Rika's Rooms

Rika's Rooms is an intriguing read. It covers a vast sweep of history and places within the 20th Century, imagined by a true story.

It explores the experiences of an ordinary woman caught up in intense love and loss during extraordinary times.

As a young girl of only fourteen, Rika leaves behind her beloved parents, and escaped Nazi Germany just prior to the outbreak of World War Two. She fled to Palestine, and lived with her aunt in Tel Aviv, rather than her sister in a kibbutz. At the time, the Jews in Palestine were determined to create a Jewish homeland but initially joined the British forces to fight against Nazism. Later though, the Jewish population rebelled against the British administration, including Rika who engaged in Irgun related activities. Throughout this period, she was obsessed with the unrequited love of a young kibbutznik, Natan.

Rika meets a young South African volunteer who has come to fight in the Israeli War of Independence. When he gives her a present of a handbag and proposes marriage, she feels she has nothing to lose and agrees to leave Israel and move to Johannesburg, South Africa. The Yiddish family, in particular Shaine Reisa, the mother-n-law, welcome her to the 'real land of milk and honey', but she finds the family alien and cannot understand why they treat their black servants so badly. She feels compelled to join the anti-apartheid struggle and engages in a the campaign to bomb pylons. By this time, Rika is the mother of two. Her husband who does not share her anti-apartheid ideology and threatens to inform on her unless she desist from these dangerous activities. The prospect of losing her children and ending up in prison, makes Rika chose the inevitable and she becomes that which she earlier despised; a conventional Jewish housewife leading 'the good life'; tea with sisters-in-law, eating cakes, playing cards, and moaning at the servants.

Eventually, the children grow up, move away from South African and Rika and her husband follow them to England. By this time Rika has developed Alzheimers which deteriorates rapidly.

Rika inhabits two worlds; the present which makes no sense and the past which is coherent, but peopled by ghosts. These periods intermingle to show a poignant, at times funny, but always engaging portrayal of a woman of the twentieth century.