By Yair Lapid (Trans: Evan Fallenberg)
Elliott & Thompson, £18.99
The notion is bizarre - that a son might so totally steep himself in his father's life, his innermost thoughts, that, after his father's death, he can recreate the man and write the autobiography his father never penned. But this is what Yair Lapid has done. The result is a literary tour-de-force in which the son reassembles the voice, the spirit of the father so absolutely that, for most of this big book, it is the man himself who turns the pages of his life and speaks directly to the reader.
And Yosef "Tommy" Lapid has a lot to say. As a journalist, a politician, a celebrity, Tommy Lapid wrote, recorded, broadcast and shared with his close and loving family so many of his experiences, his thoughts, his emotional highs and lows, that his son Yair, himself a high-profile journalist and broadcaster in Israel, had an abundance of sources.
Born into a comfortable, intellectual and secular Jewish family in Novi Sad, in the Serbian republic of former Yugoslavia, Tomislav Lampel (later Hebraised to Lapid and the Tommy prefaced by Yosef - which nobody called him) lived in Budapest with his mother after his lawyer father had been taken by the Germans (he died in Mauthausen two weeks before the Liberation).
