Novel
אלף לבבות
Not translated into English
Dan Tsalka · 1991
Synopsis
In 1919, the Ruslan, an immigrant ship that has left Odessa, reaches Jaffa. On board is Ezra Marinsky, an architect and committed Zionist, who dreams of covering the beaches of the country he has come to build with concrete. Around him, the narrative follows over fifty years immigrants of the third wave: Alek Tcherniak, a gifted young man who wants to be wholly European and whom life sends back to the margins, and Madi, born in the country, who struggles to find her place in it. From Mandate Palestine to Poland and Samarkand, up to the Tel Aviv of the late 1960s, the stories intertwine.
Context
Tsalka regarded this book as his greatest work, in scope as in quality. It appeared in 1991 from Am Oved, in two volumes of more than eight hundred pages; Ariel Hirschfeld compared it to War and Peace and Memoirs of Hadrian, and the Alterman Prize crowned it in 1992, but sales were weak. A tightened edition, prepared by Eli Hirsch according to the indications left by the author, appeared in 2008 from Xargol and Am Oved. The narrative is built along the stages of Renaissance drawing and mixes myth and legend with the voices of the characters.
Who it is for
A long novel, with no French edition. It is better to know the waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine after the First World War.
Prizes and reception
Alterman Prize 1992; regarded by critics as one of the great historical novels of modern Hebrew literature.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.