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| The Way to Hanita Book Novels Free PDF Download |
The Way to Hanita Book Novels Free PDF Download
The Way to Hanita Book Novels
| Novel Name | The Way to Hanita Book |
| Author | Myra Kaye |
| Material | Novel |
| Format | PDF/DOC |
| Provider | hsslive.co.in |
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About/Summary of The Way to Hanita Book Novels
Many people have asked me why I wrote "The Way to Hanita" so perhaps it is of some interest. The short answer is, I had to.
I had often wondered why so much is written about love, which is, after all only a ploy in evolutionary strategies for survival. And so little about rejection, the lead player. It is on the boards from the beginning, when we are so summarily rejected from the womb. At our end, when life inexorably spits us out. And all along the way. Rejection is our daily companion, the familiar who never leaves our side.
I wanted to write about rejection at the cutting edge, where I like to work. I needed a woman (rejects in most societies) who had been rejected in every way - as a child, a person, a citizen, a wife, a mother. This is "Rachel". Rejection introduced as a second player, the Holocaust. I lost much of my family in the Holocaust. Although I never experienced it personally, it plays a big role in my life. What intrigues me is the universal, continuing, deep and lasting interest in this 50-year-old event which just won't go away. Why? It is only the Jews who cannot let it go - is it because it is in all of us? Are we capable of being perpetrators; or victims? Or both? Do we fear the Holocaust within? To explore this I needed a character who had no personal connection at all with the Holocaust. Who was born after it all ended and in a different region. What effect could the Holocaust have on the life of such a person? I conceived a young Israeli Arab, a devoted scientist, uninterested in politics, lover of Gerda, an Israeli-born Jewish girl. (As it turned out, not all the wars of the Jews and Arabs could have separated these lovers. But the Holocaust did.)
Next, I wanted a background that was in itself vibrant and exciting and so would carry a story along swiftly. I needed heroic times. I found them in Palestine and then in Israel from 1947 until the late 70's. And in Germany and Italy during and after World War II I found tragic events, albeit with their own humour, and stories of ordinary people, who, spanning all these countries, carried out extraordinary - really impossible - tasks, some of which can never be told. And some of which can.
I was there. I was not a camera. More of a thief, who took from the display window what serves my purpose. The background would include "Aliyah Bet", the illegal immigration into Palestine of the remnants from the camps, hoodwinking and evading the British Blockades. There would be no discourse on concepts and events like rejection and the Holocaust, which belong to the world of ideas and analysis. Polemics have no place in a novel. I firmly believe the novelist is a storyteller. Novels have meaning. But they are not a tool for catharsis or exposition or persuasion. The story is all.
I swam about in this free-floating soup of ideas for a couple of years, began another novel (now complete) and then came the catalyst. I abandoned "Alia" and began "Hanita". What happened is this: I was idly listening to Israel radio and I heard the story of Rachel. She is not my Rachel, but she gave me mine. This radio lady, a Holocaust survivor, came to Palaestine as a young girl in 1947. She met and married a Christian Arab, in Jerusalem, and went to live with him in his house in the Old City.
After its capture by the Jordanians in the 1948 War of Independence, she found herself cut off, an Arab wife in an Arab land. Her husband left her, taking their two young daughters to Kuwait. She worked to support herself, the police harrassed her. A Moslem Arab offered to help her by marrying her, and he did. When he was terminally ill with cancer in 1967, he said to her "Why don't you go over to your own people?" And so she arrived in Jerusalem at that time.
That gave me a framework. My Rachel is fiction. I had to give her a hometown (Leipzig). And parents. Papa was a Jewish physician, more German than the Germans. Who is Mama? Rachel is not quite sure. There are secretive phone calls. Afterwards, a flushed face. Was she not perhaps the daughter of some aristocratic German military family, who defied her parents to run away and marry her Jew? Not knowing she would pay for it with her life. She went naked to her death, the Colonel's daughter. Like all the rest.
The 13 year old Rachel is sent to an S S Camp as a child prostitute; then to Mauthausen. When the camp is liberated she is at the point of death. With the assiduous care of a black American doctor, she recovers. One day, walking in the grounds of the Field hospital with her he says, exultantly; "They didn't win after all. I have made you into a beautiful young girl again."
And she is so grateful! She wants to give him something. What does she have to give? So she lifts up her skirt and says, "You can have it now if you like". That night the doctor shoots himself.
And Rachel begins to think. What is she? A Jewish woman - nothing more. She begins the long hard journey that will bring her to Palestine. (In this part of our story, fiction cannot compete with reality). Rachel gets to Palestine. But soon, she finds herself at the start of a long sojourn as an Arab wife in an Arab land. She arrives in Tel Aviv in 1978 and here the story swings to a second protagonist, Gerda, a social worker who deals with her case. She was traumatized as a child by the sexual advances of her brother; likle a schizophrenic, she floats above her life, uninvolved. There is a bond between the two women, but its nature is not clear. Why does it involve Gerda's grandmother and the little sister she left behind in Poland?
Is it a coincidence that as Gerda's involvement with Rachel deepens she becomes capable at last of physical, sexual love? What happens to her loving relationship with Avi and what does it have to do with Rachel? Rachel seeks her role in society. Fate seems to drive her always into the company of the dying and the dead. As she says "I've had a lot of experience."
Rachel never gets to "Hanita", the kibbutz that is her actual, as well as her metaphysical goal.
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