Solal

Solal is the son of the rabbi of Kefalonia, a picturesque island populated by characters no less picturesque than the author himself, including his uncle Saltiel, Solomon and Mattathias, Pinchas, nicknamed the Woodpecker, all of the Solal family. Solal himself, who will become a respected diplomat in the League of Nations, is gifted with unusual beauty, ambition to succeed, and the ability to fall in love. He experiences a complex and contradictory love story that elevates him to the heights of happiness and brings him to the depths of despair. But he rises again, just as his Jewish people have risen again, whom he describes with love and irony, with sympathy and sarcasm, with exaggerated admiration and apparent hatred in a beautiful and original language, unique in 20th-century literature. "Rarely does a novel appear that is the work of obvious genius," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle upon its publication, and this is the shortest and most accurate description of this magnificent, now classic work.