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A bird in the snow: Haim Beer redeems his father in his book "Shadow of his hand"

How touching is Haim Beer's desire and effort in the "shadow of his hand" to dress the dead father in holiday clothes.

Resurrect his character and go on a tour with him with counts, kings, lords, celebrities, painters and writers back and forth

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• Haim Beer

Udi Ben Saadia

Monday, 30 August 2021, 00:28

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About what could have been.

Haim Beer (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Towards the end of the excellent TV show "Meeting", which aired almost two years ago on Channel 11 here, the writer Haim Beer told interviewer Roni Koben a very cruel story and at the same time also heartbreaking: when he was ten, his father Avraham Rachlevsky (as is well known, one of the commentaries , He is the son of Avraham Rachlevsky) traveled with Haim and his class on an annual trip to the Galilee as an accompanying parent, and in the evening they are with us at a Fourier hostel. His father had no place to sleep, so he slept with the children who, as usual, made noise and did various and strange antics, until in the middle of the night Haim's father got up and stood in front of them with white hats, with the whole "shop" open, and began to scold them with a strange mixture of Yiddish and stuttering Hebrew.

This shameful class pursued Haim Beer for years, both when he left Jerusalem and moved to Ramat Gan, his current city of residence, and also when he became a prominent and well-known figure in the literary community.

And if he has somehow been forgotten and dissolved and almost disappeared and faded or let go of his grip from the back of the memory, comes Chaim's good friend ("Tov" with a big question mark), the late journalist Amnon Dankner, and a kind of "Yehuda Ish Karyot" gesture (not for the first time I remember

(I did not ask Haim) that maybe at this moment Haim had the idea to write a book about his late father, almost sixty years after the father's death. Of the mother, who was fifteen years younger than his father, and lost her two young daughters before her marriage to Avraham Rachlevsky, has already been extensively recounted in the wonderful book "Ropes" published in the mid-1990s, and here it is time to redeem, in quotation marks or not, the father figure.

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The words have a restorative status.

Cover of "Shadow of His Hand" by Haim Beer (Photo: Am Oved)

Redeem through words. To redeem through the imagination, because the writer is probably faithful to the words of Aristotle, author of "Poetics", at the beginning of the ninth chapter in Beer's new book, "Shadow of His Hand": unlike the historian, the poet does not write about what was, but about what could have been. That is, there is a place where words have a restorative status. cure. Meha. The words can add to what was in reality what might have happened. Attach a magnificent tail to a bird that has previously cruelly and heartlessly plucked all its feathers.

How touching is the desire and effort to dress the dead father in holiday clothes. Resurrect his character, at least between the pages of the book, and go on a tour with him with counts and kings and gentlemen and celebrities and painters and writers back and forth. For as the painter Jacob Steinhardt says in the book: "As long as there is only one person in the world who has in his heart the memory of someone who has died, this man is not yet presumed dead."

I must honestly say that I can of course not be trusted, because I have often heard most of what little I know from Haim himself, but there is no doubt that he marks such a necessary and necessary line as breathable air for Israeli literature: literature as "archeology", that is. A world that has layers upon layers. What comes first and what comes after. "Know who you are standing in front of" etc. Literature that does not draw its source of life only from the here and now.

In recent years, there have been several books published by Beer, in which, as usual, quite a few fascinating historical chapters have been interwoven, with a variety of quotations and stories for the most part.

Haim Beer is what he once called an important literary scholar, "the master of the illusion between the biographical and the fictional."

It must be said honestly, as one of the avid lovers of his writing, that it was not always clear to me what the "emotional engine" that underlies the story, or the "Ariadne thread" that would forge a deep and stable connection between the narrated events and help us get out of the "maze".

It seems to me that here, in this book, is again the same backbone or umbilical cord, which gives all the plots and subplots the sub-plot the required emotional validity, even if sometimes the plot lines are a bit unfounded and require a pause for mistrust.

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This time connected to the umbilical cord.

Haim Beer (Photo: Reuven Castro)

And we will sign with a short story: Once upon a time, years ago, when we lived for a short time in America, we invited Haim to our house to carry things before the members of the local Jewish community. It was a very stormy night. One of the heaviest snowstorms hit the eastern shores of the United States at the time, and we were very afraid that no one would come. And here at the appointed hour more and more people filled the house. Perhaps the shock terrible had befallen us a few months earlier, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv, made people want to hang around together for warmth and feeling of presence of the other, as well as to hear strengthen and captivating from the Israeli writer important.

But life Choose To start with a well-known joke, which was repeated many years later in Roni Koven's program: one bird lies and almost freezes to death in the snow piled up outside.

"I am this bird," said Haim, to the loud laughter of those present, and suddenly there seemed to be something else in this hanger, almost invisible to the eye.

Just at that time, or maybe just a short time later, Haim started writing "Ropes", and it was a kind of imperative for anyone who wants to get serious about this matter of writing - how to turn heartache and scorching memory into a story.

How to take off from the personal and the private to a broader and more comprehensive statement, and especially how not to forget the simple rule: good literature does not exist only in the fringed and heavenly space, but sometimes sucks most of its power and life from the difficult, painful and even shameful classes, which the writer insists on To resurrection.

"Shadow of His Hand" / Haim Beer.

Publishing with an employee.

317 pages.

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