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| Yehudit Hendel |
An Innocent Breakfast |
| Stories |
Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah
1996. 137 pp.
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This collection of stories, by one of Israel's foremost women writers, adds up to a multi-voice discourse. All the stories deal with women haunted by past experiences directly affecting their present. The first two stories' protagonists are widows who discover secrets about their long-defunct husbands. In one story, the widow meets her first husband who not only reveals that he had betrayed her with her sister, but that the second, deceased husband, with whom she had a long, happy marriage, was likewise unfaithful to her. In the other story, the widow discovers that her husband had had a daughter by another woman, of whose existence she had known nothing. In all of the stories the narrator is a witness, and it is she who sets the pace and the atmosphere. Helpless before the unfathomable inner world of her protagonists, she creates the fascinating sense of doubt and mystery which animates the collection.
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About the Book
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Jeffrey Green, writing in the Jerusalem Post, stated: "Hendel presents vivid descriptions of the physical world in which her characters act, and she conveys deep but unsentimental empathy with their suffering." Haya Hoffman, writing in Yediot Aharonot, noted the almost hypnotic power of Hendel's prose. "One can only admire the close artistic weave, not only of the individual stories, but of the whole cycle, which constitutes a single tapestry." Critic Menahem Perry stated categorically: "Few stories in Hebrew fiction in recent years …can match Hendel's …for sheer literary quality."
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