Delivery Guest Post 4

“The book focuses on daily issues and touches the deepest places… I loved the novel and kept thinking about it long after reading it.” Lee Yanini, reviewer in the The Israeli Librarian Journal

When Daphne becomes pregnant, it isn’t only her life that changes…

For her husband Amir, for their parents, and for their friends Guy and Abigail, the pregnancy and birth force them all to look at their own lives, at what they want, at their pasts and their futures. Each person has a different perspective of the delivery, and of the complexity of having a child: the difference between men and women, a changing self-perception of parents, conflicts between work and parenthood.

Lives are changed, and the equilibrium each of them has achieved is fundamentally disturbed until, after the delivery, they can find a new balance for the future.

In today’s post we include a brief excerpt from Delivery, after Daphne discovers she is pregnant:

“I sat in the restaurant for two hours. I had a huge crumble cheesecake, chocolate mousse, and two more glasses of wine. My sight was blurred, I almost forgot that I was pregnant… A devastating fear began to materialize, sometimes slipping and disappearing, sometimes as sharp as a broken bottle’s neck. A terrible pain, unimaginable. My stomach hatches and a huge chick is coming out, dirty and featherless. I am placed on the maternity bed, bleeding and shocked, recalling the picture at the entrance to the baby shop: a beautiful woman with a broad smile holding a newborn baby whose eyes are closed.”

Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein is a writer and a scholar in the Humanities. Her parents fled their homes in Eastern Europe and immigrated at to Israel, and Emanuela was born in Jerusalem. Her father was the noted art historian Moshe Barasch. Emauela studied in the faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her PhD is in Comparative Religion and Literature. She was part of the Comparative Religions graduate program at Tel Aviv University; now she is part of the Nevzlin Center for Jewish Peoplehood Studies at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzlya. She is currently living in Tel Aviv. Her husband, Yona Rubinstein, is a professor at the London School of Economics, having previously taught at Brown University. Emanuela began her literary writing following the death of her father. Her book: “Five Selves” will be published by Holland House Books in 2015. It is a collection of five novellas, addressing the issue of Israeli identity, explicitly and implicitly: generation gap in Israeli, coping with death and mourning, capitalistic values of Israeli society and, finally, the dying self.

You can read more about Emanuela’s writing on our  Authors Page.

Delivery, published by Holland House Books earlier this month, is available to order direct from Holland House books

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