The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

September 1, 2022

Friedlander's debut features imaginative, poignant, and fascinating short stories that illuminate the lives of Palestine's and Israel's diverse people and deal with love, hate, the Holocaust, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The stories' complex, conflicted characters are Palestinians, Arab Israelis, and Jewish Israelis who love and hate each other simultaneously; many of the Israeli characters are unsympathetic--con men, oppressors, and brutes. In the humorous story "The Sephardi Survivor," Sephardi brothers search for a Holocaust survivor they can bring to school to pose as their grandfather on Holocaust Remembrance Day. In "Jaffa Oranges," the Israeli narrator was 13 when he was fired from his best friend Khalil's family orchard because he was Jewish; years later, as an IDF soldier, he brutally retaliates. In "Checkpoint," Friedlander depicts an insensitive brute of a settler, while the title story's main character is an indigent divorced father who cons rich tourists into buying empty bottles. Narrators Assaf Cohen and Gilli Messer do a phenomenal job reading the book; third-person narrations are American-accented, while the dialogue of many of the characters is spoken in flawless Israeli-accented English. VERDICT An impeccably narrated audiobook that makes Friedlander's stories come alive.--Ilka Gordon

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 21, 2022
Friedlander debuts with a dynamic story collection set in Israel that probes the challenges faced by Israeli Jews—national security, relations with Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, religious-secular schisms—with sensitivity and compassion. “Checkpoint” is told from the perspective of a grieving mother who monitors potential human rights abuses at a checkpoint between Israel and the occupied territories. She ruminates about sending her son off “to be killed in a war I don’t believe in, fighting for a government I hate.” In “The Sephardi Survivor,” two siblings, envious of their classmates who have family Holocaust stories, try to convince an old man to pose as their grandfather for their school’s Shoah Memorial Day. “Jaffa Oranges” explores a Jewish man’s guilt over betraying a Palestinian friend, and the title story unpacks the fraught relationship between a father and his daughter, who helps him sell “holy” bottled air. Friedlander imbues his characters with a deeply felt humanity, and his finely tuned command of emotional tenor will evoke tears and laughter in equal measure (“I couldn’t study because I was listening to my grandfather’s Shoah story was a common reason for failing a math test”). These superior character portraits make for an auspicious start.