When I Lived in Modern Times
by Linda Grant
Summary
In April 1946 Evelyn Sert, twenty years old, a hairdresser from Soho, stands on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. Her mother is dead, the man who kept her mother has paid the fare, and Evelyn is a Zionist mostly in the way that young people are anything: because it is a door out.
She barely survives the kibbutz, being constitutionally unsuited to both agriculture and collective enthusiasm, and washes up instead in Tel Aviv, the white city, four square miles of Bauhaus concrete thrown up on the sand in a generation, full of refugees from everywhere arguing in every language about what a Jew now is. It is the making of her. She reinvents herself as Priscilla Jones, a British officer's wife, does the hair of British colonial wives who talk carelessly in front of her, and passes what she hears to her lover Johnny, who is not what he seems, and who is fighting, by means she only half lets herself understand, to push the British out of a country being born.
Grant writes it as a spy story, a love story and an argument all at once, and refuses the sentimental version of every one of them: Evelyn is an unreliable witness to her own idealism, and the state being made around her is rendered with clear eyed ambivalence.
Around two hundred and sixty pages, fast and vivid.
Best for readers who want the founding of Israel at street level, from the hairdresser's chair rather than the conference table.
Historical Context & Significance
When I Lived in Modern Times won the Orange Prize in 2000, and it made the case for the prize's range: a novel of ideas wearing the clothes of a thriller, set in the last two years of the British Mandate, with a coming of age story Publishers Weekly called unsentimental and iconoclastic. The win came with a brief flurry of plagiarism accusations over its use of historical sources, which which Grant rejected flatly, noting that she had quoted only passages Sherman himself was quoting and that an acknowledgement had been agreed between the two publishers, and the charge did not stick.
Linda Grant came to fiction from journalism, and the reporter shows in the book's texture, the prices, the salons, the exact shade of British colonial condescension. Her Jewish Liverpool background and her preoccupation with clothes, memory and reinvention run through the later work: The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the 2008 Booker, and her essays on dress and identity have a readership of their own. Tel Aviv's Bauhaus centre, the novel's real second protagonist, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site three years after the book appeared.