Title: Israela
Author: Dr. Batya Casper
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 1542674603
Pages: 366
Genre: Fiction / Religious
Reviewed by: David Allen
Pacific Book Review
Israela, by Dr. Batya Casper, is timely, well-written and cannot be ignored. This book is a masterful tapestry of the lives of three characters, their families, and a nation torn by age-old religious and civil strife.
The narrative is always moving, filled with drama, covers the period from the birth of modern Israel (1948) to the present-day. Against a backdrop of war and suffering and human resiliency, the complex stories of the protagonists are woven. Ratiba and Orit are sisters by adoption—and Orit’s birth mother was a concentration camp victim of the Second World War. One of the many fascinations of this book is its magisterial blending of the recent history of the nation of Israel with its characters’ lives. Ratiba, a journalist, leaves her birth family to marry Ibrahim, an ‘Israeli Arab.’
The book is rife with the unsolved contradictions of the Middle Eastern conflict: is Ibrahim an ‘Israeli Arab’, or is he a Palestinian Arab? Ratiba masks her Jewish origins from her husband and her family, in the process alienating herself from her sister Orit. Eisheva is a nurse who ministers to the wounded and dying of the second Israel Intifida. She serves as both a buffer and help mate between the two sisters. The fourth principal character of the book is ‘Israela’—the emerging nation of Israel, whose pulse and peoples are winningly portrayed in this captivating novel.
The women and their families carry deep and tragic secrets. Ibrahim knows that his wife is Jewish, but waits many years for her to have the courage to contact Orit. Orit’s fantasied revenge for abandonment by her sister—taking Ratiba’s son into her home—ends up wreaking havoc on all their lives when this young man is almost mortally wounded in action. Ibrahim’s father, who is an Arab, has a blood-stained Jewish prayer shawl hidden in his tool shed; the uncovering of this and its backstory make for one of the pivotal subplots of the book. Although the deadly dilemma of neighbor vs. neighbor is never fully resolved, the main characters learn and love and grow through the narrative trajectory.
Salman Rushdie’s novel is about the so-called ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’ might be considered an appetizer to the feast of culture and food and religion bounteously described in Dr. Casper’s book. (The Jerusalem Syndrome includes the almost obsessive fascination of visitors to and residents of Jerusalem with history, magic, and miracles.) Further, Casper enlivens her story by frequent lyrical if not poetic renditions of her polyglot Jerusalem.
Israela winningly elicits the drama, flavor and passion of thousands of years of history transposed to the life and times of present-day Israel.
