Apples from the Desert

The eleven stories in this collection are linked by a common theme: two people are caught up in a conflict in an enclosed space ̶ often a room ̶ for a day or a night, but the drama has in fact been transmitted down two or three generations. Troubled contemporary Israeli lives are seen as the legacy of trauma. In “Doves,” the mother, a Holocaust survivor, joins the Communist Party as a protest against her ruined youth. Her defiance reappears in her son, who becomes ultra-Orthodox. His devotion to prayer and his monkish asceticism continue his mother’s obsessions.

In most of Liebrecht’s stories, mothers and mothering are a dominant feature, or the starting point of the action. In one of the finest stories, “On the Line of the Circle,” a relationship depends on the woman’s medical specialization: she is an expert on the mental illness of her lover’s child. Cumulatively, Apples from the Desert explores the private lives that are forged between two people, with the awareness that we cannot shake off our historical baggage.