Souls

“I’m a liar and a chatterbox,” the narrator introduces himself from the first lines in Roi Hеn’s novel “Souls.” But nobody can, he claims, tell the truth about their own childhood—and not lie. As they used to say in the times of his childhood: “Let it be a lie, but let it shine!” And through that shining—through the shining of exquisite, ingenious stories—the narrator’s soul, Grisha, speaks to the listener’s soul.

His soul—the one of a forty-year-old Grisha living with his mother in an émigrant apartment in Jaffa—has been wandering from body to body, from epoch to epoch for 400 years. Like the Wandering Jew, he travels without finding peace: from a deep-rooted Polish backwater to a Venetian ghetto; from there—to a Jewish cemetery in Morocco, and through a German concentration camp—to modern Israel. He changes names: Gиц, Гедалья, Джимуль. And in each incarnation, he carries one single twin-soul: he must find it—now, this soul…

However, Grisha isn’t the only voice we get to know. Grisha’s mother, who—thank God—sits in the year 2020 in a room with an air conditioner, has her own opinion about all these stories: filthy lies, slander against the mother who is everything for him, fantasies torn from reality, invented names… Disorder with the mind! Both voices, with passion, try to convince you—each in their own version of events, each in their own view of reality.

But whose side will you, the listener, take?