num_pages: 325
description: 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."
language: English
title: The Way to the Cats: A Novel
titlecomplete: The Way to the Cats: A Novel
genres: Fiction, Israel
ratings_count: 59
publisher: Steerforth