Yehoshua’s Gift

Five Seasons by A. B. Yehoshua

A man has to be in love.

                A.B. Yehoshua

It was only on the train ride from Haifa back to Tel Aviv, after I had found a seat and caught my breath, the ancient coastline flashing by outside my window, that I opened up my copy of Five Seasons to see what the author A.B. Yehoshua had written inside. Unfortunately the inscription was in Hebrew, a language with which I have but a stumbling familiarity. Eager to know what he’d written, I asked an Israeli soldier seated across the aisle from me—a frowzy-looking teenager with an I-pod and Uzi—if he could translate the message, a request with which he seemed happy to comply. “You met him?” he asked me, after a glance at the page. He looked genuinely impressed. “Yes, just now, at a café in town.” He shook his head and smiled. “My father says he’s the best.”

It had started on whim, before I was due to visit Israel with my wife and sons, when I'd written the author at the university where he teaches on the chance that he would meet with me for no other reason than that I admired his work, indeed had been deeply changed in my thinking by his many prize-winning novels about life in Israel today. As an American I was not alone in this. “When I stumbled on the writing of A.B. Yehoshua,” writes Vivian Gornik in a recent article in The Nation, “it was as though a fault line had opened in a hardened surface to expose me to an emotional insight that life on the Israeli street had denied me.” I’d experienced exactly the same thing, some years earlier, before I’d actually been to Israel, when I’d chanced upon a novel of his, A Late Divorce, in a used bookshop in town. It was a revelation to me: for the first time there were people—real, familiar, struggling people—behind the daily newsprint drama of violence and fanaticism that had come to define the country for me. 

The Israelis of Yehoshua’s novels are at once universal in their needs and fears and aspirations, and complexly, compellingly distinct in their identity as Israelis, as Jews, a mixture of toughness, pride, and despair, a political, emotional, plainly existential dis-ease, that brings one so close to the brilliance and crisis of modern Israel that one can only be moved. And what else is literature for than to move us, to complicate our perspectives, to rattle the many truths and generalizations we hold dear?

This is not to suggest that Israel, as a nation, has simply been misunderstood, that the criticism of its policies in recent decades is without foundation, based largely on anti-Semitism and ignorance, only to state the obvious: that in a world fraught with bigotry and strife, a world sick with religious and cultural narcissism, it is fatal—literally fatal—to lose sight of the people themselves, be they Israelis or Palestinians, to be satisfied with cutouts and caricatures, with shadows on a screen. This is what good novelists do: they defy our complacency, our desire—all but instinctive, it seems—to simplify the world, to paint it black and white. This is Yehoshua’s gift: his ability to tell a story about a man, a woman, a family, in such a way that we know them as people first, with all their quirks and imperfections, and only after—if significantly—as Israelis, as Jews. 

His 1987 novel, Five Seasons (Molkho), my favorite of all, is a case in point. Never anywhere have I read a more stirring, more deeply human depiction of love and marriage and death, than in the pages of this book. The novel is worth buying for the opening pages alone, an exquisitely controlled description  of one man’s lonely vigil at the deathbed of his wife:  

Molkho’s wife died at 4 a.m., and Molkho did his best to mark the moment forever, because he wished to be able to remember it.  And indeed, thinking back on it even weeks and months later, he was convinced that he had managed to refine the instant of her passing (her passing? he wasn’t sure the word was right) into something clear and vivid containing not only thought and feeling but also sound and light, such as the maroon glow of the small electric heater, the greenish radiance of the numbers on the digital clock, the yellow shaft of light from the bathroom that cast large shadows in the hallway, and perhaps, too, the color of the sky, a pinkish ivory set off by the deep obscurity around it. 

What Five Seasons gives the reader is a grave, sometimes funny, always acutely personal account of a middle-aged man struggling to come to terms with his life after the protracted and painful death of his wife, a simple story replete with love and longing, yet further charged, further complicated, by the fact that it takes place in Israel, a nation at war with itself, so that even its most quotidian details seem intimations of some greater, more grievous truth. While never overtly political like his novels Friendly Fire, A Woman In in Jerusalem, and The Liberated Bride, each of which I strongly recommend, Five Seasons is to my mind his most accomplished, most finely-wrought tale because it leaves me, not with a nation and its politics—its settlers, terrorists, and soldiers—but with a person, a human being, a vain and vulnerable man who longs for little more from this life than love.

Avraham “Boolie” Yehoshua was born in Palestine in 1936, a fifth-generation Sephardic Jerusalemite.  Following his form al education at The Hebrew University, where he studied literature and philosophy, Yehoshua moved to Paris for four years.  In 1967 he returned to Israel and served as a paratrooper during the Six Day War. Today he resides in Haifa, where he has been a senior lecturer in literature at the University of Haifa since 1972.  His works have been translated into 28 languages and he is the recipient of the Bialik Prize, the Israel Prize for Literature, and the Los angles Time Book Prize.  He is credited with being among the first Israeli writers to give voice to an Arab character in post-1948 Israeli literature.*

* Thanks in part to Stephanie Tankel

Note: The inscription in my copy of Five Seasons reads simply: “To Peter Nash, with heartfelt greetings. A.B. Yehoshua”

Peter Adam Nash

Zeruya Shalev

Husband and Wife

When finally I put down this novel I was trembling. Described in The Scotsman as an “emotional white-knuckle ride,” this story plunges the reader deep into the heart of a rapidly disintegrating marriage in present-day Jerusalem. In prose so accomplished, so stirring, at times so achingly beautiful that one is tempted to drop one’s guard, to sit back, relax, and surrender oneself to its rhythms, Shalev is relentless in her determination to draw the reader inside the very skin of her protagonist, a mother and social worker named Na’ama Newman, as she registers the bruising daily trauma—each banal and horrific detail—of her imploding love life and family.   

The simple plot is set in motion one morning when Na’ama’s husband, Udi, a healthy, active man, wakes up at home after a solitary outing in the desert to discover that he cannot move his legs.  Unable to find a physical, medical explanation for his paralysis, they are forced to recognize that the problem lies elsewhere, in their marriage itself, their once-happy life together attacked from within by an aggressive emotional cancer.  From there, their relationship quickly spirals out of control, fueled—as fire by gasoline—by years of pent-up disappointment, longing, recrimination, and fear. Told from Na’ama’s acute, often startling perspective, Husband and Wife is the story of one woman’s desperate, exasperating, sometimes valiant attempt to save her marriage and family, to check the momentum of what at points seems as terrible, as implacable as fate.  While the novel might just as well have been set in Shanghai, Durban, or Madrid, so little do we see of modern Israel, so broadly human is the story’s appeal, one cannot help but suspect that this tangled and septic relationship is somehow reflective of the anguish and violence of Jerusalem itself.

Grim, depressing as this sounds—and is (Why would anyone but a masochist read such stuff? Or recommend it?), the novel is also singularly exhilarating in its pacing and candor, in its fearless—thereby hopeful—depiction of relationships and love.  “Husband and Wife is not a book for the faint-hearted,” writes critic Jamie Jauncey, “but for anyone prepared…to experience with almost hallucinatory vividness the complex and conflicting emotions of a modern woman dealing with a disintegrating relationship, there can be no finer opportunity.”  If, like Kafka, you believe that a book should be an axe for the frozen sea inside us, then pick up a copy of this one.  It will shake you to your core.

Zerya Shalev was born at Kibbutz Kinneret. She has an MA in Biblical studies and works as a literary editor at Keter Publishing House. Shalev has published five novels, a book of poetry and a children`s book. Her novels Love Life, Husband and Wife, and Late Family (Terra) have received critical acclaim both in Israel and abroad and have been bestsellers in several countries. Love Life has been included in Der Spiegel`s prestigious list of "20 Best Novels in World Literature" over the last 40 years, together with the work of Saul Bellow, J. M. Coetzee and Philip Roth. Husband and Wife is included in the French Fnac list of the "200 Best Books of the Decade." Shalev has been awarded the Book Publishers Association’s Gold and Platinum Prizes, the Corine Prize (Germany, 2001), the Amphi Award (France, 2003), the ACUM Prize three times (1997, 2003, 2005), and the French Wizo Prize (2007).  Husband and Wife was also nominated for the Femina Prize (France, 2002). A feature film of Love Life, produced in Germany, was released in 2008. Her books have been published abroad in 25 languages.  Husband and Wife (‏בעל ואישה‎) was translated by Dalya Bilu and is published by Grove Press, New York.

Peter Adam Nash

Israeli Conjugations:

Past Continuous and Past Perfect by Yaakov Shabtai

Meet Goldman, Caesar, and Israel. Past Continuous, Yaakov Shabtai’s ambitious first novel traces the lives and friendship of these three young men in 1970’s Tel Aviv. First published in Israel in 1977 as Zikhron Devarim or Remembrance of Things, the novel was written as one continuous 280-page paragraph, with some sentences spanning several pages. Deft and experimental in style, it is considered the first novel ever to be written in truly vernacular Hebrew.  Once translated into English by Dalya Bilu under the title Past Continuous, the novel quickly won international acclaim, prompting critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici to compare it favorably to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Past Continuous focuses on the lives of friends Goldman, Caesar, and Israel during a nine month period from April Fool’s Day to New Year’s Day, a period bracketed by the death of Goldman’s father and by that (by suicide) of Goldman himself. Reminiscent of Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel begins with a funeral and ends exactly nine months later with a birth, the story itself a period of intense physical, emotional, and psychological gestation.  While challenging to read, a story the plot of which develops largely by association and in which Shabtai’s verbs sometimes switch tense without logic or warning, Past Continuous is a dazzling existential foray into the life and fabric of modern Israel.  The very names of the principal characters--Goldman, Caesar, and Israel--signal the three often highly contentious strains of Jewish experience in Israel today: ghetto, assimilationist, and Zionist.

Now meet Meir:

At the age of forty-two, shortly after Sukkoth, Meir was gripped by the fear of death--a fear that took hold of him as soon as he had acknowledged the fact that death was a real and integral part of his life, which had already passed its peak, that he was moving swiftly toward it on a route that allowed for no digressions, and that the distance between them--which had seemed almost infinite during the Sukkoth holiday, let alone the summer, which now seemed no more than a distant dream--was growing shorter all the time, so that he could envisage it without difficulty and measure it out in ordinary, everyday terms, such as: how many pairs of shoes he would still buy, how many times he would go to the movies, and how many women he would sleep with, apart from his wife. 

A lonely, disillusioned engineer living with his unfaithful wife in an apartment in Tel Aviv, this often sadly comical hero of Shabtai’s second novel, Past Perfect, spends his days visiting his overbearing mother and anxiously obsessing about his health and his sex life, convinced as he is that his time on earth is running out.  When suddenly his mother dies, Meir undertakes a journey to Amsterdam and London in an effort to outwit, if not just outdistance, his nagging depression and angst.  Though his adventures in Europe prove largely unremarkable, even unsuccessful, as far as his recovery goes, the reader is moved to pity and compassion--and sometimes to joy--by this estranged and anguished man. 

Yet the novel is more than just the story of a man in crisis.  By combining scenes of everyday life in Tel Aviv (vivid, penetrating scenes in which this vibrant, sensual city seems to spring to life around one) with Meir's increasingly desperate dreams of Eretz Israel, Shabtai creates an unforgettable story of a man humbled by the realities--the hardships and contradictions--of modern Israeli life.  As described in a lengthy review in Le Monde, “Yaakov Shabtai dispelled the Israeli utopia. [This] is the reckoning of Israeli life of the second generation, of the sabra... It is a summary of the loss and failure of a generation."
 

Verbally and technically more modest than Past Continuous, Past Perfect (also translated by Dalya Bilu and first published in 1987) is to my mind not only a more focused, more artistically successful novel, but an even more deeply affecting portrait of life in Israel, both then and today.   

Peter Adam Nash