When I lived in Modern Times

Author(s): Linda Grant

Location(s): Tel Aviv

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): 1946

Location

Content

In April, 1946 Evelyn Sert, a 20-year-old East End London hairdresser, sets out for Palestine. “This is my story”, she writes, “Scratch a Jew and you’ve got a story”. Evelyn’s story in Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times is no less complicated than that of any other displaced European Jew in the post-war years–separated from her family and searching for some kind of reliable identity for herself in an inhospitable new land. In shining modern Bauhaus-influenced Tel Aviv she finds that she is more English than Israeli and she becomes Priscilla Jones, a peroxided English girl with an absent policeman husband. She is at her most “real”, it seems, when pretending, revelling in her ability to be entirely accepted among the English women whose hair she cuts and curls. Beyond their petty and casually anti-semitic circle, by contrast, she struggles with Hebrew, the heat, the unfamiliar food and alien, exotic way of life.
But in Palestine the English are the enemy and Evelyn is drawn into a world of shifting identities, lies and secrets by her passionate Zionist boyfriend Johnny. Even then, she is never quite sure which side she is on, or where she belongs.

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