Mirl

Mirl is a novel of remembrance - in the author's words, "a kaddish," an attempt to step beyond the limits of what can be known about the people without whom she would not exist.

At its center is Mirl, an orphan who survived a pogrom in Gornostaipol, taken in by the respectable Vail family, loved by the scholarly Haskel and abandoned by Yankel-Yosif, who sailed from Hamburg to Argentina and was never heard from again. Around her unfolds a family saga that crosses borders and decades: Haskel's son Aba, who leaves home for the kibbutzim and orange-loading docks of Mandatory Palestine; Yankel-Yosif's letter from a Buenos Aires soap factory on the eve of the First World War; the evacuation train that carries Mirl's daughter Khaya-Reizl and her infant through the war; and the Kyiv courtyards of the 1960s, where the narrator's grandmother tells stories of hunger, pogroms and dancing.

Letters, documents, family legend and the narrator's own memories are woven into one flowing text, in which a cup of soup or an embroidered cushion carries as much weight as history itself. A book about memory, love and survival, and about how a single chance turn can rewrite the fate of someone born decades later.

Karine Arutyunova is a Russian-language writer, poet and artist born in Kyiv. She lived in Israel from the early 1990s until 2009. She is the author of The Ashes of the Red Heifer, Say Red, Daughters of Eve, The Color of Pomegranate, the Taste of Lemon, The Eve of the Last Saturday, The Air Is Full of Tenderness and Char and other books, and a laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize (2010), the Vladimir Korolenko Prize (2017), the Ernest Hemingway Prize (2020) and the Mark Aldanov Prize (2021).

Мирл - роман-поминовение, кадиш, попытка выйти за пределы весьма ограниченного знания о тех, без кого не было бы и самого автора.

В центре книги - Мирл, уцелевшая во время погрома в Горностайполе сирота, пригретая в почтенном доме Вайлей, любимая книжником Хаскелем и оставленная Янкелем-Иосифом, уплывшим из Гамбурга в Аргентину. Вокруг неё - семейная сага, пересекающая границы стран и столетий: сын Хаскеля Аба, ушедший в кибуцы и портовые склады подмандатной Палестины; письмо Янкеля-Иосифа с мыловарни Буэнос-Айреса накануне Первой мировой; эвакуационный ковчег, увозящий Хаю-Рейзл с младенцем от войны; киевские дворы шестидесятых, где бабушка рассказывает о голоде, погромах и танцах.