Love Made Out of Nothing/Zohara's Journey Zohara's Journey Two Novels

With this volume, Barbara Honigmann gives us the stories of two very different women, & of their attempts to rise from the ashes of their former lives. The narrator of A Love Made Out of Nothing is a woman who leaves her life in Berlin to start over as a student in Paris. But though she has escaped from her past life & is finally living in the city of her dreams, she finds herself isolated & imprisoned. She discovers that the life of an expatriate has its own difficulties & loneliness, & that she remains tied to her old existence by her complex relationship with her possessive & manipulative father, whose history of wandering from city to city & wife to wife has cast a long shadow over her life. Zohara's Journey tells the story of Zohara, a devoutly religious Sephardic Jew "repatriated" to southern France during the Algerian War. Having wandered from one French city to another with her husband Simon, an itinerant rabbi who claims to be the Rabbi of Singapore, she wants to believe that the family has finally settled in Strasbourg when Simon returns from a long absence & disappears with their six children. In the struggle to locate her children & piece her life back together, Zohara comes to question the man she thought she knew, & the religion that has dominated both of their lives. Honigmann's view encompasses the universal (and perhaps the mythical) as well as the autobiographical & social. In these two intimate novellas, she communicates, in spare & elegant prose, both the terror & the thrill that come with starting over. Dense with imagery & emotion, these powerful novels speak directly to the nature of isolation and, ultimately, to the necessity of self-reliance.Honigmann, Barbara is the author of 'Love Made Out of Nothing/Zohara's Journey Zohara's Journey Two Novels', published 2003 under ISBN 9781567921878 and ISBN 1567921876.