Description

"Site Report" is the story of an encounter with Israel. Set in 1980-1, it follows Beatrice Fleisher, a divorced American woman of thirty-four during a sabbatical year in Jerusalem with her young daughter. Bea has decided to take a year off from her work as a computer scientist to study Biblical archaeology, but her most important encounters are personal, many with relatives, from kibbutzniks in the Jezreel Valley to orthodox Jews in Bnei-Brak and on to recent immigrants from the Soviet Union. Bea also falls in love with a Moroccan-born architect, and she must decide whether to marry him and live in Israel permanently. To encourage her to stay, her Russian cousin says: "Think of it, three strands of the family are knotted together now even more tightly. My communist grandmother's descendants, her religious brother's grandchildren, and the Zionist branch - all together now. We come from all over the earth, from Novosibersk and Boston, and we meet here in Jerusalem." But is Beatrice willing to disrupt her comfortable life in America and risk marriage to a man whose cultural background is so different from hers?