Crossing the Border

An Erotic Journey

From the publisher: "More than twenty years ago Kim Chernin set out on a journey, leaving behind her young daughter. The story of this journey, which took her to a border kibbutz in Israel, becomes a mysterious tale of erotic awakening. Crossing the Border is a powerful story of sex, seduction and intrigue. Love at the border is a dangerous affair, and in Crossing the Border love in the war zone becomes violent."

The author regards this book as an experiment in fictional autobiography. The narrative is split between two aspects of the author; the older, mature narrator, who speaks as I, about her younger self, whom, with tender irony, she refers to as Kim Chernin.

"As rich, multi-layered and as suspenseful as fiction, Crossing the Border is a tale of passion lived to its extreme. As lyrical as the writing of Marguerite Duras and as daring as the work of Jeannette Winterson, Crossing the Border is certain to provoke and captivate."

"Once again, Kim Chernin has provided a beautifully written account of the darkened regions of the female psyche. Chernin's unique gift is her ability to illuminate how the intimately personal and vastly political intersect in the details of everyday life. Kim Chernin gives a new dimension to the on-going project of reclaiming the stories of women's lives."

- Naomi Wolf

"I follow Kim Chernin's every foray, intrigued and eventually enlightened. Crossing the Border is the usual extraordinary Chernin mix of passion and politics, flesh and spirit. I find it stirring, provocative, technically amazing, fiery, unsettling and, as always, entirely original."

- Louise Bernikow

"Kim Chernin has written a story set in an Israeli border kibbutz two years before the 1973 war. In a unique voice, crossing the border captures the fully contemporary anguish of love for the Jewish homeland. In this setting, love at the border becomes as ambiguous and dangerous as the border itself. Chernin's book is full of penetrating insight and daring feelings. It is impossible to put down."

- Michael Lerner, Editor in Chief, Tikkun

"Using unconventional narrative form, the author splits herself in two: Kim Chernin (the name assigned to the thirt-year-old self) and her older (unnamed) self-as-narrator, who claims to understand much more than did her wilder, charming counterpart twenty-odd years before.In the non-linear, spiraling literary style for which she is known, Chernin writes this witty, eros-driven tale of a woman's "then" and "now"...a story of passion and self-reclamation..."

- Jerilyn Fisher, Tikkun

"It calls itself autobiographical, but really it lies in a more unsettling realm between memoir and fiction, between the imaginary and the real. Kim Chernin has played briliantly with the relation between memory and telling before. Her powerful works on women, food and the body...were followed by skilful blending of biography and autobiography in In My Mother's House. Now, Crossing the Border takes the disruption of conventional memoirs even further....Mind and heart both get feasted by this book."

- Rosie Jackson, Just Women

Publisher: Ballantine Books, New York, 1993