AHAVA AL HACHOF (LOVE AT THE SHORE)

The ensuing and inevitable love triangle is a tempest of eros, perfectly orchestrated by Michal Govrin.

And was there ever something other between them, in all the days that passed since he saw her for the first time at the edge of the dance floor, beyond the dancers, slowly lifting her arm against the night? So young, almost a girl. Standing there illuminated, in a thin spaghetti strap-dress, and the heat is resting on her naked shoulder. In a disco on the Ashkelon beach, three people fall in love. Set in a summer in the early sixties, Esther has been educated in a religious high-school. In a sensual new dress she defiantly sneaks to the club for a dance; Moise has just returned from Paris to attend his mother's funeral; Alex, the bartender, is a new immigrant from Buenos Aires. T She renders the past and the entourage of each of the three characters, and well before the dazzling end the reader understands that the historical events of the century, one that has created refugees and their will to survive, is what links the three lovers more intimately than their summer romance. “The otherness and the fictionality of Ashkelon, with its archeological site, new neighborhoods and in the horizon, Gaza, beyond the border, present a parallel plot of fatal meaning. This is the place where all immigrants and remnants of the Jewish Diaspora came to from each and every place they wandered to. To the shore they come and ascend, as on an illuminated stage, which Michal Govrin builds with the skill of a powerful director. Here, on the shore, this entirely human place, Govrin compresses the reborn wish of life, with its full and fierce vitality, and allows the states of survival and refuge to be revealed The weaving of the story creates the novel's shore, full, as in all of Govrin books, with an infinity of echoes and traces. Shva Salhoov, Tolaat Sefarim Book Store, Book Launch, September 1, 2013 Mic hal Gov rin is a novelist, essayist, poet and theatre director, whose international reputation is marked by major literary awards and accolades. In 2010, the Salon du Livre of Paris praised her as one of the most influential writers of the past thirty years. In October 2013 she was decorated with the Chevalier Prize of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. She is the recipient of the Prime Minister's Prize for Writers (Israel), The Creation Prize granted by the Tel Aviv Foundation, and the Margalit Award for Theater Directing. Professor at Tel Aviv University, for many years Govrin delivered an annual lecture at The Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York and was a Senior Visiting Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University. She has lectured extensively in Europe, the U.S., China and Japan. www.michalgovrin1.com