Laundry

The novel is written as a confession which bit by bit exposes the disturbed personality of the protagonist. The novel can also be read as a suspense story — we`re not sure what horrible act the heroine has committed until the end of the book. Havatzelet, originally named Illidiko, tells her husband about something terrible that happened when she was a child. She has never uttered a word about that fateful day to a soul. The story takes us to a small town in Translyvania in the days following World War II, where Illidiko grew up as the only Jew among her Gentile friends. A pretty girl named Yutzi who works in the local slaughter house washing cattle intestines and making sausages, makes Illidko`s life miserable and views the Jewish girl as the embodiment of Satan himself. Yutzi drags the five year old Illidiko to the slaughter house to witness the slaughtering of the cows, and threatens to do the same to the little girl if she tells what she has seen. The event adversely and irrevocably alters little Illidiko, who has lived in fear since the incident, even after she has emigrated to Israel. What happens to suddenly expose the secret? Yutzi arrives in Israel twenty five years after the slaughter house incident. The trauma of the past is reawakened, and perhaps accidentally perhaps not, Havatzelet kills Yutzi. She can no longer remain silent, and she tells her husband the story.