The Woman Beyond the Sea
This story begins in the early 1970s, but then wanders back and forth across generations as three women search for meaning in their lives and their connections of daughter, mother, and grandmother. The narrative begins with Eliya blindly in love with her husband, who spurns her in a Paris café. Wounded emotionally, she returns home to Tel Aviv, where she spars again with her emotionally cold mother. Her mother, Lily, however, has wounds of her own and has tried to forget that she was abandoned as a newborn on Christmas eve at the gates of a Catholic convent.
As the plot develops, the reader begins to see that everything that happens is a ripple effect from one woman – the woman who now lives beyond the sea but abandoned Lily at birth in the hopes the child would have a better life than she could offer.
The plot is woven with great details about Paris, Tel Aviv, Yugoslavia, and Jerusalem. The characters are memorable, the story is well-paced, and the ending is redeeming. Still, the thread of abandonment that runs through it carries a wave of sadness that permeates the entire story. I found myself being able only to read the novel in spurts because the feeling was, at times, heartbreaking. Recommended.
