When I Lived in Modern Times

Riveting narrative. I knew nothing about Israel before reading it, but Grant's story, at once personal and epic, is breathtaking without losing touch of the human elements. Grant also presents a balanced view of Israeli/Arab conflicts.

Ms. Grant's fascinating tale of the life of a girl of confused and sometimes ambiguous identity is both enthralling and pleasurable to read. Its locution and intrictae symbolisms bespeak the literary facets that have in the past molded extolled classics. Notably, however, "Modern Times" is just as accessible as it is enigmatic. It is first and foremost a quest for understanding- of the human character, of sexuality, of nationalism, of race, of culture. The main character is juxtaposed with the convulsive chaos which is her setting, an Israel under a waning British regime seeking its own unique independence. It is a tale of femininity and masculinity, one of communism and capitalism, of the melange of Europeans who clash whilst Israel clashes with the British Empire. It reconciles wealth and poverty and death and life. And from these entropic maladies and elysianities, a new sense of being is engendered- the modern one, in which time looks forward rather than backward, in which civilisation marches on in a triumphant Israel, and in which the main chacater finds herself abandoning a past which will be useless to her in the new state. Divorce from anachronism, from Europe, and for Jews from a hostile world is the explicit ideology, but that is also juxtaposed with the diversity of people who come into contact with one another- and are often in conflict culturally and ideologically.This book will be a staple in classrooms within twenty years- it has such power. I encourage a thorough digestion of its multitudinous ideas.

Linda Grant's novel sheds historical perspective on today's violence. The setting is 1946. Thousands of new white Bauhaus buildings in the new city of Tel Aviv have been built on land purchased from the Arabs with funds raised from the Zionist movements. Being sought as a witness in the kidnapping of British police officer McKintosh by the Irgun, Evelyn Sert (with alias Priscilla Jones for the Brits and Eve for the kibbutz) flees to the Arab slums of Mansheih where Irgun has a safe house. Fifty years later she learns that the government chased the Arabs out of Mansheih and razed it to the ground. Today's Hamas Palestinian terrorists seem to have learned a lot from the Irgun Jewish terrorists during the days of the British Mandate. A book worth rereading.

Linda Grant's "When I Lived In Modern Times (WILIMT)" is not a political treatise on the epoch making event of the creation of the Jewish nation state of Israel but it captures perfectly the sense of excitement and urgent anticipation that gripped the hearts and minds of the Jewish diaspora when they saw and seized the occasion that presented itself after the Second World War. Evelyn Sert (aka Priscilla Jones) suffers an identity crisis whilst living unhappily in England. She is torn between her Englishness and her own ethnicity, so when she decides to pack her bags for Tel Aviv to make her small contribution to the Cause, she comes face to face with an uncomfortable life in a kibbutz before finally emerging in Tel Aviv, where she works as a hairdresser. It is through her surprising encounters with characters as varied and diverse as Meier, Blum, Mrs Lintz, Mackintosh and her lover Johnny - most of them leftovers from the recent historical past - that we enter the minds of the various ethnic communities (including the colonial English), some declining, others rising, but all experiencing a deep turbulence in their consciousness. Just as the English weren't shedding their colonial mentality or adjusting to their declining influence on the world stage quite so quickly enough, the German Jews who had survived the Nazi era weren't ready to shed their prejudices about the Arabs and so forth. But Grant isn't out to make a political statement. Her aim is to entertain, so what she has in store for us is an adventure story, with all the ingredients of political intrigue, spying and kidnapping, etc, as we follow Evelyn in her narrow escapades and search for her own soul and identity in her burgeoning fatherland. She tastes the complexity of it and emerges the wiser and ready to give counsel to her daughter, Naomi, who asks the same questions. Grant may have made her name as a journalist but she has proven herself to be equally adept as a novelist. She has written a keenly observed, deeply relevant and highly impressive novel that will stand the test of time. It should also make compelling reading for those like me who are keen to fill the gap in their knowledge of how it was for the Jews who built Israel. WILIMT richly deserved the Orange Prize in 2000. Read it.

Idealism and disillusionment, the collisions of past and future are recurrent themes in this novel set in 1946 and 1947 Palestine, where identity is a haphazard commodity. The narrator who chronicles what she calls living history is 20-year-old Evelyn Sert, sometimes called Eve, sometimes Mrs. Priscilla Jones. Unlike many tales of Jewish refugees reclaiming their homeland, Evelyn is not a refugee, but she is a displaced person of sorts. It is right after the war and Evelyn and her mother have survived the long years of the London blitz and rationing. Growing up in England, the daughter of a woman who has cut ties from her own immigrant family and a shadowy American father only glimpsed through one old photograph, Evelyn is always reminded that she is second class, and the only thing that fiercely endures is her Jewish identity. When her mother dies an early death, her mother's lover, "Uncle Joe", who has fed and clothed them all these years, and fed Evelyn as well on Zionism, encourages her to go to Palestine, and basically pays her off to do so. One senses that it is not entirely out of conviction but a convenient way to get Evelyn out of the way of his real family.A frustrated artist, she goes to work at the only way she knows how to make a real living, as a hairdresser. In her hairdresser's capacity, she is recruited for mundane underground assignments by the mysterious sexy "Johnny", who becomes her lover. Eventually caught out by the British and forced to leave the country, Evelyn's idealistic dream disintegrates, and that is the tie-in to the book's title, but it does not end there. A mature and wizened Evelyn returns to Israel to live out her twilight years.The great thing about this story and its strength will probably also cause offense to those expecting heroic characters and lofty moral platitudes. This is an unsentimental description and examination of life under the British Mandate. It is not always a pretty or hopeful picture, although not completely dim. The Jewish characters and the British are equally put under a harsh spotlight. As each tells his or her story, argues over the old and the new world order, and prediction of what will happen when the British leave (the only thing that all parties agree will happen), a picture of a society and a people in transition emerges. The author's research has been done with care and I believe that we get an honest and accurate portrayal. Finally, this is as much a story about the building of Tel Aviv as it is about the State of Israel. Not surprisingly, it is this city and not Jerusalem that captures Evelyn's imagination. The young shining Tel Aviv, not only stands as a nostalgic historical and cultural remembrance, but also as a fitting metaphor for the modern Jewish city and therefore a new definition of the Jewish people.