Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful writing, although.....
Review: It's great writing, it uses many wonderful words and sentences. Although after about the 13th (to be exact) page, it seems to become unimportant. She is talking about how her purse got stolen, and then she recieved it back, with everything but the money. Not only this so early in the book, but she tells who she thought did it, and who she thought returned it, and how she still isn't sure to this day...blah blah blahI just found this really annoying. Sorry Adina..
Rating: 
Summary: Biased Portraits
Review: Ms. Hoffman is admittedly an eloquent writer, eager to show us the virtues of being above a "tribal" identity in contemplating the varied people that she lives among. But being more open minded than your group identity does not mean degrading the group from which you hail and seeing no wrong in anyone else. It means applying humanistic standards to all people equally, wherein there is no place for prejudiced language against any group, including yours.
But that is not what this author did. Overweight Arab men in Jordan are warmly referred to as round-bellied but an overweight orthodox Jew is contemptuously dubbed potbelly. She shows defferent respect for Arab/Muslim codes of modesty on a visit to Jordan but shows contempt for orthodox Jewish ones (which are actually more lenient than Muslim codes). And although she ponders the problems and feelings of Palestinian refugees from the war of 1948 (without doing much research), she has no room to consider the effect of the forced displacement of Jewish communities from Arab lands in the 1940's and 1950's that may play a part in some of her neighbors' difficult lives, one of whom committed suicide. She portrays an unattractive local Arab gardener warmly, but she refers to an unattractive orthodox Jewish caretaker as an "ape" and as "monkeyish". Here the author plays the chic, leftist-Israeli game - toying with antisemitic imagery in order to denigrate orthodox Jews. A game both dangerous and reprehensibly unethical.
She ponders the condescension of hiring an Arab gardener, Ahmed, to do menial chores, never asking him how he feels about it. But when she sees an orthodox Jew performing menial gardening chores for a yeshiva, what a flip flop. She degrades a local yeshiva for (presumably) housing former prisoners and giving odd jobs to a local "misken" or pitiable person. There are indeed Israeli yeshivos, or places of higher Jewish learning, that have in-prison and post prison rehabilitation programs. This positive contribution to Israeli society has been recognized by the Israeli government in its "father of prisoners" awards bestowed on various yeshivas. As usual, she gives no proofs of her assumptions, but if this yeshiva indeed serves former prisoners, or other young men who have problems and probably do not therefore have winning personalities, what is wrong with that? Why does she treat the yeshiva with such contempt for what has been recognized as a positive and largely successful act of charity? Oh she doesn't like their front yard either, though she was part of some neighborhood gardening rennovations, how about including the yeshiva in that? Because for her to consider the charitable acts the the yeshiva is doing right before her eyes, or to approach them as equal neighbors, would challenge her us versus them mentality. Then who would she have to safely dump the reservoirs of political and social frustrations that she admits to upon?
Neither can Ms. Hoffman bring herself to criticize the Arab world, which she keeps at a safe distance, and thus open to her poetic projections. She goes to Jordan to interact with an Arab family, in and out in a brief afternoon, but how about getting to know the East Jerusalem population? Oh she longs to, and goes about it by looking up land registries with few skittish interactions with East Jerusalem Arabs. Her claims of the awkwardness of it all don't ring true, she is confident when it suits her, she can provoke confontational episodes when she wants.. Perhaps her hesitation is because the minute she gets too close to seeing faults within the Arab world that she doesn't want to see, she backs off fast. For example, When an Arab journalist charmingly tells her how sorry he was that no, he could not speak to her since she is an Israeli Jew and Arafat had banned contact between Arab journalists and Israeli Jews, she doesn't flinch. Why didn't the author evince any personal objection to Arafat's tyrannical blocking of freedom of speech? But, here we go again with her boiling over on safe ground - dumping on the orthodox Jews: she assumes (again, not having spoken with them) that the orthodox Jews who are gathering books from a collection left on the street have no intention of reading them. How horrid that THEY lack literary freedom.
She gets upset about the trimming of a local tree (by an orthodox Jew), but glosses over the terrorist murder of a neighbor's wife (but that was done by an Arab).
Considering that Ms. Hoffman is quite able to be critical when it suits her, friendly when it suits her, why all this bias? Fear, perhaps. Because to really come to grips with the serious faults that lie within the Arab world and that threaten us world wide would be too overwhelming, too much to handle, too much of a pholosophical shift. Stay (philosophically) safe: get mad at the Jews, gloss over the Arabs.
Rating: 
Summary: Real Life in Jerusalem
Review: One of the many things I hate are books about foreigners who come to Jerusalem and through exploring the city find themselves. "The Book of Windows" is most definitely not one of those horrid books. Yes, Ms. Hoffman is a newcomer to the city, but the lovely book she's written is not one of neurotic American soul-searching but a minutely crafted portrait of a couple of streets she lives in that just happen to be in Jerusalem. Of course, as a Jerusalem resident I recognize the stories she tells as possible only in Jerusalem and nowhere else in the world. But Ms. Hoffman doesn't try to make any of the characters or events she so evocatively describes stand for anything except for themselves - there are no cheap attempts to turn the everyday occurrences of a tiny neighborhood and its residents into either "The Story of Jerusalem" or "The Story of Adina Hoffman". Instead, Ms. Hoffman has given us a series of small events which constitute the daily drama of living in Jerusalem: meeting the neighbors, food shopping, planting a garden. There are no earth-shattering revelations here, but the quiet, steady rhythm of real life which is far more satisfying and enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: A Different View of a Familiar City
Review: This is a fascinating view of a neighborhood very different from what Americans have come to expect in pictures of Israel. Adina Hoffman writes about her mostly Moroccan neighbors with subtlety, perceptiveness and even humor. They live behind walls in a sort of village, a section of the city most visitors don't see, where life is rich and full of vigor on the one hand, and frustrating and sometimes even dangerous on the other. Although the writer is a film critic, her essays aren't about movies, but her eye is as sharp as a film maker's and I felt like I saw "Musrara" very clearly. This is a very satisfying collection by a sensitive and attentive writer.
Rating:
Summary: Wait for the Paperback
Review: This is one of those books that you start, get to page 20, pick up, start again, essentially with no better results. I did get most of the way through it, with skimming. I really hate to say this but folks, if you really want to read this book, WAIT FOR THE PAPERBOOK. Why is reading this so daunting? One reason is that the author is very slow to create plot, if there is a plot--I'm still not convinced of that. The second is that she builds her neighborhood so slowly that you feel she is literally building it stone by stone. The third reason I do not recommend reading this is that Ms. Hoffman has no interest in making life easy for her readers. This would be fine if she were James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Joseph Conrad. She ain't... She just finds the slo mo satisfying; perhaps it was satisfying to write. But I have rarely tried so hard to read a book and now I have to admit that it felt like a terrible waste of my time. That's my truth. And why I use this header. All the other reviewers rave about it so it gives me pause to say my truth. But as professor of English in Vermont, I spend most of my time reading and I found this book unusually laborious, unusally exhausting.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Bad she didn't have a Larger Publisher
Review: Unlike her fellow Jerusalemite, David Horovitz, Hoffman knows how to poetically render the city of lights. She is a fine craftswoman, might well have been or become a fine poet.
Rating:
Summary: I loved every word!
Review: What a beautiful, intimate, touching book...humorous and sometimes lonely, sad and deep. I almost couldn't believe I could not look out of my window and see Ms. Hoffmann's neighbors in the garden, or go to the grocer in search of olive oil just before sunset on a Friday. And beautifully published too, with little photographs beginning each section. It will stay by my bed to read again.
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