On Her Own

It feels oddly like a provocative act to review a novel about present day Israel, as to even breathe the name of that country is so fraught with opposed opinions these days. On Her Own, a novel by Lihi Lapid, translated from the original Hebrew, is about an Israel beneath and apart from the headlines, written
before October 7, a smaller picture in already small country. Told primarily through the eyes of its female characters, it’s a story of ordinary people living in a most non-ordinary country.

At the center is rebellious teenager Nina, who takes up with an older married man with an unsavory criminal reputation, much to the consternation of her single mother, Irina, an immigrant from Kiev, still Russia when she emigrated. It’s the Persephene-Demeter tale from Greek mythology, as Irina wistfully recalls how her daughter, now missing, has changed:

She remembers…the bond they had, and thinks about how much has changed this year since she shot up and started watching what she eats and her cheeks aren’t like two jelly doughnuts anymore, and the admiring way she always looked at Irina dropped away along with her baby fat.

Finding herself in a dangerous situation – we aren’t told the exact details – Nina escapes the dark world of her boyfriend, and lands, disoriented and disheveled, in the doorway of a Tel Aviv apartment building. There she meets Carmela, an elderly woman living alone. In the fog of dementia, Carmela mistakes Nina for the granddaughter she longs to see, the child of her son, Itamar, who left for America many years ago.

As Nina decides to go along with this confusion of identity, she develops a sweetly caring relationship for Carmela, who is clearly in dire need of companionship and basic care. Needing to buy supplies,  she meets Eitan, a young man who works at the nearby mini-mart. Eitan quickly catches on to Nina’s deception, but as he is increasingly romantically captivated by her, does not let on that he knows something is amiss.

Like a tossed rock making ever wider ripples in a pond, the story expands to include a wider circle of characters At times, the hopscotching from person to person becomes disorienting, keeping the Israeli names straight, and who is what in relation to whom. But it is an engaging human story; a mother missing a daughter who has gone astray, the grandmother who likely knows in some part of her brain that she is being deceived, but enjoys the attention of the stranger taking care of her, and Nina, the young woman who discovers a sense of self-worth at last.

At its heart, it’s a distillation of the anomie and disruption that is a common feature of contemporary life. Millions across the world are now refugees for reasons of conflict or economic hardship, and young digital nomads who move about simply because they can. The fallout from such global movement is a breakdown of family structure which had before provided stability and a support system.

It is through the eyes of Carmela’s son, Itamar, who deserted his home country for greater opportunity, that this modern dislocation is reflected upon:

Is something really wrong with Mom, or is it him, with his feelings of guilt for what he did? He, the deserter. The traitor. The coward. The sellout. How many times had he heard his parents say those words about their friends’ children who had left the country. Words used by Israelis of their generation who built the country and saw their children leaving it, trickling out. His generation gives it a different label. Relocation, they call it. Fulfilling themselves, realizing their potential somewhere in Silicon Valley, in the London Stock exchange…But at the end of all that globalness, he thinks, is an old woman who’s been left alone on the other side of the ocean.

Ironically – the country of Israel, as conceived by its idealistic founders, was conceived as a place of communal living structures, like the kibbutz, where social and cultural life is a shared experience. So all the more striking in the contrast.

In On her Own, we are shown a picture of life in Israel that is radically different from that vision. It is one where criminal activity and corruption have become common, and while military activity is never far from daily life – Carmela had another son who was killed in an army operation many years before – the novel takes place in a period of relative peace in Israel and of course, relative is the key word here, as it has always been when speaking about Israel and the Middle East, in general. 

On Her Own is a book of modest wisdom about mothers and daughters, which pulls the reader into its web of connections and provides an unusual window into Israeli society. This book, translated by Sondra Silverston, is the first by the author to be translated into English.

Reviewer bio: Lisa Seidenberg is a writer and filmmaker residing in coastal Connecticut. Her documentary films were shown in Berlin Film Festival, Doc.London, Sundance Festival and others. Recent writing was published in Atticus Review, Asymptote Journal, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, NewVerseNews. Her art book Dark Pools: Historic Swimming Pools of Berlin is distributed by PrintedMatter.

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