The history of Israel lies at the heart of Alba Arikha’s thoughtful new novel, Where to Find Me, which in its opening moves from Nazi-occupied Paris in 1943 to the desert-lands of British Palestine in the months prior to Israel’s foundation in 1948.
The Sorbonne-educated Flora Baum, 25, is one of many Jews newly arrived from post-Hitler Europe. Having witnessed the “drip-drip of elimination” back home in Jew-baiting Vichy France, Flora is seeking redemption and a restorative beauty in Palestine (“The resinous scent of pine. The cyan blue of the sea”).
In spite of the lively intellectual ferment and disputation in the bars and cafés of Jerusalem, life is tough for Flora, with threats of militant Zionist bomb attacks. She falls in love with a Prague-born Jew, Ezra Radok, who may or may not be involved in paramilitary Jewish plots to oust the British.
In a novel of startling twists and revelations, Where to Find Me leaps forwards from the 1940s to the early 1980s. Flora Dobbs (as she is now known) had married a “world famous” Israeli concert pianist, Henry, who died young. Subsequently she gives up their son Maurice for adoption before settling in London, in Notting Hill.
Living opposite her is young Hannah Karalis, a bookish St Paul’s schoolgirl, her parents and their intermittently violent teenage son Ben. To Hannah the elegant, discreetly-dressed elderly neighbour Flora radiates a magnetic allure. Who is she?
The women become friends but their friendship terminates one day when, unaccountably, Flora vanishes. Two decades later, Hannah is astonished to find that Flora has bequeathed her a personal black notebook which chronicles her past in wartime France and in Israel.
Prompted by the notebook, a search gets under way to locate Flora’s adopted son Maurice, with clamorous results for Hannah and her brother Ben.
All this is told in the same carefully-wrought, limpid prose that distinguished Arikha’s memoir of her teenage years, Major/Minor, itself a marvellous book. The author, who is the daughter of renowned Franco-Israeli painter Avigdor Arikha, and also Samuel Beckett’s goddaughter, has written a beautiful, haunting novel that goes to the heart of questions of identity and belonging.
Where to Find Me by Alba Arikha (Alma Books, £12.99)
