A Love Made Out of Nothing: Zohara's Journey : Two Novels

"With this volume, Barbara Honigmann gives us the stories of two very different women, and of their attempts to rise from the ashes of their former lives." "The narrator of A Love Made Out of Nothing is a woman who leaves Berlin to start over as a student in Paris. But though she has escaped from her past and is finally living in the city of her dreams, she finds herself isolated and imprisoned, discovering that the life of an expatriate has its own loneliness and difficulties. Tied to her old existence by her complex relationship with a possessive and manipulative father, whose history of wandering from city to city and wife to wife casts a long shadow over her as she struggles to forge an independent life." "Zohara's Journey tells the story of Zohara, a devoutly religious Sephardic Jew repatriated to southern France during the Algerian War. Having wandered from one French city to another with her husband Simon, an itinerant rabbi who claims to be the Rabbi of Singapore, she wants to believe that the family has finally settled in Strasbourg when Simon returns from a long absence and disappears with their six children. In her desperate efforts to locate her children and piece her life back together, Zohara comes to question the man she thought she knew, and a religion that has dominated both their lives." "Honigmann's view encompasses the universal (and perhaps the mythical) as well as the autobiographical and social. In these two intimate novellas, she communicates in spare and elegant prose, both the terror and the thrill that come with starting over. Dense with imagery and emotion, these stories introduce a powerful new voice from Germany that speaks directly to the nature of isolation and, ultimately, to the necessity of self-reliance." --Book Jacket.