Yossi Waxman

"Liebchen is a novel that relates a love story between Gabi, a young, successful, and happily married young man, and Gabriella, an eccentric, elderly Holocaust survivor who lives with a pack of cats and daily faces her nightmarish memories.

 

"This story of a deep, uncommon, and seemingly impossible romantic love opens a window to a complex, dark, and terrifying world that constantly tests the readers' sensitivities.

 

"Nevertheless, with his linguistic prowess, inventiveness, and keen ear for aesthetic and emotional balance, Waxman has managed to turn the twilight zone his protagonists operate in into a most meaningful, trustworthy, and even enlightened world.

 

"This ability to create a complex and meaningful world convinced the Jury to give it the ACUM (Israeli Artists' Association) Award for incognito-submitted works for 2003."

 

The ACUM Jury: Eli Hirsch, Savion Librecht, Haim Beer. 

 

***

From the Press:

 

"Liebchen invented new speech, using some mad and bizarre Hebrew-Yiddish-German. This is the story of an 80-years-old woman who used to whore for the Nazis and now has an affair with a 40-years-old man she met in the park. You cannot not fall in love with this Grand Dame, the Big Mama of whips and Nazi officers who pop out of her kitchen's knife drawer and float around her grandiose mind…. The wonderful jargon Waxman gave Gabriella is very catchy. Not only her words are catchy. It is even tempting to adopt her moves and full sentences. What could possibly be cooler than lighting a cigarette and saying in some tragi-fantastisch humor: 'I was a piece of ass like you won't believe. Supreme epidermis I had. But today, I am like a balloon whose life slipped out of it.'"

 

Rana Werbin, Ha'ir

 

 

"This is a very special and very unique novel on the literary scene of the past few years."

 

Yaron Avituv, Yedioth Aharonoth

 

 

"Reading a book about an woman who is 80 but also feminine, coquettish, and desirable left a very powerful impression on me."

 

Zohar Wagner, Time Out Tel Aviv