The One Facing Us
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A richly colored narrative of a flamboyant Jewish-Egyptian family and its dispersal across three continents, from Israel's most original new novelist.
Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious, is sent from Israel to Cameroon to stay with her hardheaded Uncle Sicourelle, who is charged with straightening her out. But Esther resists her uncle's plans for her future--which include marriage to a cousin--and in the privileged indolence of postcolonial Africa, she looks to the past instead. Using sepia portraits and scraps of letters, Esther pieces together the history of her family, a once-grand Egyptian-Jewish clan, and its displacement from Cairo in the 1950s to Israel, Africa, and New York.
As the worn photographs yield their secrets, Esther uncovers a rich tale of wives and ex-wives; revolving mistresses and crushing marriages; desperate intrigues and disappointments; poignant contrasts between the living past and the dead present. In sensuous, inventive prose, Matalon penetrates the mysteries of cultural exile and family life to produce a first novel that is mature, authentic, and finely polished.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Illustrated with 17 snapshots from an imaginary photo album, the English-language debut from Israeli writer Matalon is a kaleidoscopic family saga chronicling the disintegration of an Egyptian-Jewish clan as, after WWII, its members fan out from Cairo to Israel, New York and Africa. Their wildly divergent fates are filtered through the ironic eye of troubled 17-year-old Esther, dispatched from Tel Aviv by her headstrong mother, In s, and her cynical grandmother, Nona Fortuna, to Cameroon, where her maternal Uncle Jacques Sicourelle, a stoic factory owner, and her parsimonious French Aunt Marie-Ange may be plotting to marry her off to Marie-Ange's sullen son from a previous marriage. Colorful shards of Matalon's quirky, sharply observed mosaic include Esther's peripatetic, pan-Arabist father, Robert, who dabbles in Israeli leftist politics and explores central Africa; her maternal uncle Moise, a Zionist who leaves Egypt in the late 1940s to found a kibbutz in Palestine; his brother Edouard, tyrannical head of Israel's secret service interrogation team in Gaza, and Robert's sister Nadine, a suicidal New York City librarian and Emily Dickinson scholar. Matalon's subtle decoding of her photomontage adds a postmodernist flavor to this study of cultural displacement, which sensitively probes postcolonial Africa's plight as well as the clash between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.
