Teacher. Ben Naftali M.

“She knew: it was time... no one heard a scream that cut through the air, no one saw a black figure of a woman-bird who flickered like a meteor in the middle of the night.” The school is shocked by the suicide of the teacher Elsa Weiss, about which no one knows almost nothing. The secret of her life and death for many years does not give rest to the former student. And 30 years later, she begins her own investigation. The result is a deep novel, on the pages of which in the interweaving of fiction and reality there is a gloomy portrait of a mysterious heroine.

“Teacher” (prize “Sapir” 2016) is an unusual novel about the Holocaust. The characters of Ben-Naftali are not heroes or martyrs, but those who, avoiding concentration camps, became a victim of their own conformism. This is a thought about the tragic fate of a woman, for whom the salvation from the Nazis turned into a curse of eternal guilt.