Edges: O Israel, O Palestine
By Leora Skolkin-Smith

Reviewed by Emberly Nesbitt

“Edges: O Israel, O Palestine” by Leora Skolkin-Smith is a satisfying first novel published by Glad Day Books. This small imprint founded by Grace Paley and Robert Nichols aims to bridge the gap between imaginative literature and political articles and criticism. The political novel carries with it certain dangers: characters can be nothing more than bullhorns for the authors’ political agendas, or the politics of a time or place can function merely as a convenient backdrop against which the more important personal drama unfolds. However, in Skolkin-Smith’s novel the story and the place inform one another; the complex reality of living in Israel and Palestine in the 40s and 60s takes the form of a story about a mother and daughter, a girl and her lover, and these stories becomes the means by which the drama of the place takes hold.

Following her father’s suicide in the 1960s, fourteen-year-old Liana Bialik and her sister are brought to Jerusalem, their mother’s birthplace, for the first time. Liana’s mother grew up in a multicultural Jerusalem. In the 1940s she was a member of the Haganah, or Jewish underground, where she used her sex to her advantage. There are brief tales in Edges of ammunition snuck across the border in her panties or her bra, of a woman’s subversive sexuality used as an element of war. The mother is the central, overwhelming presence in the first half of the book, a woman who knows no boundaries when it comes to her love or her grief. The scents that spill from her body could just as easily describe Israel as Liana sees it, a place where the air is filled with hot, wettish odors, strong fruity smells, raw, coarse aromas, hearty scents. Liana’s mixture of love and revulsion as she massages her mother’s great oily back or flinches at the sight of her mother’s breasts spilling out of her bra struck me to the quick; as girls we want our mothers to buckle and gird themselves in, to be decorous, to not be so carnally a part of life. Liana clearly wants to be free of her obedience and of the boundaries of her mother’s body in order to inhabit her own.

Finding a way through Jerusalem’s maze of language and makeshift borders, overwhelmed by the sounds, sights, and most of all smells of her first experience abroad, we stand slightly behind Liana (as if this girl-woman in her jean skirts and borrowed make-up could protect anyone from the sensory onslaught). Israel and Palestine viewed through an adolescent’s rage and confusion make the political landscape seem as full of sudden invisible dangers, missteps, and the impenetrable codes of the adult world as life seems as a teenager. In the second half of the novel, Liana crosses the border into Palestine with the missing son of an American diplomat; she “crosses the border” in every sense of the word. The parallels that Skolkin-Smith draws here between coming into womanhood and personal and political inter-and-independence are quiet and touching. Liana’s lover is big and shadowy, what we feel mostly is the absence of the mother and the calm, even mesmerizing, procession of hours and minutes left in the wake of separation and sudden violence, as well as the enormous danger of a young woman on her own in unfamiliar territory.

Ultimately, Edges manages to be political and serious and to tell an intimate story about a place that has known and will continue to know conflict. The Jerusalem of the novel may no longer exist, but painful and necessary allegiances will. Mothers and daughters will continue to test the edges of deep and complicated love. The novel hangs both conflicts on a straightforward plot and the prose follows an internal compass that seems deeply personal. As a bridge between politics and the imagination, Skolkin-Smith commits herself to the crossing.