Paperback(REISSUE)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
In the spring of 1946, Evelyn Sert stands on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. For the twenty-year-old from London, it is a time of adventure and change when all things seem possible.
Swept up in the spirited, chaotic churning of her new, strange country, she joins a kibbutz, then moves on to the teeming metropolis of Tel Aviv, to find her own home and a group of friends as eccentric and disparate as the city itself. She falls in love with a man who is not what he seems when she becomes an unwitting spy for a nation fighting to be born. When I Lived in Modern Times is "an unsentimental coming-of-age story of both a country and a young immigrant . . . that provides an unforgettable glimpse of a time and place rarely observed" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780452282926 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/31/2002 |
| Edition description: | REISSUE |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 984,973 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.67(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
When I look back I see myself at twenty. I was at an age when anything seemed possible, at the beginning of times when anything was possible. I was standing on the deck dreaming; across the Mediterranean we sailed, from one end to the other, past Crete and Cyprus to where the East begins. Mare nostrum. Our sea. But I was not in search of antiquity. I was looking for a place without artifice or sentiment, where life was stripped back to its basics, where things were fundamental and serious and above all modern.
This is my story. Scratch a Jew and you've got a story. If you don't like elaborate picaresques full of unlikely events and tortuous explanations, steer clear of the Jews. If you want things to be straightforward, find someone else to listen to. You might even get to say something yourself. How do we begin a sentence?
"Listen ..."
A sailor pointed out to me a little ship on the horizon, one whose role as a ship was supposed to be finished, which had reached the end of its life but had fallen into the hands of those who wanted it to sail one last time. "Do you know what that is?" he asked me.
I knew but I didn't tell him.
"It isn't going to land," he said. "The authorities will catch them."
"Are you in sympathy with those people?"
"Yes, I'm sympathetic. Who wouldn't be? But they can't go where they want to go. It's just not on. They'll have to find somewhere else."
"Where?"
"No idea. That's not ourproblem, is it?"
"So you don't think the Zionist state is inevitable?"
"Oh, they'll manage somewhere or other. They always have done in the past."
This time it's different, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut. Like the people on the horizon, I was determined that I was going home, though in my case it was not out of necessity but conviction.
Then I saw it, the coast of Palestine. The harbor of Haifa assumed its shape, the cypress and olive and pine-clad slopes of Mount Carmel ascended from the port. I didn't know then that they were cypresses and olives and pines. I didn't recognize a single thing. I had no idea at all what I was looking at. I had come from a city where a few unnamed trees grew out of asphalt pavements, ignored, unseen. I could identify dandelions and daisies and florists' roses but that was all, that was the extent of my excursions into the kingdom of the natural world. And what kind of English girl doesn't look at a tree and know what type it is, by its bark or its leaves? How could I be English, despite what was written on my papers?
On deck, beside me, some passengers were crossing themselves and murmuring, "The Holy Land," and I copied them but we were each of us seeing something entirely different.
I know that people regarded me in those days as many things: a bare-faced liar; an enigma; or a kind of Displaced Person like the ones in the camps. But what I felt like was a chrysalis, neither bug nor butterfly, something in between, closed, secretive, and inside some great transformation under way as the world itself—in that strangest of eras just after the war was over—was metamorphosing into something else, which was neither the war nor a return to what had gone before.
It was April 1946. The Mediterranean was packed with traffic. Victory hung like a veil in the air, disguising where we might be headed next. Fifty years later it's so easy, with hindsight, to understand what was happening but you were part of it then. History was no theme park. It was what you lived. You were affected, whether you liked it or not.
We didn't know that a bitter winter was coming, the coldest in living memory in the closing months of 1946 and the new year of 1947. America would be frozen. Northern Europe would freeze. You could watch on the Pathé newsreel women scavenging for coal in the streets of the East End of London. I had already seen in the pages of Life magazine what was left of Berlin—a combination of grandeur and devastation, fragments of what looked like an old, dead civilization, the wreckage that was left in the degradation of defeat. I had seen people selling crumbs of what had once been part of a civilized life. A starving woman held out a single red, high-heeled shoe. A man tried to exchange a small bell for a piece of bread. A boy offered a soldier of the Red Army his sister's doll.
All across the northern hemisphere would be the same bitter winter. The cold that killed them in Germany would kill us everywhere. But winter was months away and I was on deck in balmy spring weather, holding the green-painted rail of the ship, watching the coast of Palestine assemble itself out of the fragrant morning air and assume a definite shape and dimension.
In the Book of Lamentations I had once read these words: Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine. The ways of Zion do mourn, because none come to the solemn feast: all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted, and she is in bitterness.
But all that was about to change. We were going to force an alteration in our own future. We were going to drive the strangers out, bury the blackened dead, destroy the immigration posts and forget our bitterness. There would be no more books of lamenting. Nothing like that was going to happen to us again. We had guns now, and underground armies, guerrilla fighters, hand grenades, nail bombs, a comprehensive knowledge of dynamite and TNT. We had spies in the enemies' ranks and we knew what to do with collaborators.
I was a daughter of the new Zion and I felt the ship shudder as the gangplank crashed on to the dock. I put on my hat and white cotton gloves and, preparing my face, waited to go ashore at the beginning, of the decline and fall of the British Empire.
What People are Saying About This
“A stunning accomplishment…A vivid account of an elusive piece of recent history”
-Chicago Sun-Times
“Informed, intelligent…vital, original. ”
-The New York Times
“Deeply moving…at once a beautifully rendered story of one woman’s coming of age, and a gripping portrait of the last days of British rule. ”
-Boston Globe
“Ms. Grant’s fast-paced novel succeeds on many levels. It recreates the historical era accurately with sophisicated prose and lively jests about the human condition.”
-Dallas Morning News
“Appealing…[When I Lived in Modern Times] offers an unsentimental view of a young woman’s coming-of-age in a paradoxically ancient and newborn land. [A] compelling tale of a Middle Eastern adventure.”
-US Weekly
Reading Group Guide
Q: Discuss the idea, as reflected in the title, of the past being more modern than the present.
Q: The novel opens with the words "When I look back I see myself at twenty. I was at an age when anything seemed possible." How different, if at all, would this novel been if Evelyn had been twenty-five? Thirty-five?
Q: How is art in its many forms, including music, painting, and architecture, used to express the concept of modernity in this book?
Q: What are possible motives for Evelyn's "Uncle Joe" to arrange her emigration to Palestine?
Q: Evelyn's life-both in England and Palestine-is shaped by four very different men. Discuss the viewpoints of Palestine as shown in the characters of "Uncle Joe," Meier, Johnny, and Herr Blum.
Q: How alike or different are Evelyn's encounters with anti-Semitism in England and in Palestine?
Q: Mid-novel, Evelyn states that she "discovered there are two countries called Palestine." Do you agree, and if so, what are the two?
Q: How do the people she meets and her experiences change Evelyn: in England, at the kibbutz, en route to Tel Aviv, and in Tel Aviv?
Q: On page 180, Evelyn says that "Because I was English and not American, came from a place with a continuous past, I did not understand then that when immigrants settle, they try to rebuild the land of their origins." Do you agree with Evelyn's observation?
Q: As the novel draws to a close, the author creates a conversation between the younger and the older Evelyn. The young Evelyn asks the elder "Why are you so interested in the past? It's the future that counts," to which the elder replies, "The past is everything. You'll see." Both in the context of the novel and out of it, which Evelyn Evelyn do you agree with?
SOURCE: Discusssion questions provided courtesy of Penguin Putnam.