A Woman in Jerusalem
English
By (author): A.B. Yehoshua
A suicide bomb explodes in a Jerusalem market. One of the victims is a migrant worker without any papers, only a salary slip from the bakery where she worked as a night cleaner. As her body lies unclaimed in the morgue, her employers are labelled unfeeling and inhuman by a local journalist. The manager of human resources is given the task of discovering who she was and why she had come to Jerusalem.
As the image of this once-beautiful dead woman begins to obsess him, the manager turns this duty into a personal mission - he is no longer just saving his company's reputation by trying to discover her identity and assure her of a dignified funeral. He is now restoring her not only to her family and country but also to common humanity - whilst at the same time conquering the hardness of his own heart.
There are human riches here. The manager moves from a man who has given up on love to one who opens himself to it. And there are strange and powerful scenes - of the morgue, of the coffin, of the Soviet base where the manager passes through the purging of body and soul.
Carole Angier, The Independent