When I Lived in Modern Times (2000)

I loved this book and recommend it whole-heartedly. I think it should take its place among the classics of English-language Jewish literature. It’s written beautifully: thoughtful, wry, occasionally poetic.

It’s the story of a young British woman coming to Israel after the war, before it was called Israel, before it was a country, when the British were running around in khaki shorts trying to govern it. The heroine, Evelyn Sert, is young, orphaned, and used to being different from the people around her. She’s not only Jewish, but illegitimate, with no clear family history. In order to reinvent herself, she goes to a country which is also in the process of inventing itself.

The atmosophere in this book is so powerful that you feel that you’re eating, drinking, smelling and touching Tel Aviv. Besides being a love song to the city, this novel has a gripping plot. And the author has a way of sketching a character in just a few words and making the person come alive.

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Is there any end to the history of which I am completely unaware? Linda Grant’s evocative and fascinating coming of age story of both 20 year old Evelyn Sert as well as the state of Israel, had me furiously turning pages as I learned, at the feet of a masterful storyteller, about one year (1946) in the history of the country carved out of British-run Palestine after WWII.

Sert leaves Britain posing as a Christian tourist, visiting the Holy Land, because it’s the only way she can get a passport as the UK has severely limited the number of passports available to Jews headed for Palestine. After finding the grueling life on the kibbutz not to her liking, she ends up in the teeming metropolis of Tel Aviv where she takes on a job as a hairdresser utilizing the only skills she possesses. To appeal to the British nationals who frequent the shop, she assumes the identity of Priscilla Jones, and gives up her Jewish identity. Meanwhile, after work, she is Jewish Evelyn Sert and she hooks up with a Jewish man who is not exactly what he seems and soon involves Evelyn in providing information about the salon’s British customers. Her role as a spy in this underground army, fighting for the nation that is about to be born, results in circumstances that put her life in danger.

Grant is so adept at evoking this time and place in history that it proves to be quite breathtaking. Her description of Tel Aviv suggests the birth of a brand new city:

”I saw apartment buildings of two or three or occasionally four stories, all white, dazzling white, and against them the red flowers of oleander bushes. Flat-roofed white boxes, I saw, though sometimes their corners curved voluptuously like a woman’s hips and two buildings facing each other like this, on a corner, reminded me of a pair of ship’s prows sailing out into the dry waters of the street. They were houses like machines, built of concrete and glass, not houses at all, they were ideas. I saw walls erected not for privacy but as barriers against the blinding light; windows small and recessed, each with a balcony and each shaded by the shadow cast by the balcony above it; stairwells lit by portholes, reminding me that we were by the sea.” (Page 71)

Grant has written a book, in luminous prose, that is first and foremost a pursuit for understanding---of culture, of race, of patriotism, of sexuality---and has placed it side by side with a setting of raging chaos that grabs you by the throat and drags you along to witness the birth of Israel under a fading British regime. The fact that I knew so little about this bit of history was just icing on the cake. Very highly recommended. ( )

29. When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (2000, 262 pages, read June 4-10)

Evelyn Sert was born and raised in England, but never felt English. Her mother was a Jewish immigrant from a Baltic Sea country, and she never met her father. Given a chance to go to British-controlled Palestine and help build the not-yet-independent Jewish state in 1946, she doesn’t hesitate, she has nothing to lose.

I read this as part of my prep for my soon-to-come travels to Israel. So, I was ready to learn, and mentally ready to be taken by this book; and I was, completely. But then what a world this was. The Jewish side is a world full of recent immigrants, a vast sea of Jewish refugees from around Europe all with different histories, many the darkest of dark. They include extreme and idealistic Russian communists, Holocaust survivors, old men shorn of their careers and their livelihoods, and the young anxious to push ahead, desperate to get the British out. In this Tel Aviv anyone looking backward is lost. The future has no past here. Instead, the nascent Israel is rearing to go forward, ready to show the world the mistake the Germans made, ready to make the perfect country, in so many distinct and contradictory ways of perfection.

On the British side are the imperial police of the fading empire manning an impossible place that Britain really doesn’t want anything to do with anyway. Many of Grant’s best characters are English. And, broken down to its bones, this is maybe more a novel about the English watching all this happen.

And out there somewhere, mostly outside of this book, are the Palestinians.

Linda Grant has a way of instantly creating atmosphere and I was simply lost in this book. The world would shut out, as I fell into Grant’s tour through all this, switching back and forth from English to various Jewish settings. I can now recommend Grant, but, as a caveat, I suspect few readers will get quite as into this book as I found myself, being Jewish and proactively curious specifically about Tel Aviv.

As a side note, the end is puzzling. I didn’t mind except that it took me away from Tel Aviv and left me wondering instead about Evelyn Sert. But she is quite a character here too.

Winner of the Orange Prize, 2000

I didn’t have any idea what this book was about when I started reading it. I sort of like it that way sometimes because it doesn’t color my view of the book at all.

I always love it when I read a novel in a historical context and learn something that I didn’t know before. I had only a minimal clue of Israel’s beginnings and the struggle for Israeli independence. This book enlightened me on that front, and I appreciated it for that aspect. The story takes place before, during, and after World War II.

When the novel begins, Evelyn Sert is just a young girl with a young, single mother. They are lucky to be in the Soho area of London, because they are Jews. As the war begins and progresses, Evelyn’s mother has an increasingly difficult time dealing with the atrocities. After a series of events, Evelyn is persuaded to emigrate to Israel.

She begins her time in Palestine in a kibbutz, but soon leaves for Tel Aviv. Evelyn soon becomes involved in the political turmoil of the time, becoming conflicted because she feels ‘at home’ with the British occupiers but at the same time, resents their presence. She is definitely caught in the middle.

I really liked the book up unto that point, but I ended up not caring for the ending. I feel the book would have been much stronger if it had gone in another direction. Regardless, I did enjoy learning about this period in history and would probably read another Linda Grant novel at some point.

2000, 260 pp. ( )

Readable, but somewhat wooden. Interesting for the historical background, though with little feeling for the Palestinian situation. Characters are mouthpieces for ideas, groups, phases rather than interessting in themselves. But she does describe places vividly ( )