Chernin's Unusual Crossing

BOOK Crossing the Border By Kim Chernin oxford University Press $22.00, 328pp.

In her tremendously absorbing new book, Crossing the Border, Kim Chernin unfolds the story of a fearless and impetuous young woman who leaves behind her husband and daughter in California and adventures to a border kibbutz in Israel on a dangerous journey for escape and fulfillment. This wild young woman is none other than Chernin herself. The author claims that the harrowing events to 1971 transformed her so completely, that, in the book, Kim Chernin must call herself "dhe." Straddling the border between autobiography and fiction is not Chernin's only manipulation of her intriguing title in this rich and multi-layered work.

Chernin has been writing books on women for well over a decade., A psychoanalytic consultant in Berkeley, Calif., Chernin is most well-known for her trilogy of works on body image and eating disorders. She has also received high praise for her memoir, In My Mother's House, recounting the conflict and confrontation in the relationship with her mother. But in her new work, Chernin delves into the past not only to achieve a new understanding of herself through the narrative .She acts as both a critical story-teller and a passive character. Writing 20 years later she says," "Memory is a liar, a cheat, a thief, a pirate," which distorts and creates significance out of the past. Indeed, this original approach challenges the way memory, especially memory of oneself, continuously evolves.

Chernin's eloquent and passionate prose is divided into four main sections, beginning with a recount of her arrival and establishment at the kibbutz. In the beginning, the narrator, "I, looks back on Kim Chernin en route to Araht, in a resort town near the Sea of Galilee, in a tone replete of distaste. "If I could like that Chernin, that woman I was twenty years ago, if it were easy, there wouldn't be this gap that has grown between us. There would be an enduring I, a continuity. Something must have happened along the way, a wrenching more than a gradual change, splitting us off from each other. She would be outraged to think of me, her biographer."

Kim Chernin has come to this kibbutz, a small collective of fifty people who are of various nationalities and all under thirty , upon the suggestion an Australian friend, Devora whom she knows there. The kibbutzniks have build up a community based on egalitarian collective effort and who arrived together on a pre-determined date, to live, work and study Hebrew. They must bend the rules to take her in. And they do, for that is the type of woman Chernin is, or was, at least: someone for whom the rules are ignored.

The members of the kibbutz have no idea of how great an effect Kim Chernin will have upon the community they established. Kim has come, if not for the purpose of, at least with the realization, that she will fall in live for the first and only time in her life. She will not love Simon ben Zvi, the charming young man who plays the guitar and thinks he is the man for whom Chernin came to Araht. Perhaps she wanted to love Dov Aviad, the beautiful soldier who had penetrated her dreams even before he arrived. But it was not because she lost him that she fled from the kibbutz. As revealed through a surprising collection of letters in the third segment of the book she falls in love with another unforeseen person at the kibbutz. This other dangerous relationship on the border destroyed the old Chernin.

In the final segment of the book, Chernin is writing in the present day "I about reconcilement with the past. She makes contact with people from the kibbutz, Devora and Dov Aviad. She reveals the entire story to her daughter, the title girl who had written so many years ago that she was starting to forge t the face of her mother. And she welcomes back the old "Kim Chernin," banished these long twenty years since Israel.

Chernin has composed a powerful story of seduction and intrigue. She has underscored her entire narrative with the sense of longing for the Jewish homeland and the want to salvation, for she was living (and dying) at the edge where life takes on meaning Chernin's new book captivates the reader with its daring depths of emotion. The unity which she achieves at the conclusion is a triumph for her as an another and as a woman.