Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Blah-blah Blau

I have, in the past, interviewed Sahara (Sarah) Blau on my radio program together with Rami Sadan at Arutz 7 (from which I am on leave; finishing my MA at Hebrew U.).
She has a first novel out, "Yetzer lev ha'adama" ("The Book of Creation").

She's a "dati-lite" icon and I will quote only a bit of the book's theme:-

Talma, the narrator, is indeed hard to digest: She is very hungry. Her life unfolds within the small perimeter marked off by her parents' home, her grandmother's house, and her all-girls school ("daughters of Satan," she calls the students) where she teaches and which is also nauseatingly familiar, because she herself studied there. She has never been with a man...Talma, who inherited her grandmother's house and now lives in it alone, uses words, the secret words she learned from her grandmother, to make a man, a golem; a perfect man whom she shapes with her own hands out of the muddy earth of the graveyard

...So what if the golem does not have a soul, and so what if he did not speak a single word, and so what if he had no alternatives, and Talma is the only woman he ever saw. And so what if he is made out of mud. When Talma weeps in his arms, his muddy chest dissolves, leaving a hole; and Talma, instead of sinking into her own tears, finds herself deep in the mud, his mud. What could be more human?


Well, one has to acknowledge her originality, although I think she should now be termed as "dati-heavy", if not "dirty".

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