The Loves of Judith

The extraordinary story of three men in the Jezreel Valley and their love for Judith and her son, whom each man participates in raising as his own. When Judith arrives in a small, agricultural village in Palestine after World War II, she is the center of everyone's attention--especially Moshe, a widowed farmer obsessed with his dead wife and his lost braid of hair, which his mother cut off in childhood; Globerman, a coarse cattle dealer who loves women, money, and meat; and Jacob, a farmer who gives up his wife, the most beautiful woman in the village, to turn his energies toward raising canaries and wooing Judith with all his might. For ten years the three men strive to win Judith's exclusive love, but she will not agree to marry any one of them. In her eleventh year in the village she gives birth to a son named Zayde, who looks like all three men. All three consider him their son, and all three participate in raising him. Judith finally marries Moshe, but within a few weeks she is killed under a tree that collapses during a snowstorm. This extraordinary quasi-mythological tale is told many years later by an adult Zayde, as he learns the details of his mother's life over meals elaborately prepared for him by Jacob. A universal story of love and destiny, "The Loves of Judith" masterfully combines classic Israeli characters with magic realism, as cows, canaries, and crows all act as emissaries of fate, along with a homosexual Italian prisoner-of-war who knows all there is to know about love.


Genre: Literary Fiction