Description
A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning lady at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When the newspaper accuses the bakery of negligence and inhumanity toward their employee, the bakery’s owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources manager. At first, the manager is reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman’s life take shape—she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful—he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love. Questions of morality, dignity, identity, nationality and belonging are subtly explored in a sometimes hallucinatory prose. This short novel’s layers reveal themselves only gradually and, once revealed, continue to compel and provoke. At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.
