Riv­ka Keren quotes Jere­mi­ah at the onset of her haunt­ing and beau­ti­ful­ly craft­ed nov­el, remind­ing us that ​“The heart is deceit­ful above all things, and is exceed­ing­ly weak — who can know it?” In her non-lin­ear plot, we are intro­duced to five char­ac­ters, near­ly all unre­lat­ed by blood, who will impact upon one another’s lives in a mad­den­ing swirl until the moment of some­what pre­dictable clo­sure at the book’s trag­ic end. 

The nov­el is set in three coun­tries, Israel, Hun­gary, and Greece, the his­to­ry of each forg­ing a tra­jec­to­ry that will bring togeth­er Ilias, a Greek Ortho­dox monk; Beno Goittzeit, a sel­f­right­eous Holo­caust sur­vivor; his lover, Mar­got Cim­bolon, who has fol­lowed him from Hun­gary; Edna, his daugh­ter, who is try­ing to free her­self from her father’s over­pow­er­ing grip; and Zohar, Edna’s surly, needy husband. 

Keren, a Hun­gar­i­an-born clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist, and a wide­ly exhib­it­ed painter both in Israel and abroad, brings to the task of this com­plex inter­twin­ing a nat­ur­al gift for dia­logue and an intu­itive grasp of improb­a­ble des­tinies. To enhance the objec­tive real­i­ties, Keren adds a sixth char­ac­ter, a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist whose ses­sions with Edna bring togeth­er the tor­tured strands, some of which will help her under­stand that ​“peo­ple do the most ter­ri­ble things out of love.” 

“What is his­to­ry?” asks Edna mock­ing­ly of Zohar, ​“Our wretched lives day by day, by hour?” Indeed, she is ask­ing the ques­tion for the novel’s oth­er seared souls as well. Is it Margot’s deci­sion to dis­mem­ber her womb after an abor­tion she angri­ly and reluc­tant­ly agreed to? Is it Beni’s recur­ring night­mare of his wiped out fam­i­ly, destroyed by Nazis in moments and buried under a Euro­pean riv­er ice; or Zohar’s sev­ered child­hood, end­ed by a sud­den Arab massacre? 

What remains for each of these mov­ing, touch­ing char­ac­ters will be laugh­able to some, abhor­rent to oth­ers: the ongo­ing pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of gema­tria by Beni, the fre­net­ic study of his­to­ry by Zohar, the mad­den­ing­ly dri­ven ther­a­peu­tic ses­sions with Edna and her ther­a­pist, the dream­like jour­ney of Ilias to the ​“Holy Land” to hon­or a vow made to his dying moth­er, all of which are attempts to make sense of each of their tat­tered remain­ing sensibilities