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The Best Place on Earth

by Ayelet Tsabari

Ayelet Tsabari’s penetrating debut short-story collection begins with “Tikkun,” about a chance reunion in a Jerusalem café between two former lovers whose lives have followed divergent paths in the seven years since splitting up. Lior, the narrator, has remained more or less as he was when the couple were together: secular, relatively irresponsible, and averse to commitment. Natalie, on the other hand, has forsworn her party-loving ways in favour of marriage and a more traditional, religious outlook. That alone is cause enough for friction. But the unease is set against a background of suicide bombings in the city.

The collection closes with the title story, also involving an uncomfortable reunion, this time between two sisters whose relationship is strained by the younger sibling’s desire to leave her Israeli life behind after establishing herself on B.C.’s Hornby Island. In another story, “Brit Milah,” an Israeli mother cannot reconcile herself to the notion that her daughter, now living in Toronto, has chosen not to circumcise her infant son.

Toronto resident Tsabari is an Israeli of Yemeni descent, a profile shared by several of her protagonists. In the stories set in Israel, the characters’ Yemeni backgrounds cast them as outsiders, a level below the descendants of Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated from Europe. Identity comes in many guises, from ancestral birthrights to our own conscious efforts at individuality. The tension between these two poles is seldom far from the surface in this volume’s 11 stories.

Tsabari has a habit of overreaching in metaphors devoted to the human organ responsible for pumping blood. In the opening story, Lior’s heart “skips, trips and falls over itself.” Later, he states that Natalie had “ripped my heart out of my chest and stomped on it with both feet.” In another story, panic digs its fingernails into someone’s heart. These passages, however, do not detract from the author’s superior skill at excavating the internal and external conflicts encountered by her characters.

 

Reviewer: Vit Wagner

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 224 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-1-44341-195-0

Released: March

Issue Date: 2013-4

Categories: Fiction: Short