EMILIA GORDON IS FOUND. NOW WHAT?
HER LONDON WAR, Part 2: in which the author of the notebooks claims to be who she is
If you’re here you probably don’t need a recap of Part 1, but just in case, here is a quick edit of what happened.
A publishing ingenue (Tara Troubadour) discovers the lost notebooks of writing ingenue Emilia Gordon, who was a young girl in London during World War 2 and is now presumed dead but is in fact still alive, albeit extremely old. Her stories are published under the title HER LONDON WAR and take the world by the kind of storm you’d expect when excellent writing matches the mystery surrounding its author. The sensation is truly international. When the book is published in Israel in a rather basic Hebrew translation, the Tel Aviv publisher receives a letter from Emilia Gordon herself. She may be almost 100 years old, she writes, but ‘not an idiot.’ She demands an immediate meeting with the publisher and ‘compensation’. She gives her address at a retirement home in Haifa.
PART 2
In the publishing world, a scandal spreads faster than a sensation. Shlomo Pinsker, the owner of Cactusologia, was secretly thrilled: his tiny hipster publishing house in a decrepit Tel Aviv apartment with a view of the gay section of the beach (where Shlomo spent most of his time reading manuscripts between dips in the sea, often losing the odd page or two to the sea breeze without noticing any difference) would now be ON THE WORLD MAP. He would be in charge of the first contact with the elusive author, and reveal her true story to publishers and readers everywhere. Pinsker was sixty, looked seventy but felt himself to be a much younger man. He needed something new to happen.
The truth about Shlomo Pinsker is worth addressing here. He was the identical twin brother of Adam Pinsker (not his real name), a somewhat successful Mossad agent often deployed in Russia under the guise of an occasional Putin double.
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