Smaadar
Teenage Smader’s life changes completely when she leaves her abusive father, together with her mother, and moves in with her grandfather. Confused and depressed, she shuts herself up in her grandfather’s apartment and refuses to go out. She is even scared to show her face on the stairs of the building. Only her concern for her mother gets her out of herself momentarily, but her mother’s harsh reaction to any sign of affection makes her retreat back into her solitude.
That summer, Smader also fights with her closest friend, breaking a lifelong bond, so she has no one to turn to at all. And over all this hovers the nerve-wracking wait for a letter that will tell her which section she will be joining at her new high school–the prestigious A section, or the C section, where her mother Zemira spent her high school years.
Can Smader change the path that her family and society have set out for her? Or will she able to turn her life around? In sensual but economical language, Nekar-Sadi describes the grey areas of adolescence in the 1980s.
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“Smaader, the heroine of Nakar-Sadi new book, is a type of girl that is new to Hebrew literature”
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“A remarkable literary achievement”
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“Smaadar is ostensibly a minor tale about a tragic adolescence, and yet the broken but beautiful language, and the female characters in it, produce a defiant and powerful novella. ”