The Way to the Cats Book

IF ONE CAN IMAGINE Flannery O'Connor writing about a geriatric heroine with startling truths to tell, one begins to get a sense of Yehoshua Kenaz's achievement in The Way To the Cats. Praised by Philip Roth, Amos Oz, and A.B. Yehoshua, and called "a throbbing hymn to life" by Publishers Weekly, this is the story of Yolanda Moscowitz, a sensitive seventy-six year old woman who suddenly finds herself living in a Tel Aviv home for the aged where she is surrounded by unreliable friends, seducers, betrayers, fake healers, shysters, and would-be lovers. Told with blunt realism and savage humor, it is a very human story of living in a world apart and of coping with the decay of the body and the mind while keeping a sanctuary for one's soul. "A novelist must possess courage and artistry in generous measure to win readers in a story set in an old-age home, but that's exactly what Yehoshua Kenaz has done," wrote Jonathan Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times. "So vivid is the figure of Mrs. Moscowitz, and so lyrical is Kenaz's prose, that we are tempted to forget that she lives within a ravaged and failing body. But Kenaz refuses to allow us to forget.... The Way To the Cats is an engaging and accomplished novel of surprising tenderness and even a kind of grace."