Savyon Liebrecht was born in Germany and came to Israel in 1948, as the child of Holocaust survivors. The profound psychological difficulties that the survivors of the mass terror of the Holocaust endured has been the theme of several of her short stories. In her own words, she has engaged in ’breaking the silence that’s been going on for 40 years’. As a child who grew up in a home where the Holocaust was not talked about the silence had the effect of ’triggering her creativity’, because ’a child who grows up in such a home feels that questions are undesirable and so starts supplying her own answers.’

In Morning in the Park Among the Nannies she weaves the story of two middle-aged women who meet in a park and realise they share a secret past — they both were used and abused by the Nazis in the same camp when they were young — the narrator was kept as a seamstress, while the second woman was used, and given some protection, as the favoured whore of an officer. The ex-seamstress remembers the horrors that the pretty rabbi’s daughter, then a young woman, endured in the camp. Now an older woman, her beauty ravished, she is employed as a nanny to the child of privileged Israeli professionals. She refuses to, or cannot, recognise the narrator who tries to engage with her in conversation.

Another major theme has been to create portraits of Israeli women from different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Her Jewish women identify with the minority Arabs and show solidarity with them, crossing the boundaries and trying to overcome ethnic differences. The story A Room on the Roof (also in the anthology New Women’s Writing from Israel, reviewed here) is perhaps the best example of this, while the title piece of this collection Apples from the Desert, deals with a different background clash when a deeply religious and conservative woman has to accept her daughter’s flight from home into the arms of a free-thinking young farmer on a kibbutz.

Savyon Liebrecht is part of an important new generation of tough-minded, critical Israeli women writers, now beginning to be available in English, mainly thanks to the work of committed smaller publishers. M B & R K

’You gather your things, harness the little girl, get up and turn to the park gate. Again, a pace away from me, I see the ice-cold eyes surrounded by black haloes. The nannies fall silent, following you with their eyes as you pass us by. For a moment I seem to feel your glance lashing at me. Do I awaken a memory in you? An echo of German voices? The contact of flesh against your flesh? The fluttering of silk against your skin.... The girl who had aged within days, the one who swept the marble tiles...’ (Morning in the Park among the Nannies)