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When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
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When I Lived in Modern Times

by Linda Grant

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I felt as if we were all half here and half somewhere else, deprived of our native languages, stumbling over an ugly ancient tongue. We knew that we were to be remade and reborn and we half did and half didjn't want to be. We were caught up in a plan to socially engineer our souls ... to emerge as molten, liquid, golden Jewish humanity. (p. 105)

In 1946, Evelyn Sert left London for Palestine, to be part of Israel's formation. Her first few weeks were spent on a kibbutz, but she quickly tired of the menial labor. She befriended a young man named Johnny, who took her to Tel Aviv. Once there, Evelyn found work as a hairdresser and moved between the Jewish and British communities, feeling uncomfortable in both. Meanwhile, as political events intensified, so did her relationship with Johnny. Evelyn lived in denial of Johnny's involvement in the political movement, unwittingly contributing information to support his cause and ultimately getting in over her head.

I enjoyed the first half of this book as Evelyn settled into a new life in a new country. But my enthusiasm waned as she moved aimlessly from one situation to the next. I found Evelyn & Johnny's relationship a bit of a stretch. It was not clear what she saw in him, or why he would be devoted to her. This book would be interesting to those wishing to learn more about the birth of Israel, and it puts today's events in historical context. However, I was hoping for a more character-driven novel and in that respect I was disappointed. ( )
  lindsacl | Jan 11, 2009 |
This book launched me into an investigation of how the heck Israel got started. What an eye opener! ( )
  Clueless | Jan 27, 2008 |
In 1946, Evelyn Sert decides to quit London's East End to sail to Palestine and help found a Jewish state. Her story becomes bittersweet as she struggles for her own freedom and the freedom of Israel. ( )
  Elishibai | Apr 14, 2007 |
This is the 2nd time I've read this, both times for book groups. It's ok; the story is a little better than the writing, although once in a while a gem of a thought appears. ( )
  suesbooks | Feb 6, 2007 |
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Amazon.com (ISBN 0452282926, Paperback)

In April 1946, a 20-year-old East End London hairdresser named Evelyn Sert sets out for Palestine. "This is my story," she writes in When I Lived in Modern Times, which won Linda Grant the 2000 Orange Prize. "Scratch a Jew and you've got a story." Her account is no less complicated than that of any other displaced European Jew in the postwar years. Separated from her family, she searches for some kind of reliable identity in an inhospitable new land--and in shining, Bauhaus-influenced Tel Aviv, she finds that she is more English than Israeli. Lo and behold, she becomes Priscilla Jones, a peroxided Londoner with an absent policeman husband. She is at her most "real," it seems, when pretending, and revels in her ability to be entirely accepted among the English women whose hair she cuts and curls. Outside of their petty and casually anti-Semitic circle, meanwhile, she struggles with Hebrew, the heat, the unfamiliar food, and an alien way of life.

In Palestine, of course, the English are the enemy. Evelyn is soon drawn into a world of shifting identities, lies, and secrets by her passionate Zionist boyfriend, Johnny. Even then, she is never quite sure which side she is on, or where she belongs. All of this makes her a prototypical inhabitant of Linda Grant's Tel Aviv, a city of contradictions and of hope. More to the point, Grant's heroine is a fully believable figure, a chameleon of a kind readily recognizable to those of us who grew up as part of the seismic displacement of peoples that accompanied World War II--and, alas, to anyone who has been caught up in the more recent exoduses from Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania. --Lisa Jardine

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:09 -0400)

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