Mem­o­ry is a major char­ac­ter in The Women My Father Knew. Meir, whisked from Tel Aviv to Con­necti­cut when he was sev­en, has no mem­o­ry of his first years. His cur­rent life is also a blank. At thir­ty, the author of a suc­cess­ful nov­el, he has no ideas for a new one; his per­son­al life, a series of incon­clu­sive rela­tion­ships, is also stagnating.

Then Meir learns that his father, who he thought had died when Meir was sev­en and left Israel, is alive. Over the course of the next month, in Con­necti­cut and final­ly in Tel Aviv to vis­it his now dying father, Meir recon­structs his miss­ing years from scraps of dreams and mem­o­ries, fac­ing and solv­ing the mys­tery at the core of his story.

Savy­on Liebrecht, a lead­ing Israeli writer and nov­el­ist, weaves an engross­ing sto­ry of a father and son lost to one anoth­er then recon­nect­ed, releas­ing a flood of vivid and blood­stained mem­o­ries. A deft psy­cho­log­i­cal sto­ry unfolds as mem­o­ries come alive, ulti­mate­ly putting the miss­ing pieces of Meir’s life into place and restor­ing the years he had lost.