Eilat
by Luna Tarlo

Novel

This is the story of an American woman, Helen, who is traveling alone in 1965 to the port of Eilat situated at the southernmost tip of Israel on the Gulf of Akaba. Though married, she has encounters with two men, one a Christian Jew from Iran, who tries clumsily to make love to her and whom she rejects, and another, Uri, an Israeli engineer who fascinates her because of his aura of remoteness and mystery.

Arid, alien, harshly beautiful, barely populated, the landscape is an all-pervading primordial presence throughout the book. Powerful shifting images of the ferocious sun, the mountains, the heavy stars at night, the brilliantly transparent water, the untrammeled coral reefs, the empty stone beach, even the shabby hotel and the lone nightclub mask and disclose the changing states of Helen’s consciousness.

This novel is not the Israel of politics and religion. It is the Israel of the desert that borders the Red Sea, awesome and primitive in 1965, as one might imagine it has always been.