Author’s new novel John Irving, Queen Esther, deals with Israel and anti -Semitism – JTA News – Jewish Telegraph Agency

The novelist John Irving is known for telling stories placed in his native new England and Austria, the place of a key adventure in his young adulthood. Now the two settings will collide in a new novel – the one who focuses on a Jewish orphan from Vienna, which winds up in Maine before heading to Israel.

The Queen Esther novel will be the 16th of Irving when it was published in November.

Simon and Shuster, his publisher, announced “Queen Esther” on Thursday and revealed their cover showing a young girl with a suitcase arriving on a snowy night to a light home.

The short description offers clues for her identity, explaining that the book was placed in a light cloud, the orphanage (and later the illegal abortion clinic) operated on by Wilbur Lark in Cider House, published in 1985.

“LARCH is younger than you remember, and the unnamed orphans in St. “The story begins when Esther, not four, has been abandoned a winter night. At the age of 14, she was accepted by a family of the philanthropic new England, becoming a mystery and a guardian angel to them. “

In accordance with Erving’s known secrecy regarding his work in advance, the description is light on additional details of the story, saying that anti -Semitism plays a role in Esther’s life, that “Esther’s history is a fate to intersect with Israel’s history” and that the novel ended in Jerusalem in 1981, when Esther was 76.

Irving visited Israel in 1981, which was also the year of a deadly attack on the synagogue of Vienna by Palestinian terrorists.

Irving said in a statement that while Israel was in the news of his war with Hamas, history was designed long before the war began and had nothing to do with the current conflict.

“The novel has always ended in Jerusalem in 1981. You cannot review or rewrite the story. The construction of this novel has long preceded the events of October 7 and everything that happened in Israel after these terrorist attacks and the acceptance of hostages, “Irving said. “It is easy to say in the background that what I saw and heard in Israel in the early 1980s serves as a precursor to what has evolved since that time, but this is historical fiction For. “

Irving – perhaps the most famous for his 1978 novel, The World According to Garp – visited Israel last year for the first time after his trip in 1981 and appeared in Jerusalem, in which he explained why so many of his books They have Jewish heroes.

“I am not a Jew, but I have always been pro-explosive and I have always been pro-Jewish,” he said, according to the report of Israel’s times. “My most exposure to Jews were the teammates of wrestling I had. And they also had difficulties. But we all did the same thing together, so it was natural or it seemed natural to me that I somehow stayed with them. “