Yankinton

Yankinton is set in the early years of the Jewish state and tells the stories of refugees from the Holocaust and from antisemitism who struggled to build new lives in Israel. The narrator is a young Orthodox Jewish girl growing up in Tel Aviv. Through her eyes the reader meets a varied cast, from Soviet revolutionaries to weapons runners from the War of Independence. The adults around her are traumatised, and their troubles include panic attacks and suicide attempts, yet the girl keeps looking for moments of wonder among the hardship and tragedy. She moves through the streets of Tel Aviv, avoiding the places exposed to Arab sniper fire. She hunts for literature from the wider world in a city flooded with translated Soviet propaganda novels, and she learns to handle the quirks of the grown-ups. Along with her, the reader listens to political arguments, memories of Russia and wartime Eastern Europe, and Soviet revolutionary songs played on balalaikas. The novel takes its name from a couple whose lives it follows. During the War of Independence, Mrs Yankinton smuggled grenades in her baby's carriage, and for years afterward she ended each day standing at attention, alone in her living room, when the national anthem came over the radio. Mr Yankinton was arrested as a revolutionary in Soviet Russia, which ended his plans to study medicine, and he later became the proud curator of the complete works of the Zionist visionary Jabotinsky. In this mosaic of scenes and characters from postwar Tel Aviv, Rachel Shihor reflects on why remembering matters and on the search for flashes of magic in dark times.