Aquarium

November 9, 2020
Shehori’s ambitious if uneven English-language debut, a tale of two misfit sisters from a rural Israeli village, too often loses itself in life’s minutiae. Raised by reserved Anna and self-proclaimed spiritual prophet Alex, both deaf, Lili and Dori believe they are deaf as well. The family is surrounded by Alex’s loyal followers from their village, where the sisters’ mischief, including stealing mail to study handwriting, draws attention from outsiders. Soon, prying social workers discover Dori can in fact hear, and, citing mental abuse, they whisk the girl away from her family and place her in a boarding school. Older sister Lili, left behind, begins to explore the world of sound as well, with hearing aids. The remaining pages chronicle the separated sisters’ schooling, romance, and moves to the U.S. for college. Shehori employs an arsenal of styles, leaping from first- to third-person perspectives and injecting letters between the sisters
, yet the story takes its time to find a consistently engrossing stride, and the author’s withholding of information occasionally leads to unnecessary confusion about where the sisters are and what’s happened. Nevertheless, the fascinating Lili and Dori make this worth staying with.

January 1, 2021
Shehori's debut novel, winner of the Bernstein Prize in her native Israel, follows two sisters, Lili and Dori Ackerman, whose isolated childhood shapes very different futures. Both sisters are deaf, as are their parents. Their father is a scrap metal dealer and their mother homeschools the girls. The family tries to live separately from society, with Lili and Dori seeking out their own adventures. However, social services intrude to question the Ackermans' parenting and discover Dori is not actually deaf. Lili, too, is able to hear with the help of a hearing aid. Both sisters break away from their parents with different degrees of willingness. The novel's unusual structure traces the sisters' stories non-chronologically through Lili's adult narration, Dori's third-person perspective, and letters between them. With thoughtful character studies of each sister, Aquarium interrogates disability, limitations, and storytelling. Translated from Hebrew by Hasak-Lowy, the novel is written with dense prose and imagery. While the unreliable narrators at times may leave readers disoriented, the novel shines in its depiction of the malleable nature of family histories.

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May 1, 2021
Two young girls raised in a Deaf family must find their way after their sheltered, codependent world is shattered. Lili and Dori Ackerman are Deaf. All their lives, they have lived in an isolation largely imposed on the family by their father; they have no interaction with hearing people, as their parents are also Deaf and choose to teach the girls at home. All the elements of their existence are controlled, planned for, regulated--not unlike the controlled climate of an aquarium, complete with visitors pressing their faces against the glass to gaze upon the exotic dwellers within. When the borders of their fortress are breached and new elements introduced into their world, the consequences have a ripple effect the Ackermans could not have foreseen. The narrative switches back and forth between perspectives as we observe Lili and Dori walking their separate paths, representing two different possibilities--counterlives, as Philip Roth would have it. Israeli poet and editor Shehori's debut novel has the resonance of a folktale, rendered in evocative prose (for which we must also credit translator Hasak-Lowy) that lends an otherworldly quality to the story, mirroring the rarified existence of the Ackerman sisters. But ultimately, this comes at the expense of an engaging narrative, as we are kept at arm's length from the protagonists; despite the extended glimpses into their interiority, they are more like characters in a fable than they are fully drawn, idiosyncratic people. Nevertheless, Shehori has brought into being a memorable fictional world that asks us to rethink our assumptions about family versus community, nature versus nurture, and how we relate to--and communicate with--one another. A surprising, provocative debut that holds the weight of myth.

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