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." Yolanda Moscowitz is the heroine of this remarkable novel - a seventy-six year old retired school teacher who is suddenly crippled by a fall and finds herself recuperating in a Tel Aviv home for the aged. There she is surrounded by a rich carnival of characters: the uncaring head nurse ("Satana"), a harsh disciplinarian who is Yolanda's nemesis; Leon, the oily orderly who flirts with Yolanda, hints at the possibility of a sexual liaison, and connives to get her money; Adela, the masseuse who is more interested in Yolanda's property than her body; innocent Allegra, who performs menial tasks for Yolanda and whose girlish body is diseased from within; Kagan, the Russian-born, alcoholic artist whose legs have been crushed by a bus and who romances Yolanda with French poetry; and Wolfe, the religious widower who, through rotting teeth, begs Yolanda to marry him so that he may rid himself of the prurient erotic fantasies which torment him. A story of old age featuring Yolanda Moscowitz, a retired teacher in her 70s. She lives in a hospital in Tel Aviv after a crippling fall. Without family she fears loneliness and seeks to enter into a relationship with a fellow patient Recovering from a broken hip in a Tel Aviv nursing home, Yolanda Moscowitz encounters an eccentric variety of would-be seducers, betrayers, fake healers, and schemers
