When I Lived in Modern Times
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | When I Lived in Modern Times |
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| Author: | Linda Grant |
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| Publisher: | Dutton Adult |
It is April 1946. For a weary and exhausted Europe, it’s a time to begin picking up the pieces of the past, and for the armies of displaced persons on the move to slowly return home-if they still have one. But for Evelyn Sert, a twenty-year-old woman from London standing on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine, it is a time of adventure and a time of change when anything seems possible.
Landing on the shores of a nation fighting to be born, Evelyn is quickly caught up in the spirited, chaotic churning of her new, strange country. Unsure of herself and where she belongs in this world whose only constant is change, she will become Eve and work in the unbearable heat of a kibbutz. As Evelyn, she will find a home, and a collection of friends as eccentric and disparate as the teeming metropolis of Tel Aviv itself. And as Priscilla, she will find love with a man who is not what he seems to be, as she is swept up as an unwitting spy in an underground army that is beyond anything she’s ever imagined.
A coming-of-age story unlike any other, When I Lived in Modern Times illuminates a page of Twentieth century history that is at once exotic and familiar through the eyes of one of the most unforgettable heroines in contemporary fiction.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
In April 1946, a 20-year-old East End London hairdresser named Evelyn Sert sets out for Palestine. “This is my story,” she writes in When I Lived in Modern Times, which won Linda Grant the 2000 Orange Prize. “Scratch a Jew and you’ve got a story.” Her account is no less complicated than that of any other displaced European Jew in the postwar years. Separated from her family, she searches for some kind of reliable identity in an inhospitable new land—and in shining, Bauhaus-influenced Tel Aviv, she finds that she is more English than Israeli. Lo and behold, she becomes Priscilla Jones, a peroxided Londoner with an absent policeman husband. She is at her most “real,” it seems, when pretending, and revels in her ability to be entirely accepted among the English women whose hair she cuts and curls. Outside of their petty and casually anti-Semitic circle, meanwhile, she struggles with Hebrew, the heat, the unfamiliar food, and an alien way of life.
In Palestine, of course, the English are the enemy. Evelyn is soon drawn into a world of shifting identities, lies, and secrets by her passionate Zionist boyfriend, Johnny. Even then, she is never quite sure which side she is on, or where she belongs. All of this makes her a prototypical inhabitant of Linda Grant’s Tel Aviv, a city of contradictions and of hope. More to the point, Grant’s heroine is a fully believable figure, a chameleon of a kind readily recognizable to those of us who grew up as part of the seismic displacement of peoples that accompanied World War II—and, alas, to anyone who has been caught up in the more recent exoduses from Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania. —Lisa Jardine
