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| Chana Bat Shahar |
Look, the Fishing Boats |
| Novella |
Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad/ Siman Kriah 1997. 176 pp.
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The three novellas in this volume deal with the forbidden and disappointed loves, the frustrated desires of women living in an Orthodox Jewish community. Their lives are stultified and they are caught between their stormy inner world and their dependence upon the gray, obtuse men to whom they are tied by marriage. This Jewish world is conducted according to rigid conventions and rules, with a strict separation between the sexes. The glimpse into the women`s inner world reveals a desperate need for intimacy and passion, to which they dare not give expression. Thus the real action takes place in their minds and hearts, while the external occurrences, chiefly to do with the family, though depicted in detail, are mere stage-sets.
In the first novella, an odd, possibly retarded, girl falls in love with her older sister`s effete husband, the story taking place in the course of a weekend by the sea. In the second, a married woman falls in love with her husband`s younger brother who is about to get married. In the last, a divorced woman falls for a much younger man. None of these intense, obsessive loves stands the slightest chance of fulfilment in the Orthodox world.
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About the Book
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Iton Tel Aviv wrote: "This is quality fiction, meticulous in the depiction of the mental landscape and gripping in its presentation of a real and complex world." Yediot Aharonot describes Bat-Shahar`s prose as "wonderfully musical," and adds: "She has an impressive ability to infuse her prose with the qualities of a ballad, to endow her realism with the beat of fantasy."
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