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| Israel Segal |
My Brother`s Keeper |
| Novel |
Jerusalem, Keter, 2004. 249 pp.
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The struggle between two brothers is as old as human history and appears as a motif in several biblical stories. Israel Segal`s novel is a modern, dramatic version fraught with human drives and tensions. Set in contemporary Jerusalem, it portrays one of the main rifts in Israeli society. It is also the personal story of the author, a media celebrity who was born into an ultra-Orthodox family and later left the fold. Segal`s older brother, a pillar of the ultra-Orthodox community, ostracized him and forbade the family to see him. The secular Segal thus became the black sheep of the family, while in the eyes of his followers his brother became "the righteous man of his generation." Many years later, the two brothers meet at their mother`s funeral and as a result, the narrator feels the need to tell his life-story - his childhood and adolescent years, his progressive loss of faith in God, and his relationship to his brother which started as great love and turned into bitter hatred.
The narrator`s childhood was not particularly devout, nor was it idyllic. His father, a fishmonger and chicken dealer, barely managed to support his family; his rebellious mother preferred Hebrew to the Yiddish spoken in her community, and enjoyed wearing ostentatious clothes. She passed on her rebellious nature to her second son, the narrator, who began questioning his faith while he was at yeshiva, even though he was an outstanding student. At the same time, his elder brother underwent a reverse process and became more intensely religious. In this brother`s eyes, the narrator is a sinner and traitor, a Cain bearing the mark of shame on his forehead. But is this true, and is the older brother a righteous man? This book can be seen either as an indictment, or simply as the description of a man torn between his longing for his family and his terrible anger towards it. By the time the book ends, he has overcome his regrets and come to terms with the choice he made in his youth.
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