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Secrets and Lies |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Judith E. Chettle |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1998 |
| Size: 1,729 Words, 10,412 Characters |
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LOVER, TRAITOR
A Jerusalem Story
Anna Mitgutsch, translated by Roslyn Theobald
New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997
224 pp., $23.00
Our identity, which we usually take for granted, is something we jealously protect when challenged. Like a psychic driver's license, it validates our existence and confirms our place in the world. Yet we also like to think that we can change, even choose new names, create a different history, and pass ourselves off as someone we're not. We believe we could shed our pasts, if we wanted to, sloughing them off as easily as if they were jackets grown too heavy on a day suddenly warm.
But just as we imagine that we can finally shuck off the old self, we realize we are still left with our fundamental temperament. That is more firmly fixed; mo...
. . .
...o other title than the gentleman in the parlor. Like Devorah, most of us find, as we try to cast off old identities, that the new ones we assume are no less constraining and as skewered by our temperament. To be, however briefly, the lady or the gent in the parlor, especially in Jerusalem, is, as Mitgutsch so movingly demonstrates, to expect the impossible. There, ultimately, identity is all.
(824 of 10,412 characters)
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