Regards from Your Youth

This homogeneous collection of short stories, both amusing and bitter, documents the lives of the thirtysomething-year-old men and -particularly – women of North Tel Aviv with a sober eye and rich, colorful language. Gafi Amir reveals herself to be the ultimate representative of the yuppie generation, whose members avoid emotion and sentimentality like the plague.

The various heroines of this collection can be defined as members of the “ex” club: ex-stunners, ex-party girls, ex-skinny. Horrified, they observe the married couples who have settled down to a middle-class existence. They silently ridicule a couple with a new baby that resembles a rumpled sock. However, alongside their revulsion at the yuppie lifestyle of the 1990s and their conviction that all men are bastards, they are frantic at the thought that they may be the last of the unmarried women in the world and will never go on a date again.

This ennui-fraught paradox is described with great skill and humor. Amir`s heroines are eager to marry and join the bourgeoisie. The fact that they do not love the men is immaterial, because love is not the main thing. No way. The only thing that matters is to be married and have an apartment and a hot-tub. Despite the yuppie angle, the “Israeli condition” – Holocaust Memorial Day, terrorist attacks, elections and violence in the streets -features in the book, albeit as background noise for the self-involved characters. Nevertheless, in spite of themselves and to their eternal shame, some of them have a profound inner need to clutch at meaningful experiences, because somewhere deep down inside them, pathos does exist.