Hendel's Law

“Every person has the right to return to themselves, and see themselves, and accept themselves, and love themselves” — this is the personal Law of Return that the heroine of this novel derives from the Israeli context. And from the meeting with the consular official Yakov Hendel, who once said: “There’s still a little problem: you were born out of wedlock.” There indeed is a “little problem,” but it is not this one.
The daughter is going to Not That Guy. The mother — to the Country, to herself, to grandmother Yulia Alfredovna, whose documents Hendel sorted through. The son — to reassemble his relationship with what happened many years ago on the school slide. The husband — to himself, in the solitude of a Russian dacha.
Darya Tsivina writes dense, ironic, honest prose about how a person, once having torn themselves away from their place, goes through all possible kinds of returns — to language, to loss, to their own children, to their former selves. And about the fact that the boomerang always comes back — sometimes to the temple.