The
story starts off with a young girl named Rosalind from South Africa of mix
heritage, Jewish and Catholic, who follows her boyfriend to Israel and soon
discovers his hidden violent tendencies; tendencies which forces her to ultimately
abandon her relationship with him.
Rosalind
is a young student nurse working in a hospital in Israel during the Sinai War
of 1956, where she faces a challenge in dealing with all the young men who have
not only been physically scarred from the battles they’ve been in, but emotionally
as well. It is here she meets Eyal, a young soldier suffering from a gunshot
wound. They develop an emotional relationship with each other which eventually
leads to her moving in with him and his family.
Unfortunately,
this simple action immediately leads into conflict, as Eyal’s mother resents
the fact that her son would be interest in a non-Jewish girlfriend, let allow have
her move in with his family and eventually marry him. Since Rosalind’s mother
is Catholic automatically makes her Catholic as well. [Jewish law follows the
maternal line when it comes to deciding the religion of a child.] But what
makes this even worse is the fact Rosalind’s mother is a German Catholic, and
it has only been the end of WWII, and the extermination of millions of Jews at
the hands of the Nazis.
One
of the problems facing Rosalind is that she is immature to really be involved
in a relationship, the magnitude of the one she has with Eyal. And in an effort
to try to escape this, she actually begins to fantasize about her relationship
with her former lover. But eventually everything begins to work out and their
marriage finally stabilizes.
With
all the
elements this story contains and the manner in which it has been
written I’m giving Juliet Aharoni’s novel, “Together They Overcame,” 4
STARS.
While
these elements made for a wonderful story of love conquering whatever these two
lovers had to endure; I feel, there are two possible reasons some readers might
not be interest in reading this novel. The first reason is the fear of
assimilation of the Jewish young people into other religions, and the second
the simple fact the story is taking place in Israel in 1956.
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