity of Israeli society. And I think complexity and diversity are exactly what readers and writers should seek daily.
Second, they just help the siege mentality. If we’re talking about Israel having PTSD, cultural boycotts strengthen that – you’re not paranoid if people really are chasing you.
Waking Lions is published by Pushkin Press (£12.99).Click here to buy it for £10.39
Waking Lions
Publishers Weekly. 263.52 (Dec. 19, 2016): p102.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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* Waking Lions
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, trans. from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston.
Little, Brown, $26 (352p) ISBN 978-0-316-39543-4
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A moment's inattention upends multiple lives in Gundar-Goshen's powerful thriller, the Israeli author's first novel to be published in the U.S. When Dr. Eitan Green uncovered corruption at the hospital he worked at in Tel Aviv, he was forced to take a less desirable position in Beersheba in the Negev desert. Now, after a too-long shift at Beersheba's Soroka Hospital, an exhausted Eitan glances at the Moon in his rearview window during his drive home. While his eyes are off the road, he strikes an Eritrean man, who suffers a skull fracture. Unable to do anything to save the man's life, the guilt-ridden Eitan flees. His nightmare worsens when the victim's wife appears at his home, bearing the wallet he dropped at the scene of the hi-tand-run. He agrees to give her fellow Eritreans medical treatment at night in exchange for her keeping silent about his role in her husband's death. The arrangement forces Eitan to lie to his police detective wife, who has been looking into the fatality. The psychological complications match the plot ones and will please Ruth Rendell fans. Agent: Grainne Fox, Fletcher & Company. (Feb.)
Gundar-Goshen, Ayelet: WAKING LIONS
Kirkus Reviews. (Dec. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Gundar-Goshen, Ayelet WAKING LIONS Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 28 ISBN: 978-0-316-39543-4
In this intense moral thriller, an Israeli doctor conceals a fatal hit-and-run, is blackmailed by his victim's widow into operating an underground clinic for refugees, and sees everything he ever believed about himself crumble to bits. Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has just gotten out from a very late night at the ER. He is burning off steam on a deserted road in his SUV, bellowing along with Janis Joplin, "thinking that the moon was the most beautiful he had ever seen when he hit[s] the man." From the moment we meet him, Eitan's bad luck will become tangled in his good intentions, his poor choices with his righteous ones, his appeal with his weakness. The very vehicle in which he had the accident was a consolation prize to make up for having to move from Tel Aviv to dusty Beersheba: he was transferred when he uncovered corruption at his hospital. So he's quite an ethical guy, as murderers go, and a devoted husband and father, too. Further complicating the situation and spinning off additional consequences, his wife is the police detective assigned to investigate the hit-and-run accident. By then Eitan has already learned that his getaway was not as clean as he had hoped: the day after the accident, a beautiful Eritrean woman shows up at his door with his wallet, dropped at the scene--and a demand. "During the day, you can do whatever you want...but you will keep your nights free." Free to provide medical care to an endless stream of illegal immigrants whom he will treat in secret in a garage. That is just the first of the twists upon twists upon twists in this story--more than one of which will have readers yelping out loud. Gundar-Goshen's U.S. debut seems poised to catch fire, with the multiple narrative perspectives and dizzying reversals that connoisseurs of this genre adore.
Waking Lions
New Statesman. 145.5308 (Apr. 1, 2016): p45.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Waking Lions
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Eitan Green, a doctor in Beersheba, is driving home at night after a tiring shift at the hospital when he hits something. The bump is a man, an African refugee, now beyond help, his head caved in and showing "exposed neurons that glowed in the moonlight". Eitan can do nothing for him and so flees the scene. The dead man's wife, however, has seen everything and turns up the next day on his doorstep--though it's not money that she's after. This, the second novel by the Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, is a complex and affecting moral thriller.
Pushkin Press, 409pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling]
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‘Waking Lions’, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
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MARCH 4, 2016 by: Review by Ann Morgan
If there were a literary prize for nail-biting first lines, Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s second novel, Waking Lions, would win. In the first sentence, the protagonist has a split-second to admire the moon before running over the man whose death will drive the story. Pushkin Press has hailed it as a “grenade” of a novel and, with such an explosive opening, it seems poised to deliver.
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Having hit and abandoned an Eritrean migrant on a lonely desert road in present-day Negev, hospital doctor Eitan finds his life plunged into chaos when the dead man’s wife, Sirkit, seeks him out to blackmail him with a strange demand. Desperate to preserve his family, career and good name, the medic is forced into a pact that will test not only his limits, but also the mettle of the mysterious woman controlling him.
After this thrilling intro, the focus shifts from the crisis of the accident to its context and the questions it provokes, and the narrative takes long diversions to meditate on domestic life, privilege, discrimination, international politics, poverty, family dynamics and the conflicting forces that make us who we are. Although the plot continues to move forward, barring a few static scenes, it feels secondary to the ideas Gundar-Goshen wants to explore. The novel, much like its two central characters, is not what it first appears to be.
Waking Lions was first published in Hebrew in 2014 and is rather more sombre in tone than Gundar-Goshen’s first novel, One Night, Markovitch, which was set in Israel during and after the second world war and praised for its humour.
At their best, the philosophical explorations of Waking Lions are thought-provoking. The treatment of otherness is particularly rich as events bring liberal Jew Eitan into close contact with the Eritrean and Bedouin communities — groups that he has been in the habit of regarding as sinister and unknowable.
Through these interactions, the author reveals the comfortable lies we tell ourselves in the face of difference, and the way we often muffle the humanity of those we do not understand. This is accentuated by the device of putting Eitan’s words in speech marks and italicising Sirkit’s speech, so the central characters seem to be inhabiting different texts even as they converse.
Yet the fluidity of perspective in the novel, which shifts between various characters’ viewpoints and that of a rather intrusive third-person narrator, sometimes within the same paragraph, is also problematic. While it can create a nice ambiguity, blurring the divide between the self and the other, it also has the side-effect of making characters sound disconcertingly articulate about their self-deceptions.
For all that, though, there are things to admire in Waking Lions. The plot is bold and, for the most part, neat, and manages to smuggle ambitious discussion of volatile issues into the literary arena. In this, if not in all other aspects, the book is brave and startling — perhaps less a grenade than a Trojan horse.
Waking Lions, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, translated by Sondra Silverston, Pushkin Press, RRP£12.99 320 pages
Ann Morgan is author of ‘Beside Myself’ (Bloomsbury)
Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen review - a restrained, serious story of secrets and extortion
A hit-and-run accident and a blackmailing widow spark a triangle of moral dilemmas in the highly anticipated second book from the Israeli novelist
Ayelet Gundar Goshen
‘Rare ability’ … Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Photograph: Nir Kafri
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Ruth Gilligan
Wednesday 30 March 2016 11.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.27 EST
“He’s thinking that the moon is the most beautiful he has ever seen when he hits the man.” So begins the highly anticipated second novel from Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. The “he” in question is Dr Eitan Green, an accomplished Israeli neurosurgeon who has just been reluctantly relocated to the dust-riddled city of Beersheba with his wife Liat and their two sons.
To console his bruised ego, Eitan purchases an SUV with the intention of taking night-time drives in the desert. But one night he collides with, and kills, a man who is also new to the area, having immigrated from Eritrea. Fleeing the scene, Eitan resolves to keep his secret to himself, concluding that “people live entire lives with some measure or another of unease”. When the victim’s widow shows up on his doorstep, wanting not money but something else altogether, his entire existence is called into question.
At first Eitan is repulsed by this foreign woman and her “blazing extortion”. But soon her unknowability begins to intrigue him; “his first encounter with a fence behind which was knowledge inaccessible to him”. And it seems the intrigue is mutual, as we dip in and out of her perspective, studying this arrogant doctor over whom she holds a strange power.
Elsewhere, Liat’s point of view reveals how her husband is becoming increasingly unknowable to her. She is the police inspector tasked with investigating the hit-and-run case, a dramatic irony that eventually leads closer and closer to home.
English-speaking readers have only enjoyed the pleasure of Gundar-Goshen’s company since last year, when her extraordinary 2012 debut One Night, Markovitch was translated from Hebrew. Spanning events before, during and after the establishment of the state of Israel, this sensuous novel of intertwining lives garnered comparisons with the work of Gabriel García Márquez, given its political resonance, allegorical power and hints of magic realism.
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Waking Lions, though a longer book, again translated by Sondra Silverston, feels smaller in scope, largely alternating between just two locations over the course of a few months. It does gesture towards wider political themes, with the refugee narrative of particular relevance today. However, the majority of scenes remain focused on the domestic dilemma – on Eitan’s deteriorating relationship with his wife and his emerging relationship with the widow – a charged emotional triangle based almost entirely on the unspoken.
That said, a handful of new characters suddenly emerge much later in the novel, including a young Bedouin boy and a frustrated drug trafficker. It transpires that Eitan’s hit-and-run accidentally intercepted a crime network, one that deals in violent assaults, rape and murder. Thus the events of the book’s final third more closely resemble those of a police thriller, a far cry from the static space of Eitan’s personal meltdown. This shift in pace is certainly exhilarating, and Gundar-Goshen has previously displayed her rare ability to combine elements from a variety of genres. However, the tone proves slightly problematic. Where One Night, Markovitch was written in sensuous, comic prose, imbued with the generosity of language and storytelling, here the language can feel less assured.
Similes are sometimes awkward, from handwriting like a “series of indecipherable pigeon droppings”, to a line of immigrants compared to an “endless black centipede”. Moments of drama are overwritten – Eitan’s “internal organs become sheathed in ice”, while Liat is “frightened to the depths of her soul”. Elsewhere, Gundar-Goshen cannot seem to resist the comic urge, slipping in gags about Eitan’s anger “like a Sabbath hotplate”; marking moments of epiphany with a triumphant pizza order; appending the idea of walking in the widow’s shoes with the words “In her sandals? In her bare feet?”. We sense Gundar-Goshen’s wit trying to break through the surface; to escape the claustrophobic confines of a novel so committed to being a more restrained, serious offering.
Eitan is eventually told that the press will no doubt contact him about all that has occurred: “It’s not every day a story like this comes their way.” Despite some tonal inconsistencies, this novel proves it’s not every day a writer like this comes our way.
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One Night, Markovitch by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, review: 'dextrous and impressive'
Philip Womack admires the strange beauty of a debut novel set in Israel
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4 out of 5 stars
Debut novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Debut novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Photo: Nir Kafri
By Philip Womack1:00PM BST 09 Apr 2015
One Night, Markovitch is an assured debut novel that concerns itself with timeless themes of love and survival. Its main setting is Israel, before, during and after the Second World War, while the country struggles to forge itself. This process of transformation occurs at the level of character too, as everyone attempts to form themselves and their new lives, whether through marrying, having children or through language - one immigrant woman, after reaching the Holy Land, refuses to speak German any more. It is an ongoing process, however. Borders shift; and so do personalities, even until death.
Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston into prose that is wry, ironically tinged and poignant, the novel follows the friendship between two men, Yaacov Markovitch and Zeev Feinberg, and shows how their lives are shaped not only by their own impulses but by larger historical and political forces.
The catalyst for the novel is an Israeli plan to send young men to Europe. There, they marry single Jewish women, thus rescuing scores and taking them back to Israel, where they promptly divorce.
The only problem is that Yaacov, a man with such a forgettable face that he is regularly sent out to smuggle weapons, is paired with Bella, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Yaacov senses that here is his moment, and unlike the other men, he refuses to divorce. His wife has other ideas, and they are forced to live together, torn up with unrequited love on the one hand, and brimming with loathing on the other.
When Bella bears the child of a poet, things get worse.
READ: Author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen on the first lie she ever told
The other characters' lives play out in similar minor wars of attrition. Affairs are constant; both Yaacov and Zeev end up raising children who aren't their own. All are waiting for something: whether it's a woman on the shoreline, seeking her husband; or Yaacov, waiting for his wife to love him.
Gundar-Goshen occasionally strays into the territory of magical realism: as when a man jumps into the sea and swims several miles to shore. These little moments add a strange kind of beauty to the texture, reminding us that the miraculous is only a step away from the mundane.
There are many striking images, which often add to this quality: "Wicked animals leapt from Michael Katz's mouth in herds and flocks and galloped into the house."
Although the final third, which examines the children of the main characters, shades into predictability, the ending reasserts itself. This is a fable for the 21st century, and Gundar-Goshen a writer whose dexterity proclaims her one to watch.
A Fatal Hit-And-Run Leads To A Collision Of Cultures In 'Waking Lions'
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Waking Lions
Waking Lions
by Ayelet Gundar-goshen and Sondra Silverston
Hardcover, 341 pages purchase
Worlds collide in Waking Lions, a new novel by Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Like Tom Wolfe, who used the device of a hit-and-run accident in The Bonfire of the Vanities as a means to violently "introduce" New Yorkers of different races and classes to each other, Gundar-Goshen also begins her story with a car ride gone haywire.
One night, as neurosurgeon Dr. Eitan Green is driving home from his long hospital shift near the Israeli city of Omer, he decides to de-stress by detouring out to the moonlit desert. There, he cranks up some Janis Joplin and begins racing his SUV on the empty white gravel road.
Well, not quite empty. Because as Eitan glances at the enormous moon in his rear-view mirror, his SUV hits a man who appears out of nowhere on the road. The man looks to be African, a migrant, and, though he's still breathing, his skull is split open. The African man's life can't be saved, but Eitan's life, the one he's built with his wife and two young sons, can be. After a few minutes of tortured soul searching, the good doctor gets back in his SUV and drives home.
That opening failure of conscience reverberates throughout Waking Lions, warping Eitan's marriage and career and bringing him into unforeseen intimate contact with crowds of "others". Like many a noir patsy, Eitan comes to realize that in trying to dodge disaster, he's stepped backwards into a bottomless pit.
The next morning, after his wife has taken their young sons off to school, Eitan hears a knock at the door. A tall Eritrean woman stands outside, holding Eitan's wallet. Turns out, he dropped it at the scene of the crime.
The woman's name is Sirkit and she's the widow of the man Eitan hit and killed. In return for her silence, she demands that Eitan spend every night for the foreseeable future at a deserted garage outside the city. There, on a rusty metal table, with medicine he's ordered to steal from his own hospital, Eitan must treat an unending stream of African migrants, most of whom have walked over a thousand miles from Eritrea through Egypt and the Sinai into Israel.
As a novel, Waking Lions itself is the product of a collision of cultures and genres. Translated from the Hebrew, it's a psychological suspense tale mashed with a social novel about the refugee crisis.
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Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is also the author of One Night, Markovitch.
Pushkin Press
Overall, it's vividly imagined, clever, and morally ambiguous, although, occasionally, Gundar-Goshen's plot seems bit contrived. (Eitan's wife, for instance, happens to be the Israeli police detective investigating the hit-and-run accident.)
Those lapses, however, mean little in comparison to how deftly Gundar-Goshen complicates her characters here. Sirkit, who at first appears to be a fierce humanitarian, turns out to be charging her fellow refugees for the illicit medical service she's arranged. And, Eitan, who used to pride himself on his ethics and selflessness as a doctor, finds that, as his autonomy is taken away from him and his exhaustion mounts, his empathy for his fellow human beings withers. Here's a description of the nightly scene at the garage:
They came en masse. The rumor about secret, unrecorded medical treatment spread faster than any viral infection. They came from the deserts and wadis, the restaurants ... and the central bus station where they worked as cleaners. ...
Since [Eitan] had been coerced into helping his patients, he hated them as least as much as he hated himself. Was repulsed by the stench. The bodily fluids. ...
Without language, without the ability to exchange a single sentence the way people do ... without words, only flesh remained. Stinking. Rotting. With ulcers, excretions, inflammations, scars. Perhaps this was how a veterinarian felt.
Waking Lions contains lots of raw passages like that one. It's a smart and disturbing exploration of the high price of walking away, whether it be from a car accident or from one's own politically unstable homeland.
David Herman
February 11, 2016
Review: Waking Lions
Powerful thriller with a moral dimension
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: Israeli noir
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: Israeli noir
By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Pushkin Press, £12.99
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen made a great impact last year with her debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, a very human story about love and secrets, set against the background of present-day Israel. Waking Lions has a similar theme: how distant we can be even from our loved ones. Her characters have secrets that they can't or won't share, with consequences that will define their lives.
Eitan Green, the central character of her new novel, is a young, up-and-coming, Israeli neurologist. He is happily married to Liat, a police detective, and they have two young children. But Green has a secret. He has killed someone.
We are told what happened on the first page of the novel. Green is driving his SUV in the desert. He is driving too fast, late at night after a long exhausting session at the hospital. He runs down an Eritrean man and drives off without telling anyone. But the man's wife finds Green's wallet by the scene of the crime and comes and finds him.
Waking Lions falls into two halves. The first 180 pages develop this situation. The wife blackmails Green and he has to make a choice, which ends up threatening both his home life and his professional career.
Is the doctor a good man? Can someone be good even if they do one bad thing? Where will his lies take him?
The second half is very different. It becomes a fast-paced thriller, full of dark, moral complexity. There are Israelis, Eritrean illegal immigrants and Bedouin gangsters. There are drugs, rape and violence. And suddenly roles are reversed. It is hard to tell who are the good guys and the victims, and who are the baddies.
Amid all this, the writing becomes more and more interesting, inviting you to keep turning the pages as you get sucked into the plot. But you suddenly begin to realise that the novel turns on three couples, each with a dark story, involving either lies or terrible violence. It also turns on four kinds of space: Green's home, a place of love and domesticity; the hospital; the desert, a place of violence and death; and a fourth place which becomes increasingly significant.
Gundar-Goshen is a fascinating talent. She doesn't have a great turn of phrase but she's a brilliant story-teller, moving between plots and sub-plots with a gripping cast of characters.
And, like the best US, Israeli and Scandinavian TV dramas, she can take a straightforward genre - the thriller - and use it to explore big moral and political questions about secrets, lies and race in modern-day Israel. As the bodies pile up and the lies deepen, we enter a new genre: Israeli noir.
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen will be talking about 'Waking Lions' at Jewish Book Week on February 28. David Herman is the JC's chief fiction reviewer
Review of Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar Goshen FEBRUARY 28, 2017, 7:40 AM
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They clean. They clear tables. They wash dishes; they wash floors. They walk the streets, ride the buses. They are dark-skinned, indistinguishable, and most of them don’t speak our language. They are all around us, but we don’t acknowledge their existence. We see them in our peripheral vision, yet we never see them at all.
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Eritrean refugees in Israel, who hardly ever feature in our concerns, take center stage in the novel Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar Goshen (Little, Brown and Company, February 2017). They make a very strong impact, one that starts late at night on a dark desert highway. Dr. Eitan Green, recently relocated to Beer Sheva with his family, slams into an Eritrean man and leaves him for dead.
The next day there is a knock at Green’s door. It is the victim’s widow. She found the doctor’s wallet and traced him to his comfortable home. Desperately hoping that this woman will not report him to the police, Green offers her money, but apparently, that is not enough. Instead she calls on his medical knowledge to help treat the members of her illegal community, a demand that is impossible to refuse or escape.
Meanwhile Green’s wife Liat, just starting to prove herself as a detective on the Beer Sheva police force, is assigned a hit and run accident on a deserted moonlit road. At face value the case seems simple enough. Her colleagues state that a young Bedouin rammed into the victim and what does it matter anyway? Just an Eritrean migrant. Yet, something compels her to continue her investigation, never imagining how close to home the solution lies.
Waking Lions
Waking Lions – Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
The novel’s most fascinating character is Sirkit, an Eritrean woman who lives a meager, virtually hopeless life cleaning floors in a restaurant. Sirkit displays an enormous strength of character we didn’t expect to encounter. While we find ourselves hating Green for his guilty contemplations, we are attracted to Sirkit and her dreams, desires, and secrets.
Don’t expect Waking Lions to be a fast-paced, suspenseful detective novel. Instead it delves into the minds of the protagonists, into a world of guilt, cover-ups and lies, and a desperate need for survival. These are real people and we can easily imagine the situations they face to be real. Except for the fact that most of us never pay attention to the very real lives of the Eritreans who pass us by on Israel’s streets.
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is an Israeli author and an award-winning screenwriter. She won the Sapir Prize for her debut novel, One Night, Markovitch. Her second novel Waking Lions is being adapted into a television series.
Journey to the heart of an accidental
killer: review of Waking Lions by
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
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Waking Lions
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Pushkin Press, £12.99
"The dust was everywhere. A thin white layer, like the icing on a birthday cake no-one wants. It had
accumulated on the palm tree fronds in the central square … dust on advertising boards; dust on bus
stops; dust on the bougainvillaea straggling along the edge of the sidewalk, faint with thirst." The
beginning of Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s second novel, Waking Lions, is a none-too-subtle allusion to the
opening of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath. Steinbeck’s struggling farming families flee the
dustbowl of Oklahoma in search of the green – if not entirely pleasant – land of California; the Eritrean
migrants in Gundar-Goshen’s story move from dustbowl to dustbowl: from a country of war and starvation
to the lonely desert lands of Israel.
The central character in Waking Lions, however, is not a desperate immigrant. Doctor Eitan Green is an
experienced Israeli neurosurgeon who lives in the city of Beersheba. Aᴸer a particularly tiring shiᴸ at
Soroka hospital he climbs into his SUV and drives out to Kibbutz Tlalim, a race track in the desert. It is out
here, trying to achieve a cathartic release by driving around at top speed, that Eitan knocks down and kills
an Eritrean man. At home, Eitan is coming to terms with what he has done when a tall and elegant black
woman called Sirkit knocks on his door. She is the wife of the dead man, and is holding Eitan’s wallet in
Sirkit, it transpires, is one of the best things about Waking Lions. Beautiful, clever and sharp, she is a kind
of down and out femme fatale who knows that only the ruthless survive when you live in a criminal
underworld.
The price Eitan has to pay for Sirkit’s silence is to become a doctor to the endless procession of illegal
immigrants resident and passing through Tlalim. In a garage near the track where he killed Sirkit’s
husband, Eitan is forced into running a nightly clinic. His attempts to hide his crime and a�er-hours
activities from his family are made all the more problematic when his police inspector wife, Liat, is tasked
with finding out who killed Sirkit’s husband. As the narrator remarks: "You never understand how complex
reality is until you have to find a replacement for it." The plot turns into a labyrinth that winds through the
racial and class divides in Israeli society, and Gundar-Goshen tells this suspenseful story with a delving
and fresh style that unearths the inner lives of her characters.
For all the drama, it is in the minutiae of Gundar-Goshen’s prose that the most pleasure is to be found. As
an African immigrant, Sirkit is invisible to all who look at her. But in the restaurant where she illegally
works, a di�erent sort of oppression is encountered. The clientele do see her, but only as an object: "They
stared at her when she walked and imagined her when she was gone, but at no point did they ever see her.
They merely piled their desire on her, the way jugs of water are tied on a donkey’s back." The metaphor
perfectly conjures up the utilitarian way that Eritrean women are treated, both by mainstream society,
and by the Bedouins who exploit them and their labour. Eitan seems to be one of the few who
understands Sirkit in a holistic way, mind and body, and soon the enmity between them turns into
something close to love.
Gundar-Goshen’s debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, also explored the dangers of love and how it can
change a person into something they thought they weren’t. The protagonist, Yaacov Markovitch, marries a
woman to save her from Nazi-dominated Europe, but denies her a divorce in the hope that one day she
will love him back. One Night demonstrated a wonderful tragi-comic sensibility and a sly sense of irony.
Waking Lions leans more towards pathos, although there are comic interludes: the minor character Victor
Balulo, for example, who seems to conduct his life in a respectable manner, then stands on street corners
and screams expletives into the dusty air. The premise of this new novel – a privileged white male
becomes enmeshed in a world he has spent his whole life working to avoid – is less original than GundarGoshen’s
debut, but this is of little importance once one has entered her imaginary world. Moreover,
Waking Lions shows us that there’s more mystery in who we think we are than in the narrative of any
crime thriller.
Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Category: Literary Fiction
Rating: 5/5
Reviewer: Lesley Mason
Reviewed by Lesley Mason
Summary: A tense tale of life at the margins of society. A respected Doctor is involved in a hit and run, which drags him into an underworld of as much good as evil, where life is anything but certain. A morality tale without heroes, a stunning read, and one to make you think beyond the confines of the plot.
Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
Pages: 320 Date: March 2016
Publisher: Pushkin Press
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781782271567
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If the point of literature - as opposed to the less exalted though just-as-worthwhile forms of writing - is to force you to think about the real world, the political world, the painful life-as-we-know-it world, whilst catching you up in a story about something that never really happened, but, you know, might well have done so…and if you think that matters, then you must read this book.
I often wonder about the value-judgement that trails alongside the word literature as opposed to, say, novels or writing or stories or the gods forfend genre fiction. I often think that literature is a bit like an Academy Lifetime Achievement award, granted only after a period of years and only on sufferance, and usually only if it wasn't that well-loved or well-appreciated or well-acknowledged at the time. I wonder about this, because I like reading stories. Mostly, I don't care about their literary merit. I love Charles Dickens no more nor less than I love Agatha Christie or Terry Pratchett. I love Sholokov for all it's more history and memoir than literature, and Bill Bryson though it's technically neither.
But then, something comes along that makes me think that maybe there is, after all, a difference. Maybe some books count as being something more than just the story-telling and you know it even as you're reading them.
I'm not convinced, but it's a definite maybe.
The book that has provoked this musing is Gundar-Goshen's second novel Waking Lions.
Dr Eitan Green is a good man. We know this. Not only by definition: he is a family man, he is a brain surgeon, he loves his wife and his kids, and supports them all in every way. We know it also by his history. He is currently serving in a hospital in the dust-ridden outpost of Beersheba as informal punishment for daring to threaten his superiors with whistle-blowing on their corruption.
The work is stressful, and one night he decides to relieve his stress by going for a ride in the desert, tearing joyfully up and down the dunes in his SUV under a beautiful moon to the strains of Janis Joplin screaming her heart out.
A thud, a crumple, and in his is wake a dead African migrant.
Almost immediately Dr Eitan Green ceases to be quite such a good man. He drives away.
One decision that will change everything…because he dropped his wallet at the scene, and illegal or not the dead Eritrean had a wife: an intelligent wife.
Sirkit tracks Eitan down and puts a proposition to him. He thinks of paying her off, but what she wants is not money and this draws him into a dark world to which he had never given a moment's thought: a world which threatens everything he knows and loves.
Waking Lions is a surprising book. Suspense normally relies on being led along a path and then having it twist on you. Gundar-Goshen's work does something different. It leads you on a trail into the desert, into a wide open space, where all paths are open but equally all are hidden. There are not paths to twist, because throughout the book, and I mean for the whole of it, right up to the final few pages, there are so many possibilities none of them more likely than any other, none of them less certain, that all you're left with as a reader is the wanting to know… what will he do, what will she do…
…and in the background, where will Liat's path lead her. Liat is Eitan's wife. She is a police officer, and her beat includes the backwater where an Eritrean has been found left for dead. She has her theories. Her detective colleagues have their suspects. But are either of them anywhere near the truth?
This is a novel about secrets and lies and how easy they are to construct. It is about love and the fragile basis on which we build it and the lies we tell to protect it. It is about how little we can know one another, and how maybe, just maybe, sometimes, that might be a good thing.
It is also about the way the world works. Politically. Badly. It is about prejudice and war and poverty and crisis.
It is a feminist novel, without having unflawed female heroines.
It is about pride, and lack of self-esteem. About heritage, and how we corrupt it.
It is about how we relate to our parents, and to our children.
It is about how good comes from bad, and the reverse.
It is, ultimately, about humanity.
All of that wrapped in a drama that is gripping enough if you don't want to think that far into what it all means… but to be honest, I defy you not to respond to the depth.
It took me longer to read than I would normally have expected, but it rewards commitment. The language fits the telling so credit to the translator. It feels to be of the place. Gentle, lyric, tense.
We’re so used to reading about Israel from the outside, maybe we’ll understand more by reading the writers based there. For more Israeli crime fiction Bookbag recommends A Possibility of Violence: An Inspector Avraham Avraham Novel (Inspector Avraham 2) by D A Mishani and Todd Hasak-Lowy (Translator)
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‘One Night, Markovitch’, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Officers check papers of emigrants to Palestine in the 1920s
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FEBRUARY 6, 2015 by: Review by Rebecca Abrams
The words “assured” and “debut” are often yoked together in reviews of first novels but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s One Night, Markovitch. The confidence of the writing is certainly one of its pleasures but what won me over from the first page is the exuberant generosity of Gundar-Goshen’s storytelling, the fine balance she sustains in her portrayal of the rich comedy of human experience and the inevitable suffering. This is, in short, a marvellous novel: tender, sensual, thought-provoking, and very funny.
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The story opens in Palestine in the build-up to the second world war. Yaacov Markovitch, a young farmer, and his philandering friend, Zeev Feinberg, are on the run after Zeev is caught in flagrante with the butcher’s wife, Rachel Mandelbaum. The touch of Fiddler on the Roof about these shtetl names is not accidental, underscoring both the immediate comedy and the cultural context. To escape the wrath of the knife-wielding butcher, the two men are dispatched to Europe as part of a secret mission to get around immigration quotas by marrying Jewish women and bringing them back to Palestine, where they will then immediately divorce. The problems begin when Markovitch’s faux wife, Bella, turns out to be the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, and one he has no intention of divorcing, not even for the advancement of the Jewish Homeland. Bella, in return, takes a lifetime vow of implacable hatred for the man who has thus imprisoned her.
Markovitch’s futile but unwavering passion for Bella and the icy chill of their marriage is set against the rapturously volatile relationship between Zeev and his orange-scented wife, Sonya. As the story unfolds, the lives of these four characters become increasingly intertwined in unexpected and sometimes catastrophic ways. Happiness is a blessing, friendship a gift, and both can be taken away in the blink of an eye, and equally can return when all hope is lost.
Gundar-Goshen’s prose is suffused with references to Jewish and Hebrew literature. At times she invokes the language of the Old Testament — “The people saw the clouds in the sky and filled with expectation”; “The rain came and filled the land. And after the rain came the flowers.” At other times, she employs the cadences of the Talmud, or of Yiddish proverbs: “A person who doesn’t know how to live only rarely knows how to die.” In addition, she has a good line in humour all of her own, as when Sonya reminds herself: “Though it’s possible to die of love, it’s quite difficult to live from it.”
Erotic yearning, sensual delight, romantic devotion satisfied or otherwise, are the driving forces in the lives of these characters. The novel’s larger themes are woven into the fabric of their actions and concerns with considerable delicacy. It’s not until Yaacov Markovitch takes to sleeping with the nightdress of his errant wife cradled in his arms that the metaphors contained in these entangled love stories really start to nudge at our attention. “Look at us, look at this country,” Markovitch says in response to Zeev’s mockery. “Two thousand years we’ve been hoping for her, waiting for her, sleeping at night with our arms around the sleeves of her nightdress, because what is history if not the sleeves of a nightdress that has no smell? And you think she wants us? You think this country returns our love? Nonsense!”
The politics is present in One Night, Markovitch — what intelligent contemporary Israeli novelist can avoid it? The mythic, mythologising aspect to the Israeli narrative is omnipresent, and in places gently debunked: “Damn it, these people held dragons by their wings, galloped on unicorns, rode lions.” But the feeling of polemic is absent. Instead, what shines through is Gundar-Goshen’s skill as a storyteller, able to encompass both the small domestic details of men and women’s lives and the large sweep of history.
One Night, Markovitch, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, translated by Sondra Silverston, Pushkin Press, RRP£10, 384 pages
Rebecca Abrams is the author of ‘Touching Distance’ (Picador)
Photograph: Alinari/Rex
One Night, Markovitch by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen review – a lush debut set in the fledgling Israeli state
The eternal themes of love and longing, and sex and marriage displace historic events in this moving and satisfying narrative
Instinctive story-telling … Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Instinctive story-telling … Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Photograph:
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Jane Housham
Friday 20 February 2015 11.00 EST Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 10.15 EST
Just as Louis de Bernières’s fiction owes a debt to South American literature, so too Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s lush first novel, translated by Sondra Silverston, seems to take inspiration from the magical-realist traditions of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. But she is Israeli, and the culture and history of Israel clearly inform her writing. Set in the years before the birth of Israel, during the British Mandate for Palestine and Nazi rule in Europe, the novel wears its period lightly. Eternal themes of love and longing, sex and marriage take priority. This is story-telling that feels instinctive, chasing characters into extreme situations. Reversals of fortune and the literary equivalent of handbrake turns follow one another furiously. Characters suffer and prosper in love, living, dying, hoping, despairing. Men and women smash together, scorching each other, sometimes fatally, with the intensity of their desires. Gundar-Goshen exerts reassuring control over her narrative, though, and confidently moulds symmetries from it that are both moving and satisfying.
ONE NIGHT, MARKOVITCH BY AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHEN - REVIEW
JANE GRAHAM
BOOK REVIEWS
FEB 4, 2015
"One Night, Markovitch is a sprawling story almost entirely devoid of cliche; unpredictable, sensuous, vivid"
Reviews:
When the Facts Change, Tony Judt and Jennifer Homans, hardback, William Heinemann, £25, out January 29
One Night, Markovitch, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, paperback, Pushkin Press, £10, out Jan 29
When the Facts Change is a new posthumous collection of essays from the exceptional historian and intellectual Tony Judt, compiled by his widow, Jennifer Homans.
Homans also contributes a fantastic introduction, which reads both as a heartfelt tribute to the man she loved and admired, and as a guide to the historian, whose thirst for knowledge and keenness to remain independent of mind, perpetually receptive (hence the title) and practically positive kept him questioning, analysing and working – even when, quadriplegic and weakened, he knew he was dying.
Homans lists Judt’s great inspirations: Karl Marx, Isaiah Berlin, Philip Larkin and, at the top of the tree, Albert Camus and George Orwell. The essays themselves stand comparison with the latter’s for depth of thought – driven by a pain-staking search for moral fortitude and a pragmatism borne out of Judt’s undertaking to write, and draw conclusions, ‘in good faith’.
What becomes ever clearer is his gradual disappointment and frustration with an increasingly history-ignorant worldJudt writes brilliantly about contemporary Israel, European anti-Semitism (most presciently about racial and religious intolerance in France) and the impact of the 9/11 attacks. What becomes ever clearer is his gradual disappointment and frustration with an increasingly history-ignorant world, creating a persuasive mood that will make the reader, convinced of Judt’s innate fair-mindedness and deep desire for social improvement, wring his hands and wish it was otherwise.
It’s hard to believe One Night, Markovitch is a debut. The 32-year-old Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen has won awards for short film scripts but to summon up a novel as affecting as this is quite another kind of feat.
One Night – the story of two Jewish friends travelling from their home in Palestine to meet, briefly marry and thus ‘save’ two Jewish women from an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe on the brink of World War Two – is remarkable in its sure-footedness and clarity of voice.
First, it is genuinely funny and delightfully quirky; one of our protagonists Zeev Feinberg is ‘first of all, a moustache’. Feinberg is the Oliver Reed of the two friends – loud, sexy, hedonistic, audacious. The other, Yaacov Markovitch, is more of an Eddie Marsan – you vaguely know his face but can’t quite remember where from. Markovitch has developed an undemanding personality in response to his lack of impact.
But when the gods of admin wed him to the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, he rises up with a new boldness. He will not, as instructed, divorce her. She will hate him, his neighbours will threaten him – even Feinberg will abandon him. But the man who has expected and taken nothing from life can’t accept the alternative; ‘to be so close to living his life with a woman like Bella Zeigerman, and not to dare…’ And he decides: no.
What follows is a sprawling story almost entirely devoid of cliche; unpredictable, sensuous and vivid. Hope, that cruel mistress, reigns throughout, in Markovitch’s rejected yearning heart and in the reader, waiting for a transformation in his fortunes.
Time passes, there is war and peace and lives play out the way they do; in turns joyful and disappointing, comforting and shocking. Compassion and heroism rear up and fade away. Children arrive and change things, in big and small ways.
The prose stays economical yet poetic, and the characters so pitifully human it is, at times, immensely touching. The film rights have been snapped up. I hope they get it right. Eddie Marsan would be awesome.
@Janeannie
Illustration: Dom McKenzie
Is Zionism Like Unrequited Love?
An Israeli debut novel about a plot to save Jewish women from the Nazis and bring them to pre-state Israel seems to think so.
Giulia Miller Feb 11, 2015 2:40 PM
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Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s novel is neither a cynical appraisal of Israel’s birth, nor is it tinged with nostalgia. Dreamstime
“One Night, Markovitch,” by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Pushkin Press, 384 pp., $15 (paperback)
Penning a novel in the 21st century about Israel’s early history is perhaps a surprising undertaking for a budding author; the period of the state’s establishment is steeped in contradictions that are further complicated by a modern-day perspective. But Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s debut novel, “One Night, Markovitch,” broaches the subject with imagination and wit. Set largely in pre-state Israel on the eve of World War II, it has drama, sex, betrayal and humor – everything necessary to captivate a contemporary audience.
Most of all, “One Night, Markovitch” is a dizzying assault on the senses. The world it describes, a Promised Land redolent of overripe fruit and lust, is sickly sweet, inhabited by characters that veer maniacally between excess and denial, and stumble drunkenly from hope to despair. The novel is both intimate and epic in its proportions. Spanning two generations, it centers on the fortunes of two very different Jewish men: the gallant and moustachioed Zeev Feinberg, and his friend, the uncharismatic Yaacov Markovitch.
The fact that its author – recipient of the prestigious Sapir Prize for debut fiction – is also an experienced screenwriter is no surprise: In Sondra Silverston’s masterful English translation, the vivid descriptions of landscape and irresistibly amusing dialogue are pure cinema (rumors suggest a film adaptation is imminent).
Our story begins, slapstick style, in an unnamed village in northern Palestine: Feinberg has been sleeping with the wife of Avraham Mandelbaum, the local butcher, and been found out. If he doesn’t leave the village, his balls are likely to be chopped off; he persuades his best friend, Markovitch, to flee with him to Tel Aviv and seek the help of Feinberg’s old acquaintance, Froike, the deputy commander of the Irgun (pre-state underground militia).
Froike, a formidable man who would “swallow a grenade and eject it from his anus if it would help save the country,” concocts a solution that later proves to be calamitous for everyone involved. As part of a Zionist mission, Feinberg and Markovitch will sail to Europe with a group of young men; there they will be arbitrarily matched and wed to Jewish women they have never met. The grooms will then bring their brides back to Palestine, thus achieving two goals at once: saving young Jewish women from the Nazis, and increasing the Jewish population in the Holy Land. Back home the fictitious marriages will be annulled and all will supposedly be well.
In a cruel twist of fate, the unremarkable Markovitch, forever overlooked and ignored by women, is paired with the most beautiful of the would-be brides, Bella Zeigerman.
Flabbergasted by the fortuitous match, Markovitch realizes this might be his one shot at true happiness. He makes a tragic calculation, assuming that if he refuses to grant Bella a divorce, this exquisite creature, utterly indifferent to her fake groom, will over time fall in love with him.
Upon their return to Palestine, all the new marriages are dissolved, except for that of Markovitch, who callously denies Bella her annulment. Meanwhile, Feinberg, who has gladly divorced his hairy wife, marries his true love – the passionate and volatile Sonya. All four return to the village, with Bella, now a caged bird, livid in captivity and Markovitch stubborn in his resolve to conquer her heart.
What follows is an entertaining and moving account of the vicissitudes of life and love that befall the two couples. Bella becomes a zealous advocate for the Hebrew translation of German poetry, while Sonya relocates to Tel Aviv to become a hotshot member of the Irgun. Even the plain and lonely Markovitch, despised by everyone in the village for his treatment of Bella, does something extraordinary and helps deliver a neighbor’s baby beneath a carob tree.
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Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Photo by Nir Kafri
While Gundar-Goshen recounts the couples’ stories, she also injects some uproarious insults into the mix: At one point, while her future husband is still at sea, Sonya is standing on the beach, watching the crabs, and yells out to an imaginary Feinberg:
"I hope that one of these grabs your penis in its claws ... When I get through with you, you’ll walk on your side, like them, for the rest of your life.”
As well as its colorful concoction of pathos and humor, “One Night, Markovitch” has a distinctly mythic quality – reminiscent of magical realist novels such as Meir Shalev’s “The Blue Mountain” (1988) and “Four Meals” (1994) – where characters possess curious or superhuman qualities: Feinberg’s wife, Sonya, has a genetic condition that leaves her smelling of oranges, while their son, Yair, gives off a constant scent of peaches. In Sonya’s case, this fragrance is considered seductive, luring men to their downfall like a siren’s song. For the adolescent Yair, however, this condition is a curse, preventing him from fulfilling his dream of becoming a soldier, because it would mean always alerting the enemy to his whereabouts. Feinberg, who is secretly ashamed of his son’s affliction, does his best to mask the scent by repeatedly scrubbing him in water. However, his prejudice toward Yair proves to be not simply a matter of gender inequality, but of life and death, and he pays dearly for it.
Unlike “The Blue Mountain,” which overtly takes Zionism to task by undermining the mythology of the Second Aliyah, Gundar-Goshen’s novel is trickier to categorize. It is neither a cynical appraisal of Israel’s birth, nor is it tinged with nostalgia. It is, in some ways, very old-fashioned – men regale their friends with amusing tales of sexual exploits and women are so beautiful that sea captains are thrown off course and sail in the wrong direction. But all this is interwoven with a thoroughly modern sensibility that often punctures any romanticism. For instance, we learn that Bella chose to immigrate to Palestine because of a lyrical poem she once read, comparing the sun to an orange. When she eventually reaches her destination, she seeks out the poet, only to discover that he reeks of chicken liver and that she doesn’t even like oranges.
Old Jews of the Diaspora and the New Israeli Sabra
The most damning deflation relates to Markovitch’s desperate attempt to make Bella fall in love with him. At the start of the novel, when Feinberg scorns his friend for his pigheadedness, Markovitch compares his plight to that of the Jews:
“Look at us, look at this country. Two thousand years we’ve been hoping for her, waiting for her, sleeping at night with our arms around the sleeves of her nightdress ... And you think she wants us ... Nonsense! She vomits us up time and time again, sends us to hell ... You hold on to her as hard as you can and you hope...”
Without giving too much of the plot away, “One Night, Markovitch” hypnotizes the reader with the possibility that if you truly desire something for long enough, it will be yours. Yet because it is premised on unrequited love, the novel also equates Zionism with a mad ardor and selfishness.
Much of Modern Hebrew literature over the past 60 years has posited an unresolved relationship between the Old Jew of the European Diaspora and the New Israeli Sabra – take, for example, Moshe Shamir’s “He Walked Through the Fields” (1948), David Grossman’s “See Under: Love” (1989) and Yehoshua Kenaz’s “The Way to the Cats” (1991) – yet it has nearly always remained on dry land. The vast body of water that separates Israel from Europe rarely features in these works, and so “One Night, Markovitch,” which revolves around four major sea voyages between Palestine and Germany, during and after World War II, is an oddity in this respect.
Each 11-day voyage is described in detail; far away from the shore and the politics of the two countries, attention is given to the rocking of the boat, the seasickness, the promenades on deck and the expectations of the characters as they approach their destinations.
The water that surrounds the boat is always “calm” and “opaque,” resolutely refusing to reflect the emotions of the protagonists. It is simply cold, wet water, and nothing more; the fact that, by contrast, land is hardly ever just land in Modern Hebrew literature – metaphor, simile, symbol, yes, but not just land – reinforces the strangeness of the water.
In contrast to the evocative and fleshed-out descriptions of Palestine, Germany, as described by Gundar-Goshen, is a surreal labyrinth of cobblestones and dark alleyways, devoid of place names and geographical markers. When Markovitch and Feinberg disembark after their first journey to find their wives, it is as though they have entered a dream. All that is mentioned is a nondescript café and a waitress; the two men could be anywhere. The clue to their sinister bearings comes when Markovitch innocuously drops a “mountain of porcelain saucers and coffee and cake” and muses that the crashing sound is a bit less noisy than Kristallnacht.
Although Feinberg’s much later second voyage to Germany, during which he goes in pursuit of Nazi criminals, includes more concrete references to Nazi crimes – such as German abuse of Jewish children – the horrors of the Holocaust are, for the most part, barely mentioned. More importantly, facing these horrors, or coming to terms with them, is never an end in itself: Feinberg may have been sent to Europe on a mission to save Jewish girls, and then later to hunt down war criminals, but he only ever agrees because he is running away from something back home. The heroism involved in these operations is forever pierced by pragmatism.
The fake marriages that form the backbone to “One Night, Markovitch” are based on historical fact and this alone is of interest. But the “what ifs” proffered in the novel – what if a plain and lonely man joined a Zionist mission to rescue European women? What if he was randomly matched with the most desirable one? What if he refused to let her go? – keep the reader hooked until the end.
Giulia Miller is a freelance reviewer. She is the author of “Reconfiguring Surrealism in Modern Hebrew Literature: Menashe Levin, Yitzhak Oren and Yitzhak Orpaz” (Vallentine Mitchell, 2013).
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/books/jerusalem-international-book-fair/.premium-1.640311
David Herman
February 26, 2015
Review: One Night, Markovitch
Love given, taken and lost
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: subtle shifts
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: subtle shifts
By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen(Trans: Sondra Silverstein)
Pushkin Press, £10
When we first meet Yaakov Markovitch, he is serving in the Irgun in 1940s Palestine. Early on, he strikes up a friendship with Zeev Feinberg. The two could not be more different. Markovitch is quiet, ordinary, "gloriously average". Feinberg is larger-than-life, a creature of appetites, whether food or sex. Imagine Porthos in The Man in the Iron Mask played by Gérard Depardieu. That's Feinberg.
At first, it seems as if this powerful, moving novel is going to be a rom-com. Feinberg craves sex and lots of it. Markovitch is his innocent sidekick. But the mood darkens. In due course, they both end up married: Feinberg to Sonya, who is more than a match for him, and Markovitch to Bella, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. This is when things start to get complicated.
There is a third couple in the small, rural village: Avraham Mandelbaum, the slaughterer - like Feinberg, a giant of a man - and his wife, the beautiful Rachel, a refugee from pre-war Vienna. Add another force of nature - Ephraim, deputy leader of the Irgun - and you have the central cast of characters.
Gundar-Goshen moves expertly between them, weaving a fascinating plot, part love story, part historical novel, and always gripping. The writing is sometimes beautifully evocative and there are perhaps half-a-dozen moments when your mouth will open in astonishment at some dramatic twist.
The novel switches smoothly between gentle humour and darker, more powerful emotions. Gundar-Goshen has a gift for shifting tone and keeping several threads going, moving from one relationship to another, weaving in and out of the big background history of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the birth of Israel. This is subtle and never overdone. Gundar-Goshen keeps her eye on the central characters, as they fall in and out of love.
Strikingly, although they fall in love and marry, they remain alone, afflicted by terrible sadness, each for different reasons. The village remains the centre of the story but characters flee: to post-war Europe or to the big city, Tel Aviv or Haifa, to find love, fulfilment or to serve the new Israel. Though often on the move they usually return to the village.
There is something very simple, almost biblical, about the storytelling and the tragic choices the central characters face. This is not a "state of Israel" novel. There are no significant Arab characters. It is a human story about love, requited or unrequited, and passion. Its central theme is how distant we can be even from our wives and husbands. Her characters all have secrets that they can't or won't share, with consequences that will define their lives. This is a promising debut by a very talented young Israeli writer.
Josh Cohen will be interviewing Ayelet Gundar-Goshen this Sunday, March 1 at Jewish Book Week. David Herman is the JC's chief fiction reviewer
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s passion for storytelling: One Night, MarkovitchWith the launch of her new book this week, Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen tells Deborah Cicurel about her major passion for storytelling One Night, Markovitch is the kind of novel aspiring writers everywhere wish they’d penned. Funny yet simultaneously heartbreaking, it centres around two men, Zeev Feinberg and Yaacov Markovitch, who travel to Germany as […]February 16, 2015, 1:53 pm
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Ayelet Gundar
With the launch of her new book this week, Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen tells Deborah Cicurel about her major passion for storytelling
One Night, Markovitch is the kind of novel aspiring writers everywhere wish they’d penned.
Funny yet simultaneously heartbreaking, it centres around two men, Zeev Feinberg and Yaacov Markovitch, who travel to Germany as part of a group who will marry Jewish women, selected randomly by the authorities, to allow them to escape war-torn Europe and enter Palestine legally – only to be divorced straight after.
Except Yaacov won’t divorce his beautiful wife, Bella, leading the rest of the plot to unfurl deliciously.
It’s the sort of book you’ll be reading with a torch at 4am and still be clutching on the Tube the next day. It is a remarkable debut by Israeli author Gundar-Goshen, a prize-winning author at the tender age of 32.
A trained psychologist, civil rights activist and ex-news editor on a leading Israel newspaper, she is accomplished, articulate and an exceptionally talented writer.
One Night, Markovitch takes place in so many locations – the freezing landscape of Europe, the chaos of Israel, the tempest of the ocean – that my first question when I meet Gundar-Goshen is to ask what initially inspired it.
“I owe my first novel to the boring ‘meeting the parents’ gathering,” she jokes. “The first time I visited the home of my boyfriend, I saw a strange house behind the fence, but there was something sad coming out of it. I was curious. I said ‘Who lives here?’ “My boyfriend said: “She is the most beautiful, miserable woman in the whole village.”
That was the first time I heard about this heroic fake marriage operation. What happened was that during the Second World War, a group of men came to Europe to marry Jewish women and sneak them out. This man refused to let his wife go. I was fascinated by this woman’s story.”
Having read her book, I can understand Gundar-Goshen’s fascination with the anti-hero of her story, Yaacov, who refuses to divorce Bella, hoping that one day she will love him back. “A man risks his life to enter Nazi Europe – everyone tries to get out and he goes in! – and then he turns into the bad guy. He’s so madly in love that he becomes totally blind.”
I ask if part of her motivation for writing the novel was to address the ongoing issue of women being unable to obtain a get. “A writer isn’t a politician,” she says. “I didn’t write an essay about issues in Israel today. Of course, as a woman, I’m furious about it, but there’s a difference between a petition and a novel. In a petition, the man is a bad guy; in a novel, it’s a bit more complicated than that.”
I tell her that when I read the novel, I found it hard to view Yaacov consistently as ‘the bad guy’ – that I actually felt sorry for him. “I’m pleased you said that,’ Gundar-Goshen says. “I didn’t want people to think he was a villain. I wanted him to be a real person.”
It is the intimately personal details with which the author imbues her characters that makes them so lifelike. I ask her if it’s true that all good characters are 50 percent the writer and 50 percent someone the writer knows. She laughs at that and says: “It’s like Frankenstein. You take one organ out of everyone you know, the moustache from one man, the smell from another… you put it all together and create a new something.”
The novel spans decades, generations, but it begins with the war and the birth of Israel. “I was always drawn to that period because this is where legends begin, where myths were born,” Gundar-Goshen says, in the poetic way only a writer can. “Israel was born out of a womb of death and fire. I was always fascinated by it.”17 ayelet 1
It is a very Jewish tale – the experiences, the gossiping, the relationships. She says: “Some of the stories in Markovitch were based on my own family’s experience. “When you’re a kid and you listen to the stories, your family sound like heroes, and when you grow up you realise you don’t agree with everything they did. You realise that some people can be both heroes and villains.”
As her success begins to take hold, she will no doubt be flying all over the world for launches and parties and events. I ask how she feels about the various translations of her book, given that her voice is so strong and distinctive. Her reply is direct. “I didn’t read the English translation because I knew it would be too hard,” she says.
It took her two years to write her debut book. She recalls: “I kept asking myself who is this man? Why would he do such a thing? From that came the character, a man who nobody bothers to look at. That’s the man who would hold somebody by force. That was my door into the story.” As a psychologist, her journey to understanding Yaacov’s motivations is one of trying to avoid the temptation to label someone ‘the bad guy’. “You always search for a door,” she says.
“Even if what you’re looking at looks like a huge wall of bricks, you always search for a door, and if you search long enough you will always find a way in.”
The film rights to her book have already been bought, and she is halfway through writing the screenplay, which she calls very tricky. “You have to be able to let go of what you love in order to write something new,”she explains.
When I ask why it’s tough to adapt her book, she laughs. “It’s like having to fall in love with someone all over again,” she says. As a reader, I can’t wait to fall in love with One Night, Markovitch all over again.
• One Night, Markovitch is published by Pushkin Press and is out now, priced £10