Five Selves
Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein, 2015
Holland House Books
190 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781909374799
Summary
Five Selves is a collection of five stories.
♦ "A Bird Flight," is about a woman traveling from Israel to Chicago after the death of her father. It is the story of my own dealing with the death of my beloved father.
♦ "Earrings" is about a relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter in Israel—three generations of Israeli women, three stages of Israeli society.
♦ "The Grammar Teacher" is a reflection on the changing values of our world; an excellent, hardworking teacher is fired because she is not assertive or "modern" enough.
♦ "Watchdog" is a story about dealing with phobia. A young man manages to overcome his fear of dogs.
♦ "Aura," an experimental work, depicts a man waking up after a severe accident, unable to recognize his family. It is an attempt to adopt a primordial perspective. (From the author.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Jerusalem, Israel
• Education— B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Hebrew University, Jerusalem
• Currently—lives in Tel Aviv, Israel
Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein is an author, scholar in the Humanities, and a blogger. She focuses on cultural symbols and themes, and studies their effect on human behavior.
Emanuela was born in Jerusalem. Her parents fled their homes in Eastern Europe at the outbreak of World War II, wandered for years during the war, until they finally came to Israel. Her father was an art historian, Moshe Barasch. He encouraged Emauela's humanistic education and enthusiastically nurtured any intellectual curiosity.
The choice of studying in the faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University was a natural one. Her B.A. is in Comparative Literature and Philosophy. Her M.A. and Ph.D. are in the field of Comparative Religion. She was part of the Comparative Religions graduate program at Tel Aviv University, and now she is part of the Nevzlin Center for Jewish Peoplehood Studies at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzlya, a private academic center.
Emanuela engages in literary writing. A collection of five novellas, Five Selves, was published by Holland House Books in the UK. She wrote the stories in Hebrew and translate them herself into English.
Emanuela runs a successful blog: On Ourselves and Others on literature, art history, history, and other cultural topics, with a pronounced Israeli perspective.
Emanuela has published scholarly books on the cultural perception of Nazism: The Devil, the Saints, and the Church (Peter Lang, 2004), Nazi Devil (Magnes Press, 2010), and Mephisto in the Third Reich (De Gruyter Press, 2014).
Book Reviews
(Starred review) While preoccupied with different issues—grief and privacy, inflexibility and a changing work culture, generational rift, and a phobia—characters are interconnected in the literature through their common search for personal insight.... Barasch-Rubinstein's lean, beautiful writing prevents the characters from overstating emotion and avoids any melodrama.... This anthology is a highly visual, spiritual gem.
Publishers Weekly
A man in a hospital percreives the world through semi-consciousness; another seeks to overcome his fear of dogs; a teacher confronts her limitations; a woman coming to terms with the death of her father travels to a symposium.... [C]aptured at a moment of crisis, are written with an affecting, powerful intelligence, and shot through with an emotional intensity. A memorable and singular voice."
Mail on Sunday: Best New Fiction (UK)
Some writers dwell on flesh and furnishings, others, like Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein, look deep into interior lives. Her Five Selves is a mindscape masterpiece—a handful of novellas in which the dramatis personae struggle to understand themselves in dark times. An Israeli-born scholar of culture, religion and philosophy, Barasch-Rubinstein seems to perceive the soul through x-ray eyes—or perhaps, as the daughter of a renowned art historian, she was raised to look way beyond canvas and brush-strokes.
Madeleine Kinksley - Jewish Chronicle
Discussion Questions
1. "A Bird's Flight"—what are the stages of mourning for a loved one?
2. "Earrings"—Could a grandaughter be closer to her gradmother more than her mother, not only presonally but also culturally?
3. "The Grammar Teacher"—in the contemporary, modern world, is appearance more important than substance?
4. "Watch Dog"—when struggeling with phobia, what is it that we need to overcome?
5. "Aura"—When we talk about "memory loss," is the fundamental human framework of thought and experience still there?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)