Bone to The Bone: A Novel / A major prose writer and dramatist, Nathan Shaham received the 1992 National Jewish Book Award for The Rosendorf Quartet, the story of the return to Israel of four Jews born in exile. In Bone to the Bone, Shaham brilliantly reverses this construction as he explores the voluntary exile of a man who leaves his homeland for the sake of his passionate political faith. Bone to the Bone is the life story of a revolutionary: a man born with the century who carries its history on his flesh. A Russian Jew, Avigdor Barkov first leaves his homeland for Eretz Israel in the 1920s. There he devotes himself to the political revolution in Palestine. He has an affair, and although his lover gives birth to his son, he leaves them - without guilt - when his ardently leftist beliefs draw him back to postrevolutionary Russia. In Moscow he falls in love again, marries, and fathers a daughter, but even this family cannot supplant political activism as Barkov's primary responsibility. Indeed, he must survive interrogation, torture, imprisonment, and nearly twenty-five years' exile from Moscow as his true dedication to communism is questioned. And it is not until he is seventy and returns to the Israel he left nearly fifty years before that he is reunited with his long-abandoned children, his wife, and even his lover. How is it that Barkov's total and unquestioned devotion to the revolution absolves him from blame for his absence from the lives of those he loves? This is the complex and compelling question that Shaham addresses in this novel of vast insight and political power. Through the intense exploration of self in the notebooks that Barkov has kept in order to make sense of his own life, Shaham shows usthat there is hope and redemption for those who sacrifice the personal for the political, and that we are never too old to know and love those we have left behind.
