Novel
The Name
השם
Michal Govrin · 1995
Synopsis
In a remote quarter of Jerusalem, Amalia weaves on her loom an ark curtain in which the names of God are interlaced. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she bears the first name of her father's first wife, a musician who died in the camps; she has fled that past and her successive first names, Emily then Amy, to become a penitent in an ultra-Orthodox seminary for women. During the forty-nine days of the counting of the Omer, she addresses God, the Name that gives the book its title, and tells her life alongside the history of her people, while a yeshiva student is promised to her.
Context
The book is a long confessional monologue addressed to God, paced by the seven weeks of the Omer, which give it a ritual framework; one reads in it the kabbalistic idea of the repair of the world and an echo of Agnon's work. Published in 1995 by Sifriya ha-Hadasha, Kibbutz ha-Meuhad Publishing House, it received the Kugel Prize of the city of Holon and was reissued in 2013 with an afterword by Yehuda Liebes. Barbara Harshav translated it into English in 1998; it has also appeared in Russian. Don DeLillo saw in it a work that puts form itself to the test.
Who it is for
A novel written as a first-person confession, with no French translation. It helps to know that the days of the Omer link the exodus from Egypt to the giving of the Law.
Prizes and reception
Kugel Prize in Israel; in English, Koret Jewish Book Award. Two other novels by the author have appeared in French.
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