When I Lived In Modern Times (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
This was a very readable book, and easy/quick to read.The great strength of the writing was to evoke a time and a place. A part of history I know little about (and suspect I'm not alone). I partly mean the birth of the state of Israel but especially the immediate Post War period. It was only through reading this book and poking around a bit on the internet that I realised I have never thought - after the concentration camps were liberated, where did people go? And not just camp survivors. All my life I've known former Displaced People - the old classmate's father who fairly recently talked about how he came to Britain from Poland, via Iraq and India. I knew, because we all 'know' that many Jewish people from Europe went to Israel and I know about the Right to Return. But this book shows that it wasn't easy. It mentions a 'Displaced Persons' camp in Cyprus. I passed a sign in Cyprus pointing to a refugee camp, and assumed it was a left over from the 1974 conflict there. Or was it because of the millions fleeing Syria and Iraq, and Eritrea and Somalia. Current events in the Mediterranean underline the perennial problems of displaced Persons.Evelyn, the main character in this book was not a DP. She travelled to Palestine from London. I admit a slight irritation. She didn't feel that she belonged in England - and her experience of anti-Semitism is not to be sniffed at. But she was in London because England had accepted her refugee grandparents and she was safe there - notwithstanding the Blitz - but she wouldn't have been safe in Latvia, or anywhere else. Should I expect her to be grateful? Of course not.The little I know of the founding of Israel is a fascinating story and this book makes reference to this. Those people who are the Weimar Republic in exile; those that came from the Soviet Union (or pre Soviet, the lands that went on to be part of the USSR), with an idealistic collectivist, socialist secular ethos. I have read other stuff about the early years of Israel, a young optimistic nation founded on admirable principles.Or were they? There are passing references to Arabs, and they are dismissed as being lesser people, and almost not human. Yes, they're hidebound in a rigid religious culture that harks back to pre-Mediaeval times. And that makes me despair as much as it does the secular Jews. But it's no way to treat people. Then she describes the attitudes of the petty British bureaucrats administering the Mandate, and that makes my blood boil, too. Exactly the attitudes you read in literature about India pre-1948, and I'm sure it would be just the same if I read about Kenya, Rhodesia or Malaya. This book, a fiction, only scrapes the surface of the politics of the time; what is now history. People have strong views on the Middle East, very few views are informed and rounded. This story is just a snapshot of the unintended consequences of history. I recently read Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell which described the carve up of the lands of the former Ottoman Empire post WW1. This novel takes us forward 20-30 years after that. In between, of course, was the Holocaust. And you cannot examine the history of the State of Israel whilst ignoring the Holocaust. But the creation of the Israeli state, and even more so, its territorial expansion had consequences, and continues to have consequences today. Those consequences are inflamed by lies, half-truths and propaganda from all sides.This book doesn't have the answers, nor should I expect it to. But it has further provoked my awakening curiosity to study the aftermath of war, and the resettlement of Displace Persons. Difficult to find readable sources. I'm not interested in reading military strategy, and I'm not that interested about statesmen meeting in rooms to carve out areas of influence and quotas. I want to find out more about the human stories of ordinary people and how their lives were uprooted and moved.
4.75 out of 5 stars.I did enjoy SO MUCH reading this book. I was going back and forth between 4 and 5 stars, but there was so much of the book that I did love and its vivid scenes really compels me to give it 5 stars. The story is based specifically in 1947, in the final stages of British occupation of Palestine. It is a fictional story, but helps to create the uncertainty, instability and division that emerged as Jewish immigrants went to Palestine after the World War II. The story follows Evelyn Sert, a Jewish girl born and raised in London, who lives with her single mother and learns hairdressing skills in the 1940s. Her mother unexpectedly dies and as a result, her "step-father" Uncle Joe encourages Evelyn to politicize herself and join young Jewish in Palestine to create contribute towards a new society (that would eventually lead to the birth of Israel). As someone who needed some direction in her life, Evelyn follow these steps and migrates to Palestine, where she needs to figure out her own place in this new land. Familiar to being an outcast as a Jewish girl in London, Evelyn finds a different situation in Palestine, where she's not Jewish enough to join the movement for a new society. She finds herself connecting more with the British occupiers and through her role as a hairdresser, begins to navigate the British social circles. She eventually meets "Johnny" - a Palestine who is part of the Irgun youth gang, who uses her close proximity to the British folks to get information that can help expel them. As Evelyn falls in love with Johnny, she doesn't see clearly her involvement and finds herself going through the flow of circumstances to never really clarifying her role in this land. It's quite the book that highlights the themes of displacement, self-discovery, adaptability, division and tensions of different groups... it's a book so easy to read, yet provides wonderful context and great insights. Some of my favourite quotes:"She had the best from him, though he owed her nothing in law. What is the secret intimacy between two people that no one who is not a part of it can fathom?" (23)"Whatever you do, Evelyn, do not make my mistake and marry. I don't know why people thin that happiness lies in sharing a bathroom." (121)"And then we began a conversation about novels, which was pleasant to have with your toes curling in the sand and the smell of the beach in your nose..." (108)
What do You think about When I Lived In Modern Times (2002)?
I enjoyed this story of one womans experience of the beginnning of the state of Israel. The author explores many themes that are associated with this story - the obvious ones being immigration and idealism but she also looks at the darker side of the creation of the state of Israel - terroism, the failure of the British to control their mandate, the fear of the British rule, the reasons why many jews were Zionists . The book is set in the new city of Tel Aviv in 1946 just as many of the holocaust survivors are arriving in Palestine. These men and women are unexpectedly portrayed as difficult, disruptive and hard hearted individuals not necessarily the victims portrayed in other literature . Every other character seems to represent a type of person that may have lived in Tel Aviv at this time . The narrator is a jewish immigrant form Britain, her lover a Jewish terroist, her neighbours are immigrants from various parts of Europe. The book evokes an atmosphere not only of heat, dust and discomfort but also of menace, uncertainty and hints throughout at the eternal struggle the jews have had to undertake to establish a nation and then to hold onto it . But the author never loses sight of the fact that in the process of getting their State they deprived the Palestinians of theirs so condemning them to lives as refugees or subjects of a State that mistrusted and hated them.
—Alison
A young woman's search for cultural identity at the end of the Second World War is the focus of Linda Grant's award-winning When I Lived in Modern Times. The story is set largely in Palestine before partition and is told through the eyes of a 20-year-old Londoner in search of her Jewish roots.Evelyn Sert is English by birth, but her parents are Jewish immigrants from Poland and Latvia. All through her childhood, she is conscious of the fact that she is "exotic" — "I was a round-faced, stubborn, dark-haired girl whose lips were too red and whose eyes were too black" — and struggles to fit in.After a failed attempt to join art school, she works at her mother's hairdressing salon in Soho until her mother's untimely death in 1946. Then, itching to start a new life and keen to discover her Jewish roots, she moves to Palestine, where she finds it equally hard to fit in.Living on a Kibbutz, where she washes floors, disinfects urinals and works long hours, doesn't suit her — until she (belatedly) discovers boys and sex. But then she moves to Tel Aviv, a brash modern city, and reinvents herself entirely, with a new name, new apartment and new job — as a hairdresser in a salon with a largely British clientele.You can read the rest of my review here.
—Kimbofo
Given that this was my recommendation for my book club, I was quite disappointed. I had been really impressed by Linda Grant's latest two novels "The Clothes on Their Backs" and "We had it so Good" but this earlier book was not nearly so well written, even though it won the Orange Prize. It didn't help that our narrator, the 20 year old Evelyn Sert, is so bogged down with an identity crisis about her Jewish background, having been brought up in London, that there is a complete lack of humour and wit. The mood of her experiences in the Palestine of 1946 is sombre and lacking in emotion. It doesn't help that it is hard to feel any sympathy for Evelyn. She is naïve, attractive, totally self centred and thinks like a racist (being anti Christian with what she calls "their second rate God").But I guess this is all meant to describe the complexities of the characters involved with the immerging new state of Israel. A lot of the people Evelyn comes into contact with are actually quite nice compared to her. Except (and crucially) for Johnny. The author has certainly done her research and I was very interested in her descriptions of these dangerous times. There are a lot of philosophical questions raised about national identity and I guess that we who are so lucky to have one find it hard to understand those who have not. Not an easy read, but one that is worthy and necessary.
—David
