Novel
Summer in the Street of the Prophets
קיץ בדרך הנביאים
David Shahar · 1969
Synopsis
Jerusalem, 1936, under the British Mandate. A ten-year-old boy, whose family rents a room in the Louria house on the Street of the Prophets, befriends Gabriel Yonatan Louria, son of Prosper and Gentilla, recently returned from Paris where he was studying medicine. Through him a world opens up: his stories, the cisterns, the sounds and accents of a city where Christians, Muslims and Jews of all origins live side by side, and ideas drawn from the Kabbalah. The narrative proceeds by association and memory, from one character to another, rather than in chronological order.
Context
The book opens the cycle of The Palace of Shattered Vessels, which Shahar wrote over thirty years, until 1994; the name comes from the kabbalah of Isaac Luria, whose name the hero bears, and the author called the whole Lourian. Madeleine Neige, who was his only French translator, had it published by Gallimard in 1978; Jacqueline Piatier stressed its Proustian character in Le Monde, and the third volume, Le Jour de la comtesse, won the Prix Médicis étranger in 1981. In Israel, the critics remained cool.
Who it is for
A novel translated into French, the opening of a multi-volume sequence. It is as well to know that the characters return from one book to the next.
Prizes and reception
Opens a cycle crowned in France by the Prix Médicis étranger; Haim Be'er sees in it one of the peaks of Israeli literature.
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