On Her Own

• Author: Lihi Lapid
• Genre: Suspense
• Publication Date: March 19, 2024
• Publisher: HarperCollins

A moving, page-turning story of two families in crisis that melds the clock-ticking tension of Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me with the “issue-driven” gravity of Jennifer Haigh’s Mercy Street. 

Watching her Russian immigrant mother, Irina, struggle to put food on the table, Nina, a beautiful and restless teenager, vows her life will be different. When a strapping older man in a fancy car appears at school one day offering her luxuries her single mother cannot afford, Nina believes he’s her ticket out of her dumpy little town. Ignoring the danger signs and her mother’s constant pleas—which end in exhausting screaming matches—she packs a suitcase and leaves home after one last fight. Ten days later, a terrified Nina, her dress torn, is hiding in the stairwell of a Tel Aviv apartment after witnessing a murder she cannot talk about. She is discovered by one of the building’s tenants, a confused, lonely old widow who mistakes her for the granddaughter she hasn’t seen for a long while, not since her son moved his family to America. “You’ve come back to me, Dana’le.” Instead of correcting the mistake, the desperate Nina jumps at the chance for a place to hide. Hiding from her mother and the dangerous man who are both frantically searching for her, Nina settles into the old woman’s apartment. But how long can Nina possibly hide out until the poor woman realizes she’s not who she says she is, or before someone else – her homesick son in America who keeps calling, or the lovely local neighbors who drop by with groceries—catches on? Set between the eve of Passover and Israel’s Independence Day, On Her Own is a tense and immersive psychological read about two families looking for redemption, the transformative bonds between strangers, and the unexpected places from which love can grow. 

Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverton.

Reading translated literature is endlessly fascinating to me. There’s always something new to learn about a place through translated books, and this book was no exception. Although the location is familiar to me, this is a side of Israel that I didn’t see…and one that makes me realize that no matter how different the setting, people are still people and we all do stupid things.

In this book, we have Irina, a Russian immigrant who just barely scrapes by doing menial jobs, contrasted with her daughter Nina, a rebellious teenager who sees her beauty as a way out of poverty. When an older man shows up at her school in a flashy car and offers her the things her mother can’t, she’s easily taken in. There are plenty of red flags, and her mother tries to point them out to her, but teenagers, especially Nina, aren’t inclined to listen.

Instead, after a particularly bad fight with her mother, Nina packs a suitcase and takes off. She calls her boyfriend to pick her up, and from here, the red flags intensify. But Nina doesn’t have the life experience to pick up on these warning signs, and walks directly into a relationship with a man who is controlling and abusive. Ten days later, we see Nina hiding in a stairwell after seeing a murder. In a strange twist of fate, an elderly resident of the building mistakes her for her granddaughter, who lives in America.

It’s always difficult for me to read a book with a teenage protagonist, especially when they’re doing things as dumb as Nina is, and are convinced that they know everything. In many cases, they learn something over the course of this book, and in Nina’s case, she did learn from her experiences. Despite the story taking place in about three weeks total, the growth that Nina experiences is immense. Well, often we need to learn a hard lesson to really internalize it, and this was that for Nina.

The relationship that she has with her mother is so contentious that they’re barely able to interact. As a single mother with no education, Irina is limited in her ability to earn money, but Nina doesn’t see the danger of Shmuely, the man she’s involved with, until it’s almost too late. The dynamics between Nina and Shmuely are no surprise—he wants to control literally everything about her life, including her clothing and who she can talk to. But what I really found to be most fascinating was the relationship between Nina and Carmela, a widow with her surviving son living in America with his wife and children. 

Carmela is suffering from dementia, and when she sees Nina crying, she confuses her for Dana, her own granddaughter. This situation actually works to help both of them when they need it most—Carmela really needs help in the home, and Nina needs a safe place to lie low while she figures things out. Naturally, she feels guilty about lying to Carmela, but she also can’t go home. But as she settles in, she realizes that Carmela really is pretty alone, and needs the assistance too. So while she settles in to examine her options, she’s able to justify the living situation since Carmela can’t live alone anymore. 

We see how the connection between Nina and Carmela starts out as something tentative, and then becomes something completely different. While Nina is unable to see Irina’s struggles and actually think about how her mother feels, she is able to empathize and receive that soft, grandmotherly attention that she’s been deprived of. This allows her to open up and be a little more vulnerable, but also to show us the varied sides of Nina at home, with Shmuely, and with Carmela, and how different these versions of herself are from each other.

The story expands, too. While it takes place mostly in Tel Aviv, there are also flashbacks from Carmela to explain her life with her husband and children and why she is all alone, and there are flashbacks for Nina in revisiting what happened after she left her mother to go off with Shmuely. We see perspective chapters from her son who is living in America with his children and has been visiting less and less the longer he stays in the US, as well as from Irina and Shmuely. It is intriguing to see how the same people can view the same situation so differently, but I was also engrossed in seeing whether Nina and Irina would ever reconcile, what would happen to Carmela, if Shmuely would leave Nina alone, what happened with Carmela’s son Itamar and if he’d return to Israel, and what really happened the night of the murder.

Overall, this was a fantastic book, and I was so impressed. I read this as an audiobook narrated by Emily Lawrence, and she did a wonderful job with the Hebrew words in the book. The book was a fantastic exploration of the way all these characters navigate their world. Both Irina and Itamar are immigrants, and the book also gets into a little bit of the feeling of being caught between two worlds—Irina stayed in Ukraine with her own mother until she passed and then emigrated to Israel, while Itamar left the country of his birth because of a business opportunity, but it leaves the feeling of loneliness and longing for the life and people you leave behind, as well as the sense of disconnection Itamar experiences as an Israeli in America. I was so impressed with the relationships in this book and how beautifully Lapid has portrayed these two different but overlapping identities of Israeli and immigrant. And the way that she wraps everything up turns out to be absolutely perfect.

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