Wednesday, November 5, 2014

BOOK REVIEW # 20 - TOGETHER THEY OVERCAME

The story starts off with a young girl named Rosalind from South Africa of mix heritage, Jewish and Catholic, who follows her boyfriend to Israel and soon discovers his hidden violent tendencies; tendencies which forces her to ultimately abandon her relationship with him.

Rosalind is a young student nurse working in a hospital in Israel during the Sinai War of 1956, where she faces a challenge in dealing with all the young men who have not only been physically scarred from the battles they’ve been in, but emotionally as well. It is here she meets Eyal, a young soldier suffering from a gunshot wound. They develop an emotional relationship with each other which eventually leads to her moving in with him and his family.

Unfortunately, this simple action immediately leads into conflict, as Eyal’s mother resents the fact that her son would be interest in a non-Jewish girlfriend, let allow have her move in with his family and eventually marry him. Since Rosalind’s mother is Catholic automatically makes her Catholic as well. [Jewish law follows the maternal line when it comes to deciding the religion of a child.] But what makes this even worse is the fact Rosalind’s mother is a German Catholic, and it has only been the end of WWII, and the extermination of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

One of the problems facing Rosalind is that she is immature to really be involved in a relationship, the magnitude of the one she has with Eyal. And in an effort to try to escape this, she actually begins to fantasize about her relationship with her former lover. But eventually everything begins to work out and their marriage finally stabilizes.
With all the
 elements this story contains and the manner in which it has been written I’m giving Juliet Aharoni’s novel, “Together They Overcame,” 4 STARS. 

While these elements made for a wonderful story of love conquering whatever these two lovers had to endure; I feel, there are two possible reasons some readers might not be interest in reading this novel. The first reason is the fear of assimilation of the Jewish young people into other religions, and the second the simple fact the story is taking place in Israel in 1956.




No comments:

Post a Comment