וכי נחש ממית?

He was conceived, so the family believed, as a living charm to heal his older brother. Decades later he is a well-known figure in Israeli broadcasting, the brother is a leading rabbi of the ultra-Orthodox, and for years they have barely spoken. Standing together at their mother's grave, he decides it is up to him to sort out the past. He looks back on growing up secular, on a boyhood in the last years of British rule and the lean years after independence, on a miserly, unbending father and a mother who never got the life she was meant for, and on a bond with his brother so close that it was made of envy and of a love too heavy to bear. Moving between 'I' and 'he', between recollection and invention, the autobiographical novel also brings in Talmud study and tales of the strained relations between the Haredi world and the press.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

249 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Autofiction (assigned by AI)

Set in

Israel

First published

2004 by Keter

Author's age

60 when first published

ISBN

9789650712921 (original)