Book Description

The Name is the story of Amalia, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, named for her father's first wife, a concert pianist who perished in a Nazi death camp and whose sanctified memory haunts Amalia's youth. In a decisive, rebellious break from the culture of remembrance in which she was raised, Amalia grows into a wild, defiant young woman who attempts, unsuccessfully, to remake her life, to change her identity, to redefine herself as a woman stripped of history. Unable to escape her cultural legacy and plagued by troubling questions of faith, Amalia seeks refuge in an ultra-Orthodox women's seminary in Jerusalem and assumes yet another persona, that of the ba'alat tshuva - the penitent. Before long she is drawn to a charismatic rabbi who preaches a fiery heterodoxy. Under his sway, Amalia moves into an isolated apartment on the fringe of Jerusalem and devotes herself to rituals of purification and redemption that are to culminate in a horrific, ultimate act of atonement.