Time for Love
This beautifully written family saga follows the lives of Hai’tche, Aron, Moishe, Senya and Pnina who came to Palestine from Minsk in the 1930s, led by their mother, an archetypal “Yiddische Mama” and a truly memorable character. Although she is an emotional dictator, she more than compensates for this with the overwhelming love she pours on her children, seeing them through years of hardship, unhappy love, abandonment and untimely death. Fascinating, too, is the youngest daughter Pnina who, although happily married to loving, reliable Yuda-“the Litvak”-still has sexual memories of her first husband, a gambler and womaniser who abandoned her.
In an unusual twist, Varon portrays a group of urban pioneers-not those who came to create agricultural settlements, but a family who migrated to the city and worked with bricks and cement, fighting to make ends meet. Dipped in humor and sadness, irony and empathy, meanness and compassion, Varon’s novel is captivating.
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“ Time for Love is a lively, warm and well-written novel - humorous, touching, sophisticated and profound.”
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“ Time for Love has a rare capacity for observing the remote places [of the soul... and turns the dust of family dramas into a work of literature filled with taste, scent and humor ... One can almost reach out and touch the people.”
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“ A sad, funny and heartrending book that arouses one's longing for a world that may already be gone.”