When I Lived in Modern Times

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Summary: Jewish state of mind : a truly awesome read
Review: Altho the story line is a bit disjointed, the book provided an interesting look into prewar Palestine. A time and place I was not famililar with.

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Summary: Fictionalized History, a Good Read
Review: I read this book when it first came out. Now that Israel is in the news, it's refreshing to read about better times, the first times, even if it is fictionalized. Wish that what's happening today was fiction, but we can dream. Recommend Linda Grant, also a great journalist.

Rating:
Summary: Good read
Review: Idealism and disillusionment, the collisions of past and future are recurrent themes in this novel set in 1946 and 1947 Palestine, where identity is a haphazard commodity. The narrator who chronicles what she calls living history is 20-year-old Evelyn Sert, sometimes called Eve, sometimes Mrs. Priscilla Jones. Unlike many tales of Jewish refugees reclaiming their homeland, Evelyn is not a refugee, but she is a displaced person of sorts. It is right after the war and Evelyn and her mother have survived the long years of the London blitz and rationing.

Growing up in England, the daughter of a woman who has cut ties from her own immigrant family and a shadowy American father only glimpsed through one old photograph, Evelyn is always reminded that she is second class, and the only thing that fiercely endures is her Jewish identity. When her mother dies an early death, her mother's lover, "Uncle Joe", who has fed and clothed them all these years, and fed Evelyn as well on Zionism, encourages her to go to Palestine, and basically pays her off to do so. One senses that it is not entirely out of conviction but a convenient way to get Evelyn out of the way of his real family.

A frustrated artist, she goes to work at the only way she knows how to make a real living, as a hairdresser. In her hairdresser's capacity, she is recruited for mundane underground assignments by the mysterious sexy "Johnny", who becomes her lover. Eventually caught out by the British and forced to leave the country, Evelyn's idealistic dream disintegrates, and that is the tie-in to the book's title, but it does not end there. A mature and wizened Evelyn returns to Israel to live out her twilight years.

The great thing about this story and its strength will probably also cause offense to those expecting heroic characters and lofty moral platitudes. This is an unsentimental description and examination of life under the British Mandate. It is not always a pretty or hopeful picture, although not completely dim. The Jewish characters and the British are equally put under a harsh spotlight. As each tells his or her story, argues over the old and the new world order, and prediction of what will happen when the British leave (the only thing that all parties agree will happen), a picture of a society and a people in transition emerges. The author's research has been done with care and I believe that we get an honest and accurate portrayal.

Finally, this is as much a story about the building of Tel Aviv as it is about the State of Israel. Not surprisingly, it is this city and not Jerusalem that captures Evelyn's imagination. The young shining Tel Aviv, not only stands as a nostalgic historical and cultural remembrance, but also as a fitting metaphor for the modern Jewish city and therefore a new definition of the Jewish people.

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Summary: A DESERVED PRIZE
Review: Linda Grant won the British Orange Prize 2000 for her new book "When I Lived in Modern Times". As with her first well-received novel "The Cast Iron Shore" (also out of print!), this is a skillful combination of the personal and the political. In the Orange winner book, we follow the fortunes of Evelyn Sert who leaves postwar UK after her mother's death for a new life in Palestine. Evelyn never knew her father and grew up in what she describes as a 'shadow family', her mother the mistress of a married Jewish businessman. Arriving in British-ruled Palestine, Evelyn is like a blank canvas, in search of an identity for herself. An admirer of all things modern and with no interest in the past, she finds herself in a country with its face turned firmly towards the future. Evelyn settles in the modern city of Tel Aviv and soon becomes involved with the struggle for Jewish independence. Assuming the identity of hairdresser enables her to pass information about the policemen husbands of her British clients to her lover in the Jewish underground movement. Tel Aviv is home to the Jewish refugees of the world and Evelyn soon discovers that it is one thing to survive, but another to survive intact. Grant produces strong visual imagery and dynamic characters with memorable voices that resonate throughout this enticing and satisfying novel. A deserved prize, then.

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Summary: Israel past and present
Review: Linda Grant's novel sheds historical perspective on today's violence. The setting is 1946. Thousands of new white Bauhaus buildings in the new city of Tel Aviv have been built on land purchased from the Arabs with funds raised from the Zionist movements. Being sought as a witness in the kidnapping of British police officer McKintosh by the Irgun, Evelyn Sert (with alias Priscilla Jones for the Brits and Eve for the kibbutz) flees to the Arab slums of Mansheih where Irgun has a safe house. Fifty years later she learns that the government chased the Arabs out of Mansheih and razed it to the ground. Today's Hamas Palestinian terrorists seem to have learned a lot from the Irgun Jewish terrorists during the days of the British Mandate. A book worth rereading.

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Summary: Good read
Review: Linda Grants' story was captivating. It reminded much of my own experiences of living as an immigrant in Tel Aviv. I learned a great deal from her story about the early immigrants to the city and their unique characters and ways of behavior. The story follows a young English women who leaves England for Palestine in the years before the establishment of the State of Israel. One learns of the kibbutz experience and its hardships, of the difficulties of adjusting to life in a new country with its different cultures and norms. The descriptions of the British and the many different immigrant groups in Tel Aviv were insightful. As someone who has lived in Tel Aviv many of Linda Grants' descriptions run true to this day. This is book worth reading. As a side note Ms. Grant recommends a book on Tel Aviv by J. Schlor which I recently purchased which is fantastic. It offers historical insights into the creation of the city of Tel Aviv

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Summary: If anyone should have connected I should have....
Review: Ms. Grant's fascinating tale of the life of a girl of confused and sometimes ambiguous identity is both enthralling and pleasurable to read. Its locution and intrictae symbolisms bespeak the literary facets that have in the past molded extolled classics. Notably, however, "Modern Times" is just as accessible as it is enigmatic. It is first and foremost a quest for understanding- of the human character, of sexuality, of nationalism, of race, of culture. The main character is juxtaposed with the convulsive chaos which is her setting, an Israel under a waning British regime seeking its own unique independence. It is a tale of femininity and masculinity, one of communism and capitalism, of the melange of Europeans who clash whilst Israel clashes with the British Empire. It reconciles wealth and poverty and death and life.

And from these entropic maladies and elysianities, a new sense of being is engendered- the modern one, in which time looks forward rather than backward, in which civilisation marches on in a triumphant Israel, and in which the main chacater finds herself abandoning a past which will be useless to her in the new state. Divorce from anachronism, from Europe, and for Jews from a hostile world is the explicit ideology, but that is also juxtaposed with the diversity of people who come into contact with one another- and are often in conflict culturally and ideologically.

This book will be a staple in classrooms within twenty years- it has such power. I encourage a thorough digestion of its multitudinous ideas.

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Summary: History As Life
Review: Riveting narrative. I knew nothing about Israel before reading it, but Grant's story, at once personal and epic, is breathtaking without losing touch of the human elements. Grant also presents a balanced view of Israeli/Arab conflicts.