The Teacher

Elsa Weiss was the English teacher nobody liked: harsh, aloof, reducing the language to dead grammar. When she leapt from her rooftop, her death revealed as little about her as her life had. Thirty years later one of her old pupils, the narrator, realises that this woman taught her something decisive and sets out to discover what it was. Weaving charged historical material with imagined episodes, she pursues someone who tried hard to vanish without a trace, and as she slowly cracks the code of that lesson, it carries her to several of the great upheavals of the last century.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

186 pages in the original

Genres

Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

Israel

First published

2015 by Keter

Author's age

52 when first published

ISBN

9789650724702 (original)

9781948830072 (Open Letter, United States)