Edges: O Israel, O Palestine

By Leora Skolkin-Smith

It's summer, 1963. Fourteen-year-old Liana travels to Jerusalem, accompanied by her older sister and larger-than-life mother. The trip takes her from a sheltered life in Westchester County, NY to the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1930180144
• ISBN13: 9781930180147
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Glad Day Books
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.5" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

memorable novel

I'd like to tout Leora Skolkin-Smith's new novel, Edges: O Israel O Palestine It's about the adventures of an adolescent girl in Israel in the early '60s. Her character's mother had grown up in British Mandate Palestine, one of several factors making the memory bank of this book so rich -- appropriate for a place with almost too much history to bear and retain one's sanity at the same time. What is most memorable to me is the sense of place that Ms. Skolkin-Smith has achieved -- the sunny and scary Jerusalem and countryside -- and the hope, love, hate and fatalism of the groups, Palestinian and Israeli, living amongst and apart from each other in a thin, rocky, brilliantly bright corridor too rarely shaded by old gray-green olive trees. Perhaps above all, the novel, told with restraint and poetic precision, is about how we shoulder on (and wing it) under the weight of history -- family and public.

Metaphorical work

Leora Skolkin-Smith's "Edges" shouts metaphorically. When her father suicides, fourteen-year old Liana leaves her protected (if torturous) N.Y. suburb with her mother...and sails right into our world. An edgy world of tense borders, barbed wire. A world where soldiers and children are endangered species. In the mother;s old home in Jerusalem the family lingers around the traditional Friday evening meal. Liana watches this marooned island of love and civility, each one damaged in their own way--an uncle with a stump where there had been a leg, the mother giggly with memories of runnng bullets in her bras and and panties when she was fourteen. "Edges" has been called a coming-of-age novel. But I consider it not just as the struggle of one fourteen year old's girl for identity but the artist's stuggle to comes to grips with gender and violence. Skolkin-Smith offers us something human and whole: fourteen year old Liana leaving the dense-with-war Jeurusalem to make of its dangerous borders a glade, the forest primeval, the Mediterranean-flicked hillside of her own "personal". She soon learns that she is her own country,

Unique and Riveting

It took me only a few days to read Edges,this book blew me away. It is hypnotic, frightening--the feeling of danger never let up, not for a second. It is beautiful, visceral--I think of it and smell oranges and desert (I grew up in a desert), and oh--the author so nailed that terrible longing that I remember feeling at 14 or so. The scene in Palestine with the mother, all those shops, colors, smells--I was in heaven reading that, and scared to death at the same time. To be able to write somebody like this mother, horrible and beautiful all at once, takes great talent. I also loved that it was smooth-- one second, or more than a second, then raw as hell the next. I think this is why the unexpected moments worked so well, why a Jewish mother, worried about safety, would suddenly drag her youngest daughter into a place that turns out to be not safe at all (those boys, after night fell, in Palestine), and why I bought, completely, Liana's taking off to find William, to find Paris, to find that something she longed for. It's absolutely not perfect, but that's a good thing,

Brilliant and Evocative

I just finished this brilliant book Edges. One of the best I've read in a very long time! This book got inside me, and books these days rarely do. It's the way Skolkin-Smith wrote of the land, the repetitiveness of place, the sensuality in the land there and how it took the character Liana over and transformed her. That dug into me like a spade to the heart. It's a book that left an after-taste in my mouth, both bitter and sweet.

original and impressive

In Edges Leora Smith skillfully tells the story of a girl of fourteen in the wake of her father's suicide, brought abruptly by her distraught mother from a comfortable suburban Westchester to the harsh terrain of a young State of Israel. The girl is caught in the maelstrom of political claims between Israel and a West Bank, still part of the Kingdom of Jordan. The turmoil both of the girl and her mother is graphically detailed as they struggle to define themselves in the light of a haunted past and present. The poetry of the girl's sexual awakening ripples through many pages, softening the fierce realities of the conflict between Arab and Jew. The pages evoke as well the memories of a shared land, and the mother's childhood growing up in an old Jerusalem before the city was separated by physical barriers, the religious, cultural, divide between Arab and Jew easier to bridge. The author's vivid sense of landscape, her gift for identifying with both mother and daughter, Arab and Jew, gives the novel a unique sense of balance and brings the reader, regardless of political conviction into sympathy with this portrait of a vanished Jerusalem.