The Nature of Blood

A German Jewish girl whose life and death are shaped by the atrocities of World War II...her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood...the Jews of the sixteenth-century Venetian ghetto, trapped both literally and figuratively by rabid prejudice...Othello, newly arrived in Venice...a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel: these are the people whose stories fill "The Nature of Blood" and who, despite their clear differences, share the weight of memory as burden and sustenance. Their individual voices - delineated with masterful precision - speak out of profound depths of feeling about their worlds and their experiences of persecution, courage, and betrayal. But they move beyond the particulars of their own stories as well, their voices twining in an intricate narrative fabric that tells the larger, timeless story of ethnic hatred and racism; of the powers of faith and the shock of its loss; of the cruel patterns of repetition that mar humankind's history, and the crystalline significance of each individual within its sweep.