Strange Girl With Earrings

For Marianna Huberman and her doctor father, Israel is not the promised land they had envisaged in their East European home. They are housed in an unwelcoming immigrant project, and on Marianna’s first day in the neighborhood her inexplicable behavior marks her as an oddity: “‘She had two thick black braids wrapped around her head like a basket. She looked inside a suitcase and then pulled out a big bear. It was squashed and hairy, a teddy bear with glass eyes.”’ The children watching the new girl couldn`t know that the bear was the last thing Marianna had to remind her of her mother. They didn`t know that Marianna came from a freezing country, and that years ago her sick mother had been sent to Israel, to a better climate. Since then, Marianna’s mother has been missing.

Dr. Huberman and his daughter follow up every half-clue relating to Marianna’s mother, any lead that might bring information. Her father despairs, believing his wife to be dead, but Marianna does not give up. Strange Girl with Earrings has become a classic children’s work about immigrants, and Marianna herself is the paradigm of the determined resilient newcomer. This book has been serialized on Israel Television.