"What's Written
Above" juggles between numerous events and a colorful richness
of human stories. It is told by more than twenty heroes, interweaving
folktales, legends and Romancas. The novel travels through
continents and centuries, as if trying to follow the complicated ways
of fate, the hidden Angel's map written above.
In the first part
of the novel, Michael Frankfurter tells Na'ama Kaballero all that
had happened to him until the day she showed up in his apartment.
His injury in the Yom Kippur war, his journeys abroad as well as in
his inner world, his love to his wife Anna, his tragedy, are mixedd
with his family's stories, from medieval Frankfurt, through Berlin,
to contemporary Jerusalem.
In the second
part of the novel, Na'ama Kaballero writes to an addressee who's identity
is revealed only later. The story of her love to Michael, which shocks
her proud, traditional family, is echoed by her family's stories from
the past, from Spain and Portugal before the Jews' expulsion (15th
century), through Morocco and Turkey, to today's Israeli suburb of
Bat-Yam.
Cover art: Etty
Ben-Zaken
|
"The
Empress Card" (1998, Sifriyat Poalim)
(The title in Hebrew: "Klaf Ha'keysarit")
"A unique, special novel... Ben-Zaken conveys emotions
in an intense, powerful way"
(Israel's daily, "Yedi'ot Aharonot")
|
Etty Ben-Zaken's first novel, "The Empress Card," brings
together three women from different times and cultures: Gil, a contemporary
young musician, who writes from San Francisco to her female lover
who has left her for another woman; Guljan, a Muslim Turkish singer
from the 13th century, who is taken to Mongolia by her Tartar master;
and Joya, an old Sephardic Israeli woman, who recalls her childhood
in Turkey of the early 20th century, and prays to see her granddaughter,
Gil, married. The stories intermingle to create a colorful picture
of womanhood, fertility and creation - the picture depicted on the
Empress Card.
Cover art: Etty Ben-Zaken
