When I Lived in Modern Times

Evelyn Sert, a hairdresser's daughter who renames herself Eve on the boat to Palestine in 1946, is drawn by Grant as someone for whom Zionism is inseparable from a more personal hunger: the chance to shed an entire inherited identity, class, accent, even her given name, and build a self from nothing on a kibbutz that promises exactly that kind of erasure and rebirth. The kibbutz's collectivist idealism, communal children's houses, shared labor, deliberate flattening of individual history, offers Eve a version of belonging that has nothing to do with the London she left, and Grant is careful to show both its genuine appeal and its coercive undertow.

Eve's move from the kibbutz to Tel Aviv, a city Grant renders as brand-new, half-built, and defiantly modern in the middle of an ancient landscape, tracks a second reinvention layered on the first: she becomes a hairdresser again, this time by choice rather than inheritance, and builds a circle of friends as improvised and cosmopolitan as the city itself. The novel treats Tel Aviv's architecture, its Bauhaus buildings going up on sand, as a physical embodiment of the same self-authorship Eve is attempting with her own biography.

Her relationship with Johnny, who turns out to be operating under a false identity as a British officer while actually working for the Irgun underground against British rule, complicates Eve's own reinvention by showing her a far more dangerous version of the same instinct: constructing a self for strategic purposes rather than personal freedom. Eve's unwitting role passing him information implicates her in violence she never consciously chose, forcing the novel's argument that a nation being invented from scratch demands the same kind of self-erasure it offers, only with much higher stakes.

Grant frames the novel with an older Eve looking back on her younger self's arrival, and lets the two voices actually argue rather than simply narrate in sequence, the young Eve impatient with nostalgia and insistent that only the future matters, the older Eve certain that the past is the only thing that ever really counts. That framing device keeps the novel from reading as a simple coming-of-age story; it is explicitly about which self, the one who acts or the one who remembers acting, gets final authority over what a life meant.