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Tzruya's new: A sweeping and exploding family affair of meanings Israel today

2021-10-14T07:57:57.236Z


An encounter between two women is at the center of Tzruya's novel Tzruya Shalev is a writer of affinities, parallels and reflections, whose previous books, including "Love Life", "Husband and Wife", "Thara" and "Pain", are immersed in an intricate web of repetitive and reflective patterns that create wonderfully aesthetic kaleidoscopic arrays. In her new book, Marvel, this kaleidoscopic design culminates, but at the same time, the new book also includes a reluct


Tzruya Shalev is a writer of affinities, parallels and reflections, whose previous books, including "Love Life", "Husband and Wife", "Thara" and "Pain", are immersed in an intricate web of repetitive and reflective patterns that create wonderfully aesthetic kaleidoscopic arrays.

In her new book, Marvel, this kaleidoscopic design culminates, but at the same time, the new book also includes a reluctant look at this doubling mechanism of meanings, and at the end of the book there is already hope for liberation from its excesses - for relaxation, for forgetfulness, Things.

Two characters are at the center of the novel, Rachel and Atara.

At first they both seem very different, almost polar, but slowly a variety of webs are drawn between them, visible and hidden, some predictable and some surprising, which bind their destinies together.

Rachel, 90, is a former Lehi wife who for one year - at the age of 20 - was married to Menachem, Atara's father, who has since passed away. Now, 70 years after their sudden divorce, Atara, when she is already 50, is trying to track down The same cut-off love affair of her father, which is not entirely clear why it ended, and manages to trace Rachel's footsteps and reach the doorstep of her home.

In the first meeting between them - or rather a non-meeting - which takes place immediately at the opening of the book, the first symmetry between them is also created.

This is because just as Menachem left Rachel unexpectedly, leaving her standing still in front of his closed door, without providing her with an explanation for his departure - his daughter Atara also stands in front of Rachel's closed door, refusing to let her into her house and answer her questions about the love affair between them. , Block versus block.

At first glance, it seems as if these two women, standing in front of the two closed doors, also represent two door-slamming poles of secular Israeli politics, right and left. Because while Rachel, a former underground fighter, lives in Ma'ale Adumim - Atara lives in mixed Haifa, and her best friend is an Arab. But the book does not go in paved political paths, nor does it develop the tension between the characters in clear political terms; He largely follows an apolitical path. What's more, Shalev takes care of blurring early political assumptions about "left" and "right." Thus, for example, she puts in Rachel's mouth the repeated claim more than once that the Lehi members actually hoped to form an alliance with the Arabs, and did not act against them but only against the British, believing - though refuted - that the rivalry with the Arabs would resolve itself once the British left the country.

The apparent contrast created between the two women is also reflected in the structure of the book, whose chapters alternate between the perspectives of Rachel and Atara. But not only is the dichotomous structure largely artificial here - it also reveals an imbalance in the structure of the book, because the parts relating to the life of Atara and her family are infinitely richer and more complex than those dealing with Rachel. But the weakness of the structure pales in comparison to the beauty of Shalev's writing and her talent for describing Atara's failing consciousness as she tries to trace the angers, pains and losses of the past, and how they may re-emerge in present life.

This movement between the need to preserve the past and the need to renew is a principle in the book, and this is also the big question that is asked in it: Should we preserve the past or break free from it, and how? Atara is a conservation architect who earns her living by embodying the characteristics of old buildings within contemporary construction: combining the past with the present, without stopping time completely, on the one hand, but also without completely alienating what was, on the other. Rachel, on the other hand, sometimes looks like a kind of "conservation object" herself, a kind of "mammoth", as she puts it, refusing to adapt to the present, living an ascetic life of a hard-boiled egg for dinner, memorizing the names of the underground members and mourning their deletion, to her sense, From the chronicles of the new Israeliness: "Everything crumbled, dissipated, pushed to the margins of history in insult and not in pride." In other words, Rachel assumes to be their "memory agent", just as Atara is the "memory agent" of the buildings facing demolition and alteration.

But the question of preservation acquires a particularly acute dimension in his because it also concerns the very writing of it. Shalev's text, which is full of reflections and reflections (even in relation to literary texts that in any case strive to redeem reality from pure coincidence to meaning), forces on the details that appear in it a circulation of meanings. It is a text that infuses mechanisms of inheritance, repetition, influence. For example, after Rachel's Haredi son tells Atara the story of Rabbi Nachman of Breslav's "Heart and Spring", fragments of the story will reappear throughout the book not only in the recurring dynamics of longing and longing, but also in the landscape descriptions (the mountain, the aridity), and the drying relationship between Atara and her husband. (And Atara asks herself if "their spring is dry").

In this way, "Wonder" brings his own to a frontal confrontation with the raison d'etre of her writing, as it is also expressed in her previous books: with the desire to connect all possible connections - the repetitive structures and reflections - and give them meaning. In a sense, Shalev writes her book as a literary commentator, trying to interpret all the open connections of the narrative world within the writing. "If we do not discover the connections, we will find ourselves surrounded by details that do not connect with each other," she repeats.


But this mode of writing, of writing as interpretation, leads in "wonder" to a dramatic result.

The literal literary interpretation of words, turns out to be destructive, at least from Atara's point of view, also on the level of the plot.

She brings her crown to the realization of how dangerous the attempt to grasp meanings, to preserve them, as they move between different contexts.

And this insight, which touches the heart of Shalev's literary act, turns this book, beyond being a sweeping and multi-layered family story and plot twists, into an Erspotian book, which deals with questions about the core of its writing. 

Tzruya Shalev / Marvel, Keter Publishing, 275 pages

Source: israelhayom

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