On Love Stories and Other Endings

In this fourth collection of stories, Liebrecht further refines her nuanced style, her uncanny ability to combine memory and desire and to create moments of epiphany. In these stories she leaves behind the central themes of her earlier collections – war traumas and family dramas – and gives us ten bittersweet tales of fury, passion and disenchantment. In the title story, a young teacher confronts a woman who was her father’s mistress thirty years before. She feels compelled to create an ending to the romance, even though her father has been dead for thirty years. As Haaretz noted: “Within the helplessness [caused by their pain], all the characters, including the sinners and offenders, deserve consolation. And in fact, all the characters, and all the readers, find consolation here.”