Culture Watch
When I Lived in Modern
Times
By Linda Grant Penguin/Putnam;
Plume paperback, 2002 I
When I Lived in Modern Times is so good that it is difficult to write about, for I fear my words won't do it justice. This novel won England's Orange Prize in 2000, a prize awarded the best novel by a woman published each year.
Witty, astute, moving, wise—it is a good story, worth your time. Author Linda Grant said that the novel resulted from her curiosity about how life appeared to her parents, young English Jews at the time when Israel was about to burst forth from the British Mandate, Palestine:
"A few months before the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel I began to think about what this must have meant for my parents and the rest of their generation. I knew that I wanted to write a novel set at around that time and that it would concern a naïve young woman who travels to Palestine to fight for the new state …"
Imagine yourself in the London of 1947. World War II is over, and you are a twenty-year-old British woman, a recent college graduate with a risk-taking disposition. The land of Palestine promised young Jews justice, opportunity, adventure. It was "the" place to be, the "happening place." As Linda Grant's novel begins, young Evelyn Sert has embarked on just such an irresistible voyage, from England to the British Mandate of Palestine. She wanted, in her youthful idealism, to be part of a place where "things were fundamental and serious and above all, modern."
From the time Evelyn gets on that boat, her experiences and reflections are so compelling that it is almost impossible to put this book down. In her eyes, everything is new. She embraces the mystique of building a new socialism, and at first tries to become a "new kind of Jew" by joining a kibbutz. But her sojourn in a kibbutz does not last long; having no skills and little physical strength disqualifies her from all but simple cleaning jobs. ("I didn't belong and I was bored. Apparently it was possible for utopia to induce ennui.") Beginning to think in Hebrew, and minus her virginity, she leaves the kibbutz for the city.
Evelyn finds an apartment in Tel Aviv and finds work as a hairdresser in a salon catering to British wives. Since "everyone in Palestine had a tale of some kind and they were prepared to tell it to you at the drop of a hat," Evelyn sifts through tales told by residents of her building, who become her friends. She also hears British stories, the colonial point of view, from customers at the beauty salon whose husbands are police officers or military men. She misses her dear mother. Meanwhile, she has fallen passionately in love with a man who at first seems to be a British soldier but is actually a member of the Irgun, a secret paramilitary group aimed at ejecting the British. She must make her first big political decision, whether or not to help the cause by providing information to Irgun about the British.
The city of Tel Aviv, usually considered less interesting than Jerusalem, comes alive as a fascinating place where castaways and refugees assemble without pretensions, where experimental Bauhaus apartments coexist with mosques and traditional Islamic architecture, where the British colonials are a separate clubby stratum. Grant's descriptions may be so vivid because she interviewed scores of people who lived in Tel Aviv before independence and herself walked every street mentioned in the book. Her beautiful recovery of this place and time makes one realize how most of us have left the world of our parents and of our own youth unrecorded. A voice inside me shouts, "Now is the time to write it all down, before it's too late!"
Linda Grant is a feature writer for the Guardian newspaper in London. Her books include an award-winning account of her mother's dementia, Remind Me Who I Am; The Cast Iron Shore, her first novel; and Sexing the Millennium. Her current project is a novel set in Liverpool, about an affair between a British woman and an American man.
