BOOKS > Walled City

The Walled City is about the narrator – a young Bene Israeli Jewish girl growing up in India. A country where gods have bodies faces, eyes. She has to cope with her own god without eyes and many other unanswered questions about her religion, which is different from the rest. In a country of colour and festivities, she feels walled in, because of her Jewishness.

The novel is set in Ahmedabad - a city of walls, which become symbolic in context to the novel. Walls of the city, Walls of Indian communities, Walls of the Jewish community. Walls of the family, and the Wall of just being a woman.

The Walled City is also about a diminishing miniscule minority community, and all about the sterility, which is setting in the Jewish community. So, in a way it is about sterility, isolation and an immense cross cultural conflict of the narrator as she tries to preserve her Jewish roots – without understanding them. The Walled City is also about Ahmedabad, and how the city of Gandhi has been reduced to a city of violence. The walls are breaking, and the small Jewish community lives in a divided city and cannot place itself. Should they leave for the Promised Land or stay in India?
 The novel probes the entire concept of home and roots.

Published by East West Books Chennai.
Republished by Syracuse university Press, USA.
Translated into Gujarati, Bhint by Renuka Sheth, published by Navbharata Sahitya Mandir.

Translated into French by Sonja Terangle and published by Editions Philippe Picquier. Republished as second edition in French as a pocket book.

To buy this book contact East West Books Chennai, ewb@airtelbroadband.in, pro@westland-tata.com