Novel
The Blue Mountain
רומן רוסי
Meir Shalev · 1988
Synopsis
A village in the Jezreel Valley, never named, founded by pioneers from Russia in the time of the Second Aliyah. Baruch, grandson of Yaakov Mirkin, one of the founders, tells, moving back and forth in time, what he has from the accounts of his grandfather and the elders: the work group named after Feyga Levin, founded as a game with two friends and equipped with rules, the marriage of Yaakov and Feyga decided by a vote although he loved a woman who had stayed in Odessa, their children, and Uncle Efraim, who came back from the war with a burned face and one day leaves the village.
Context
The story is set in a kind of novelistic double of Nahalal, the author's native village, and mixes reality and invention. Published by Am Oved, the book sold nearly 100,000 copies in two years and became one of the great bookshop successes in Hebrew; the author received the Bernstein Prize in 1989. It appeared in French as early as 1990 from Albin Michel, and in English in 1991, in a translation by Hillel Halkin. An American critic compared it to a painting by Chagall, rich in atmosphere and myth more than in plot.
Who it is for
A long novel, available to read in French in a paperback edition. It is better to know that the Second Aliyah refers to the immigration of Jewish pioneers from Russia between 1904 and 1914.
Prizes and reception
A rare bookshop success in Hebrew, and the beginning of a body of work translated throughout the world.