Some impressions of Thessaloniki and My Brilliant Friend

Years ago, when it was published in Israel, I read The Days of Abandonment by the anonymous Italian author who is known by her pseudonym Elene Ferrante. The novel was an international success, and when it was translated into Hebrew it was not long before it reached the best-selling book list and received praise from literature critics in Israel. But to me, a bookworm ever since I learned my Aleph Bet, the book was slightly overrated. It contained graphic language, but that was not an advantage or a disadvantage. It dealt with the subject of rage, and I found it hard to read two-hundred pages about rage, since it is not an evolving emotion. Many years have passed since I purchased that yellow cover skinny novel, and again, the newspapers and media feeds were all singing praises for Elene Ferrante, be whoever she may be, and her new novel translated to Hebrew, My Brilliant Friend.  Curios by the ongoing accolades, and the different poets and screenwriters who posted photos of the book lying on their coffee table, I decided not to go against the flow – and give 
this new novel a go myself.


This reading experience was utterly different than the one I had with my yellow book. I took My 
Brilliant Friend to Thessaloniki with me, and set with her at coffee shops around town. Greek people have this trend of places which serve only drinks, with no food. This was an oddity to me as an Israeli, but I went with the flow and sat in smoky coffee shops with posters and stickers encouraging people to go and rescue Syrian refugees in Lesbos. Thessaloniki was once a Jewish town but in the Holocaust the Jewry of Thessaloniki was wiped out. Nothing but a tiny monument by the sea and a Jewish Museum was left to remind the Greeks of the Jews who once ran this city. In My Brilliant Friend I was reading of the Neapolitan ghetto. Hard working men and Women, domestic violence, poverty, and the spider web of neighbors and families living in such closeness and intimacy with each other, like one big clan. In this poor ghetto of sweat and odors of the poor, grow the two youngsters, Lina and Lena. They play with rag dolls, run around, and peep on the neighbors' quarrels and love affairs, and at six they go together to elementary school. Pretty soon Lena realizes that her friend Lina is a remarkable genius, who outsmarts everybody, with her elaborate imagination and surprising wit. With envy and fascination she watches from up close how her ugly looking friend turns to be a dominant figure within the social world of the neighborhood, and feels how she herself is drawn closer and closer to her charismatic persona.

Many other plot twists occur in the life of the two young girls, who are forced to manipulate their way through a violent world, controlled by Mafia and possessive men, and set deep in the rules of patriarchy. Many people try to get a hold of them, and each day they need to find a way that would keep them free, without appearing to be undermining the ancient rules of the ghetto patriarchy. The Second World War, Fascism, all these world changing events happen around the ghetto unnoticed, as the families all lead their life from day to day, concerned only with love affairs, thefts, murder and survival.

When I finished My Brilliant Friend, in a small Café that served nothing but drinks, with my half a litter of Alpha beer, I felt a sharp pain going through me. This novel ends with a betrayal that is hard to grasp. The war of the sexes never seemed as evident to me as it is in this novel.  Men in this novel seek to control women, to own them, to gain a power and control over them, and the women try to find their freedom through men of fortune, and find themselves caught in violent prisons made of fake gold. All of the men in this novel were attempting to put women down, and no one, not a woman nor a man, could see beyond the borders of the ghetto, that concealed a world of greater freedom.