Some novels are explorations and some are investigations. This novel is both. While it's a journey from the tech centers of Silicon Valley to the streets of Tel Aviv, it's also an embarkation into awareness and awakening that winds through worlds within and without by way of winding roads of insight. As its subtitle, "A Four-Hands Concerto" implies, the narrative style is like a piano duet involving two players at the same piano, and the interplay of its authors' distinct yet kindred voices gives the novel an energy and verve that derives from authorial hands on the metaphorical keys which, though showing off their individual styles, are always harmoniously matched and always on key.
Descended from persecuted "secret" Ethiopian Jews and now living in Tel Aviv, Ziva runs a center for mistreated children, children with ruptured lives and injured souls. Its mission is to give them back their humanity and guide them to productive futures. Her dedication is challenged by her lack of resources; here in the poorer section of town, in South Tel Aviv, it's a struggle to give her charges -- some from outside Israel, who don't have residence permits -- hope, shelter and the courage to go on. Their persecution mirrors Ziva's and that of her forebears; through helping them she can ameliorate her personal suffering. Her narrative voice speaks of her problems, and we know of her children's troubled lives through poems, paragraphs, letters of love, shame and hate, and intensely moving dialog; these voices match Ziva's, they are flip-sides of the same coin.
Enter Clifford, American, wealthy, accomplished, and in love with Ziva, yet like her, and like her proteges, he's also suffered, also been misused, and also like them, he bears the invisible scars of a past that have never fully healed. Somehow, though neither can fully understand it, both are spiritually mended by their relationship, as well as are Ziva's children. A gift of money from Clifford enables Ziva to establish a center with full amenities for treating the disturbed youth of Israel and Palestine, be they Arab, Jew or Christian, but the money appears in no deus ex machina fashion; this key plot development is cleverly orchestrated from the very beginning so that its arrival is like the wished-for savior angel rather than the buckram ghost of a novelist's Beelzebub, and -- speaking as one of the most unsentimental persons on earth (a man who laughed at the end of "Titanic") -- I defy any reader not to find a tear in his or her eye on coming to this novel's dramatic conclusion, or for that matter, to resist the urge to leaf through it just one more time.
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- Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2021
