The Ravens

Two women dominate Avirama Golan`s astute novel, representing two different worlds – Zhenia, who was born in 1919 in a small, muddy town near the Polish-Ukrainian border, and Didi who was born on an idealistic kibbutz in Israel in the mid-1950s. In 1939, just before the German invasion, Zhenia met an envoy from Eretz Israel, emigrated with him to his country and was saved from annihilation. Didi, who grew up in the children`s house of the kibbutz without any love, rebelled against her parents and the ideals on which she was raised, left the kibbutz and married a young man of Sephardic origin. The paranoid Zhenia has raised two children; she is a suffocating, castrating mother as well as a frigid housewife obsessed with cleanliness. Didi is now an assistant television producer, a yuppie career woman with an adolescent daughter. At the age of forty-four, she is having an affair with a much younger man. What is the relationship between these two women who meet by chance? Finding any resemblance between them is left to the reader. We simply follow the life-stories linked by a web of similarities that reflect the dynamics of Israeli society. Zhenia, for example, whose son is killed in a daring military operation, is offset by a Palestinian mother whose son was killed during a demonstration. When Didi meets Zhenia in the course of her research for a television program, she is repelled by the paranoid elderly woman who blames the entire world for her son`s death – perhaps because Zhenia reminds her of herself. For like Zhenia, Didi is a stifling mother who tries through her love to rectify the stern education of the kibbutz. Strangely, she cannot fathom her daughter Na`ama`s interest in the ravens that nest in the big tree by their house. These birds can be dangerous in their excessive care for their young.