One Night, Markovitch

Starts out promisingly but was frustrating. I think it is hard for a woman to write like a man and she is quite heavy on the blokish stuff - but oddly enough it is her female characters that annoyed me. they are essentially all the same woman and hard to distinguish between them. the basic premise of the book is Markovitch and his friend leave Palestine during the WW2 to marry English Jewesses to bring them to Palestine and thus escape Europe. Markovitch who has such a plain, unmemorable face that he is immediately given the role of arms smuggler by his army captain, ends up paired with the most stunning woman on the list. The idea is the girls marry andthen get divorced as soon as they hit Palestinian soil. Markovitch refuses to do so and the story is of their life and her interaction with two other women in the village . It is an ok read

Just finished the book and like all good reads it is still haunting me! Quite apropos as it happens since we travel with our characters Yaackov Markovitch and his counterpoint Zeev Feinberg through so many feelings of love and rejection - of love and despair. The women Sonya and Bella (and others) are equally well drawn out as is the nascent state of Israel. The author is visceral in her fascination with the scent and smells of being and as we head to the "after-afterwards" of the book. All the characters in the book are very strong and no one in a sense is weak whilst all are equally flawed and thus equally magnificent. Each man in turn has to carry out a final act of grace and here we benefit from the author's career in psychology not because she writes as a therapist (thank goodness) but because she has a real understanding of human fallibility and an unwillingness to be critical of the strange twists and turns that her characters seem to take, as it were, seemingly without any guidance from her. So, though a first novel we are in the hands of person who seems to have insight into men as well as women and this to an extent accounts for the maturity of the rendition. The translation from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston seems to be a tour de force allowing me (a non Hebrew speaker) to have such access to the characters and story as I have described.

Finding it hard to review as not sure what I thought about it. It's not funny despite the reviews but is certainly moving and interesting. There isn't one heroic character but there are several lovable ones. I'm not sure I've helped anyone decide to read it but I am glad I did.

very interesting read, I didn't know what to expect, having bought the book after hearing its review on the radio

What promised to be an interesting story just went on rather too long. I gradually lost interest in what happened, although I did finish it. The writing style was quite good but I became a little confused as it went on.

What a beautiful, tender, and charming book. I congratulate Ms. Goshen on her exquisite writing and her moving account of the Israeli experience. The characters, every one, are humorously and meticulously drawn, from the European refugees to the adolescent misfits, each with his or her own deep felt sense of alienation. As an Israeli myself I would say that it takes one to know one. The only jarring note is the use of The Irgun who at that time were not as depicted here, the Palmach would have been more appropriate.

Well written but story not my cup of tea.

Although originally written in Hebrew, the author must have thought in Yiddish, the sense of which is marvelously conveyed by the translator. Like another reviewer, I don't know what to say about this book - not quite magical realism, although the time scales are as elastic as a chest expander - but the writing is poetic, warm, sympathetic, imaginative, and catches one out time after time. I enjoyed it very much indeed.