The Messianic Mechanic - Review

The Messianic Mechanic

By Reva Mann

Reviewed by Lucille Cohen

The Messianic Mechanic more than lives up to its jacket's promise as "a comic tale". I was a touch sceptical, but found myself returning to it in happy anticipation. I even found myself laughing out loud in a couple of instances.

That's not to say that this novella does not present some serious aspects. Yet humor persistently bubbles just below the surface. Alex, the cockney London mechanic in question, seems to be gifted with supernatural healing powers. His hands produce a healing heat. However, in the best traditions of the superhero comic magazines, these powers can and do go haywire, which is what he is running away from in search of absolution.

From a scene of devastation in London, he travels to Jerusalem, where we find him with some version of the Jerusalem Syndrome. Wrapped in his hostel's white sheet, we imagine him through a series of sharply drawn anecdotes as he traverses the city in search of gainful employment and consolation.

In parallel to his story we learn about the family of a fictional Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Moshe, who eagerly awaits the messiah and the end of days, his wife Monique, their daughter Rose, born with a withered arm, and their social misfit son, Levi.

Despite his status as the scion of Israeli Jewish "royalty", Levi is something of a square peg in a round hole, and has run away to a mountain near the Dead Sea to live with the Bedouin and become their adopted son.

One of the highlights of the book is when Monique sets out with the chauffeur to meet Levi and finds herself participating in some unexpected rituals in the encampment. Naturally, we experience them through Monique's eyes, and there are some excruciating moments of dark comedy amid the unfolding drama.

As expected, young Rose and Alex are bound to meet, and their developing relationship is intriguing and engrossing. Levi finds himself embroiled in this situation, and one cannot really see where this tale will end. The book wends its way to a surprising ending though.

Throughout, Mann cannily captures the cockney mannerisms of Alex as the north-east London working class lad that he is. His very speech and expressions are so at odds with his surroundings and the people he meets that the dissonance is in itself a recurring source of amusement.

To my surprise, the book's plot was inspired by a true story. About twenty years ago, Meir, the son of the Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Amar, was arrested on suspicion of abducting and assaulting his sister's online boyfriend. Meir had followed a similar path to the fictional Levi's. From Bnei Brak to a Bedouin encampment where he spent ten years, then time spent in the Far East and in the settlement of Tekoa, then in Tel Aviv, he lived the life of an unruly wild child. As in the book, his mother had set out to meet him in the Bedouin encampment, but had never actually got out of the car.

Reva Mann, something of an unruly, wild child herself according to the London-based Jewish Chronicle, took this idea and developed it further by getting the fictional mother out of the car and interacting with the residents of the Bedouin encampment and letting the story unfold.

Reva Mann's own life has had some parallels to the book. As the granddaughter of the former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, Isser Yehuda Unterman, and the daughter of Morris Unterman, rabbi of the West End Marble Arch synagogue in London, Mann well understands the exigencies of that world.

She was born in 1957 and moved to Israel where she studied literature and archaeology at the Hebrew University before immersing herself in the ultra-orthodox world and esoteric study. The Rabbi's Daughter – a true story of sex, drugs and orthodoxy, was Mann's first book, a memoir, and relates the story of her life including her wild youth in London.

She now shares her time between Zichron Ya'akov in the north of Israel and the Greek Cycladic island of Paros. She is in the process of writing a second memoir on her escapes from war in her beloved, chaotic homeland to the tranquillity of Paros.

*The Messianic Mechanic is on sale through Amazon. Paperback: $11.99. Kindle: $5.99

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Reva Mann is offering a writing retreat from April 23-29 led by her own mentor, Judy Lev, on the idyllic island of Paros in the Greek Cyclades.

"Prose on Paros" will feature mornings reading, writing and analysing prose texts, while afternoons can be spent writing or exploring the island, with some chi gong, and perhaps swimming. Breakfast, lunch and shared accomodation are provided. Cost: Euros 1,200. Travel and dinner are not included.

For more information go to https://www.judylev.com/prose-on-paros or contact Reva Mann via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..