Circling Eden

August 29, 2005
When Rebecca Harrison leaves her Yalie boyfriend behind in 1973 to spend her junior year abroad in Jerusalem, hoping to define her Jewish identity, she envisions Israel partly as an all-green biblical eden, partly as an idealistic, egalitarian utopia. Inevitable disappointments and misunderstandings, and her gradual awakening to modern Israeli realities and a new sense of self, form the substance of this frank, humorous, sharply observed debut novel. To some of the Israelis she meets, Rebecca is an amerika'it, an assimilated Jew who confirms their notions that Americans are either selfish individualists or romantic seekers. Rebecca's affair with her Hebrew tutor Ethan, son of a Las Vegas rabbi, a deeper romantic entanglement with Avner, a Yemenite Jewish student, her volunteer work on a new settlement in the Golan Heights and the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, which snatches Avner from her, are signposts on an affecting, sensitive voyage of self-discovery. Magun, who lived in Israel for nine years, palpably evokes daily life in that country and captures the tensions between Israeli and American Jews.

December 1, 1994
Magun's protagonist is an assimilated American Jew, Rebecca Harrison, who is spending her junior year in college in Jerusalem--a "flirtation with Zionism," her father calls it. She rents a tiny room that she's forced to vacate every Shabbat when the landlady's soldier son comes home for the Jewish Sabbath; but then she moves to a room where the landlady, Mrs. Bozo, gives her five months' free rent in return for most of her clothes. The time is 1973 during the Yom Kippur War, and Rebecca's plight is told in nine stories. Magun, who lived in Israel for nine years, unfolds in trenchant prose the trials of a single woman's journey of self-discovery in modern-day Israel. This first novel shows the author to be a truly gifted writer. ((Reviewed December 1, 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)