When I Lived in Modern Times
Author: Linda Grant
Publisher: Dutton (originally, for the US edition, 2001)
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
In the spring of 1946, Evelyn Sert stands on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. For the twenty-year-old from London, it is a time of adventure and change when all things seem possible.
Swept up in the spirited, chaotic churning of her new, strange country, she joins a kibbutz, then moves on to the teeming metropolis of Tel Aviv, to find her own home and a group of friends as eccentric and disparate as the city itself. She falls in love with a man who is not what he seems when she becomes an unwitting spy for a nation fighting to be born. When I Lived in Modern Times is “an unsentimental coming-of-age story of both a country and a young immigrant . . . that provides an unforgettable glimpse of a time and place rarely observed” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
TL;DR Review
When I Lived in Modern Times is historical fiction, about the early days of the State of Israel. It didn’t sweep me away, but it does some things very well.
For you if: You are interested in reading about this period of history from a Jewish perspective.
Full Review
“It was April 1946. The Mediterranean was packed with traffic. Victory hung like a veil in the air, disguising where we might be headed next. Fifty years later it’s so easy, with hindsight, to understand what was happening but you were part of it then. History was no theme park. It was what you lived. You were affected, whether you liked it or not.”
“‘Listen,’ she said, after we had got to know each other better. ‘You and I are of a type. We are the kind who break the walls with our bare hands.’”
When I Lived in Modern Times won the Women’s Prize in 2000, and I’m reading all the past winners this year for their #ReadingWomen challenge.
This book takes place in the late 1940s, right after WWII ended, during the birth of the State of Israel, just before and as the British pulled out of what’s now Palestine. The main character is a Jewish girl from London named Evelyn who decides to travel to Palestine to witness and help with the birth of their new nation. After a brief time living with a kibbutz (like a commune), she moves to Tel Aviv. There she sort of accidentally gets swept up into the affairs of the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that used terrorist strategies at the time.
So, this one is tricky for me to review because I knew (and still know) very little about this period of history or the politics of it. I’m not Jewish or British or personally connected to the history that it describes. I think if I were, I might have liked this book a lot.
In many ways it’s a love letter to the Tel Aviv of the time, and Linda Grant does an absolutely incredible job of bringing the physical setting to life for you. She also really captures the feeling in the air of newness, rebirth, possibility, and the importance and desire of having a home and a greater national identity. Each character has a specific role to help bring that history and the varying political ideologies to life, and Evelyn is a questioning sponge who helps us soak it all up.
That said, I just don’t think I was this book’s best reader. I didn’t necessarily dislike it, but it just didn’t grab me, and it was hard to make myself focus and get lost in the story; I sort of had to pull myself through it. I think it’s because it so heavily leans into this history that I don’t know a lot about, with a great deal of description and not much dialogue. Plus, it felt sort of “and then and then and then” until about halfway through the book, when the plot line about her involvement with the Irgun started.
There’s no doubt that Linda Grant’s writing is excellent and that this book has many merits, and I think if you’re interested in this period of history, it might be much better for you than it was for me.
Trigger Warnings
Antisemitism and Islamophobia
Pregnancy
Rape (spoken of by a secondary character)
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