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| Daniella Carmi |
The Yassin Family and Lucy in the Sky |
2 novellas
Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 2009. 303pp.
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From the book
Maybe none of this would have happened if the nuns these days were a little more ethical. After all, what was I really missing in order to get pregnant? Just the hormone known as Pergonal.
They explained to me: if you don`t have it naturally we can get it for you, every woman has it in her urine. But then-the urine has to be clean. The woman can`t be one of those pill-swallowing hormone-takers.
"Where are you going to find a woman like that?" I asked the doctor.
"Nuns," he said to me.
But when I showed up two weeks later to get the injection, it turned out
that they hadn`t found a suitable amount of clean urine.
"They don`t really understand," I said to Salim, my husband. "Maybe even
in the cloisters things aren`t what they used to be. People think that nuns are supremely faithful to their one and only-you-know-who-and save their bodies
for eternal life in paradise. But that’s not it exactly."
"Well how about the meantime?" Salim said. "Maybe they want to take
just a teeny bit of pleasure in the paradise here on earth-at least that`s a sure thing...”
One way or the other I reached thirty-seven, so Salim and I decided to
adopt a child.
Synopsis
Imagine this wild mix: a bewildered Arab couple, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, a stern rabbi, firebrand settlers and a withdrawn adolescent. What Daniella Carmi creates with her bold imagination and surrealistic prose moves crazily between the real and the fantastic, the amusing and tragic—a reflection of Israeli reality.
Thus, in the title story, an Arab couple who have waited years for a child finally have an opportunity to adopt one. But the fulfillment of their dream is grotesque—instead of a baby they get a slightly autistic Jewish adolescent who relates to reality only through the Beatles’ songs. And so they are caught up in a psychedelic world of yellow submarines, strawberries and marmalade-colored skies—including a rabbi who insists that the Arab parents coach the boy for his bar mitzvah.
In Adina and Marcella Seek a Lifeline, the mothers of two soldiers in a coma fight to save their boys from the “poison” that has taken over their bodies and souls. After they steal urine in the hospital—part of a scheme so the boys never return to the military—a strangely hilarious bond grows between the two very different women, as both struggle for sanity in a world that has turned its back on their sons.
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