When first published in 1979, Haim Be'er's Feathers was a critical and commercial success, ushering in a period of great productivity and expansiveness in modern Hebrew literature. Now considered a classic in Israeli fiction the book is finally available to English readers worldwide. In this, his first novel, Be'er portrays the world of a deeply religious community in Jerusalem during the author's childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s. The novel is filled with vivid portraits of eccentric Jerusalem characters, chief among them the book's main character, Mordecai Leder, who dreams of founding a utopian colony based on the theories of the nineteenth-century Viennese Jewish thinker Karl Popper-Lynkeus. Similar high-flying dreams inspire the family of the narrator, strict Orthodox Jews with impractical minds and adventurous souls-men such as the narrator's father, who periodically disappears from home on botanical expeditions meant to prove that the willow tree of Scripture is in fact the Australian eucalyptus. Experimental in structure and mood, Feathers features kaleidoscopic jumps in time, back and forth in the narrator's memories from boyhood to adulthood. Its moods swing wildly from hilarity to the macabre, from familial warmth to the loneliness of adolescence. Jerusalem and its inhabitants, as well as the emotional life of the narrator, are splintered and reconstituted, shattered and patched. This fragmentation, combined with a preoccupation with death and physical dissolution and dreamlike flights of imagination, evokes an Israeli magical realism. Feathers was chosen one of the 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature by the National Yiddish Book Center. Editorial Reviews From Booklist First published in Hebrew in 1979, Be'er's comic--but death-obsessed--novel is part of Brandeis University's Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry series. It takes the form of the memories of its narrator, Mordecai Leder, from his boyhood in the 1950s to his service in an Israeli army burial unit in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Leder's ambition is to establish a utopia based on the theories of Karl Popper-Lynkeus, a nineteenth-century Viennese Jewish scientist and social theorist. Leder's grandfather is the indefatigable pursuer of "true biblical blue," and his great-grandfather is famous for "stalking the Dragon of Time" in the mountains of Jerusalem. The novel's women, on the other hand, do all they can to protect their lives, homes, and children from the havoc wreaked by male fantasies. Translator Halkin points out in the foreword that, like feathers, dreams are light but subject to gravity; that is the basic theme of this novel, which is^B written with lyrical grace and sparkling humor. George Cohen Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review "...written with lyrical grace and sparkling humor. Be'er has created a delightful jewel-box of a world."-Booklist