Reviews

• A unique story told as a richly imaginative parable

  This 2004 Israeli novel is strangely compelling and richly imaginative. It begins in Jerusalem in the wake of a suicide bombing. One of the victims is a non-Jewish woman in her forties who had emigrated from one of the former Soviet republics to Israel. Her body is in the morgue, an anonymous victim of violence, her only identification a pay stub from a bakery where she worked as a cleaning lady. A journalist in a local paper writes a scathing article faulting her employer for neglecting this incident and so starts a chain of events that explores the concepts of identity, responsibility and the uniqueness of Israel itself. Interestingly, with the exception of the name of the woman, Yulia Ragayev, all the other characters in the novel are not given names. Instead, we meet the human resources manager, the secretary, the ex-wife, the owner, the journalist, the photographer, the bakery supervisor, the morgue attendant, the ex-husband, the boy, the mother, etc. This literary device makes gives the book the feeling of a parable and sets a unique tone which is one of the book's strengths. Little by little, we get to know more and more about the dead woman, but we mostly get to know more about the human resources manager, whose job it is to find out about her and then, eventually, help transport her body back to her native land for burial. The author is not maudlin about this at all; in fact the book is peppered with some darkly comic moments that made me laugh out loud. But beneath the running story, there is a larger theme which makes some of the sillier moments all the more worthwhile. The book is a mere 234 pages and I read it quickly. The ending was a surprise and put the whole story into a contextual message which was the author's intention. This is a fine book.

• The Resouce Manager's Mission

  This work might best be called a tale because the text takes the form of a simple recounting of events that more or less move forward without undue skipping around. Thus, the novel is very easy to read and even becomes a page-turner. Third person italicized commentaries, scattered throughout the work reminiscent of a Greek chorus, add a poetic elaboration. It would be quite interesting to compare this translation to the original. The story is simple. Yulia Ragayev, a foreigner living in Jerusalem, is killed by a terrorist attack, and can only be identified through a pay stub, found on her body, as a nameless employee of a large bakery firm. Abandoned while fighting for her life in a hospital, she then lays unidentified in the hospital morgue for many days until a story headlined "The Shocking Inhumanity Behind Our Daily Bread" appears in a newspaper. The distraught old jewish owner of the large firm, berated by an eager journalist, charges his human resource manager with identifying and burying their dead employee. With the exception of the unidentified dead woman, all the characters in the novel have tags rather than names--the resource manager, the old man, the weasel journalist, etc. This anonyminity extends to character descriptions as well. The reader learns only a little about any one of the characters including Yulia Ragayev. Although the author uses an Israeli example, the novel seems to address the horror and inhumanity of any nameless and forgotten terrorist victim in this age when in some parts of the world death by terrorism has become an ordinary way to die. Another important issue that the author addresses is the question of who should live in Jerusalem. The author's answer to the question controls the ending of the work. This is not a question to be governed by politics or bureaucracy but by a deep regard for humanity. Yehoshua tells his tale beautifuly and with subtlety, but somehow the end seems to lack the intricacy of the rest of the story.

• Decent

  An odd book. The themes were wonderful but the conveyance was hard to get into and the attention was hard to maintain.

• Unusual and thought provoking.

  It's a great book with an unusual plot. A nameless human resource manager follows the trail of a cleaning woman who was employed at his company and murdered in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, and yet no one from the company seemed to realize she was missing. His journey to discover her identity and why she was not missed, brings him to realizations about himself and his city. It is beautifully written, even in traslation, but the meandering plot lost me for awhile. Probably more my fault than the author's. I'd like to read it again in a few months. They are layers yet to uncover.

• If there is subtlety in this book, where is it?

  I was disappointed by this novel. The plot is simple: The protagonist, identified only as the "[Human] Resource Manager" of a bakery in Jerusalem, is assigned by his boss to identify and then handle the funeral arrangements for the corpse of a woman killed in a bombing; she once worked for the company but was fired, although the pay checks kept going to her. No one seems to remember her. The resource manager is also instructed to apologize publicly for his company's inhumanity in failing to notice her death. Thus commences an odyssey which takes our man to an unnamed foreign country (Uzbekistan?) which is cold, barren, and has signs written exclusively in Cyrillic. Along the way he encounters a journalist, a photographer, the woman's child, mother, and ex-husband, and has vinegary conversations with his ex-wife. We also learn that the loyal manager was a soldier in the Israeli army, and a successful salesman. Apparently his boss has big things in mind for him if he can get his company out of hot water. But why no names? This is hardly a universally employed story line. A bit of humanism--though frequently referred to but never spelled out in the novel--would have helped me get through it with more interest. As it stands, the resource manager's angst is left, along with the coffin which is his companion, lying in the cold snows of an Asiatic winter.

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