Children’s Mate

The novella Children’s Mate takes place in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Milotchka, a gifted and perceptive little girl, suffers from obesity, and when her family moves to a new town, she finds it difficult to make friends. The other children tease her and call her a “fat cow.” Milotchka also has another problem, which she tries very hard to hide: she’s Jewish. Borya, the boy next door, is also Jewish and when the other boys discovered his secret – in the public bathhouse – they started bullying him. Little Milotchka doesn’t understand how they found out; her mother explains that when Jews get undressed, you can see they are Jewish. So when her mother takes her to the bathhouse and tries to undress her in front of everyone, Milotchka feels that it’s the end of the world.

With rare delicacy and compassion, Bella Shaier sketches a world of children who are trying to survive and be accepted in a cruel children`s society that persecutes anyone different.

The novella Galit and Gordon takes place in Tel Aviv years later, and Galit, who grew up in a dingy neighborhood, craves for belonging and acceptance by Gordon, a thoughtless man she has been going out with for 25 years. On the surface, they are happy together, but there is a deep rift: Galit waits patiently for a proposal of marriage that never comes, while Gordon dreams of finding a glamorous woman from his own social class. This would satisfy his emasculating mother, who treats Galit with contempt. The reader follows Galit with anxious empathy: unlike the cynical and critical Gordon, she never loses the innocence of youth or her faith in human beings.