Some Day

On the shores of Lake Kinneret – the Sea of Galilee – lies Shemi Zarhin’s Macondo, the city of Tiberias, a city of magic, bursting sexuality and longing for a love that is larger-than-life. It is firmly planted in Israeli reality, yet also exists on the border of fantasy. A wild wind rages there, people go crazy with love, or are infected with mysterious diseases caused by witchcraft, and their lives read like poetry. The air, saturated with the smells of cooking and passion, lead to a housing project which is a funny, but also painful and disturbing microcosm of Israeli society.

Shlomi is a handsome and creative child with reading difficulties; although he is only seven and a half, he has fallen deeply in love with Ella, a strange-attractive girl next door with suicidal tendencies. He has developed a remarkable talent for cooking, while his frail little brother Hilik has an obsession with collecting words in his notebook. Yet the adult world that swirls around them, earthy, wild, selfish and menacing, robs them of their childhood and forces them prematurely into adulthood. Robert, Shlomi’s father, almost a dwarf, has long thick hair and a weakness for women, while his wife Ruhama, a powerful presence with a poet’s soul, is as tall as a lighthouse. Robert cheats on Ruhama with Ella’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, and also fathers an illegitimate son with his uncle’s young wife. The child looks incredibly like his son Hilik, whose tragic fate will later disrupt his family’s life and break our hearts. Ruhama cannot forgive her wayward husband and kicks him out, but he never stops longing for her and waits for many years, in thrall to his deep love for her. Shlomi also misses Ella from a distance. Meanwhile, he hones his cooking skills and his hobby becomes a career. But for him it is still mainly a way of expressing his inner feelings and thoughts.

Some Day is a sweeping saga: exciting, romantic and sometimes grotesque as it displays three decades of Shlomi’s family history. In the background, in an ostensibly parallel world, runs Israel’s history, with its founding moments, its wars and heroes. Yet the rules of Shlomi’s world bend only to his beloved, Ella, and he waits all his life only for her. Or almost.

Zarhin’s hypnotic writing, replete with humor, lyrics and human emotion, stimulates the reader’s senses. At the same time, it offers an alternative perspective on Israeli reality as it sheds old social structures. The novel became a bestseller immediately upon publication.