Cafe Nevo

by Barbara Rogan

Vered begins an affair with a Palestinian in hopes of freeing herself from her husband, Peter Caspi, a famous Israeli author

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

309 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1988

About the author

Barbara Rogan is the author of eight novels, including SUSPICION and HINDSIGHT (Simon & Schuster). Her next novel, A DANGEROUS FICTION, is the first in a new mystery series set in the high-stakes world of big publishing. It will be published in July 2013 by Viking/Penguin.

Her books have been translated into a dozen languages, featured by the major book clubs, optioned for movie and television and issued as audio books and ebooks.

Barbara has also worked extensively in publishing. She started as an editor for a large New York publisher. After moving to Israel, she was the founder and, for 12 years, director of the Barbara Rogan Literary Agency. During that period, she served on the Board of Directors of the Jerusalem Book Fair.

After returning to the U.S., Barbara taught fiction writing at Hofstra University and SUNY. She currently teaches for Writers Digest University and in her own online school, Next Level Workshops. She's a frequent lecturer on both the business and craft of writing and teaches seminars and master classes at writers' conferences.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toward the end of their exodus from enslavement in Egypt, the Israelites with their leader, Moses, camped near Mount Nebo in Moab on the east side of the River Jordan. There, the Lord commanded Moses to “Go up into the Abarim Range to Mount Nebo in Moab, across from Jericho, and view Canaan, the land I am giving the Israelites as their own possession. There on the mountain that you have climbed you will die and be gathered to your people, just as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his people. . . . You will see the land only from a distance; you will not enter the land I am giving to the people of Israel’” (Deuteronomy 32:48–52).

So why could Moses and Aaron not enter the Promised Land despite them leading the Israelites on a forty-year journey out of slavery? Why was Canaan made unattainable for Moses? Why could he only look down upon the land from the vantage point of Mount Nebo?

On their journey through the Sinai desert, Numbers 20: 10-12 explains that Moses and his brother Aaron had failed in a test of obedience and faith when the thirsty Israelites begged for water near Meribah Kadesh. God instructed Moses to speak to the rock and God would then bring forth water.
So, “Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock” but then Moses acted in his own name saying, “Hear now, you rebels: shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice, and water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their livestock.”

Consequently, even though God provided, “the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.”

Sternholz lowered his voice, in the manner of one adult speaking to another in the presence of children. “In a sense, you see, Israel is Nevo: it is a vantage point onto the unattainable.” -----Café Nevo

Arabs and Jews, young and old, men and women, artists and politicians, conservatives and liberals call Tel Aviv’s run-down café their home away from home. There, Emmanual Sternholz, the elderly owner and waiter who was a refugee from Nazi Germany, serves as the conscience of his patrons as their hopes and dreams intersect with their disappointments and fate.

Through Sternholz’s eyes, readers stand on the mountain top and gaze at the Promised Land with hope but realize it may never be attained.

I enjoyed this book. As Rogan tells the intertwined stories of Sternholz and those who come to Café Nevo, I often recalled the old television series Cheers named for the bar where “everybody knows your name”.

Besides Sternholz who escaped Nazi Germany under tragic circumstances, there is Ilana, a beautiful and wealthy prostitute who becomes pregnant and unable to decide if she will abort the fetus. As Ilana tries to make her decision, she strikes up a friendship with Vered who is also pregnant following an affair with an Arab poet who is a rival of Peter Caspi, Vered’s novelist husband. Both Vered and the poet desperately want to hurt the cruel and loathsome man.

Also making the café home is the young Sarita, the gifted artist and daughter of Yael Blume the beautiful, deceased actress Sternholz silently loved and fought with against the British before the country gained its statehood. And there is Arik, the disillusioned young man falling in love with Sarita. The son of a general Arik is also an army deserter who despairs as Israel enters war in Lebanon and builds Jewish communities in Palestinian territory.

These and other likeable characters fill Café Nevo. The novel, however, takes readers beyond clichés and characters and illuminates for them the modern State of Israel with its hopes and promise, but also its weaknesses and failure.

Though the book is currently out of print it is possible for interested readers to find used copies as well as eBook copies. Though on the surface the book is funny and even romantic, readers cannot but look deeper to consider one of the world’s most observed countries. A recommended book.

[Ajk · Rating 3 out of 5]

So the politics of this book are suboptimal in a very dated, 1987, sort of way. There is one (1) Arab character. He seduces a Jewish woman out of revenge for his people and shouts "Allahu Akbar" when he penetrates her. There's a Tunisian crone who reeks of cumin. I didn't know this going in, but I also kiiiiiiinda knew it going in. Maybe you should to.

It's all very The Children of Leon Uris' Exodus. Almost explicitly so in the Uri/Arik father-son combo. And I was curious about this book because it feels a lot like maybe Israel might have been redeemable in the 1980s, and I thought this book would be an interesting look at the country 40 years ago. Similar to Waltz with Bashir, maybe. And I suppose the book does get at that. The Irredeemable Plot to Destroy The State From Within in the book is now explicitly-stated Likud party policy.

So that's your politics, and I can't really dock the author for that, we're all products of our time blah blah blah. It's very much of it's time. That doesn't even get us to the women stuff, which I'm not totally equipped to comment on but felt real weird reading.

But you know what? I love chaotic books that center around place and the people who haunt it. The characters are all absurd, larger-than-life, heroic scale (especially the bartender, who is Literally Moses) in a way that's fun to hang out with. Even the jackasses are so dastardly, moustache-twirlingly wicked that they chew scenery and all of that. It's great melodrama set in a morally black-and-white universe. Unfortunately I just kinda disagree with those morals.

[Darlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cafe Nevo is a beautiful and poignant tale of Tel Aviv, almost a microcosm of the story of modern Israel. There are clashes between the generation of founders--kibbutz pioneers and refugees--and the disenchanted younger generation sent to fight in Lebanon; clashes between Arab and Jew; women held captive by religious law governing marriage and divorce; and the struggle of artists of all stripes, both the talented and the hack. There's even a touch of magic realism.

At the center of it all in grungy, fly-specked Cafe Nevo is Sternholz, the waiter (maybe owner) who takes it all in and filters it for the reader.

I found it a captivating read, but initially was thrown off by the shifts of point of view and characters within a scene. After the first couple times of being pulled out of the narrative, I chalked it up to the author's voice and the element of magic realism present in the story and went along for the ride. It was worth the effort, and the book is recommended to anyone who likes serious fiction about people--and a country--in turmoil.

[Joe Stafura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every page was a deeper look into the land of Israel through a lens that was new to me, moving beyond the history and the TV portrayals and the news coverage that has gone on my entire life.

My other experience was working with a group that produced a computer game or interactive documentary that allowed one to play the role of either the Israeli or Palestinian leader to reach a two state solution.

It was a cognitive mirror and as the game launched there were widely divergent views of the biases perceived in the game, it set me on my way to starting a new company to help people learn about and develop coping methods so that biases don’t cause them to have a distorted view of the world, or as we call them at GoThrive.io Cognitive Illusions;^)

[Nancy L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author wrote beautifully and the characterizations were heartfelt and detailed. The insights provided on the habitues of Cafe Nevo opened a new, fascinating aspect of Israeli society to me; portraits of the rich and poor alike, the non-affluent chess players to a Minister and affluent authors, were all striking. The women were incredibly portrayed and convincing. And the presence of waiter/proprietor Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz watching and guiding his clients in their lives, was unforgettable.

[Banbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

The characters are well delineated, and we care about them. The plot is well structured, and supports the theme of the continuation and value of life and joy even while recognizing the dangerousness and sorrow of the world. It is a story one wants to keep getting back to, and to find out the ending. My only quibble is that the author sometimes goes a step too far in explaining the significance of some of the action--the reader can figure it out without being told explicitly.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful, quirky and moving - Israeli characters whose lives intertwine at Cafe Nevo.

[Kurt Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book many years ago, and enjoyed it. I have always meant to reread it.

[Richda Mcnutt · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a Cafe Nevo in a section of Tel Aviv wherein Emmanuel Sternholz resides, rules, and watches over a motley collection of customers - although they should more correctly be called inhabitants. The first chapter appears to be a scene of chaos, but it resolves into a narrative about these people, who will also inhabit the reader of this novel. And none more so than Sternholz. The novel has more depth, as well as an impact on your emotions, than you first expect. You feel the characters' failures, disappointment, miscommunications - and you feel their glories as well as their sorrows. A tale to absorb and savor.

[Ellis Shuman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Café Nevo is the "oldest and certainly the grungiest of the Dizengoff cafés". The coffee shop, originally established by two enterprising Polish brothers, attracts not only common workers, but "writers, actors, and artists who by virtue of their socialist ideology styled themselves members of the proletariat, but who in fact constituted the Tel Aviv elite of their day".

"If they were that good they'd be working," one of the characters of the novel says of Café Nevo's clientele. "Nobody with any serious work to do hangs out in cafés".

Café Nevo has quirky and colorful regulars - they hang out in the coffee shop for hours at end. Each of them has an opinion about the establishment. "Nevo was like some great puzzle whose pieces wandered around of their own accord," one says, while another notes that "Nevo was a place where events and chance meetings broke over one's head like waves. One could duck or jump them, but swimming for shore was not one of the options, not unless one chose to opt out completely."

The man serving Café Nevo's patrons, when he bothers to do so, is Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz, a "jealous and exacting waiter." Sternholz "was the keeper of Nevo, no more, no less. If Nevo was a stage, and all his customers protagonists in their separate dramas, then Sternholz's roles were manifold but uniformly subsidiary. He was the propman, the janitor, the Greek chorus, and the machinist of the deus ex machina; he was everything to others and nothing to himself."

Tourists are often turned away from the Café Nevo tables, as Sternholz feels they might disturb the regulars. But "a customer on whom Sternholz deigned to wait" would not always get "what he asked for, for the waiter reserved the right to edit all orders. He gave his customers what they needed, not what they wanted."

The café serves as just the center of this wondrous stage. Rogan's novel takes us into the lives of its regular customers one by one. We meet a cabinet minister with secret real estate deals in the West Bank; a celebrity prostitute who only takes on Jewish clients and ends up pregnant by one of them; a disillusioned kibbutznik who walked away from his Israeli army service, upsetting not only his IDF general father but the entire kibbutz; a young painter who sets up her studio on Sheinkin when that street was still affordable; a famous Israeli author at odds with his Palestinian collaborator on an anthology; and the author's estranged wife, who has a casual
affair with that same Palestinian.

Sternholz doesn't hesitate to sit down with his customers, listening to their life stories and offering solutions to their problems. Frequently he tries to kick them out of the café, to get on with their lives. As one of his regulars observes, "He was always telling customers, 'Go home, get a job, get out of here.' Sometimes they went, but they never stayed away. Whatever changes, growth, or petrification took place in their outside lives, they kept on coming back, as if Nevo were their spawning or their burial ground."

Café Nevo, the book, transports readers to Café Nevo, a coffee house that was trendy long before there was a trend to visit gourmet coffee shops on a daily basis.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning novel. It revolves around the habitués of a run-down café in Tel Aviv in the late 1980s (it was published in 1988). The epicenter is Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz, referred to throughout as the café’s waiter, although it’s an open secret that he’s actually the owner. Like an author, he keeps watch over his characters—artists, writers, publishers, bums—letting them get on with their lives, trying to keep them out of trouble, and nudging them in the right direction. We follow the stories of a handful of the café’s regulars. Most of them are trying to free themselves from the burden of the past: Sternholz from the murder of his wife and child by the Nazis; a young artist from memories of her late mother, a famous actress whom she strongly resembles; a 36-year old woman from her career as a high-class whore; a young hothead from the renown of his father, a prominent politician.

Although this may sound gloomy, the book is anything but. On the contrary, it is hopeful and energizing—and beautifully written. The author is American, but was living in Israel when she wrote this. The book is about Israel and about the struggle of living. It also speaks to Americans of today, who despair at the state of their own country.

The most you can do is to keep on working, keep on trying, and if you can’t hold on to the hope of Zion, hold on to the vision.

[Rosemary Dreyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 3/4 Stars: Cafe Nevo, set in Israel, is about the regulars who frequent this old bar. The writing is descriptive and the characters well drawn. There is romance and jealousy, war and politics, echoes of loss, and artistry. While the ending felt a little too easily resolved, it was still a good read. The only complaints were all the typos found in the e-book version.

[Zan Marie Steadham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Café Nevo shows modern Israel in all its religious, political, social, and racial diversity, but at its heart lives the a deep core of humanity exemplified by the main character, Sternholz.

[Carole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and captures the very human side of a group of people who love their country.