Four Mothers : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A rich and sweeping family saga set in Israel
Review: A rich and sweeping family saga set in Israel over a century, about five remarkable Jewish mothers.

Amal, after giving birth to a son, and thereby breaking the curse of the women of her family explores the lives of her mother, the wayward Geula, her grandmother Pnina Mazal who can read minds, her great grandmother, the legendary beauty, Sara, and her great great grandmother, Mazal, who was forced to marry young and was abandoned by her husband after giving birth, thus setting the trend of single motherhood which each of the women in the family would be burdened with.

Full of sites and signs and undercurrents , and many other characters and persons that burst from the pages.

It is an epic rich in humanity, erotic, ironic, and full of twists and turns, that will stay in your mind long after you have read it. It traces the many generations of Jews that have lived in Jerusalem, in a sensitive and thoughtful way.

Sadly some people in the world cannot recognize humanity. When Shifra Horn appeared on Australian radio to discuss this totally non-political book, the talk show host aggressively interrogated her on the supposed sins of Israel's government, ignoring the book she had come to talk about.
Some people in the world refuse to recognize the humanity of Israel's Jews, dehumanizing them in such a way that resembles Europe before the Holocaust.


Rating:
Summary: How many was that?
Review: About 50 pages into the novel I had to make a family tree because I was getting so confused. Who is who? The mystery in the book remains a mystery at the end. Unfortunately I read furiously through the book to discover this fact. Many times my emotions were stirred but I was left with an emptiness. Perhaps the author attempted to create in her readers the same missing feeling that her characters had about men in their lives. Sadly, the men in the book are characterized as rapists, demented, callous, disrespectful, adulterers, bigamists, and scoundrels. There is too much emphasis on blood and gore and bad smells. Could it be, as another reviewer stated, a bad translation? Something went wrong.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed but Significant Contribution
Review: After a few dozen pages, my only thought was, "what a stupid book..." It didn't even occur to me that I was still reading! In fact, as stupid as it may have been, I kept reading, all the way through to the end.

There's so much bizarre stuff happening, at a rate of maybe fifteen "oddities" per page -- a grandmother who smells of roses, an incident at the mikveh, a handicapped American girl in Israel -- it's just impossible to stop reading. You're too desperate to find out what happens next, even if the events aren't strung together with anything resembling a conventional plot.

Forget everything you ever learned about literature. The framing story here is weak and the notion of the family "curse" is poorly drawn; there is little or no believability, even for a magical story such as this one. It doesn't make sense -- but it works.

I found the text a little awkward in places (avoiding contractions where they might have been appropriate, etc), but generally, you forget you're reading a translation and just immerse yourself in the experience of this story. Horn is clearly a significant modern Israeli author, and I'm grateful that her works are available to non-Hebrew speakers as well.

Rating:
Summary: Go for it!
Review: Beginning with the orphan Mazal, four generations of women in Jerusalem were beset by a curse of failed marriages and absent fathers. Continuing Mazal's curse were her golden-haired daughter Sarah, her cat-loving grand-daughter Pnina-Mazal, and her rebellious spikey red-headed great-granddaughter Geula. The curse was set to end with the birth of a healthy baby boy to Mazal's great-great grandaughter Amal. An especially interesting character was Sarah's son Yitzchak, who although retarded and mute (except for the word "food") had a continuing role throughout the book.

Rich in detail and with a perfect use of magical realism, I found this story and the writing delightful. Some parts were funny in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. It was like reading a cross between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Amoz Oz. There is so much in this story that by the time I reached the end, I almost forgot what happened in the beginning. No problem. That was just an invitation to reread this book! You'll savor every sentence for the feeling and humor with which Amal's story is told.

Rating:
Summary: JERUASALEMITE SENSE/STINGS OF HUMOR
Review: I AM NOW READING THIS AUTHOR 4TH BOOK "TAMARA ON THE WATER", NOT YET TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH; AS SOMEONE BORN IN ISRAEL/JERUSALEM THE HEROES AND THREADS CONNECTING BETWEEN THEM REMIND ME OF MANY JERUALEMITES "PURE SEPHARADY" WOMEN INCLUDING MY MOTHER.

Rating:
Summary: A hauntingly beautiful magic-realist saga
Review: If you love the magic-realist novels of Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, you'll love Four Mothers. Four Mothers is a saga of a family of women cursed by fate to be abandoned by their husbands shortly after giving birth to either daughters or sickly sons. Charting the lives of this eccentric family from the exotic Jerusalem of the mid-19th Century to the reunified Jerusalem after the 1967 war, the novel centers on Sarah, a woman of legendary beauty and the narrator's great-grandmother. Set against the tumultuous history of this fascinating era, Sarah, who along with her children is blessed with strange powers, guides her family through poverty, war, pogroms, and the vagaries of human love. The author has a real gift for conjuring gorgeous sense images with real emotional resonance. A book to treasure, to savor and to share with your friends.

Rating:
Summary: An imagimed novel on five generations of women in Jerusalem
Review: Shifra Horn's lyrical and imagined novel spans five generations of women and one hundred years of life in Jerusalem. Horn wrote a wonderful work of historical fiction that kept me interested from beginning to the end. I wept. I laughed and I found myself in each chapter in the book. I found love and despair, hope and hopelessness, humor, compassion and deep understanding.

Rating:
Summary: FLIGHT INTO HISTORICAL FANTASY
Review: THE BOOK IS WELL WRITTEN WITH A WEALTH OF DESCRIPTIONS OF JERUSALEM AS IT WAS ONCE ,WITH A WONDERFUL MINGLING OF FANTACY AND ACTUAL HISTORICAL HAPPENINGS THAT TRANSPORTS YOU MOST SUCCESSFULLY TO A ROMANTIC AND EXCITING PERIOD. THE TREATMENT OF WOMAN AS THE STRONG AND DOMINENT HERO ADDS ANOTHER STRONG DIMENSION. I GREATLY ENJOYED THE BOOK AND WOULD SUGGEST FOR ALL TO ENBARK ON THE SAME JURNEY .

Rating:
Summary: JERUASALEMITE SENSE/STINGS OF HUMOR
Review: This is a story about 5 generations of women in a 'cursed' family - where all men are somehow damaged - retarded, die at a young age, or abandon their wives. This story is told by the last woman in the chain - the one who gives birth to a healthy baby boy and breaks the curse, who investigates (with us in tow) her family history.

This book has all the elements of a soap opera - kitch, romance, 'grave' tragedy, many twists and turns and changes in marital and family status... For people like me, who don't favor the 'sticky romance' genre, I'd reccomend to skip this book.

Rating:
Summary: Enchanting, stirring and magic realistic novel
Review: While reading the first page of Four Mothers I had the strong feeling I would read this novel in one long night. My feelings were right: this novel is irrisistable and I could almost feel the warmth of the stones of Jerusalem, almost touch the women, smell the odeurs of roses, identify with the passionate love between the main character and her lover.

The style is suggestive and enchanting, the story is placed in Jerusalem and contains almost 150 years of the roaring Israeli history. The women are strong and therefore Four Mothers is lightly-femenistic, allthough many man reacted very positive on this novel, because Shifra Horn is capable to awake feminin feelings in men.

Main character is Sara, who has a extraordinary beauty and she is blessed with a great performance. She is the leading woman in the novel and is almost a mythical figure, 'the woman of women', I could call her. The magic realistic component in Horn's novel is stirringly brought out in Sara and many readers went to the Mount of Olives to visit her grave, but they forgot Four Mothers is pure fiction. A perfect example of the strength of this convincing novel.

Four Mothers is the best novel I've read in years: strong and full of passion.

Peter van Beek M.A. Literary reviewer, HN-Magazine, The Netherlands