Fima

The National Jewish Book Award–winning author presents an "astonishing . . . galvanic and intoxicating" portrait of a man—and a generation—adrift (The New Yorker).

Efraim "Fima" Nisan lives in Jerusalem, but feels he ought to be somewhere else. In his life he has had secret love affairs, good ideas, and written a book of poems that aroused expectations. He has thought about the purpose of the universe and where his beloved country lost its way. He has felt longings of all sorts, and the constant desire to pen a new chapter. And here he is now, in his early fifties in a shabby apartment on a gloomy wet morning, engaged in a humiliating struggle to release his shirt from the zipper of his fly.


With his mordant wit and penetrating insight, Amos Oz is widely regarded as "the most accomplished—and, certainly, the most celebrated—of contemporary Israeli novelists." In Fima, the Franz Kafka Prize-winning author offers a work of deep political conscience through the lens of one man's Existential crisis (L.A. Times).

"One of Oz's most memorable fictional creations . . . Fima is a cross between Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Joyce's Leopold Bloom." — Washington Post