Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return Paperback – February 11, 2013

From the first pages of this book, the tone of a masterpiece emerges powerfully.This book makes us realize that the "Israel problem" cannot be understood in a journalistic frame of mind. Politics, war, land, culture, and contemporary experience are expressions of the deep core of human life, the core of the human soul.This is an important book for anyone who thinks about "cultural identity" and the love of one's own country and culture.Junko Chodos

This slim but incisive novella is a philosophical but completely comprehensible take on contemporary Israel. From a "litany of lamentations" drawn from the current generation which appears to be the antithesis of their idealistic founding fathers, the thoughtful narrator Eli Shimeoni (about to give a lecture in New York) recounts his overriding despair - but eventually concludes with hope. Elegantly and thoughtfully mourning today's saga of Israeli disillusion without hope, bitter alienation, and collapse of Zionist ideals, Sheimeoni indicts the present movement out of the country for profit and the concomitant surrender of "soul." But relying on the consistency of past Jewish history and the "triumphalism of hope" the reader reluctantly puts the book down - and smiles!