Four Fathers
One day, Giora, a veterinary surgeon by profession, discovers that his wife Sharon has been publishing love poems under a pen-name in a youth magazine. A few hours later, Sharon is killed in a car crash and the newly widowed Giora is left alone with a little daughter. Eliahu, a crotchety Tel Avivian, shoots off a series of complaints to the city deputy engineer complaining that his upstairs neighbor has built a terrace without a permit. When the official comes to check it out, he falls in love with the beautiful neighbor. On her 17th birthday, Nira writes a blog revealing that on the day she turned six her father left her in a forest on the road to Jerusalem, alone at night in an abandoned truck. “I am not your father,” he told her, and returned home alone.
What connects all of these characters and events? The three plots that make up the novel take place years apart from each other, but link up and coalesce at the end, and they are all founded upon lethally powerful love and jealousy, betrayals and dark secrets. What begins as an apparently routine correspondence between a prying citizen, secretly in love with his neighbor, and a conscientious municipal clerk, uncovers a great underlying drama.
Amir Ziv, in his debut novel, fluctuates with surprising skill and much talent from comical scenes to dramatic climaxes, and he integrates characters from several generations inextricably into the plot. From page to page, the reader is carried along together with them, and is entertained, jolted, intrigued and engrossed, right up to the last line.
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“The book is a well-honed literary and artistic treatment of fundamental issues in the ongoing tragedy of Israeli masculinity. The transition between the generations of inadequate fathers to the generations of flawed males they produce ripens into a tragedy that is powerfully illuminated by the movement between the different parts of the book. The morphological and stylistic transition between the parts of the book is a magnificent artistic achievement … Amir Ziv has written a book that is equally enjoyable and disconcerting to read.”
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“Ziv succeeds in a very impressive manner to clear a way through the entangled path of the forging of a new Israeli masculinity. ”
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“Four Fathers is a surprising book in which a different wind prevails … The writer has done a splendid job and succeeded in putting life and interest into a painful and authentic story, one that you cannot stop reading until you have finished it. ”
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“This is one of the most riveting books I have read recently, a harrowing anatomy of a betrayal out of which no one emerges intact. Unlike many contemporary texts, whose writers seem to have forgotten the art of storytelling, the plot of this book is so thrilling that I couldn’t put it down. The skillful unfolding of the plot reminded me of writers like Ian McEwan, and the ability to depict the pathology of a family echoed the marvelous novels of A. B. Yehoshua … An impressive first book. ”