Many sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy writ­ers cre­ate coun­tries and even uni­vers­es of their own imag­i­na­tion. But Masha Zur-Gloz­man did not need to look far from her home in Israel to con­struct the spec­u­la­tive parts of her daz­zling debut nov­el, Love and Oth­er Enchant­ments: A Time-Crossed Tale. 

Before the sto­ry begins, the read­er is pre­sent­ed with two maps of Atlit, the sea­side town in north­ern Israel where the sto­ry takes place. The first map is from the King­dom of Jerusalem in 1240 dur­ing the Cru­saders’ reign, while the sec­ond is of present-day Atlit. The most strik­ing thing about these maps is that they are almost identical. 

The book’s main char­ac­ters, Idit and her hus­band Hal­i­mi, come from dif­fer­ent back­grounds: she’s Russ­ian and he’s Alger­ian by way of France. Their rela­tion­ship pro­gress­es at warp speed, but it’s not long before Idit real­izes that Hal­i­mi can­not be monog­a­mous. To try to save her mar­riage, Idit sug­gests an open mar­riage with rules, but this doesn’t go well even after their daugh­ter, Lily, is born. Nev­er­the­less, Hal­i­mi is a dot­ing father, and he remains atten­tive to Idit. 

One day at the beach on a psy­che­del­ic mush­room trip with Hal­i­mi, Idit falls into the water and is sud­den­ly trans­port­ed back to 1240, dur­ing the rule of the Cru­saders. On the shore of the Mediter­ranean, Idit meets Jean d’Ibelin, Count of Arsur, a real his­tor­i­cal per­son. Idit finds that she can eas­i­ly trav­el back and forth in time between 1240 and the mod­ern day. 

As Idit and Jean’s friend­ship devel­ops, Zur-Gloz­man weaves in the sto­ry of Idit and Halimi’s ear­ly rela­tion­ship with­out using head­ers to indi­cate the shifts in time. The seam­less­ness of these shifts between past and present is a tes­ta­ment to Zur-Glozman’s tal­ent for storytelling. 

Idit’s nar­ra­tive voice also adds humor to the sto­ry. As she and Jean get to know each oth­er, she freezes when he asks if she attends church. Idit mus­es, ​“Aside from the fact that I’m not reli­gious, I thought, was this even the time to reveal to Jean that I was Jew­ish, pre­sum­ing he had not fig­ured it out? I remem­bered that the Cru­saders were not par­tic­u­lar­ly enam­ored of the Jews. It was hard for me to imag­ine the relaxed Jean d’Ibelin butcher­ing and pil­lag­ing Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties, but I pre­ferred not to tempt fate by telling him now and prob­a­bly nev­er would.”

Love and Oth­er Enchant­ments presents a nar­ra­tive that is not usu­al­ly cen­tral to con­tem­po­rary dis­cus­sions of Israel. Even Idit is sur­prised by the his­to­ry she learns from her time-trav­el­ing expe­ri­ence. ​“I thought that as an edu­cat­ed per­son, I knew the his­to­ry of my coun­try, but I had scant knowl­edge of the King­dom of Jerusalem, that two-hun­dred-year-old king­dom that the Cru­saders estab­lished that, at its peak, extend­ed over parts of today’s Lebanon, Syr­ia, Jor­dan, and Israel.”

This nov­el was extreme­ly pop­u­lar in Israel, win­ning the Israel Gef­fen Award, for spec­u­la­tive fic­tion, and the Min­istry of Cul­ture Prize for Debut Lit­er­a­ture. Now Eng­lish-speak­ing read­ers are now for­tu­nate to have the chance to read this engag­ing tale of a con­tem­po­rary mar­riage with a healthy dose of mag­i­cal realism.