I, Anastasia

In contrast to her own glamorous image, Alona Kimhi’s stories reveal an obsessive interest in situations involving pain, misery, self-destruction, repression, sickness and insanity. Yet the characters belong unquestionably in their modern Israeli setting, and their extreme situations reflect the discontent of the younger, middle-class generation. A young married couple, sinking into a state of empty boredom, stop having sexual relations and spend much of their time watching films on video. Ultimately, the husband falls for another woman and the wife remains behind, betrayed and lonely. An adolescent girl in a Russian immigrant family suffers from her stepfather’s hostility and compulsive cleanliness, and their relationship only improves when the man develops a sexual interest in her. A Tel Aviv journalist infects his lover with AIDS. An intelligent, depressive young woman tells her life story as an inmate in a psychiatric hospital. A bulimic fashion photographer manages to work in between bouts of compulsive eating and self-mortification.

Kimchi’s characters talk about themselves in an idiomatic, uninhibited language, sometimes coarse, often violent. The rough force of these stories and their protagonists assign the author a very distinctive place among the women writers of Israel.