In that Place

At the center of In that Place stands the book, or more precisely the Jewish book, that is handed down from father to son and passed from collector to collector, transmitting the secret of Jewish wisdom through its many texts. With his arresting style, Be`er links the spiritual and the worldly, that act side by side both in the characters` relationships and in their attitude towards books. Thus Israeli millionaire Raphael Zussman, whose daughter died young, wants to found a private institute for the study of the humanities so that he will be able to understand the secrets of human existence. At the same time, he carries on a tempestuous affair with a young German woman whom he later abandons with great cruelty. There is also old Shlomo Rappoport, a compulsive collector of books and Judaica who has turned his aggressive pursuit into a lucrative business. His driving force, it turns out, is to restore the library that belonged to his father, murdered by the Nazis. And finally there is Katrina, the young German woman abandoned by Zussman, a romantic doctoral student whose life is at a crossroads. At the surprising end of the novel, she becomes a mother and inherits Rappoport`s fortune. Significantly, it is in modern Berlin that most of these events take place. And Berlin, which the author sees as struggling between life and remembrance, brings together an odd mיlange of characters: an Israeli writer on a visit during the Second Lebanon War, who has to face European hostility, an elderly Jewish refugee, and the German Katrina who is trying to overcome her inner conflict.