Having gone to report on the murder of an Israeli poet named David Bellen, who wrote a narrative poem about King David as a prototype of the Jewish gangster, she has gotten herself caught up in a writing project about the web of lives and motives that include the famous American gangster Meyer Lansky and an Eastern European Israeli immigrant named Gila, a former Jerusalem hotel cocktail waitress, who was Lansky's mistress and, later, after she emigrates to New York, possibly Groff's father's as well. To write about all this, Hannah explodes the memoir genre, eschewing her own role in the story and zigzagging from Lansky's attempt to gain Israeli citizenship to his early days as an immigrant boy in New York, Gila's love affair with him, Hannah's own affair with an Israeli journalist, a tour of the dark criminal side of Israeli life, and an introduction to, among other figures, the distressed family of the late poet Bellen. The outcome of all this is both revelatory and mystifying, two large effects in this artful and intense investigation - by its very nature only partial - into the nature of Jewish American identity, an investigation that moves back and forth in time (from the period of early 20th century immigration) to the present and points in between, and back and forth across oceans and continents, from the United States - New York and Las Vegas - to Israel's city and desert and back again. He would sit on a bench or on the steps and look at the restaurant sign across the street with its two red Coca-Cola logos, and he could have been in Miami facing trial there. Or when he's alone in his hotel room - as Hannah imagines him, of course - and he stared at the Old City of Jerusalem from a window. ... [...] the contemporary novelist's practice of using whatever means possible to tell an engaging story with personal, historical and political dimensions.
Reported by SFGate 6 hours ago.
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