Louisa Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

Louisa follows three characters as they try to put their lives back together at the end of World War II. The voice pulling us into the novel belongs to Nora Csongradi, a fifty-year-old Holocaust survivor from Budapest. In 1949, she arrives in Israel with her German daughter-in-law Louisa. They expect to be met by Nora's cousin Bela, a passionate Zionist and war hero who settled in Palestine thirty years before. But Bela -- who Nora has loved from childhood, writing him letters almost daily until the war -- fails to appear, stranding the two women in an absorption camp for new immigrants.

Flexible as mercury, Louisa quickly adapts, even when the other refugees treat her with contempt. As Nora searches for Bela, she is forced to take stock of her life, a series of disappointments and missed opportunities. She has lost her family and is left with Louisa, who had hidden her during the war. Like the Biblical Ruth, Louisa clings to her dead husband's mother. But to Nora, she is unwanted baggage. Nora sees Bela as her one chance to begin a new life. Yet Bela is far from perfect, and though he knows that Nora has arrived in Haifa, we discover that he is afraid to face her.