Wendy Zierler
Esau
by Meir Shalev, translated by Barbara Harshav, Harper Collins: New York 345 pp.
Hebrew literary critics have increasingly begun to speak about the postmodern literary temperament of contemporary Israeli writers. Some, such as David Grossman, Orly Castel-Bloom, Yoel Hoffman and Meir Shalev are joining the postmodern company of writers in other languages in their dismantling of the novelistic form and subject; their incorporation of elements of the fantastic or of magic realism into otherwise realistic description; their pastiche-like use of quotation or allusion and their persistent laying-bare of the mechanics of story-telling. Shalevs "Esau," a delightfully quirky and fantastic saga about a quasi-mythical family of bakers, is an exemplary postmodern work, filled with scepticism, humour, impossibility, and self-conscious literariness. It is a novel which delights in words, metaphor, allusion and story, but which never takes itself too seriously, offering formal invention, metafictional musing, erudition and profundity, along with a generous store of laughs.
The novel begins with a seemingly irrelevant short story about a spoiled European duke who dies a half-tragic, half-ridiculous death after a visit to the Holy Land. Subtitled "An Imaginary Story about People Who Never Were," the story challenges the reader to make connections between so-called fiction and fact, between this initial digression and the main story line about the first-person narrator (who is never explicitly named but who we assume to be the Esau of the title) and his eccentric kin. As the reader progresses through the story, certain details from the initial short story begin to recur. Like Duke Anton, the narrator has a twin brother and a vigorous sexual appetite. Other details from the Duke Anton story resurface later in the novel: the dukes chariot becomes an escape vehicle used by Esaus family to escape from Jerusalem in the wake of a 1927 earthquake; a descendant of one of the goslings the duke uses to wipe his behind becomes the beloved pet of Esaus mother Sarah; the Nawrite women who seduce and debauch the duke in Jerusalem reappear in the form of Edelmans four daughters, who torment the narrators lame cousin Simon, and so on.
The principal narrative is similarly interrupted by two more short stories, one which comes in the middle and another, at the end of the novel. The second story, subtitled "A Story Close to the Truth about people with Fictional Names," is a fantastic, witty and horrific variation on experiences of Esaus Aunt Duduch and Uncle Elijah in turn-of the century Jerusalem. The third story, subtitled "An Imaginary Story About Real People," begins as a realistic continuation of the main storyline but dissolves into complete and utter fantasy at the end. Together, the main narrative and these three variations on the theme, all of which are told to an unidentified female, tell the larger story of how a writer makes stories by taking them apart and reassembling them in different forms. As in many other postmodern works, the process of storytelling itself becomes one of the novels central concerns.
The metaphor which the narrator himself uses to describe the writing process comes from the family bakery. "Like my father and brother," he writes, "I also make my living from bread, but I dont bake it anymore. I write about it." Indeed, the stories of his childhood on Israels coastal plain, of his fabulously learned ancestors, his mothers storied conversion to Judaism, his parents pseudo-legendary meeting, his rivalry with twin brother Jacob, and his various romantic exploits, are the bread he bakes and lives on. In Esaus mind, the stories ferment, grow, and spill over, rising and baking and taking on a hard crust until they are mixed, kneaded, and made to rise anew. And as in the case of the bakery which attracts passersby with its aroma, the reader is pulled in by the various details, textures, movements and metaphors of the ever-changing story.
The bread metaphor is only one of several images in the novel. The Roman mosaic of a young girl, which is discovered and then lost by Esaus friend Brinker (and which appears on the novels jacket) becomes another metaphor for the artistic process. When Jacob dismantles and gives the ancient portrait to Leah as a love offering, Leah divides the myriad stones in groups and constructs several new mosaics. "Ive already had flowers and birds and a wonderful man," Leah says to Esau. Similarly, Esau regroups the details of his own life and family history and arranges them into countless new literary forms.
Micrography, the fashioning of pictures out of lines comprised of tiny words, also serves as a visual analogue to the process of writing fiction. Throughout the novel, various characters are seen making preposterously detailed pictures out of miniaturized passages from the Bible and other holy books and inscribing them on the unlikeliest surfaces: a fingernail, a foreskin, a grain of wheat. In this novel, both micrography and fiction-writing are absurd but wonderful creative acts, entailing the formation of worlds out of words, small worlds that contain everything but that only one person can look at, at a time.
Shalevs characters make word-pictures out of the Bible both literally, in the form of micrography, and figuratively, in the form of new stories. As the title indicates, the whole novel is patterned after the biblical story of Jacob and Esau. Echoing that story, Shalevs twins have an uneasy, combatative relationship; the younger Jacob wins the family inheritance and continues the baking tradition, while the elder Esau feasts on language and books and runs off to America to become a writer. Like the biblical hero who wrestles with the angel and incurs permanent injury, Shalevs Jacob loses a fingertip while vying with Esau for the love of their neighbour Leah. As in the Bible, the matriarch and patriarch of the family are named Abraham and Sarah, although they are a mismatched pair, she, a beautiful but illiterate convert and he, the scion of prominent sages.
In sum, the differences between Shalevs story and the biblical story are as many and as important as the similarities. The absence of Isaac and Rebecca in this scheme immediately signals the reader to avoid simple equations between the Bible and Shalevs story. Esau borrows from the Bible in a pastiche-like manner, randomly adding details, discontinuities and discrepancies. After the manner of Shalevs first novel, "The Blue Mountain," which told the story of the pioneering generation in the Land of Israel, Esau is all mock-myth and hyper-symbolism a family saga to be taken with several grains of salt, or better wheat.
There are some irksome moments in this novel. Occasionally Shalevs gorgeous language becomes a bit too gorgeous, his characters speeches too preachy and profound, his metaphors too symbolic. We never quite figure out to whom Esau is telling his story and why, and the magnificent energy of the novel seems to peter out somewhat at the end. Still, this is a wonderful, witty and original book, with a wacky cast of characters many of whose exploits made me laugh out loud. "I conclude," Shalevs narrator tells his unnamed addressee at the end, "because one way or another I have answered most of your questions. Incidentally, these stories arent as complicated as they sound." Shalev does not answer all of our questions, and we must do some work to uncomplicate the stories. It is thoughtful, rewarding work, however, the kind a reader welcomes and enjoys. If this is Israeli postmodernism, we should applaud its arrival.
Wendy Zierler is a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
Matt Nesvisky
Funeral At Noon
by Yeshayahu Koren; translated by Dalya Bilu, Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont. 254 pp.
Observers of the publishing scene have long been convinced that decisions on what does or doesnt get into print must be influenced by caprice, whim, chance, blackmail, back-scratching or any number of other factors not necessarily involving literary merit. The same certainly seems to hold true for decisions on what gets translated.
This is not to suggest that Yeshayahu Korens "Funeral at Noon" is a bad novel. It is not. But it is also not an especially good one. Good or bad, too few Israeli novels are translated into English. Thus a considerable degree of unresolved mystery surrounds the fact that, of all contemporary Hebrew fiction, "Funeral at Noon," originally published in Hebrew in 1974, found its way a generation later into the hands of one of Israels most distinguished translators and is now presented by a small American publisher to readers of English.
Jerusalemite Koren is an acclaimed short-story writer, but his sole novel is no classic of Hebrew literature. What then does "Funeral at Noon" have to recommend it? How about...typicality? Cruel as it may sound, this novel is most remarkable for being reminiscent of countless other Israeli novels, particularly those that surfaced in the first decades of statehood. It offers numerous features associated with the early work of such writers as Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Pinhas Sadeh, Aharon Megged, Yehoshua Kenaz and a host of other, lesser-known writers. The result is that "Funeral at Noon" walks a fine line between quintessential example of the genre and parody.
The setting is an unnamed village somewhere in Israel. The time is similarly indeterminate, although the references to the lira coinage and horse carts place this story some time before, well, before shekels and Volvos. The sun is scorching, the soil sandy, the thorns prickly. Everyone sweats. In fact, sweat is evoked on virtually every page.
In addition to sweating, everyone in the book is either slightly mad or terminally bored. It is hard to tell which it is because, in keeping with the classic conventions of the genre, we are told little of the background of these characters and nothing of their interior lives or thoughts. Everything is described cinematically, that is, strictly by surface appearances. (Cinema, and most specifically the arty French existential cinema of the 1950s, is one of the most notable influences on Israeli fiction of the era.) The language is terse, objective, concrete, specific and utterly pared free of simile or metaphor:
"She walked to the bottom of the yard. The mailbox on the gate was empty. A truck loaded with watermelons drove down the street. A boy in a T-shirt was sitting on the top of the pile and holding on to the slats of the frame.
"Dry grass stretched along the roadside, she got dressed, took a basket and went out."
Leave aside the intriguing suggestion that the heroine got dressed only after she walked to the mailbox. Such prose, with its dedication to subject-verb-object structure and its flat declarative tone, is at least readable, if not especially musical. It can set a certain mood, and even suggest menace, as is intended here. But such self-conscious style can also tire the reader and draw too much attention to itself. Korens severe self-limitation in sentence structure and vocabulary also lead to an unfortunate penchant for repetition.
In describing an outdoor market in Jerusalem, for example, Koren enumerates "the crates of onions and vegetables, the heavy meathooks, and the paper bags scattered over the narrow streets. The torn bags mingled with the dry husks of the corn and rotting fruit which had fallen from the crates."
Just 40 pages later were in an outdoor market in Acre, with "crates of vegetables... rotten fruit, and papers littering the paving stones of the narrow street. Meat on hooks..."
Well, all outdoor markets are alike, and so too, I suppose, is a lot of Israeli fiction. Readers will certainly experience a certain sense of déjà vu on encountering Korens ominously-named Hagar, the young, bored and childless village wife with time on her hands, and Tuvia, her stolid, tight-lipped and uncomprehending husband. We even get the classic refrain:
"Whats the matter with you lately? Its impossible to talk to you. Answer me... Things cant go on like this.
Dont yell at me, she cried and pushed him away."
The matter is that Hagar takes long walks each day into an adjacent abandoned Arab village, where the army periodically conducts exercises. Sometimes she is accompanied by Yiftach, a neighbours ten-year-old son, but often she goes alone. Soon shes exchanging meaningful looks with one of the soldiers in the village. One look leads to another. Then theyre not just looking.
The sun meanwhile is scorching, the soil sandy, the thorns prickly. Everyone sweats. Tragedy threatens, then strikes.
Such a story is not without interest, but the characters do not particularly engender sympathy or concern. Not the least reason for this is the authors determination to withhold information. Little Yiftach informs Hagar that he has something important to tell her, yet never does. Hagar receives an important letter, but its contents are not divulged. Hagar says she has something significant to tell her husband, but she tells neither him nor us. Other characters, such as an old watchman, a café owner, a politically radical farmer and a madwoman flit about bearing weighty secrets only suggested, never revealed.
Which is all very intriguing. But its a fairly calculated way of generating mystery.
The real mystery remains: why are some Israeli novels chosen for translation into English, while others are not?
Matt Nesvisky is a US-born writer, critic and journalist, and a past editor of The Jerusalem Post weekly magazine.
Linda Zisquit
Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems of Rachel
Translated by Robert Friend; The Menard Press, London, 60 pp.
Close to the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee, in a small cemetery filled with tombstones bearing the names of pioneers from the second and third aliyot (waves of immigration to Eretz-Israel), is one slightly raised, moss-covered grave bearing the name "Rachel." Next to the tombstone is a small stone box containing a book of her poems. Countless groups of schoolchildren and adults have made pilgrimages to this quiet, celebrated grave site to open the stone box and read the beloved poems of Rachel Bluwstein (who wrote only under her first name) near the sea she immortalized. And there, they have paid and continue to pay tribute to a woman born in Saratov in Russia in 1890, who first came to Palestine in 1909, lived on a kibbutz and worked the land till 1913 when she left to study agriculture in Toulouse, and who returned again in 1919 to stay till her death in 1931 at age 41; a poet whose work has been set to music and sung by generations of Israelis; a lyricist whose sparse, personal lines have become popular, nostalgic expressions for the deep longings and confusions of Israeli youth. But not till the publication of Robert Friends, "Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems of Rachel," has her work been accessible in English.
Moreover, it is ironically Friends sterling and sensitive translations of Rachels poems that, for me, elevates them from their position of popularity and brings them to a level of profound, complex poetry deserving the highest critical attention. Just as visitors to that cemetery near the Sea of Galilee Kinneret in Hebrew could so easily miss the small hardcover book preserved in the stone box, so a reader of poetry who is aware of Rachels place in the cultural life of this country could so easily have missed the deeper achievements of Rachels work.
As Robert Friend notes in his informative introduction, the work of Rachel is deceptively simple, seemingly effortless. "Quiet as lake water /this is the way I am:/ fond of childrens eyes, daily tranquilities,/the poems of Francis James." She chooses small subjects, details of her daily life, "tiny joys, joys like a lizards tail," in order to speak of her longing for happiness, of her past loves, her illnesses and despair. And "modest are the gifts I bring," she writes in "To My Country," apologizing for the unheroic, human-sized proportions of her work. "But on the shores of the Jordan/my hands have planted a tree,/and my feet have made a pathway/through your fields/... Modest...the offerings/of your daughter/Only an outburst of song/on a day when the light flares up,/only a silent tear/for your poverty." With candid self-awareness, Rachel clearly prefers her gifts, the tree and the song, to the "great deeds of a hero/or the spoils a battle yields."
Similarly, "I have only known how to tell of myself" is layered with both the poets understated longing to rise above the selfs private concerns as well as her intense knowledge of the self. Subjectivity is sharp-eyed under Rachels scrutiny, compensated not only by depth of feeling and control but also by an acute understanding of the poets own powers and limitation. "My world is like the ants, my pack/just as much a burden to me,/too heavy for my frail back./My way, like hers to the top of the tree,/is a way of pain and struggle, mocked/by a contemptuous giant hand/and maliciously blocked." Even when she lapses into abstraction, an innate modesty and an intense need for self-examination provide freshness to the poem and insight to the pain:
Meeting, hardly meeting, suffices:
one quick glance, fragments of obscure words,
and again waves of happiness and pain
sweep over everything and rage
The dam of oblivion I built in my defence
is as if it had never been.
I kneel on the shore of the roaring sea
and drink my fill.
Whatever madness that "meeting, hardly meeting" reopens, its upheaval is a comfort, a great relief and release. In these eight short lines, years of shutting out the desired connection have suddenly ended, the wall is no longer erect, all that the spirit built to protect and prevent the poet from an experience that is both ecstatic and painful has been removed. The gaps and breaks at the beginning of the poem echo the poets tentativeness and fear to accept the dramatic change. But life takes over, "waves of happiness and pain/ sweep over everything and rage."
Friends exquisite translation of this poem of dread and longing, of waiting and receiving, of damage and healing, captures the softness and the toughness of Rachels spirit in its tight internal struggle with surrender. And in one of the last poems in the collection, "Tenderness," Rachel acknowledges and confronts again "the murderous/ war between a woman and a man" in what seems a simultaneous embracing and forgiving of the past; as though suddenly freed from the tug of winning or losing, she offers the consolation of an unqualified love:
How strange: those hard words of rebuke
were suddenly gone, those words of bitterness,
as if a miraculous wind had blown
into the whispering embers of tenderness.
No longer locked in that ageless, murderous
war between a woman and a man,
you became like a brother to me,
or a beloved son.
That Rachels poems speak for so many no longer keeps the English reader from partaking in their pleasures. The late Robert Friend who died last year, has made a gift to us of her poems their simplicity and music, their heartbreaking sadness, their expression of her joyful love of the natural world and deep attachment to the land of Israel, their silence and their words and we should be grateful.
Linda Zisquit is a poet and translator living in Jerusalem. Her most recent collection of poetry, "Unopened Letters," (The Sheep Meadow Press) appeared in 1997.