It is difficult to say what Noa Shaharbani Sadan's first book, "Golem," is about.
On the face of it, he tells the story of Hagar, an educational counselor at a high school who has just separated from her husband, and amid the upheaval in her life, she continues to decipher the figure of a schoolgirl, Inbar, who committed suicide by jumping from the roof of a building in Jerusalem.
But the book did not stick to this plot axis - it deviates from it to youthful memories and inner and side life experiences, and many of the questions it asks remain unresolved.
"I think I was trying to create a search experience," says Rabbi Sadan in an interview.
"The question itself is significant, it's what produces an act of inquiry. There are books written about 'X', but then I do not feel like reading them, I will read an article. Natalia Ginzburg writes in her book 'Valentino': 'You get another look at someone's life "Nuances that make up a whole picture." For example, Michal Ben Naftali, who read "Golem," pointed to the anomalies - also physical - as a central element in the book.
Or even detachment. Because the two main characters, Hagar and Amber, are thrown out of a shielded system. So maybe this is how the book should be framed, as a book that seeks to be torn out of context and framed?
"If you write like that no one will read it! People are just looking for 'what is it about?'. I was told to go through the bookstores and say what the book is about, and it's hard. Writing the back of the book was hard too. Framing is hard for me, probably as a human being." .
We live in a very impatient time, with a low frustration threshold, and it is very difficult in a time like this to put out a book without clear framing.
"I agree it's a book I'm looking for, but I think it's possible to connect to the plot as well. It's also has a detective dimension, with Hagar as the amateur, unskilled detective. The search for Inbar's cause of death is actually negative, because I think its".
The name of the book is also very enigmatic. Why "golem"?
"During a visit to Jerusalem, I saw two dogs playing, which went between closeness and violence," says Rabbi Sadan. "I wrote about it" - and apologizing for being more comfortable with writing than talking, she finds the break and reads to me from the book: "How fast the moment between the pleasure of the game and the pain. She knew how to sniff and rub, to make a secret noise that a person could not hear, only they. "But how do you know, and she would say, 'You know I'm not exactly a girl, I'm like a pupa of something. I do not yet know what."
So can we say that the book is a pupa who is not looking to become a butterfly, who wants to stay in this intermediate stage?
"Exactly. To stay in the hybrid place of 'before the opening'. Usually, for example in a romantic novel, falling in love is supposed to produce some opening, but when an immigrant falls in love she stays the same pupa. A pupa that has become a butterfly is a Cinderella story, but it does not really happen here. The same solid materials of who we are. "
A drip that erupted a rock
Rabban Sadan, who currently works as a library director at Mazkeret Batya, previously worked as an educational consultant in schools and as a teenager she studied at an art school in Jerusalem, as described in the book.
But the book is far from the reality of her life.
"There is no autobiographical truth there," she says.
"Hagar is divorced, I'm married. I'm a person who stays away from confrontations, terribly pissed off, and the book has something difficult. There's a lot of loneliness in the relationship between Hagar and Inbar and their mothers, and a lot of love that fails to reach those who need it. My day.
"Supposedly I am the most socially adapted person possible, but there is a layer of existence that is not mine to the end, and writing was a place that is mine. I would liken the writing process to a kind of thin drip, which eventually erupted some rock that was there. I have something to say. Suddenly I realized that there is a world and its fullness within me, that I can create a whole world. While writing I felt a bit like the ugly duckling, as if suddenly there is a place for my things and I manage to express myself better.
"I took all sorts of things related to my life and played with them - I let the immigrant have the profession that was mine and I broke up with it, I allowed the immigrant to break up with a partner and start over - and it helped me look at myself, my life. I gave my characters bold lines - they touch life and death intensely, do not stay aside. Aviv Gadge, quoted at the beginning of the book, says: 'Speak loudly when you speak the truth'. "And between my family's pride in the book I published and the fact that the book is not easy to digest. I did not write a cute romantic novel. There is a lot of anxiety in the book, it is written without air sometimes."
To observe the place of the dead
What attracted you to the suicide case of a girl from Beit Tov in Jerusalem?
"I was looking for a plot that is a platform for bigger questions that preoccupied me. In all the plots in the book the issue of connection arises, there is a longing for the main characters to be swallowed up in someone else's life, and on the other hand there is a fear of being swallowed. "From the parents' house. The writing allowed me, married with three children, to come out of my protective shell. I think that's what happened to immigrate. She is not close to herself. When asked about her youth she does not know, she does not understand. But somewhere she does understand."
Where does she understand? In the body?
"Probably. I was very interested in the physical experience of things. Her pursuit of Amber - she understands that there is something for her, that she needs to solve something there. There is something in the fact that Amber died that makes her a great source of projection. "It would have been possible. And that is also Hagar's observation of her own dead places, of her youth."
How do you write a character like that, who is so inaccessible to herself?
"I'm often a person who is inaccessible, and only after years do I understand what happened. But in writing I am more accessible to myself, through the characters I write. I understand things that happen to them. Characters who are very accessible are not interesting to me. I'm interested in gaps, non-places "Aware, when you do something and then ask, 'What did I do?'
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