7 Harimon St.

7 Harimon St. is the Tel Aviv address of a day-care center for amnesia sufferers and elderly people who need a supportive framework. The center was founded by Naomi, a widow since the age of thirty. After studying social work in New York, she returns to Israel and sets up the center together with her good friend Daria, a woman with artistic leanings whose husband has gone to India to find himself and has no intention of coming back any time soon. Naomi says that social work is the only occupation she feels capable of, but there is something far deeper hidden behind this statement: she is looking for a sense of family, and the center gives it to her. Characters of all kinds come there. They all have a past which is rich and gripping, but they have no future. There is Margalit who has Alzheimer`s and was once a famous actress, Dr Kirsch who was a cardiologist, Shraga the alcoholic, Chaimke the Holocaust survivor who was castrated by Dr. Mengele, and two sisters bonded in a symbiotic relationship because of a trauma in their past. This humane and empathic novel traces the relationships formed at the center as well as the attempts by some of the characters to create a new life for themselves. Naomi, the narrator, is not only the center`s director and therapist but also, as it turns out, a patient who manages to break out of her emotional paralysis. Margalit, who has never had children, and Chaimke, who has never been in love, become a couple and disappear one day from the center. Finally, Naomi finds them hiding in the wing where she lives, but she acts “unprofessionally” and doesn`t tell anyone where they are. Her own mental needs, like those of the elderly couple, come before what society expects of a social worker. In Margalit and Chaimke, Naomi finds surrogate parents and they come to regard her as their daughter.