All the Rivers

February 27, 2017
Bernstein Prize winner Rabinyan’s modern take on forbidden love between young dreamers on opposite sides of a bitter cultural conflict enthralls and delights. Liat, an Israeli Fulbright scholar studying in New York City, has a chance meeting one afternoon with the affable Hilmi, a Palestinian painter on an artist’s visa that explodes into an intense love affair. A relationship unthinkable at home flourishes in post 9/11 New York. Liat is poetic and emotive, her intense infatuation for Hilmi sustaining Rabinyan’s florid prose—the feel of Hilmi’s dark curls against her face, her strong reactions to his intense, beautiful paintings—making the electricity between the two lovers palpable. Although their relationship is full of passion, Liat believes their romantic fling cannot last and will end when she returns to Israel. But instead their intimacy grows into love, complicating the once-tenuous affair. It is a realistic relationship that sparks with vitality and vitriol, jumping through blissful rendezvous, heated arguments, and shameful secrets that build upon each other. While their political, cultural, and religious differences should be of little importance in multicultural New York City, there remains an obscure, impenetrable wall between them. Rabinyan beautifully loops the story from season to season, depicting Liat and Hilmi’s lives and love vividly and memorably.

October 1, 2016

Multi-award-winning Israeli author Rabinyan won the Bernstein prize for this book, which features the love affair between a young Israeli translator studying in New York for six months and a sweet Palestinian man she meets. But Israel's Ministry of Education demurred when a group of teachers asked that it be included in the Hebrew high school literature curriculum. The resulting furor fueled sales in Israel and abroad, where more than a dozen countries have bought rights.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2017

This beautifully written and complex novel about a love affair between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man who meet in New York City in 2003 won the Bernstein Prize, but Israel's Education Ministry attempted to ban the book, fearful that it would encourage intermarriage. In what later became a best seller, Rabinyan shows how two young people find happiness despite holding vastly different political and religious beliefs.

SEE ALSO: Rabinyan's Strand of a Thousand Pearls (2002), Persian Brides (1998)

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.