Miryam Sivan – författare

A traumatized American living on a kibbutz is drawn to a stray dog. An artist meets her lover during a missile attack. A pregnant woman consumed by the legacy of her grandparents' generation sits shiva with Kafka's grandson. From New York City to Haifa and Tel Aviv, from Afghanistan to the Galilee, Miryam Sivan presents a dozen stories of women and men experiencing cross-cultural pollination and coping with the very serious business of war and love. History, dogs, obsession, religion, and the lost promise of romance weave their way through tales of mad partners, passionate lovers, wearied fighters, and folk just trying to make it through.

"Pages, Isabel, I need pages."

Isabel Toledo''s publisher is getting impatient. An American living in the Galilee, Isabel has been telling other people''s stories for twenty years - as a ghostwriter for Holocaust survivors. But her latest project has bogged her down in a way no other has. Barking dogs, a clerk asking for her papers, a shadowy figure glimpsed in the streets of Prague. The stories are slipping out of her control, collapsing boundaries between past and present.

Isabel has two grown daughters and a seven-year-old son to keep her grounded. She has an official boyfriend who wants to be more than that, a young lover who understands her demons, and another man on the side in Prague. But the temporary relief she finds in their arms is not enough to keep the ghosts at bay. 

And the story she most wants to uncover, her own mother''s ordeal, defies all efforts to be brought to light. Why won''t her mother share her story? Why has her father''s story, which was never even on Isabel''s radar, inserted itself unwanted into her life? Isabel wants concrete realities. She needs to slam the brakes on using the Holocaust as her measuring stick in the world.