Feathers

By Haim Be'er

Book Overview

When first published in 1979, Haim Be'er's Feathers was a critical and commercial success, ushering in a period of great productivity and expansiveness in modern Hebrew literature. Now considered a classic in Israeli fiction the book is finally available to English readers worldwide. In this, his first novel, Be'er portrays the world of a deeply religious community in Jerusalem during the author's childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s. The novel is filled with vivid portraits of eccentric Jerusalem characters, chief among them the book's main character, Mordecai Leder, who dreams of founding a utopian colony based on the theories of the nineteenth-century Viennese Jewish thinker Karl Popper-Lynkeus. Similar high-flying dreams inspire the family of the narrator, strict Orthodox Jews with impractical minds and adventurous souls--men such as the narrator's father, who periodically disappears from home on botanical expeditions meant to prove that the willow tree of Scripture is in fact the Australian eucalyptus. Experimental in structure and mood, Feathers features kaleidoscopic jumps in time, back and forth in the narrator's memories from boyhood to adulthood. Its moods swing wildly from hilarity to the macabre, from familial warmth to the loneliness of adolescence. Jerusalem and its inhabitants, as well as the emotional life of the narrator, are splintered and reconstituted, shattered and patched. This fragmentation, combined with a preoccupation with death and physical dissolution and dreamlike flights of imagination, evokes an Israeli magical realism. Feathers was chosen one of the 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature by the National Yiddish Book Center.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 158465371X
• ISBN13: 9781584653714
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Length: 235 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

The end of this story lies shrouded in death

Haim Be'er's Feathers is a unique novel, at turns frolicking and grim. Feathers plays with the entire notion of the Zionist enterprise in its utopian guise, but does so covertly, by taking on other, equally as unsuccessfully utopian schemes and gestures. Some of these are little known, like the Popper-Lynkeus dietary cult, while others need no introduction, such as Esperanto and Communism. All the while Be'er betrays his deep and convoluted knowledge of ultra-orthodox religious Judaism. The search for the biblical "true" blue dye and the actual willow used in the hadass, the myrtle tree at Sukkoth, take on an equally utopian flavor, as characters try to bring the ideal into the real with crushing results. All the while these actions are framed by the Yom Kippur War, Israel's most ego shattering conflict. For humans, there is probably no great source of disillusionment than trying to enact our dreams in the real world. Feathers is a case study in this exercise.