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| Ruth Almog |
Roots of Light |
| Novel |
Jerusalem, Keter, 1987. 359 pp.
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The tale of Mira Gutman, the heroine of Roots of Light,is interwoven with the obscure history of her family, covering a hundred years of passion and madness in Eretz Israel and the surrounding region. Mira, the last link in the family chain, tries to disentangle her roots and discover where she belongs, while at the same time attempting to free herself from the coils of her family's fate.
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About the Book
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Critic Ariel Hirshfeld wrote, "The depth of the heroine's character arouses admiration. We find a Dostoyevskian echo in the underground wanderings of the 'I'. The structure of the novel, even more than its other elements, is a tour de force. Not only is the structure convincing and justified, it is the very thesis of the book, its intense message, its profound insight." Yaakov Siman-Tov spared no superlatives: "The reader feels a complete identification between the world of the heroine, her ancestral roots and the landscapes of her native land.... Ruth Almog's descriptions of landscape are the strongest and most exciting I have ever encountered in Hebrew literature, especially because it is so close to the world of the character. It seems to complement human existence and even contributes to its complexity."
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