Trail

The setting of the novel is quarantine Jerusalem, a city where the events of the Old Testament story and the upheavals of the recent past coexist side by side. Pilgrims, who imagine themselves as kings and messiahs, are undergoing treatment with a psychiatrist. At the center of this plague carnival is the heroine, stripped of her ego and thus unable to identify herself. She "searches for herself" in the deserted Jerusalem and in the documents of several generations of a family that has experienced the full horror of the early decades of Soviet Russia. The characters trace their convoluted paths through the past and present, their fates intertwining and merging with each other, rhyming with biblical events, while the documents, letters, and diary entries woven into the fabric of the narrative become a map leading to the acquisition of the eternally elusive "self." Elena Makarova is a writer, historian, art therapist, documentary filmmaker, and exhibition curator. She is the author of the books "How to Mold a Snort," "Exotic Tzatziki," "The Name of Separation," "Fridl," "Eternal Shift," "The Guide to the Lost," published by "NLO."