Zar lo yavin
Hila Florsheim-Barron
A Stranger Will Not Understand is the story of Orr, a woman who grew up in the shadow of her father's war, one of more than three hundred IDF soldiers captured during the Yom Kippur War. At the age of twelve, while the family was on a mission abroad, light years away from the children's home on the kibbutz, a light awakened in the dead of night to cries of pain that terrified her world and secured her to the ground of reality hidden under her father's heroic stories. From that moment on and for many years she follows with her piercing gaze a father in whom a hidden dam has suddenly burst, wondering what is hiding in the cellars of the heart and the dungeons of consciousness and trying to decipher the stranger who will not understand. Against the background of her father's war, captivity and post-trauma story, Orr faces the other challenges of life, including special parenting for a child with cerebral palsy and a loving relationship that goes through difficult times. Orr tries to free her father from the prisoners of war, her son from the limitations of his disability and her partner from the sense of alienation into which he finds himself in mid-life. In the first person and in fluent language, intimate and painfully honest, the narrator reveals tap after tap from the worldview of the second generation of post-trauma and their coping with the challenges and gifts of everyday life. About parenting, dreams, disappointments, desires, hope, pain and one big love. -- Translated from publishers site.