Fallen Man

The delegitimizing social-political concept attached to Israelis residing abroad is turned upside down in Dorit Abusch’s novel. Heiman, a successful professor of Art History, has fallen gracefully from Tel Aviv to New England, undisturbed by guilt, military nostalgia, or separation from his clan. Rushing excitedly between airports, hotels, health clubs, computer screens, academic conferences and museums, the homo-cosmopolitan records to himself the peculiarity and magic of his adoptive country America, while images of European paintings flash in his head. After a short stay in Tel Aviv, Heiman’s suppressed tribal emotions rise up uncontrollably, pinning the detached sophisticate in a position despicable from his perspective, that of the immigrant torn between his birth and adoptive lands. Fallen Man is a funny, analytical, insightful portrait of post-national Homo Sapiens: portable, a hybrid of cultures and languages, cosmopolitan and provincial at the same time.

Moznayim wrote: “It’s a long time since such a witty and intelligent satire was written about Israeli society in relation to the Western one which influenced it so essentially.” Maariv stated that “Dorit Abusch is the most important and interesting writer in the group of women writers which appeared here in the eighties and nineties.”