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This is the first volume, in Hebrew, of Seashell Queen (מלכת הקונכייה), Zipora Cochavi-Rainey's three-volume biography of the Israeli writer Naomi Frankel, author of the novel Shaul and Johanna. The Hebrew title of this volume is אל האור (To the Light).
The story opens with Frankel's birth in Berlin in 1918 to a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. As a baby she survived surgery to remove a large growth from her head, after which a doctor predicted she would grow up either a genius or an idiot. Orphaned young, she was brought to the Land of Israel by her guardian in 1933, after Hitler came to power, and studied at Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi's girls' farm school in Jerusalem.
Cochavi-Rainey, a scholar of the Hebrew language, was Frankel's friend from 1974 until the writer's death in 2009. Published by Gefen in 2013, in paperback.