Five Selves

Five powerful stories exploring identity and selfhood. With haunting, Kafkaesque prose, Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein creates a series of profound, internal narratives. THE STORIES: A Bird Flight: After the death of her father the narrator travels to an academic symposium in Chicago; her host seems fixated on her bereavement as he tries to reach understanding of his own recent loss through her experience. Earrings: The narrator’s choice of earrings becomes symbolic of her desire to establish her own identity separate from the clashing ways of her mother, born in Israel, and her grandmother who emigrated from Europe. The Grammar Teacher: A teacher who believes in the right and proper way to behave and teach, and who achieves the highest standards from her classes, finds everything she believes in challenged by a new, modern teacher. Watch Dog: The consequences of an irrational fear of dogs for a young man seeking to make his way in the world. Aura: A man lies in a hospital bed and experiences an internal world disconnected from his old life.

Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein is a writer and a scholar in the Humanities. Her parents fled their homes in Eastern Europe and immigrated at to Israel, and Emanuela was born in Jerusalem. Her father was the noted art historian Moshe Barasch. Emauela studied in the faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her PhD is in Comparative Religion and Literature. She was part of the Comparative Religions graduate program at Tel Aviv University; now she is part of the Nevzlin Center for Jewish Peoplehood Studies at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzlya. She is currently living in Tel Aviv. Her husband, Yona Rubinstein, is a professor at the London School of Economics, having previously taught at Brown University.