The One Facing Us

by Ronit Matalon

Book Overview

A richly colored narrative of a flamboyant Jewish-Egyptian family and its dispersal across three continents, from Israel's most original new novelist. Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805061851
• ISBN13: 9780805061857
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Holt McDougal
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

The "Ethnic" Novel perfected

Ronit Matalon takes a somewhat overworked genre of fiction, the "ethnic" novel and invests it with new vitality in The One Facing Us. First there is the form she uses. Each chapter is centered on a family photo, and takes that photo as the basis for the chapter's theme. She continues this throughout the work, layering the material forward and backward in time, and in the process giving a distinctive montage of a family spread out all over the world. Secondly she casts new light on a kind of Sephardic Jewish identity that can't be defined by any region, religion or set of values. In The One Facing Us the family is rootless even in their ancestral land of Egypt, and even in the promised land of Israel. So Matalon uses her materials wisely and has form and function complete each other to great effect. The photos, little ragged images of a past long dead, function as sign posts for the telling of a family history with little in the way of artifacts. The end product is an unsettling but profound take on the ethnic novel.

A Wonderful but Sad story of a Sephardic Jewish Family

This is a sad but quite interesting story of four generations of a Jewish Sephardic family that once lived in Egypt and then became dispersed around the world from Israel to Africa to America. The story is full of unfulfilled potential and human tragedies that feel very close and real. There are no particular heros, just normal human beings with all their struggles, dreams, and weaknesses.The story is told in the voice of an Israeli woman who records her reactions to old photographs as stories of the history of her grand parents and great grand parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. The story is sprinkled with Egyptian Arabic expressions which made me feel very much at home. It reflects the diversity of the Egyptian Jewish community: an uncle who became a Zionist and moved to a Kibbutz, a father who couldn't live in Israel and moved to the US, a grandmother who reminds me very much of my own Egyptian grandmother. It just goes to show that people are the same regardless of their differences.The book is very well written. I enjoyed it very much. It's not the easiest book to read because there is no particular plot. It's like modern art. Several photographs were missing in the version I read. Perhaps it is intentional ! It sure made me wish that I could see them. I really enjoyed it. I particularly recommend it for those who lived in Egypt or Israel.

If you've had enough beach books for a while, try this

Is this really her first novel? Matalon is a fine writer. The photographs are not just a device, they're a metaphor, but not a heavy-handed one. This isn't the easiest novel to read, which is a relief after some other recent fiction, even some good stuff. It feels good to have to work at reading sometimes, and it helps me to understand what the deconstructionists are talking about when they say the reader is part of the process. Sometimes you hear people say that they felt like they knew the characters. I don't feel that way about this Levantine family, and that's not a criticism -- I feel like I got as close to them as they would actually have let me (an Ashkenazi) if I had met them -- which isn't very close. I got an oblique look -- like looking at an old photograph, come to think of it. I look forward to more of Matalon's work.