DAVID HORNIK’S BOOK: “BESIDE THE STILL WATER”
He has written a novel, Beside the Still Waters, which takes place in America and Israel. His protagonist is a writer, Steve Sandorsky, who is introduced to the reader as a kid growing up in a rural area near Schenectady, New York. Steve is the child of a brooding and uncommunicative father whose parents were Holocaust victims, and a mother who is not Jewish. When Steve learns at age eleven that according to Jewish religious law, as someone with only a Jewish father, he’s not considered Jewish, he’s profoundly shocked and feels himself from that point on, for a number of years, to be drifting in a no-man’s-land without a real identity.
But Steven’s romantic encounters, bouts of depression, fringe alcoholism, and marital stress increasingly propel him toward Zionism and identification with Israel, until he takes the huge step of moving there. And it’s in Israel that the second part of the novel takes place.
Is it autobiographical? I don’t know, but the spirited description of Israel’s dilemmas, and Steve’s staunch defense of his adopted nation as an emerging journalist, are reminiscent of the author.
A great deal of this highly engaging and readable novel consists of dialogue in various forms–conversations, phone calls, emails. In all of these the reader hears the voices–the angst, the joys, the disappointments, the disillusion and the doubt, of all the very vivid and varied characters.
Ultimately the novel is both romantic and an introduction to Israel, a nation of outsize contribution to the world despite a largely hostile environment. It’s powerfully affecting in both dimensions, most of all when they start to mesh as Steve confronts his true challenges.
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