All paintings by Taysaar Baraket
"Edges" is a dark and penetrating look at pre-1967 Israel and Palestine through the eyes of a 14 year old Liana Bialik. After her American father's suicide, Liana's Jerusalem-born mother decides to take Liana and her sister back to her homeland, where her family had lived for four generations. Once they get to Israel Liana, who feels overwhelmed and suffocated by her mother, begins to detach herself from her. She embarks on a mission of self-discovery to learn why her mother does not speak about her father and why he took his own life. Edges is well-written, powerful in both imagery and subject matter..."
-Jewish Book World, Spring 2006
Vol. 24, Number 1
Leora
all woodcuts by Tayseer Baraket
".... Leora Skolkin-Smith's new novel, Edges: O Israel O Palestine (is) about the adventures of an adolescent girl in Israel in the early '60s. Her character's mother had grown up in British Mandate Palestine, one of several factors making the memory bank of this book so rich -- appropriate for a place with almost too much history to bear and retain one's sanity at the same time.
What is most memorable to me is the sense of place that Ms. Skolkin-Smith has achieved -- the sunny and scary Jerusalem and countryside -- and the hope, love, hate and fatalism of the groups, Palestinian and Israeli, living amongst and apart from each other in a thin, rocky, brilliantly bright corridor too rarely shaded by old gray-green olive trees.
Perhaps above all, the novel, told with restraint and poetic precision, is about how we shoulder on (and wing it) under the weight of history -- family and public.
Ms. Skolkin-Smith will appear to discuss Edges at Books on the Square, in Providence, on June 16 at 7 p.m., and at Barrington Books, on June 18 at 2 p.m.
-- Robert Whitcomb, Providence Journal
"Edges takes the reader to an Israel before the high walls formed, a border, when instead metal wires hung like "hosiery lines" across the land...Here, Skolkin-Smith's young heroine tries to shake off her father's suicide and her mother's mourning by making an escape with the missing son of an American diplomat...Skolkin-Smith, in clear, burnished prose, fuses personal and political rifts into an exhilirating debut novel."
--Philip Graham, Director, Creative Writing Program,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
" Where, and how and to whom do we really belong? Leora Skolkin-Smith's brilliant debut novel is a hypnotic meditation on the ever-changing boundaries of love and need. A coming of age story of the bond between a young American and her powerful mother, etched in a wartime Mideast as shifting and dangerous and mysterious as the Israeli desert."
—Caroline Leavitt, author of "Girls in Trouble" and "Coming Back to Me"
" In Edges Leora Skolkin-Smith skillfully tells the story of a girl of fourteen in the wake of her father’s suicide, brought abruptly by her distraught mother from a comfortable suburban Westchester to the harsh terrain of a young State of Israel. The girl is caught in the maelstrom of political claims between Israel and a West Bank, still part of the Kingdom of Jordan. The turmoil both of the girl and her mother is graphically detailed as they struggle to define themselves in the light of a haunted past and present. The poetry of the girl’s sexual awakening ripples through many pages, softening the fierce realities of the conflict between Arab and Jew. The pages evoke as well the memories of a shared land, and the mother’s childhood growing up in an old Jerusalem before the city was separated by physical barriers, the religious, cultural, divide between Arab and Jew easier to bridge. The author’s vivid sense of landscape, her gift for identifying with both mother and daughter, Arab and Jew, gives the novel a unique sense of balance and brings the reader, regardless of political conviction into sympathy with this portrait of a vanished Jerusalem.
Edges is a powerful evocation of lost worlds which it is a joy to wander back into."
Mark Mirsky,writer and founder of Fiction Magazine, and Professor of English at City College of New York. Books include "Diaries: Robert Musil 1899-1942"; "Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah"; "My Search for the Messiah: Studies and Wanderings in Israel and America"; "Blue Hill Avenue: A Novel"; "The Red Adam"; and "Absent Shakespeare".
"EDGES"
by Leora Skolkin-Smith
Glad Day Books
June, 2005
ISBN 1-930180-14-4
Contact: skolkin@nyc.rr.com
"Edges" takes the reader to an Israel before high walls formed a border, when, instead, metal wires hung "like hosiery lines" across the land. Liana Barish is fourteen years old when the suicide of her American father forces her mother, mourning, in despair back to her family--to Jerusalem where she grew up. For Liana it is the place where the powerful interdependence of mother and daughter--physical and spiritual--ends. It is the place of her sexual awakening.
This can happen when Liana escapes across the border with the missing son of an American diplomat. They are made closer by the death of a young Palestinian boy. They move deeper into the world of Palestinian fields, olive orchards, villages.
The novel is set in the Israel of the early '60's. Liana's mother and aunt tell lively stories about the 1940's, their young guerilla-like struggles against the British particularly, the mother's memories of growing up in a shared land in the old city before it was divided.
Growing into a womanhood forever formed by the boundary-less spaces of a lost geography and people, Liana’s coming of age brings this tumultuous region into startling light and relief.
"The story of Edges begins in the stratosphere as fourteen-year-old Liana Bialik, her sister Ivy (two years older) and their mother Ada fly away from their home in Katonah, Westchester County, New York, toward Israel, where Ada was born and raised. Liana's father recently had committed suicide, but this fact serves more as an undercurrent to the story and never is openly discussed. I am familiar with this tendency toward secrecy and toward repressing memories too painful and difficult to talk about. Skolkin-Smith does a superb job conveying the strained atmosphere that results from such denial. She tells Liana's story in a style so lyrical it takes my breath away..."
---Duffie Bart, Storycircle Reviews
"Discovery. Here is a word full-up with the exotic, the unknown, with learning, with growing. Edges by Leora Skolkin-Smith is packed with discovery as good fiction should be.
Edges is not only a story that explores the very edges of the protagonist's psyche (and therefore the edges of our own) but it is also an introduction to a culture and place that--even if we should be lucky enough to travel to this mysterious realm at the southern edge of the Mediterranean we would never know it in quite this way. Jerusalem and environs comes alive. It is sensual, visual and, though exotic, no longer foreign."
Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Bookpleasures.com
"Edges" is Ms. Skolkin-Smith's first published novel. A Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of a P.E.N. American Center grant, she has had fiction pieces in "Persea: An International Review" an anthology published by Persea Books and "The Sarah Lawrence Review" .
