Look, the Fishing Boats

The three novellas in this volume deal with the forbidden and disappointed loves, the frustrated desires of women living in an Orthodox Jewish community. Their lives are stultified and they are caught between their stormy inner world and their dependence upon the gray, obtuse men to whom they are tied by marriage. This Jewish world is conducted according to rigid conventions and rules, with a strict separation between the sexes. The glimpse into the women`s inner world reveals a desperate need for intimacy and passion, to which they dare not give expression. Thus the real action takes place in their minds and hearts, while the external occurrences, chiefly to do with the family, are mere stage-sets.

In the first novella, an odd, possibly retarded, girl falls in love with her older sister`s effete husband, the story taking place in the course of a weekend by the sea. In the second, a married woman falls in love with her husband`s younger brother who is about to get married. In the last, a divorced woman falls for a much younger man. None of these intense, obsessive loves stands the slightest chance of fulfilment in the ultro-Orthodox world.