Novel
Feathers
נוצות
Haim Be'er · 1979
Synopsis
Jerusalem, the Geula neighbourhood, in the mid-1950s. A religious boy, whose father searches the texts for the trees of the Bible, befriends Mordechai Leder, an eccentric who lived in prewar Vienna and brought back from it the social doctrine of Popper-Lynkeus. Leder wants to found a “food army” that would ensure everyone's subsistence, and gathers in apartments around the city vegetarians, Esperantists and admirers of the Emperor of Austria. In 1973, the boy, now a soldier, recovers the dead for the military rabbinate, and his dreams lead him back to Leder.
Context
Be'er had published a poetry collection, Shaashuim yom yom, in 1970 with his employer. This first novel appeared with the same publisher in 1979 and made him a novelist; Shmuel Hasfari adapted it for the Cameri Theatre in 1987. It opens a kind of trilogy of apprenticeship in which an adolescent from Jerusalem is seen from several angles, with Et ha-zamir (1987) and Havalim (1998). The critic Yosef Oren reads in it a satire of utopia itself. Hillel Halkin translated it into English in 2004.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred pages, with no French edition. It is better to know who Popper-Lynkeus was, a Viennese thinker who wanted to guarantee everyone the necessities of life.
Prizes and reception
Selected by the National Yiddish Book Center among the hundred great works of modern Jewish literature; adapted for the theatre in 1987.