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Five Selves
Five powerful stories exploring identity and selfhood. With haunting, Kafkaesque prose, Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein creates a series of profound, internal narratives.
A Bird Flight: After the death of her father the narrator travels to an academic symposium in Chicago; her host seems fixated on her bereavement as he tries to reach understanding of his own recent loss through her experience.
Earrings: The narrator’s choice of earrings becomes symbolic of her desire to establish her own identity separate from the clashing ways of her mother, born in Israel, and her grandmother who emigrated from Europe.
The Grammar Teacher: A teacher who is certain of the right and proper way to behave and teach, and who achieves the highest standards from her classes, finds everything she believes in challenged by a new, modern teacher.
Watch Dog: The consequences of an irrational fear of dogs for a young man seeking to make his way in the world.
Aura: A man lies in a hospital bed and experiences an internal world disconnected from his old life.
‘These stories are brilliant and highly original. They movingly depict the inner lives of the characters, and the impact is as gripping and dramatic as any thriller.’
Miriam Gross, formerly Literary Editor The Sunday Telegraph
‘The stories are important in the way they portray the intricate formation of an Israeli identity, and shed new light in the complexity of Israeli life; yet they go beyond this, revealing a profound understanding of wider human – and humanistic – themes and a fresh, significant artistic voice.’
Aharon Appelfeld
A Bird Flight: After the death of her father the narrator travels to an academic symposium in Chicago; her host seems fixated on her bereavement as he tries to reach understanding of his own recent loss through her experience.
Earrings: The narrator’s choice of earrings becomes symbolic of her desire to establish her own identity separate from the clashing ways of her mother, born in Israel, and her grandmother who emigrated from Europe.
The Grammar Teacher: A teacher who is certain of the right and proper way to behave and teach, and who achieves the highest standards from her classes, finds everything she believes in challenged by a new, modern teacher.
Watch Dog: The consequences of an irrational fear of dogs for a young man seeking to make his way in the world.
Aura: A man lies in a hospital bed and experiences an internal world disconnected from his old life.
‘These stories are brilliant and highly original. They movingly depict the inner lives of the characters, and the impact is as gripping and dramatic as any thriller.’
Miriam Gross, formerly Literary Editor The Sunday Telegraph
‘The stories are important in the way they portray the intricate formation of an Israeli identity, and shed new light in the complexity of Israeli life; yet they go beyond this, revealing a profound understanding of wider human – and humanistic – themes and a fresh, significant artistic voice.’
Aharon Appelfeld
196 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 17, 2020
A superior collection of short stories. Common to each is a resonant interiority. I’m using the current lockdown conditions to make my way through the various titles I’ve downloaded, mostly on a whim as they have been given away free, and this has been languishing unread for long enough for me to lose any recall of its existence. Having no real idea of what to expect, and therefore no expectation either, this has turned out to be a fine find. Five pieces, some long enough to be novelettes, some substantial short stories, all very accomplished. A beautifully clear yet descriptive style pervades. The author is extremely proficient in capturing the vividness of the everyday, and I’m pretty sure this collection will linger and standout in memory as a result. Highly recommended.
May 19, 2016
How Should One Behave?
Something about the author's query letter inviting me to review this book intrigued me and, unusually for me, I agreed. And equally unusually, I read it as soon as it arrived by air mail from Israel. I am still intrigued, increasingly impressed by the author's sense of design, but puzzled by the meaning of some of the five longish stories it contains. I also wonder how much it would mean to anyone without first-hand experience of living there, certainly more than my own two-month stay almost thirty years ago.
The key story, I think, is the second, "Earrings." Beginning and ending with a young woman in a jewelry store, it looks at three generations of Israeli women: the European grandmother who arrived as a refugee in the forties, the daughter whose fierce independence rebelled against the old-world decorum of her parents, and the granddaughter who in turn rejects her mother's example and looks to the eldest generation for role-models, but does not find the secret there either. Seeking of her grandmother, she says: "Though her words were obscure, they had a familiar echo. Something about the constant need to guess how one should behave, the lack of solid posts supporting everyday life made sense, though it was not fully intelligible." It makes sense to me too, though I don't know Israeli society well enough to recognize more than dimly the truth in the details that the author describes.
The third and fourth stories (the publisher calls them novellas, but all are under 40 pages) are less comprehensive, but by the same token more focused. In "The Grammar Teacher," a youngish woman answers the question of how one should behave by demanding the strictest discipline from herself and her students, with initial success but devastating consequences. "Watch Dog" has almost the opposite trajectory: a college student is crippled by an irrational fear of dogs until one day he meets a canine adversary that totally merits his fear. Despite the rather dry declarative writing here and all through the book, it makes a fascinating case-study. Would I be wrong to think of it as a coded fable about Israelis and Palestinians?
I have left out the first story, "A Bird Flight," mainly because I did not know what to make of it at the time. Barasch-Rubinstein says she wrote it shortly after the death of her father, and indeed it might almost be autobiographical. An Israeli academic (as the author is) shocks her family by going to Chicago only a few days after her father's death to read a paper at a conference. Clearly she knows Chicago; a number of the details are spot-on: the squeal of the trains on the Loop, the lakeside buildings in the fog, the biting winds. But an equal number are simply off: flights getting in at the wrong time of day, seat companions going to quite different places, empty suitcases that mysteriously fill themselves. At first, I put these things down to poor editing, but there were simply too many of them, and it soon became clear that Barasch-Rubinstein is not a careless writer. So I wondered if the dislocation in space and time was deliberate, a kind of surrealism, though it was not quite clear enough for that either.
However, my theory was confirmed by the last story, "Aura," which are the thoughts of a seriously injured man in a hospital following some kind of accident. I do not respond well to inner monologues of delirium, so I liked this story the least of the five, but that may simply be personal taste. At the same time, I recognized the author's skill in bookending her collection by two stories that verged on fantasy, both featuring older men close to death in a hospital. For the right readers, Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein has a lot to offer.
Something about the author's query letter inviting me to review this book intrigued me and, unusually for me, I agreed. And equally unusually, I read it as soon as it arrived by air mail from Israel. I am still intrigued, increasingly impressed by the author's sense of design, but puzzled by the meaning of some of the five longish stories it contains. I also wonder how much it would mean to anyone without first-hand experience of living there, certainly more than my own two-month stay almost thirty years ago.
The key story, I think, is the second, "Earrings." Beginning and ending with a young woman in a jewelry store, it looks at three generations of Israeli women: the European grandmother who arrived as a refugee in the forties, the daughter whose fierce independence rebelled against the old-world decorum of her parents, and the granddaughter who in turn rejects her mother's example and looks to the eldest generation for role-models, but does not find the secret there either. Seeking of her grandmother, she says: "Though her words were obscure, they had a familiar echo. Something about the constant need to guess how one should behave, the lack of solid posts supporting everyday life made sense, though it was not fully intelligible." It makes sense to me too, though I don't know Israeli society well enough to recognize more than dimly the truth in the details that the author describes.
The third and fourth stories (the publisher calls them novellas, but all are under 40 pages) are less comprehensive, but by the same token more focused. In "The Grammar Teacher," a youngish woman answers the question of how one should behave by demanding the strictest discipline from herself and her students, with initial success but devastating consequences. "Watch Dog" has almost the opposite trajectory: a college student is crippled by an irrational fear of dogs until one day he meets a canine adversary that totally merits his fear. Despite the rather dry declarative writing here and all through the book, it makes a fascinating case-study. Would I be wrong to think of it as a coded fable about Israelis and Palestinians?
I have left out the first story, "A Bird Flight," mainly because I did not know what to make of it at the time. Barasch-Rubinstein says she wrote it shortly after the death of her father, and indeed it might almost be autobiographical. An Israeli academic (as the author is) shocks her family by going to Chicago only a few days after her father's death to read a paper at a conference. Clearly she knows Chicago; a number of the details are spot-on: the squeal of the trains on the Loop, the lakeside buildings in the fog, the biting winds. But an equal number are simply off: flights getting in at the wrong time of day, seat companions going to quite different places, empty suitcases that mysteriously fill themselves. At first, I put these things down to poor editing, but there were simply too many of them, and it soon became clear that Barasch-Rubinstein is not a careless writer. So I wondered if the dislocation in space and time was deliberate, a kind of surrealism, though it was not quite clear enough for that either.
However, my theory was confirmed by the last story, "Aura," which are the thoughts of a seriously injured man in a hospital following some kind of accident. I do not respond well to inner monologues of delirium, so I liked this story the least of the five, but that may simply be personal taste. At the same time, I recognized the author's skill in bookending her collection by two stories that verged on fantasy, both featuring older men close to death in a hospital. For the right readers, Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein has a lot to offer.
July 4, 2016
My review appears in New York Journal of Books. Read that review first. Additional remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.
Israeli books: Five Selves explores five inner lives
Five Selves, a book of five short stories and the first fiction book by Israeli humanities scholar Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein published last month by British publisher Holland House Books, explores the psyches of five characters, three of whom are nameless and female, while the two with names are male. Perhaps the three female protagonists represent different sides of the author, or maybe not.
In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend Five Selves “to readers who enjoy interior prose and psychological literary fiction.” All five characters are ill at ease in their social environments. Some seem to be temperamentally outside the mainstream, introverts in an even more extroverted society (Israel) than America, though the first one we meet is in mourning and the last is hospitalized after a traffic accident and suffering from amnesia, extreme conditions that tell us little of what they are normally like.
The first character has the most personal voice of the five and like the author is an academic who has lost her father. Going straight from the shiva to an overseas scholarly conference, in her bereavement she lacks the strength to shake loose her clingy, also mourning, misery-loves-company host and explore the foreign city on her own. Back in her hotel room she recalls her father in his final illness:
“Unconscious, surrounded by endless tubes, he seemed like a complete stranger, and it was impossible to recognize the man that he was. His vital, sharp expression was replaced by a deep coma, and my attempts to trace the familiar features were futile. It seemed to me that a terrible mistake was taking place here, and we were all gathered around the bed of another old man, a stranger, to witness his death. By his body you could tell he had reached a very old age—apparently he ate very little in his last years since he was skinny, and the tone of his face was grayish, almost silver, creating the notion that he was already in the process of passing to another world. Wrapped in a hospital robe, tubes and needles piercing his thin body, the dreary light of the hospital didn’t bother him at all, and he was entirely indifferent to the loud whistles of the machine inserting oxygen into his lungs.”
The characters in the other stories include a young woman who identifies more with her immigrant grandmother than with her Sabra mother, a rigidly neurotic teacher, and a boy who must overcome an irrational fear of dogs. The young woman and the teacher are old-school and at odds with their more modern peers, while the boy has a clearly defined disorder which he gradually learns to overcome in what is the most hopeful of the five stories.
But from the hopeful end of the penultimate story we are cast into the despair of the last one whose protagonist like the first character’s father lies helpless in a hospital room:
“If I could, I would escape from this place, abandon these oppressive lights lacking the slightest compassion, penetrating me, ignoring the pain they cause, attempting to illuminate without mercy what should be left in the dark. Even if they can be endured for a minute, this beam of light leaves me breathless, suffocated by a desire to throw myself into the darkness.”
For a fuller discussion of Five Selves see my NYJB review.
Israeli books: Five Selves explores five inner lives
Five Selves, a book of five short stories and the first fiction book by Israeli humanities scholar Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein published last month by British publisher Holland House Books, explores the psyches of five characters, three of whom are nameless and female, while the two with names are male. Perhaps the three female protagonists represent different sides of the author, or maybe not.
In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend Five Selves “to readers who enjoy interior prose and psychological literary fiction.” All five characters are ill at ease in their social environments. Some seem to be temperamentally outside the mainstream, introverts in an even more extroverted society (Israel) than America, though the first one we meet is in mourning and the last is hospitalized after a traffic accident and suffering from amnesia, extreme conditions that tell us little of what they are normally like.
The first character has the most personal voice of the five and like the author is an academic who has lost her father. Going straight from the shiva to an overseas scholarly conference, in her bereavement she lacks the strength to shake loose her clingy, also mourning, misery-loves-company host and explore the foreign city on her own. Back in her hotel room she recalls her father in his final illness:
“Unconscious, surrounded by endless tubes, he seemed like a complete stranger, and it was impossible to recognize the man that he was. His vital, sharp expression was replaced by a deep coma, and my attempts to trace the familiar features were futile. It seemed to me that a terrible mistake was taking place here, and we were all gathered around the bed of another old man, a stranger, to witness his death. By his body you could tell he had reached a very old age—apparently he ate very little in his last years since he was skinny, and the tone of his face was grayish, almost silver, creating the notion that he was already in the process of passing to another world. Wrapped in a hospital robe, tubes and needles piercing his thin body, the dreary light of the hospital didn’t bother him at all, and he was entirely indifferent to the loud whistles of the machine inserting oxygen into his lungs.”
The characters in the other stories include a young woman who identifies more with her immigrant grandmother than with her Sabra mother, a rigidly neurotic teacher, and a boy who must overcome an irrational fear of dogs. The young woman and the teacher are old-school and at odds with their more modern peers, while the boy has a clearly defined disorder which he gradually learns to overcome in what is the most hopeful of the five stories.
But from the hopeful end of the penultimate story we are cast into the despair of the last one whose protagonist like the first character’s father lies helpless in a hospital room:
“If I could, I would escape from this place, abandon these oppressive lights lacking the slightest compassion, penetrating me, ignoring the pain they cause, attempting to illuminate without mercy what should be left in the dark. Even if they can be endured for a minute, this beam of light leaves me breathless, suffocated by a desire to throw myself into the darkness.”
For a fuller discussion of Five Selves see my NYJB review.
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