All She Loved
At the end of the 1950s, a lonely woman named Cilag is deported from her native Romania as a suspected spy and comes to Israel. Her sole interest, both there and here, is to find someone who may know about her daughter Erika, who disappeared in the horrors of World War II. Cilag pursues this goal obsessively although she knows it is illogical to hope that her daughter is alive.
In warm, luminous Haifa live the only two people she knows: Iser and Lazlo Neimand. Like her, they survived the Holocaust, but unlike her, they have started new families, and Cilag`s arrival clearly threatens the peaceful lives they have managed to create. While Cilag is busy searching for her daughter, Iser`s wife Mary is busy with her own obsession – watching over her daughter Ziva who is not supposed to know anything about her parents` past.
In this moving reconstruction of Israel`s early years, the life stories of the five adults – stories of survival – move between forgetfulness and memory, repression and exposure, between the child that disappeared and the one that is alive.
-
“ A loving novel, brimming with compassion and respect, understanding and good will... a book of remembrance written with great care...A flowing narrative.”
-
“ Noy`s greatest achievement is the way she writes about repressed, controlled pain... In measured sentences and paragraphs that seem about to shoot off the page, she describes how life in Israel, supposedly the calm after the storm, was the start of a difficult new journey... Only at the end do you slowly catch your breath.”
-
“ Noy`s greatness lies in her ability to offer an almost subversive understatement... of the survivors` relation to the frightening memory they refuse to pass on.”