The Name
by Michal Govrin
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 448
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 1573227552
Publisher: Riverhead Books
The recipient of two of Israel's most prestigious literary awards,
The Name tells the story of Amalia, a daughter of Holocaust survivors
who seeks desperately to remake her life and escape her history. Named
for her father's first wife—a concert pianist who perished in
a death camp—Amalia finally seeks refuge in an ultra-Orthodox seminary
where she encounters a fierce, charismatic rabbi who preaches a fiery
Kabbalistic Judaism, and embraces a life of passionate penitence. It is
the starting point of a strange and hypnotic journey that takes the reader
from the earthy and erotic to the spiritual and sublime—marking a
powerful, disturbing, and unforgettable debut.
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1. Do you think it's true that our names always influence our fate in some
way? Are we, in reality, burdened with whatever freight the name carries
for our parents?
2. How does Amalia's name seem to play a role in her fate? Discuss the different aspects of
this.
3. Discuss the similarities between erotic passion and mystical passion. To what extent do you think
these are similar feelings, directed at different loves?
4. Isn't religious passion often a sublimated form of erotic passion? Or is that a statement
of secular bias? Isn't it possible that we are all born with a natural
yearning for God that finds replacement or dilution in earthly passion?
Discuss these intertwined roles in Amalia's case.
5. To what extent are the themes of The Name, while Jewish, accessible to readers of other faiths?
Are they more accessible to religions with a mystical core?
6. Discuss the emotional and psychological legacy of the Holocaust for the children of survivors.
Talk about your experiences of this or those of people you know. Is there
an event in the non-Jewish world that has had a similar collective impact?
7. How does Amalia's father's survival shape Amalia's world? For better? For worse?
8. Discuss Amalia's search for atonement. Why does she feel the need for atonement? What are
the symbolic implications of weaving the prayer shawls? Discuss the role
and meaning of other rituals of redemption, tikkun, or repair.
9. Talk about Jerusalem: in what way does the city itself become a character in this book? In what
way does the city's complex personality mirror Amalia's own?
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