Small change : a collection of stories / Yehudit Hendel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hendel, Yehudit.

Contributor:

Harshav, Barbara, 1940-

Pomerantz, Marsha.

Bilu, Dalya.

Series:

Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry series

The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry series

Standardized Title:

Short stories. Selections. English

Language:

English

Hebrew

Subjects (All):

Hendel, Yehudit--Translations into English.

Hendel, Yehudit.

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

xvi, 142 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Hanover : Published by University Press of New England [for] Brandeis University Press, [2003]

Summary:

This collection of short fiction by one of Israel's premier women writers is characterized by intricate, deeply-felt tales that convey, on many levels, human relationships gone tragically and pathetically awry. These eight stories, which should be read as a cycle, offer variations on the themes of loneliness, family ties, obsession, and irreversible loss. Hendel's protagonists, often middle-aged women, carry the burden of past or present painful relations with husbands, lovers, friends, children, and strangers. Cluttered by the ghosts haunting her characters, the settings for these stories include events (conversations, shiva, dinner parties) commemorating the dead or near dead, hospitals, and cemeteries. For Hendel, very little separates the living from the dead, for both carry secrets that undermine empathy among her characters. While death is omnipresent in all these stories, so is Hendel's fascination with the trivia of daily life. Domestic details, meals, decor, the weather, the quality of light and air lend a riveting, even surreal sense of reality to deeply terrifying themes. In Mrs. B's Dinner Party, a woman dying of cancer comes home from the hospital to hold a dinner party. Although dying, she is obsessively precise about all the arrangements. But what becomes clear in the course of this minutely-observed story is that Mrs. B has already been forgotten; her husband has begun a relationship with a younger woman, who will quickly replace her. The emotional leitmotif of this, and all these stories, is betrayal and disappointment, worsened by dissociation from one's own feelings.

Hendel's close attention to detail, the spareness of her writing, and her utter lack of sentimentality create a fantastic world of emotions, which seem heightened and surpressed at the same time. Her geography is an intensely real, yet wholly phantasmagoric, shadow land between life and death, in which, perhaps, the greatest human triumph is the ability to grieve honestly. Small Change offers a compelling introduction to one of modern Israel's finest writers.

Contents:

A story with no address

The letter that came in time

My friend B's feast

Low, close to the floor

Small change

Fata morgana across the street

Apples in honey

Late revenge.

ISBN:

1584652799

OCLC:

50479198