With This Ring

Reviewing her first book, critics compared Zisapel to the highly acclaimed Ya’akov Shabtai. This time the young, talented author has written an unusual love story that takes place in action-packed Tel Aviv. The love story that is weaved between two women is as gentle and sensitive as it is daring and revealing. Amit, the narrator, is a twenty-something Tel Aviv student majoring in biology. She is involved in a long-term, stable and somewhat conservative relationship with Yuval. The two have been together since they were in high school. Dannie – a young, beautiful, unconventional, sensual and wild young woman – unexpectedly enters her life. Dannie is the opposite of Amit.

Amit’s conventional existence revolves around her degree, her partner and their future children. Dannie lives life to the fullest. She loves to try everything and she turns reality into a dream. She loves to love and to be loved. She devours life. But she has a self-destructive streak as well. She uses cocaine and ecstasy, becomes depressed and flees her responsibilities. Amit and Dannie fall in love with each other, break off their previous relationships and move in together. “Am I a lesbian?” wonders Amit. “No. I’m not as lesbian, I’m simply in love with Dannie, not with women. Dannie just happens to be a woman.” Through her love for Dannie, Amit experiences things she never had with Yuval. She’s careful not to get carried away and she continues to study and to prepare for exams. However Dannie is not satisfied with things the way they are and she continues to respond to admirers and to seek new experiences. Amit is jealous. Dannie, after a failed suicide attempt, breaks up with Amit and leaves the apartment. Amit goes back to Yuval, and a few months later she learns that Dannie has died in India. Amit flies out to India to follow in her beloved’s footsteps, where she ends up in the temple of the Dalai Lama. There she hears the story of an Israeli Buddhist nun who froze to death when seeking solitude atop a mountain peak.