Lori

by Gloria Goldreich

Suspended from school for smoking pot, Lori Mandell spends a year in Israel, where her defiance and confusion are slowly replaced by an understanding of herself and her family

Genres: Young Adult

Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Gloria Goldreich graduated from Brandeis University and did graduate work in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a coordinator in the Department of Jewish Education at National Hadassah and served as Public Relations Director of the Baruch College of the City University of New York.
While still an undergraduate at Brandeis, she was a winner of the Seventeen Magazine short story contest where her first nationally published work appeared. Subsequently, her short fiction and critical essays have appeared in Commentary, McCalls, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Ms., Chatelaine, Hadassah Magazine and numerous other magazines and journals. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated.
She is the author of a series of children's books on women in the professions entitled What Can She Be? She has also written novels for young adults, Ten Traditional Jewish Stories, and she edited a prize-winning anthology A Treasury of Jewish Literature.
Her novel, Leah's Journey won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in 1979, and her second novel Four Days won the Federation Arts and Letters Award. Her other novels include Promised Land, This Burning Harvest, Leah's Children, West to Eden, Mothers, Years of Dreams and That Year of Our War. Her books have been selections of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild and the Troll Book Club.
She has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada.
Gloria Goldreich is married to an attorney and is the mother of two daughters and a son, and the grandmother of six grandchildren.

Reviews

[Laura Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweet book about a fun year spent in israel. YA

[Vivienne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is this the author’s least popular book?
I’ve spent much time looking for it and I couldn’t remember the title at all.
I finally found it by posting on Reddit:
‘Looking for a novel from the 70s or early 80s about a young American Jewish high school girl whose parents discover she has started smoking pot. They send her to Israel to discover and take pride in her Jewish roots. She wants to stay in Israel but decides to come back to the States and flushes her leftover drugs down the toilet.
The cover had an orange grove on it with a young woman, probably the protagonist, and a young man.

Sadly the Goodreads doesn’t show any cover yet. I may have found the book faster if Goodreads had a cover.

I read this at a very young age possibly in elementary school from my school library.

[Alissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I had read as a child and had always stuck with me so I decided to re-read. It still holds up. Though a bit dated (would any teenager today have heard of a telex machine or believe that people communicated by handwritten letters??), I would still recommend this to young adults to get a flavor of what makes Israel so special.