Tamar Yellin

I've just read the most inspiring, most poignant collection of connected stories I think I have read in my entire life!  I say this advisedly and without hyperbole.  It is simply great and deserves to be considered a major work of literature.

'Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes' by Tamar Yellin (The Toby Press 2008)

Rather than writing a detailed review, I just recommend you reading it.

Later today : I shall, however, think of a few words that do the book justice and place them here in due course.

Later again today: This book will please those who appreciate the disparate fictions of Elizabeth Bowen and Thomas Ligotti (I can give it no greater praise) .... the contrasts represented by the respective atmospheres of Marcel Proust and well-written ghost stories .... 'Death In Venice' and 'The Heart of Darkness' .

A wing-touch of restless displacement. 

The nemo-strange and the yearning. The yearning for perfection.  This book has reached, in my opinion, the form of perfection for which it so achingly yearns.  Many different readers of varying experiences of reading will be positively affected by its veils and piques. It has a Jewish soul and 'nostrility', but, based on my own experience of the book, one does not need to be Jewish to begin fathoming that soul. 

Sorry, my words here seem pretentious, but I somehow knew I could not reach the perfection I needed to write about this book. So be it.  Perhaps I should have left my "Rather than writing a detailed review, I just recommend you reading it" standing.  Or perhaps I shall resume writing here in days, months or years to come with even more words about this wonderful book as and when I can find them. Tamar Yellin's book itself also seems to continue living and changing even though it's set in stone...