Bookplanet: novel about life in Israel today

The Bomb Scene
Review of A Woman in Jerusalem by A.B. Yehoshua (translated by Hillel Halkin)
By Ruth Franklin/ The New Republic

According to the Jewish calendar, the day begins at sundown. This runs counter to the way most people experience time, but it makes a peculiar sense in the novels of A.B. Yehoshua, in which the most important activities almost always take place at night, and the main characters are insomniacs, either by choice or by compulsion. In The Lover, Yehoshua's first novel, published almost thirty years ago, the owner of an auto repair shop takes to driving around in a tow truck during the early morning hours in search of a man who has mysteriously disappeared. More recently, The Liberated Bride --a glorious romp of a novel that bursts with genres (family romance, campus satire, epistolary novel, folk tale) and personalities--features an extended sequence in which an Israeli professor of Arab studies, accompanied by an Israeli Arab driver, attends a midnight mass at a Christian monastery to hear the rhapsodic singing of a Lebanese nun who is said to faint at the height of her religious ecstasy.

In the world of Yehoshua's fiction, the night frees people from their inhibitions, leaving them receptive to experiences or ideas that they might not normally entertain. He exploits to the fullest the hyper-alert, restless state of excitement that results from staying up all night, and which makes his characters vulnerable to slipping beyond the realm of rational behavior: one does not have to be asleep for the sleep of reason to produce monsters. And the consequences rebound into the day that follows, as his exhausted heroes (they are usually men) often find themselves recovering from their adventures in unexpected beds.

The entire first section of Yehoshua's strange and beautiful new novel takes place over the course of a single evening. The human resources manager of a prominent bakery is ordered to stay late at the office to track down the identity of a woman killed in a recent suicide bombing, who was carrying no papers other than a pay stub from the company. Her employers have learned of the death through an advance copy of an article scheduled to appear in a tabloid, headlined "The Shocking Inhumanity Behind Our Daily Bread," which indicts both the bakery's owner and the manager for the callousness of not having noticed the loss of one of their workers; her body has lingered in the morgue for a week, unidentified and unclaimed. It does not take the manager long to determine that the bakery was not technically responsible for the woman: she was no longer working there at the time of the bombing. But the newspaper refuses to cancel its story, and the manager, investigating why she was kept on the payroll despite her firing, finds himself drawn into a strange chain of obligation that ends with him personally supervising the return of the woman's body to her native village.

Nearly all the book's characters are identified only by their title--"the human resources manager," "the owner," "the secretary," and so forth. (The book's title in the Hebrew original is the painfully literal The Assignment of the Human Resources Manager ; Yehoshua's American publisher seems to have preferred something kitschier, and more ethnically identifiable.) The sole exception is the dead woman, whose name, the manager discovers, was Yulia Ragayev. Her homeland, also never identified, appears to be somewhere in the former Soviet Union; there she was trained as an engineer, but the only employment the bakery could offer her was as a cleaning woman. A non-Jew, she came to Israel with a Jewish boyfriend, and after he left her she decided to stay. "Because Jerusalem I like. Is interesting place," she told the human resources manager during her interview, of which he has no recollection. She made a greater impression on the night shift supervisor, who became so obsessed with her that he feared for his marriage if she continued to work at the bakery, as he confides to the manager late that night in the company's cafeteria. He convinced her to leave her job and look for a better one, but he kept her on the payroll "so that if she failed to find anything, or if he missed her too much, she could always return."



A novel about the victim of a suicide bombing cannot shrug off its political freight, a burden that Yehoshua intensifies by dedicating his book "to the memory of our friend Dafna who was killed in a terrorist attack on Mount Scopus in the summer of 2002." References to the continual state of terror appear frequently, regarding everything from the manager's familial obligations-- he needs to get home to drive his daughter to her dance class, since "what with all the bus bombings, they didn't want her taking public transportation"--to the weather, a torrential rain "on which we pinned a desperate hope: that more than all our policemen and security guards, it might cool the suicidal zeal of our enemies." (The novel's reflections on the impact of terrorism are not limited to the Jews: at one point it is noted that the bakery must step up its production due to "a closure imposed on the Palestinian territories--a measure that invariably meant an increase in the inhabitants' consumption of bread, as opposed to more expensive foods.") Yehoshua's tone is always light, even humorous, so these asides feel less like polemical digs than simply observations about Israeli life.

Indeed, despite its subject, A Woman in Jerusalem is not a political novel, in the sense of a work constructed to make a political point. Rather, it uses its political subtext--a subtext that can hardly be avoided if one is to write a realistic novel about modern-day Israel--as the basis for a deeper inquiry into how living under the constant threat of terror has affected the country's inhabitants. What does it mean for a society when a person, even an immigrant cleaning lady with few acquaintances, can simply disappear without anyone taking note of it? How, the novel asks, did human life become so devalued?

The word "humanity" is repeated almost liturgically throughout the novel's first section, as the human resources manager visits the morgue and then the dead woman's rented room in an effort to find out all he can about her, which in the end is as pathetically slight as the few possessions he gathers in a suitcase to carry home for her. The attack in which she died has already been overshadowed by a more recent incident; and so at the hospital he must remind the guard that the corpse that he seeks was a victim of "last week's bombing, which no one remembered anymore." Viewing the rows of bodies in the morgue, he comments that "a visit here is a must. It gives you a sense of what's important." "And of what isn't," the lab technician accompanying him responds. Ironically, in a country where it is not unknown for body parts to litter the streets, one must visit the morgue in order to become aware of death.

Later, the manager asks the technician if he is religious. "No, the man replied. Yet there were times when anyone working here had to believe in something. Otherwise you could lose your humanity, watching so much life drain away." This, we come to realize, is the real toll of terrorism, which will drain a country of its very humanity, in both senses of the word--its people, but also its ability to account for and to care for them all with the dignity to which they are entitled. Yehoshua has said that he wrote this novel after the start of the second intifada,

“when the question was what to do with these constant deaths. Israeli society, I saw, was repressing these deaths. When a bus or restaurant was blown up, the bus was taken away, the streets were cleaned and normal life returned. This was a kind of a formula--we have to keep normal life. We don't have to be affected by this, as we don't know how to mourn. The heart was becoming hard, very hard. And this was the place which I wanted as a writer to open. “

Why else is a corpse the only character to be given a name? Yulia's humanity is restored to her in death, but the human resources manager will have to continue to struggle for his own.

The investigation of humanity is, of course, the highest task of the novelist, whose primary subject, no matter his formal or aesthetic inclinations, must always be the human character. Throughout his career, Yehoshua has been deeply interested in the literary investigation of human psychology: the mind's opacities and stratagems, its unfathomable motives, its perverse desires, its peculiar shames. He has most often chosen to conduct these explorations in a distinctive form that, despite its grateful debt to Faulkner, he has made his own: his novels are commonly narrated in the voices of multiple characters, which offer a second or third or fourth interpretation of scenes we think we have already understood. Over the years his experimentation with voices has grown more and more innovative, culminating in 1990 with perhaps his best-known novel, Mr. Mani , which consists of five conversations that take place between 1848 and 1982--but the words of only one of the speakers are provided, leaving the reader to imagine the other half of the dialogue.

The new novel offers a different innovation. The book's stripped-down narrative is interrupted sporadically by passages spoken by voices, always referring to themselves in the plural, who serve as a sort of chorus. As the manager and the night shift supervisor conduct their tête-à-tête in the cafeteria, we get a glimpse of them from the perspective of the workers mopping up:

"When the floor was spotless and dry and the chairs were lowered again from the tables, and the violet light of a clearing sky shone through the window, we were shocked to see the older man bury his face in his hands as if hiding something painful or shameful, as if he had finally understood why an empty cafeteria had been chosen for his confession." When the manager appears at the home of the dead woman's landlord, the door is answered by his gaggle of daughters: "We almost fainted. A stranger was there, not even a religious Jew, a big strong man with short hair like our mother's when she takes off her wig before going to bed."

It is hardly surprising that an Israeli writer would be uniquely sensitive to the idea that every story must have at least two sides; and in Yehoshua's previous work the differing perspectives have served as a kind of check on each other, filling in missing details or correcting mistaken impressions. Here, though, the shadow narrators seem to have a different purpose. Appearing sporadically and with the illusion of spontaneity--two such passages will come in quick succession, then thirty pages will go by before we see another--they remind us that no matter where we are or what we are doing, someone else is always watching: the bartender who serves us our drinks, or the woman we pass on the street. Together these voices have the effect of speaking for a collective conscience--and not just of Israel, since they continue throughout the human resources manager's journey, but of all humanity. ("Tell us, you hard people: After desecrating the Holy Land and turning murder and destruction into a way of life, by what right do you now trample on our feelings?" ask the inhabitants of an apartment building where the manager and his entourage--which includes the journalist whose story set all these events in motion, a photographer, and the local consul--have come to pay a visit. "Is it because you and your enemies have learned to kill each other and yourselves with such crazy impunity ... that you think you can leave a coffin, with no explanation or permission, in the courtyard of an apartment building in someone else's country?")

In a collection of literary essays published in English several years ago under the title The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt, Yehoshua lamented the disappearance of the moral perspective from literary criticism, and argued for its reinstatement as one of the essential criteria for evaluating works of literature. As if to illustrate this principle, A Woman in Jerusalem may be the most strictly moral novel he has written. It is centered around one of the primary tenets common across the vast majority of human cultures--"Bury the dead," which is in fact one of the examples that Yehoshua gives in the introduction to his literary essays for his definition of a universal morality. Its plot makes no sense from any other perspective. There is no logic to the manager's obsession with this "engineer who had died as a cleaning woman in someone else's war," no reason that he should choose to personally accompany her coffin on its arduous trek across the steppes. It is simply a question of doing the right thing.

Yehoshua has said that he intended the manager, an "alienated bureaucrat," to gradually surmount his "indifference" in more ways than one: "He takes moral responsibility for the neglect of this woman and falls in love with her even though he never met her." Yehoshua's fiction has long exploited the irrational and sometimes ridiculous things that people--again, mostly men--do in the name of love. In The Lover, the main character first sends away his wife's lover and then spends the remainder of the novel engaging in ever more desperate acts to find him again. But the action of that novel, unconventional though it may be, is justified by the very high level of psychological realism that Yehoshua sustains throughout. Characters may behave in ways that are difficult to believe, but they always obey the essential laws of literary realism, which is the novel's gravitational force.

A Woman in Jerusalem does not always honor those laws; it does not have the same grounding in reality. There are some sketches at rounding out the human resources manager: he is going through a divorce that has left him embittered and insensate, and much is made of the fact that on their single meeting he had been unaffected by the dead woman's beauty. "You live inside yourself like a snail," his secretary tells him. But these gestures are not entirely successful. After all, how much can the reader sympathize with a character who does not even have a name? And to say, as Yehoshua does, that the manager actually "falls in love" with the unknown and unknowable dead woman runs counter to everything that Yehoshua's books have taught about love. Love can take place between unlikely people--an Israeli and an Arab, an older woman and a younger man, a middle-aged man and a teenager (these examples are drawn from a single book!)--but it always has an element of the sensuous, the terrestrial. Love is not the abstract fantasies of a man who cannot remember having laid eyes upon a woman's face.

"The love of beauty must remain open-ended," the journalist tells the manager during a late-night philosophical discussion. "Its extremes can drive a man to the most shameless acts." Yet the act in the name of love that we see in this novel--and we may indeed call it love, in the sense of love for one's fellow human--is the very opposite of shameless. It is precisely when the novel moves its furthest from realism that this part of the story reaches its culmination. En route to the village that is their final destination, the group accompanying the woman's coffin decides to stop for a visit at an underground military base that was once a nuclear installation and is now a tourist site. While they are there, the manager, possessed by the lingering effects of a strange dream, wanders off to a peasant market and drinks a cup of a vile brew. (The reader learns from the chorus of local observers that the woman selling it was not right in the head, but unfortunately the manager misunderstood their warnings.) He falls violently ill with food poisoning and spends the following day and night on a hospital ward in the depths of the bunker.

The symbolic connotations of the manager's descent underground and the physical purging that takes place there are obvious; and he emerges reborn, ready to fulfill what remains of his mission. "I am not a courier who comes and goes," he tells the amazed inhabitants of the village that is the coffin's final destination. "I am a human resources manager whose duty it is to remain with you until the last clod of earth has fallen on this woman's grave. Only then will I return to my city, which exists for me as a bitter reality alone."

Even in his most explicitly psychological fictions, Yehoshua has been happy to stretch the boundaries of realism in order to make a point or to startle the reader. (Hence that swooning nun in The Liberated Bride.) His exploitation of the twilit areas of the human consciousness has always challenged the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. But his sometimes wild inventiveness is at bottom an affirmation of realism. He is a realist who can be magical, but he is not a magical realist. And a parable, which is what A Woman in Jerusalem is, need not appease our skepticism about every particular detail in order to work its peculiar and powerful effect. Yehoshua's moral fable combines the amusements of imagination with the responsibilities of conscience. If love here turns out to be the ultimate moral expression, it is evidence that the sleep of reason does not produce only monsters.

(Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic.)