The Second Half of the Night / Kornfeld Shepra On the day of her wedding, a fifteen-year-old girl in a borrowed dress, several sizes bigger than her, is standing and waiting. This tall dress had already been worn by dozens of women before her in the small yeshiva on the mountain: all of them married humbly, gave birth sadly, served their God willingly and their husbands obediently. But she - who grew wild, climbed on roofs with scraped knees, went down to explore the secrets of the mountain and woke up ghosts from Marbatsen - was destined for a different fate. The unforgettable heroine of the second half of the night enters the orchard, peeps and is hurt, torn between books of the sacred and of the sand. The forbidden words carry her across distant days, but also shatter her innocence and hopes on the ground of reality. Her story takes place in Sek Beit Midrash Sek, a closed sect, a magnet for the lost, dreamers, artists and madmen. This is a place where the laws of man are routinely violated, and the laws of God take form and are revealed. A place where, when the mountains dance like stags, even the most solid rocks can crack. Shafra Kornfeld's language combines Hebrew with Yiddish from the Brooklyn shtetl and English from the fields of Woodstock into an original work of great beauty and charm. With power and precision, Kornfeld draws a portrait full of bittersweet longings of a strict and wild community, a space of infinite freedom and invisible chains. Noa Manheim Shafra Kornfeld was born in Jerusalem in the winter of 1980, the second of eight brothers and sisters. She grew up in the Old City, in an ultra-Orthodox family. Has a bachelor's degree in industrial design from Bezalel. She won the TV show "Big Brother" in 2008. Today she lives in Tel Aviv with her partner and daughter.
