When I ask Maya Weksler what led her to write her debut book, "Amnesty," about a supposedly normative woman who finds herself in prison, she tells me about a variety of supposedly normative experiences – motherhood, loneliness, financial distress – that led her to identify with her heroine, a Modi'in resident and mother of three, who was sentenced to 15 years behind bars.
The book began to take shape for Weksler in the years when two of her three children were diagnosed on the spectrum. "At the time, no one around us had children with special needs. I felt very alone with this experience. From the outside, all children look the same, but parenting children with special needs is very different, and it's impossible to explain to those who don't experience it to what extent."
These were days full of diagnoses and treatments, but what brought Weksler together with the thread that led her to write "Pardon" was actually one moment of silence. It happened when she was riding in the car, alone for a change. "I wasn't with any kids in the car, and no one asked me a million questions and I could hear myself thinking." On the radio, someone told of an acting workshop she gave in prison, and when asked about the prison, she said: "The conjugal rooms in Neve Tirza are empty."
This sentence resonated in Weksler's mind. "What does it mean that the conjugal rooms are empty? This means that no one comes, that the prisoners have no spouses. That moment was like a gong to me. Then I went to find out and found out that it was really true, because as soon as a woman goes to prison, her family falls apart. If the man goes to prison, his wife will usually continue to keep the house and children and come to visit, the family will not fall apart. But when the woman is imprisoned, her husband divorces her immediately, remarries, and her children, if they were still at home, are sent to frameworks and foster families."
That sentence told you loneliness.
"Loneliness, remoteness, marginality. These women are no longer a factor in the world."
And it was the loneliness that connected you to the prison experience?
"Not just the loneliness. Diagnosing a child with special needs is like a bomb that explodes slowly; At first it is very difficult to understand what the consequences are. I had no freedom of action. For example, no one wanted to be a babysitter at my house. Once I invited someone who was highly recommended to me, and then the big one enters Tantrum, the middle one runs to the road, and the little one somehow managed to break free from the cart and crawled at top speed to the horizon. The babysitter did not return. It was always me or my partner. I still haven't found a babysitter, and my eldest is soon enlisting."
Are you actually saying that motherhood was a kind of prison for you?
"Yes, but only that won't be the headline!" she laughs. "Obviously, once you have a baby, any baby, you're not free anymore. Mothers of young children are in constant distress unless they have lots of help or a robust support system. When you have normal children it usually normalizes after a few years, but with us it has only become more complex. At ages 3 to 5, when normal kids can be more independent, my son would run away all the time, digging for hours on tractor wheels or turning the lights on and off constantly."
Book a supposedly normative woman who finds herself in prison, photo: (illustration): Efrat Eshel
Not living for the self-employed
The difficulties and anxieties of the diagnosis period were joined by a major economic crisis. Before the diagnoses, Weksler and her partner were freelancers: she worked as an animator, who won awards (including for her film "Stars"), while he worked in renovations. But shortly after the middle child was diagnosed, they both realized that they could no longer work as self-employed. "Those who are self-employed must be dedicated to their business, initiate and invest. And when your main job is to be a parent of a child with special needs, two in our case, and in fact the third was not in the best emotional state at the time of the diagnosis – you can't be available for your business, and we quickly reached a serious financial hole."
During this chaotic period, she turned to writing – at first not creative writing, but writing in an online forum. "It was an 'orange' period, and I started looking for myself on forums. I came to a forum to support women after childbirth, where women talked about themselves and not about their children. I remember my first message there, after my son was diagnosed, which was very anguished. I wrote that everything was falling apart, and I got a lot of responses. Someone wrote to me that her son had also been diagnosed, 'You'll see, you and your family will still know happiness,' and I copied her message onto a note and saved it. Somehow there were many mothers of children with 'letters' on this forum – ADHD, ASD, PDD, etc. – that I could consult at any time. This forum accompanied me like a beacon. It gave me the feeling that I wasn't alone."
But the forum gave her more than support and participation – the women there gave her real help. "When you're worried and anxious about your financial situation, your whole cognition is negatively affected. It's like a cloud following you everywhere. Your IQ goes down. One day, for example, I went with the dog and child in a stroller to the supermarket. I tied up the dog, bought what I bought, went back with the child and the shopping, and forgot about the dog. A few hours later, they located me through the chip. When I told this on the forum, there were women who really scolded me, but one of them wrote to me that she understood my heart and gave me a gift - 8 hours with a woman who gives administrative classes, to help me bring some order into my life. This woman, I'll find out later, was ultra-Orthodox."
Today on Facebook such a meeting would not have happened.
"Nope. Today, as soon as you see the picture of the woman in front of you, you know in advance what her opinions are, you know what she thinks. But there, because they were all writing nicknames, you couldn't tell who was on the other side. I wouldn't have thought that she, the ultra-Orthodox, would see my difficulty, but my life was much closer to hers than to that of a secular woman who lives in a nice house and has two children, and she doesn't ask herself where the money for rent will come from next month. At the forum, I met women from different worlds than mine, and we had a very strong human connection. It was a life-changing experience for me. I had faith that I was a liberal and free person, and I had no idea how limited and influenced my thinking was by external things."
Did you meet with them?
"Yes. When we met, I saw women very different from me, but it didn't matter anymore, it was too late, we were already friends. Today it's a real community. When my father passed away this year in October, they came to visit me at shiva from all corners. In the meantime, we went from Orange to Facebook, to a secret group of about 160 women. The book launch party was held at the home of a religious woman from the Forum."
Amnesty. Book cover,
It was precisely during that time, at the height of economic and emotional stress, when she was also caring for a six-month-old baby who would later also be diagnosed on the spectrum, that she embarked on her first writing workshop in Tel Aviv, perhaps also because of the pleasure she derived from writing in the forum and the reinforcement she received for her articulation ability. "Going to a writing workshop didn't work out with anything in the home setup, but I informed my partner that this is what I would do one night a week, because that's what it has to be. I knew that if I didn't write I would probably die, so I better not die. It was a rescue. I remember reading a passage in the workshop and there was silence, and in the midst of that silence I said to myself: Here, this is the thing, I found it."
In the prisoner's head
Now that her children are grown – now 16, 13 and 10 – and she works as an employee, a surveyor for the Central Bureau of Statistics, Weksler can devote most of her resources to writing. Three times a week and on Fridays, she shows up at the National Library as soon as the gates open, sits at her regular table, and writes. Working at the National Library not only offers her peace, but also a wealth of reference books and research papers that opened a window to the only women's prison in Israel that she was not allowed to visit (only invitees or professionals are allowed to visit the prison).
In one of the books, she came across the list of supplies the prisoner receives upon entering prison, and the daily allowance of one teaspoon of coffee and two teaspoons of sugar. "When I read this list, I immediately understood how relationships in prison are built around perpetual scarcity – 'If I don't have any, I'll take by force.' It's just a list of equipment, but it tells us how little there is for someone who goes to prison without a support system – without her family sending her money for the canteen from outside, for example."
She read IPS reports, reports by Knesset members, and non-fiction books describing the difficult situation of Israel's only women's prison, such as "Women's Prison: The Backyard of Israeli Society" by Gila Chen and Tomer Einat (Resling). "The National Library is a treasure. It became a second home for me. My life was so chaotic and complex that one of the things that helped me cope was building a writing routine. The fact that I sat in the same place every day and gathered the same books around me helped me complete this work."
"When a woman goes to prison, her family falls apart. If the man goes to jail, his wife will usually keep the house and children and come to visit. But when the woman is imprisoned, her husband divorces her immediately, remarries, and her children are sent to frameworks and foster families."
Unable to visit the prison and talk to female prisoners, she learned about prison life and language from research papers, such as Keren Dagan-Moshe's master's thesis from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Haifa, "The Language of the Prisoners in Israel" (2017), in which raw monologues by female prisoners were presented for their linguistic analysis. "This work presents the words of the prisoners as they are. When I approached her, she told me that she couldn't give me the tapes themselves, because they were confidential, but the written monologues gave me enough material to get into the prisoners' heads and understand their plight of existence."
In your book, prison is where the heroine eventually recovers.
"When she arrives at prison, she must participate in a therapy group and is forced to face her inner demons for the first time in her life. Although she was a very functional woman, she did not give emotional space to her complex experiences, and this ultimately led her to the extreme step that drives the story. In any case, I wouldn't recommend prison as a vacation destination for introspection. The reality of women's prison in Israel is far from healthy. While men have dozens of prisons with varying conditions, including a religious wing and white collar, women have one prison, which has not been renovated since the 60s, is small and crowded, and has maximum security, even though the vast majority of prisoners are nonviolent and there has never been an escape."
"No love between handsome and piece"
Weksler's heroine, Shira Biton, is defined as "a completely ordinary woman from Modiin" who one day finds herself in prison. But Weksler's heroine is by no means an ordinary woman. She is a cocoon of rage. Beneath her functional veil are bubbling the difficult feelings she does not pay attention to, pushing her to take the law into her own hands and take the life of the person who murders her son.
The event that starts the plot is taken from a story that really happened. "At the age of three, shortly after he was diagnosed, my son entered a communication kindergarten that was far from home and we got to him by bus. At the time, I didn't know that transportation was hell, and the escorts change all the time. That day his escort, who was great, was probably on vacation and didn't call us to come down to pick him up. No one called in her place. Our house isn't adjacent to the road, it's in a thicket of Jerusalem courtyards, on the third floor. Suddenly, the door opens and the three-year-old enters the apartment. The driver dropped him off on the street and drove off."
Out of this event, countless "what if" threads began to run through Weksler's head. What if her son couldn't find the way, and what if the shuttle dropped him off the wrong street? There is no shortage of nightmares that did take place on the bus: children who waited for transportation for hours, a child who was forgotten in the shuttle car, etc. "When the children were very young, I was scared of what would happen if someone kidnapped them. I thought, what if someone kidnaps the middle son, because he's very cute, and then gets mad at him, because he can be annoyed, and doesn't understand how to behave with him... I really remember the circle of thought."
"The reality of women's prison in Israel is far from healthy. While men have dozens of prisons, women have one crowded prison, with maximum security, even though the vast majority of prisoners are nonviolent and have never escaped."
These "what if" thoughts found their way into the book, which begins when Shira Biton's eldest son gets off the bus on the wrong street and is murdered. "I thought, what could have made me go to jail? Only if someone did something to my children. Many told me, 'Everyone would react like Shira Bitton if someone hurt his child.' But basically no one does that. It's a fantasy of revenge that many people are preoccupied with, but a normative person will never realize. He will be furious, he will eat himself, but he will not take life. Many people are outraged when people hurt others and go unpunished. They murder, rape, and go unpunished. This helplessness, the feeling that there is no response from the authorities, from the state as the parent of all of us, is terrible. But to do such an extreme act, she couldn't be an ordinary person. In order to imagine a woman realizing this impulse, I needed literature."
What makes her such an extreme figure?
"I consulted with a friend of mine who works in mental health and asked her what could lead a woman to react this way. She told me: Either the parents aren't there, or there's another experience of first needs deprivation. Shira Biton grew up in a very disturbed environment, and that's the only way to understand her. She tries to fix things, but in the wrong way. Only with the treatment she goes through in prison does the reason she built those walls begin to crumble."
Therefore, with all of Weksler's preoccupation with loneliness, "Amnesty" is ultimately about successfully dealing with demons from the past, which relies, among other things, on a strong relationship that survives all the difficult crises. The entire book is written in a couple format - a chapter in the heroine's voice and a chapter in her husband's voice, alternately.
"Many say that the vast majority of couples who are parents of children with special needs divorce. The problem is that it doesn't solve anything, because the kids aren't going anywhere. On the other hand, when you manage to take joint responsibility and go to all the treatments together, a rare connection is created. I felt that there was a lot of talk about relationships that crumble after the children are diagnosed with special needs, but the relationship can also be what holds."
So it's also a book about love?
"About love that holds. Not romantic love, not falling in love at first, but a relationship that is not destroyed even though each partner has very obvious weaknesses. It's a love that exists not between the handsome and the handsome, but within the bourgeoisie and in the midst of the crisis."
Maya Weksler, "Hanina", Kinneret Zamora, 540 pages
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