Price £11.99
Format Paperback and ebook
Published 4 October 2018
Length 336 pages
ISBN 9781905559923
ISBN 9781905559930 (ebook)
Click to order
Click to order
Reviews
The Jerusalem Post, March 2019
Jewish Quarterly, February 2019
The Jewish Chronicle, November 2018
Coming Soon: The Flood
Zvi Jagendorf
Who are these wanderers and outsiders living on the cease fire line in Jerusalem, a city torn in two? What do they know of an impending storm?
Is Jerusalem the centre of the world or the place where it will end? For the people of this novel set around 1960 in the divided city, it is the end. There is no way out. In front of them lies the border and no man’s land; behind lies a nondescript little town and the road they won’t take away to normality and the sea.
They are a colourful crew: refugees, Jews, Christians, run-away monks, nuns, a restless polyglot kind of family – intellectual, artistic, theatrical – who, by choice or accident, find themselves living at a dead end, near or even right on top of the volatile border that cuts the city in two. The wound is still new and won’t heal. So their lives, loves and jealousies are shadowed by the ghosts of the people who, ten years before, abandoned the houses where they now live, and the instability they experience in their lives grows out of this landscape and its history.
The Eichmann trial, and preparations for it, pervades the book, as do preparations for an outdoor staging of the medieval mystery play Noah’s Flood, adapted and set in contemporary Jerusalem. The play contains a turbulent, quixotic, but also serious warning. The waters could be here any day and who knows how to build an ark?
“This masterfully written novel offers Jerusalemites the unique opportunity to walk the streets of the city as it existed in 1961… a rare gem and a must-read.”
The Jerusalem Post
“It is as if T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land had come to 1960s Jerusalem…memorable, contemporary fiction at its best”
David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
"Jagendorf handles the material with astonishing finesse, balancing the playfulness with a delicate and sensuous world of touch and smell, evoking a fragile world threatened by sorrows that cannot be forgotten."
James Hopkins, The Guardian, on Wolfy and the Strudelbakers
‘The delight is in the comic detail, even when the matter is serious.’
The Times review of Wolfy and the Strudelbakers
About Zvi Jagendorf
Born in 1936 in Vienna, Zvi Jagendorf fled to England with his family to escape the Nazis. Educated at Oxford, he later emigrated to Jerusalem where he taught English and Theatre Studies at the Hebrew University. His first novel, Wolfy and the Strudelbakers, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001.