ורד הלבנון

In 1982, while Israeli troops push into Beirut, a girl in uniform arrives at the Tel HaShomer rehab ward offering to keep a casualty company. She gives a false name, Vered, though she is really Leah, and the man she is assigned, Yonatan of Merhavia, lies nearly paralysed and is nothing like she pictured. To him she recounts the Israel he never knew: a Bat Yam slum of the 1960s and 1970s filled with forgotten survivors and voiceless newcomers, her father from Salonika who came back from Auschwitz and never speaks of it, her mother who has no say, and her own hunger for truth and for writing. Out of this a strange friendship grows between two damaged young people, and with it a quiet rebellion.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

543 pages in the original

Genres

Coming of age, Autofiction, War (assigned by AI)

Set in

Israel, 1960s–1982

First published

2009 by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan

Author's age

47 when first published

ISBN

9789655174212 (original)