Young Israeli authors are creating a stir of late, calling a great deal of positive attention to themselves and to their imaginative works.
Last month, JTA published a story about “seven acclaimed Israeli expatriate writers” who are establishing themselves as talented literary figures. Some months before the JTA story, Forward literary writer Beth Kisileff wrote a story that was titled, rather emphatically, “Eight New Israeli Writers You Need To Read Right Now.”
Like Israeli society in general, many young Israeli writers give a place of high honour to fearlessness in seeking and recounting truth, as they see it. And, in pursuit of that truth, they often assiduously dissect the core stories of the founding of the country as taught to them by the older generations.
Although she was not included in either of the above feature stories, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is among the new generation of authors being lauded by Israeli critics. Gundar-Goshen is an award-winning author who has written or co-written several screenplays and TV series. At the age of 33, she is an experienced writer with a diverse writing corpus to her credit.
One Night, Markovitch is Gundar-Goshen’s first novel. It was well received and widely acclaimed in Israel as a stirring, richly depicted literary achievement for which the young author received the Sapir Prize for Debut Fiction. Panoramic in scope, bold in its telling, One Night, Markovitch is an epic tale of the founding of the State of Israel. It begins prior to the creation of the Jewish state, during World War II, when the Jews of Mandatory Palestine were trying to build a new society even as they were offering their assistance to defeat the Nazis in Europe. The story ends sometime after the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
But a novelist in the pursuit of truth will likely tread a different path than, say, a historian. Thus, while the sweep of the novel is commendably wide, covering the full expanse of key epochal events in the rise of the fledgling state, Gundar-Goshen introduces us to literary characters, each of whom is deeply flawed, in some cases even psychopathic, or just plain lacking the fundamentals of conventional, normal behaviour.
The core of the plot is based upon the effort during World War II to rescue Jewish women from Nazi Europe by arranging marriages for them and bringing them to Mandatory Palestine as wives of men already resident there. Once the “couple” arrived in Palestine, the arranged marriage would be summarily dissolved by the rabbinate.
But one of the new instant husbands, Yaacov Markovitch, is so captivated by his “wife’s” overwhelming beauty that he rejects his role as faux husband and refuses to grant her a divorce. He clings to the chimeral hope that he and the beautiful Bella Zeigerman will one day transform into a truly loving couple. But she is abject in her complete rejection of Markovitch. She is cold, unfeeling and constantly cross with him. Marcovitch sleeps alone on the sofa clinging to Bella’s nightgown but never to her.
The myriad consequences of Marcovitch’s reversal of course – his “sin” as it is sometimes called – resound throughout the book and hammer away at the tarnished, bent metal of the story until the very end.
Marcovitch’s attachment to the feeble, frail hope of requited love is likely more than a description of the man’s most compelling character trait. It probably stands as a metaphor by Gundar-Goshen for a far more significant relationship: that of the modern Jewish People to the modern Land of Israel. She implies this relationship in an exchange between Marcovitch and his best friend, Ze’ev Feinberg. In most every way, the two men are opposites. But their friendship is true and long lasting, tested by dire circumstance. Thus, the question is legitimate: does their conversation represent more than a rebuke between friends?
“Going to bed with a nightdress and hoping you’ll wake up with a woman in it? You must have fallen on your head. It’ll never happen, not in a year, not in 20.”
“So in another 30, or 40. You know what, Feinberg, maybe never. But I hope, and that’s something too. And maybe if I hope enough, if I hope really hard, that hope will turn into something real. Look at us. Look at this country. Two thousand years we’ve been hoping for her, waiting for her, sleeping at night with our arms around the sleeves of her nightdress, because what is history if not the sleeves of a nightdress that has no smell? And you think she wants us? You think this country returns our love? Nonsense! She vomits us up time and time again, sends us to hell, beats us down without mercy. With the Romans and the Greeks and the Arabs and the mosquitoes. So you think that someone here says, ‘If she doesn’t want me, I should go?’ Someone here says, ‘There’s no point in holding a country by force if she’s been trying to get rid of you from the minute you came to her?’ No. You hold on to her as hard as you can and you hope. You hope that maybe she’ll finally look around and see you and say – that one. That’s the one I want.”
The answer to the above question, therefore, is: yes. Most definitely.
Gundar-Goshen is too sophisticated a writer, especially with the word “hope” – Israel’s national anthem – reverberating in the air like a stuck metronome, to be so unsubtle about her intention for the grand theme of the story.
Readers will require patience. The writing is complex. The atmosphere is bleak. And the characters are challenging.
