Hila Blum’s English-language debut opens with a scene of domestic harmony, as two young sisters and their parents sit down to dinner in a book-filled house in a Netherlands suburb. What changes everything is the fact that we’re viewing it through the eyes of a woman who is standing across the street, thousands of miles from home and hidden by darkness, glimpsing her grandchildren for the first time. It’s also the first time in six years that she has seen the girls’ mother, her only child, and the spectre of what could have gone so shatteringly wrong between them drives a mesmerising, disquieting tale of family estrangement.
The woman watching is Yoella, Blum’s narrator, and after she returns to Israel, the novel charts her efforts to understand why her daughter Leah has shut her out of her life. In this respect, How to Love Your Daughter is a kind of mystery, in which Yoella is sleuth and prime suspect. Leah’s father, Meir, has died so there are no witnesses, and in the search for clues, Yoella can only rake over her memories, interrogating “day-to-day mishaps” or the bouts of depression that made her withdraw from Leah on occasion. None of it seems to explain the rift.
