The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem
SynopsisPlot
Gabriela's mother Luna is the most beautiful woman in all of Jerusalem, though her famed beauty and charm seem to be reserved for everyone but her daughter. Ever since Gabriela can remember, she and Luna have struggled to connect. But when tragedy strikes, Gabriela senses there's more to her mother than painted nails and lips.
Story
About this book
Gabriela grows up in Jerusalem watching her mother Luna attract admiration from everyone around her, yet feeling shut out from that warmth herself. The distance between them is old and stubborn, and Gabriela has never fully understood its roots. When a family crisis forces her to look more closely, she begins tracing the lives of the women who came before her: her great-grandmother Mercada, known locally as a healer, and her grandmother Rosa, who worked cleaning houses for the British during the Mandate period.
As Gabriela reconstructs these stories, she encounters hidden romances, long-kept secrets, and patterns of emotional difficulty that repeat across four generations. The novel moves through several decades, touching on the era of World War II and reaching into the 1970s, with Jerusalem as its anchoring setting throughout. Sarit Yishai-Levi draws on the textures of Sephardi family life in the city, where household memory and spoken history carry weight alongside the larger political shifts happening outside.
The book was originally published in Hebrew and became a bestseller in Israel before being translated into English. Its structure follows each generation in turn, giving individual shape to the women whose choices and silences continue to affect those who come after them.
