In her book about the broken hours, Riki Cohen approaches her childhood memories very carefully and reveals to herself and to us, tap by tap, what she tried to hide and forget all her life: her childhood in the shadow of a mentally ill mother. Now she is bravely writing her story to fight the shame and concealment, to give her mother a voice and presence and say - that's how she was, and her being is a part of me. With compressed and wounded directness, she tells about the outbreak of her mother's illness, about the hospitalizations, about the exhaustion of the father who is having trouble taking care of his three children alone - but also about beautiful moments with the mother and her courage to rebel against small and large rebellions within the patriarchal climate in which she lives. In Ricky Cohen's later view there is great compassion for the mother and her wasted life and also forgiveness for the father, with whom, in his old age, she conducts a close and intimate dialogue.
