This work is exquisitely composed, rich and profoundly layered, symphonic, with motifs being played out and developed gently but resolutely. Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, in 1924, and moved to Israel with his parents in 1936. In this novel the main protagonist, Joel, is an archeologist who wants to reconcile himself with and re-evaluate many of his past experiences. He feels the need to return to Germany, to ’Weinburg’, his birthplace, to better understand the people, the past conflicts — the haunted world that inhabits his thoughts twenty-three years after first leaving. Amichai presents this physical and metaphysical journey, its themes and sub-themes in a modern symbolist style in harmony with the poetry work he is most known for.

We are introduced to the concept of duality, of the need to pursue perhaps two strands of thought and exploration in the early pages of the novel, on ’one of those summer evenings when people talk to each other about their plans’. Joel’s friend Mina, revealed to be a schizoid personality, encourages him to both return to Southern Germany and to stay on in Jerusalem to address the doubts in his marriage to Ruth. During this ’overture’ we meet several of Joel’s circle of friends, each one in transition, at a moment of uncertainty and change; Einat, who is deciding to fall in love, Yosi with his violin, who also wishes to travel, and Patricia, with her seductive, strangely familiar face. Once this stage is completed, the novel-as-symphony starts up, and the rich interplay of voices and melodies begins.

The narration switches to the first person, and Joel is the ’I’ who decides to travel back to his German birthplace. He becomes overwhelmed by memories of his dearest childhood friend, Little Ruth, crippled in an accident in childhood, and then dying at the hands of the Nazis. He is first reminded of her in his conscious memory (she has never left his subconscious one) once her father, Dr Mannheim, reappears in a hospital in Jerusalem, elderly and frail. With insight and delicate probing Amichai presents this retracing of the stages of his childhood. Joel talks of the need to examine the faces of the older generation of Germans — a common experience of Holocaust survivors — to decide their roles in his personal fate, to try and determine some path of revenge.

The Joel who stays in Jerusalem is presented in the third person: he needs to pursue various relationships in his contemporary world, including the question of whether the main attraction of his wife Ruth was her name, as the re-embodiment of his childhood love. He develops a passionate, physical alliance with Patricia, woman doctor, Christian, American. Clearly he is exploring the aspects of ’otherness’, hoping perhaps to be healed by a different reality, one where his Jewishness and his Israeli personality are rehabilitated in a different way.

With both scenarios or major motifs established Amichai commences the brilliant contrapuntal section of the novel. Joel intersects with a motley crew of people in Weinburg, who have their resonance in the characters he is interacting with in Jerusalem. He spends many hours with his original nanny, Henrietta, at a home for the elderly in Weinburg; through her he can scan all those incidents of his childhood that trouble him, the existential questions and the factual truths. This is echoed in Jerusalem by his conversations with Dr Mannheim. As both the personas of Joel peruse these ancient faces, he senses that all of his life is contained and reflected in a few significant faces.

In all his encounters and explorations in Weinburg, Joel needs to redefine his identity, literally rename himself, to gain access to inhospitable places. These vignettes are the most amusing of the novel. For all the seriousness of the subject, Amichai presents it with a lively pace and honest and witty self-reflection. His inanimate objects are revealed with heart and soul, e.g. the ’tree which loved chocolate’ from his childhood, or the changing faces of society, reflected by the bizarre conference he intrudes upon near the end of his stay in Weinburg, which changes its name and purpose at every turn.

The book’s two scenarios are finally brought together both philosophically and thematically as Joel reflects on the rewriting of biography in the light of the past.

Within the whole range of his personality, Joel has needed to admit to the major significance of his past on his current life. Amichai, regarded as the ’poet laureate’ of Israel, has created a novel exploring intimate and profound material that reverberates with lyrical grandeur.

’The tailor across from the cafe opened his shutter. An unfinished suit is always on display in his window. No finished garment catches the eye the way a suit does that still shows the white basting stitches and has but one sleeve. It is possible that Joel, too, was like that, unfinished. But only Patricia, the American, who looked in through the café window, realized that Joel’s life was incomplete, despite the fact that in age and status in society he seemed completed long ago. She went in, and when he turned around he noticed her gray skirt and sleeveless blouse loosely tied at the neck with a golden thread. She came toward him like a ship in full sail, and her face was like the painted faces of women that adorned the prows of ships in years gone by. And in fact she began by saying, "This skirt is made of sailcloth." She anchored and sat down beside him and smiled and lifted a questioning finger: "Where are all the others? The gang? The people? The friends?" And he gave her some sort of answer, and she smiled slyly and knowingly.’ p53-4