A Small Door Set in Concrete

A Woman on Her Own, the latest book by Israeli writer Ilana Hammerman, is an episodic book, marrying stories of protest and more personal interludes on larger moral issues at play in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though Hammerman is an activist, thereader will not find her arguing with Israeli settlers, tearing down blockades, or getting arrested. Hers is a much more personal, moving, and everyday kind of activism. She smuggles Palestinians into Israel in the trunk of her car. She spends months trying to get a pair of eyeglasses to a myopic Palestinian prisoner. She takes four Palestinian children to the beach to see the sea for the first time. Written in a third-person, Kafkaesque style, this book puts the absurdity of the situations on full display; the accounts are often bitter, but always in an honest way. These are acts of resistance by a woman who is at a point in her life when she is free to do what she likes, acts with a different and deeper intimacy than those of which we have read before--