"A body from which the filler was taken, you will say later. As if they took from me the Dina I was. I was no longer a woman or a girl. I was something between a man and an animal. In a very great closeness. Dina who knew wanted to caress Dina she did not know. Hug her. (P. 208).
This is Dina and Joel's wedding day.
Outside the house in the village, where Joel's father and twin brother live, the guests are already waiting - including Menachem, Dina's stepfather, and Shaul, a former lover.
But Dina is lying on the couch at home, emptied, barely conscious.
Despite the pleas of Joel and his relatives, she refuses to go out to the guests, to show that everything is fine.
A terrible thing is done to her, but the question of what exactly, and by whom, is just as vague as Dina's consciousness.
After her book "Tomorrow we will go to the amusement park", which won the Sapphire Prize and dealt with the muted aspects of the mothering experience, in her new book Ilana Bernstein dives again into the heart of darkness.
The focus this time is on sexual assault, and specifically sexual assault within the family setting.
As in her previous book, here too the protagonist is a marginalized woman, devoid of protection or support systems: Dina is 19 years old, orphaned by father and mother, without a matriculation certificate and may even suffer from a slight mental retardation (the last question remains vague - Dina's voice From her years, and sometimes wise and poignant).
Joel, more than a decade older than her, seems to have chosen her precisely because of this vulnerability: he was looking for a mother for his children and a wife he could control.
Gradually, in leaps and bounds in time, Dina's past and her relationship with Joel are revealed, which can also be seen as a long line of warning signs: the different ways Joel belittles and dismisses her, his impatience and lack of appreciation for her, the forceful way he understands the world and His place within him.
Joel is a complex character in his own way, but seemingly without any positive traits: even Nathan, his drunken and rude brother whose sanity is in doubt, evokes more sympathy.
Shaul and Menachem, on the other hand, represent a completely different kind of masculinity - but one that, in the end, does not have enough power to save Dina from the reality she finds herself in.
The place of occurrence is simply called "the village": unnamed, without geographical association (thin clues indicate that it was probably a moshav in the Jezreel Valley).
Contrary to Dina's dreams of the nobility of the village and its inhabitants, the descendants of the swamp dryers, it is a crumbling, degenerate place, sunk under a blanket of dust and financial debts.
Joel left the village for the benefit of the city, leaving behind his father and brother.
Their home, like the village as a whole, has stood on the brink between the wild and the culture, since the death of the mother of the family.
"This border is completely blurred and often crossed. Efforts to domesticate the savage, to subdue it, have failed" (p. 178).
Family members understand their masculinity as animalistic and act accordingly.
In this dark legend, the wolves are not in the forest but rather in the heart of the house.
"The Wrath of Tammuz" is not a simple book to read, in more than one sense.
The events are described in detail, and cause the reader a disorientation that is on the verge of vertigo.
The book is full of jumps as they orbit around the main event, approaching in a kind of spiral but never really reaching its heart.
This narrative technique reflects Dina's own condition, the trauma and dissociation she experiences.
Like the form, the content deals with the struggle over the narrative, the question of what happened: "[Joel and his family] are the ones who chose what to tell, they are the ones who arranged the events across the sequence, and they are the ones who connected them. "(P. 17).
In this sense, the dismantled story not only reflects the mindset of the protagonist but also constitutes an act of rebellion against the attackers, those who seek to hear not only Dina but also her story.
The book is replete with biblical allusions: Dina's rape is an almost self-evident association, but here there are no relatives to redeem her and use violence in her name.
The relationship between Joel and his twin Nathan is sometimes reminiscent of the one between Jacob and Esau, and in the indifferent violence that takes place in the heart of the house, echoes of a mistress's story on the hill are also felt - here too in reverse, since the guests are the indifferent spectators.
Above all these hovers Tammuz, which gives its name to the book: Apart from the summer month, there is also a hint here of the pagan deity representing an earlier, wilder and more violent law.
There may also be a political allusion to the name, a reference to the land's previous occupants who refuse to let go of it: "It's like surgery for a heart transplant," says Menachem, Dina's father, about the difficulties the economy ran into, "the land rejects the transplant" (p. 21).
In the style Bernstein uses - short sentences, sensory descriptions, the melody of a fairy tale - there is something almost magical: "At the end of the earth the sun tends. Cold slowly clings to the dying day. In the valley of the swamp and fever. The story of their lives. They spent their past hoping for a better future. A future that did not come. And so did Dina "(p. 37).
In contrast to this style, the choice to insert paragraphs here and there in a completely different voice stands out, giving dry data on biological, legal and other aspects of sexual assault, for example: At most, rape is considered a tort "(p. 106).
Perhaps the goal is to illuminate the general element of Dina's personal story, perhaps even to give the support of an authoritative voice to a character who does not know how to speak for herself;
But not only do these passages break the charm of the story, but they do the opposite of what they were intended for:
The plot is delivered in a circular rather than a linear fashion, and accordingly the book ends almost at the point where it began.
Occasionally, however, passages flicker that burst through this vicious circle, hinting at Dina's exit from the nightmare she's been in.
As befits a message that the same story tries to convey, alongside the pain there is also hope - if not for correction or a happy ending, at least for freedom.
And maybe, at times, that's all there is to it.
Ilana Bernstein / The Wrath of Tammuz, Kinneret Zmora Dvir, 224 pages
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