A Woman on Her Own
A woman travels alone, meets Palestinian villagers and her heart reaches out. She meets parents who want to make their children’s dream come true: to go for the first time to the seaside. She joins in visits to relatives in prison, and gets pushed around at checkpoints together with those wanting to enter Israel to try and find work. She gets close to people whom many Israelis do not hear or see. And she writes about them, about their life. But she doesn’t only document – sometimes she gets involved in their lives and is called on to act: for a man who needs work and asks her to smuggle him in the trunk of her car; for a prisoner who asks her to buy him a pair of glasses; or for Palestinian children whom she takes – in defiance of Israeli law – on a trip to the zoo. And she also tells of interesting conversations with men imprisoned for a long time without being indicted, who talk to her about peace.
This book is a human document of the highest order: a collection of pieces written over some thirty years during which Hammerman traveled all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, meeting people, assisting some of them, just lending a sympathetic ear to others.
Her starting point is personal. After losing her husband and her sister, who died one after the other, Hammerman traveled to the end of the world – New Zealand. And there she found the secret of her own personal freedom: the ability to move from place to place without regard for internal or external boundaries. And together with this freedom, she found joie de vivre and a resolution – she would travel around the West Bank, meet women, men and children, listen to their dreams and document their lives under occupation. An enthralling document.
- Languages
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Dutch, English
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Dutch
Amsterdam, De Bezige Bij, 2019 -
English
Chicago , Chicago University Press, 2019
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| Title | A Woman on Her Own |
|---|---|
| Writer's Last Name | Hammerman |
| Writer's First Name | Ilana |
| Genre | Non Fiction |
| Publisher (Hebrew) | Achuzat Bayit |
| No. Pages | 301pp. |
| Book title - Hebrew (phonetic) | Isha Levada |
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“This is a forceful and weighty book … written in a quiet, personal voice, and with humor. It is a documentary book, but it is written like literature in the full sense of the word, it produces in the reader – at least it did in this reader – empathy and emotion, and it reads like a powerful, consciousness-changing novel. ”
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“I have no doubt that A Woman on Her Own is the most important Hebrew book that has or will come out this year. A crucial book. ”
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“I am torn while I read it. I weep … The writing is so honest and so lovely. It is as if there is no other way to seduce the horror. But please, do read it.”