Used book – Asteraï, Omri Teg'amlak Avera, Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech

Petgu, a child of the Gondar mountains, lives in his native village in harmony with nature, his goats, and his people, the Beta Israel, a lost Jewish tribe of Ethiopia, descendants of the Queen of Sheba.

Fed by his grandmother's initiatory stories, the little shepherd learns to tame demons, to penetrate the hidden world, and discovers a unique intimate relationship with Asterai, the magical bird that protects and guides his community.

A precious bond that proves vital when the tribe decides to set out across the desert to "return" to Jerusalem, the promised land hoped for for millennia. For, from the refugee camps of Sudan to the arrival in Israel, a brutal epic then begins that will crush Petgu's serenity and innocence. To survive, he will have to draw strength and faith from his ancestral culture.

Between a coming-of-age novel and an African initiatory tale, Omri Teg’Amlak Avera delivers a proud, clear, and moving novel about the loss of innocence and the accession to the turmoil of the contemporary world, about the importance of knowing oneself to remain oneself and triumph over adversity. True to the journey made by Ethiopian Jews, testifying to a reality little or not explored by Israeli literature, Asterai is the first fiction written in Hebrew by a young Ethiopian author.

«Omri Teg’Amlak Avera was born in the Gondar region of Ethiopia in the 1970s. He left on foot with his family to "ascend" to Jerusalem by crossing the desert in 1983, finally arriving in Israel in 1984, during "Operation Moses". He now lives in Haifa. Asterai is his first novel.»