Savyon Liebrecht

The gripping story of a reunion between two family members Micha, an Israeli expat in Los Angeles working as a ghostwriter, receives an unexpected invitation. Adella, married to his beloved uncle, has bought him a ticket to Israel and booked a boutique hotel, so that he can return home and meet with her. Years before, Micha was the bridesman at Adella’s wedding. He remembers her as a rebellious young woman, and orphan and an outsider, who was mocked by his close-knit family of Persian Jews. Micha is stunned by the Adella of today – poised, confident, with nothing of the uneasiness he remembers from the past. When Adella finally reveals the true story of her life, powerful memories resurface in Micha, although nothing can prepare him for the surprise she has in store for him… With a beguiling cast of characters and their interwoven stories, The Bridesman is a moving tale about family, place, and the unceasing power of the past to reshape our lives and identity.

From one of the most important voices in contemporary Hebrew literature, the gripping story of a reunion between two family members that brings back a long-forgotten past and reveals secrets that will change their lives forever.Micha, an Israeli expat in Los Angeles working as a ghostwriter, receives an unexpected invitation. Adella, married to his beloved uncle, has bought him a ticket to Israel and booked a boutique hotel, so that he can return home and meet with her.Years before, Micha was the bridesman at Adella's wedding. He remembers her as a rebellious young woman, and orphan and an outsider, who was mocked by his close-knit family of Persian Jews. Micha is stunned by the Adella of today-poised, confident, with nothing of the uneasy woman he remembers from the past. When finally Adella reveals the true story of her life, powerful memories resurface in Micha, although nothing can prepare him for the surprise she has in store for him...The Bridesman presents a beguiling cast of characters, whose stories are interwoven into a gripping and moving tale about family, place, and the unceasing power of the past to reshape our lives and identity.

After his successful first novel, Meir suffers writer s block. Then his father, poet and charmer of women, who supposedly died decades earlier, contacts him and they arrange to meet. Fragmented, troubling memories of a forgotten childhood time spent alone with his father rise to Meir s consciousness. Swirling floodwater, a man hiding from the Gestapo, a woman flirting, a bloodstained sheet. What happened during that time, and why did his father disappear? While solving these riddles of the past, Meir inhabits the borderland between memory and artistic creation. There he finds emotions so deeply tangled in his being that they can only be expressed through art. He begins to write again a story of a loving son who witnessed a seduction and perhaps also a murder.

Thematically linked stories about Israelis in love and in trouble far away from home--by the author of the acclaimed "Apples from the Desert," Savyon Liebrecht, one of Israel's most distinguished and popular authors, has won an avid readership in the U. S. for her rich, believable fiction about affairs of the heart. Her newest collection includes seven long stories named for places--Munich, America, Tel Aviv, Hiroshima--and features Israelis abroad, women and men in love and in trouble far away from home. A woman living congenially in Hiroshima for nine years becomes involved in a love triangle with an American and a Japanese, and learns with chilling finality that she can never be at home in this city of the Japanese holocaust. The tables turn on an Israeli journalist, in Munich to cover the trial of a Nazi war criminal, when he becomes a witness to anti-Arab violence and to the murder of a beautiful Muslim woman he has secretly desired. In these searing stories setting becomes an accomplice to fate, and history intrudes into the heat of passion. In the end, "A Good Place for the Night" makes us realize that we are all wanderers, and the safe haven of "home" is only an idea.

An international bestseller--a novel of passion by one of Israel's finest writers. In the unlikely setting of a Tel Aviv nursing home, Hamutal, wife and mother, falls in love with a man in a green jacket. Like herself, he has come to visit a dying parent. As Hamutal's mother reveals unsettling truths about her Holocaust past, Hamutal's obsession with the man grows. With sensitivity and insight, Liebrecht captures the intensity of their sudden love affair and its aftermath

Savyon Liebrecht's intense, lyrical, and emotionally complex stories have made her a best-selling writer in her native Israel. Apples From the Desert brings together Liebrecht's most vivid and affecting work and makes it available in English for the first time. With a precision and a subtle ferocity reminiscent of the work of Nadine Gordimer, Liebrecht's stories reveal the impact of larger social and political conflicts within the private worlds of home and family. She depicts the personal tragedies--and the small acts of courage and reconciliation--that grow from the deep-rooted conflict between Arabs and Jews, women and men, and older and younger generations in present-day Israel. These stories create a finely nuanced portrait of contemporary Israel; at the same time, they reach toward truths that know no national boundaries. As Lily Rattok writes in her introduction, "Liebrecht's skill as a writer, combined with her perceptiveness, her compassion, and her deep humanity, create a body of work that is a testament to the healing power of storytelling."

This collection of stories offers a broad panorama of contemporary Israeli society that reveals the passionate and intense layers underneath ordinary lives of people from different ethnic backgrounds. The stories concern Arab-Israeli relations from a woman's view.