Search results for ""author betsy rosenberg""

Eleven years old and on the cusp of puberty, Aron Kleinfeld is precocious, imaginative - the leader of his gang of friends. But his bar mitzvah is looming, his friends are all hitting puberty and Aron, terrified and revolted by what he sees around him, enters a state of arrested development. He stops growing, retreats from the world, and is imprisoned in the body of a child for three long years. While Israel inches towards the Six-Day War, and his friends cross the boundary between childhood and adolescence, Aron remains in his child's body, spying on the changes that adulthood wreaks as, like his hero Houdini, he struggles to escape the trap of growing up.

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I was twelve years old when what I'm about to tell you took place. Today, sixteen years later, I still recall the pounding of my heart as I heard the approaching footsteps of the bully of Heidelberg University. Above me on the bed sat Heinrich Rosenthal, a little man, seventy years old, with a big white mane of hair, but under the bed I was very much alone, and I remember thinking in those moments of suspense, Mom's right, maybe I should go out and make friends my own age instead of always hanging around by myself or with weird people like Mr Rosenthal. So begins an intriguing tale of friendship between an extraordinarily beguiling boy and an old man with a past - a history that shapes the plot of "Duel" and cleverly unfurls in the way real stories do between friends. David and Mr Rosenthal are generations apart in age but equally brave, equally stubborn and each as unique for their years as the other.

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