The Other Shore : Publication Details

Publication date: June 2011
Imprint: Aqueous Books
Trade Paperback
706 pages; 7.5" x 9.25 "; $21.00
ISBN: 978-0-9826734-5-4
Publisher: Cynthia Reeser
Editor: Erin McKnight

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Press Release (PDF)
Title Information Page (PDF)
Book Cover: Print | Web
Review in Haaretz English Edition, August 2011

About the Author
Fred Skolnik was born in New York City and has lived in Israel since 1963, working mostly as an editor and translator. He is best known as the editor in chief of the 22-volume second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, winner of the 2007 Dartmouth Medal and hailed as a landmark achievement by the Library Journal. Other award-winning projects that he has been associated with include The New Encyclopedia of Judaism (co-editor, 2002) and the 3-volume Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust (senior editor, 2001). At various times he has also operated a farm, managed a hotel, and served as financial comptroller of a textile firm. Now writing full time, he has published dozens of stories in the past few years (in TriQuarterly, Gargoyle, The MacGuffin, Minnetonka Review, Los Angeles Review, Prism Review, Underground Voices, and others). The Other Shore is his first published novel.

Book Description
The Other Shore is set in Israel in the 1980s, between the Lebanese War and the outbreak of the first Intifada (1984-1989), a pivotal time which saw the final transition of Israel from a Zionist-socialist society to a Western-style consumer society. The novel follows the lives of representative characters across the entire breadth of Israeli society but focuses on two families – the Shachars, a kibbutz family, and the Goldsteins, representing the emerging Israeli middle class. The protagonists in effect vie to win the heart and soul of Israel itself, personified by the beautiful Ariela.

Blurbs | Advance Praise

The Other Shore is a compelling and insightful novel set [between the first Lebanese war and] the first Intifada. The book is a significant addition to our understanding of Israel, its politics and social history. A tale of two families, the novel encompasses a large social panorama, moving easily from the kibbutz to the city, from the army to the business world. Skolnik is adept at letting his chosen families move through the spectrum of Israeli life, reflecting as well as embodying it. As a result, it is not only an important addition to Jewish literature but also a necessary one.
―Lewis Fried, author of the Handbook of American Jewish Literature

Fred Skolnik delivers a multifaceted and richly textured intergenerational story, a vast canopy of war and peace that moves deftly through the strata of Israeli society, artfully rendering the lives of socialist kibbutzniks, urban capitalists, and soldiers in the field. He masterfully places the reader in the heat of still-raging controversies as experienced from a multitude of perspectives without ever straying into polemic. Whether portraying farmers or trendy Tel Avivians, the verisimilitude on display captivates and astonishes. The Other Shore offers the rich pleasures of an old-fashioned epic, presenting Israel’s tumultuous 1980s and the struggle to preserve an imperiled society built on a fragile dream, now adrift in malaise, doubt, and disillusionment, and struggling to fulfill the promise of its foundational ideals. In their struggles to create lives of coherence and meaning, the novel’s memorable characters consistently evoke the essential Israeli reality. A triumph of both the aesthetic and moral imagination.
―Ranen Omer-Sherman, author of Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature, Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert, and others