"Home in Portugal" by Yigal Sarna ends with two of the most beautiful words I have read recently

It's been a long time since a book has arrived that evokes two such sharp and contrasting feelings.

On the one hand, delighting in the detailed and fascinating description of the people the narrator meets, and on the other hand, the text is mostly "tourist", caresses the face of reality and is not really written from it, making it dichotomous

Udi Ben Saadia

02/09/2022

Friday, September 02, 2022, 01:35

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A clear and beautiful love song.

Cover of "Home in Portugal" (Photo: Pardes)

Let's start from the end: "Home in Portugal", the new book by the writer and journalist Yigal Sarna, ends with two of the most beautiful words I have read recently, and at the same time two extremely painful words, at least for me: "I am in my place", he writes, after a long and winding journey, riddled with crises and insists on building his new home in northwest Portugal, near the border with Spain and not far from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

In the English version of the book ("The Stranger's Homecoming") whose summary I read on Amazon, it seemed to me that I recognized a man moving between two homelands, but here, in the Hebrew version, it seems to me that there is only a love song, clear and very beautiful, to one homeland - Portugal.

I admit that it has been a long time since I read a book that evoked in me two such sharp and contrasting feelings.

On the one hand, delight in the detailed description full of fascination with the people he meets, and on the other hand, some sense of resistance, the roots of which I will try to explain in more detail later.

Yigal Sarna's story is more or less familiar to anyone who has read newspapers here in recent years: about five years ago, he got into a high-profile legal dispute with the former Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, a dispute that resulted in him being fired, among other things, from his many years of work as a journalist at Yedioth Ahronoth.

Sarna, who served during the Yom Kippur War as a tank commander in the Golan Heights sector, left the country by choice and established his residence in northern Portugal, a kind of "leave your country and your homeland" only in the opposite direction - to the place from which his parents came 77 years ago, immediately after the end of World War the second.

That's why the thoughts about the book probably go far beyond one or another literary value, but to a large extent they force the reader to come back and confront the fundamental views concerning the very life here.

As someone who quite religiously follows Serena's activity on the social network, for example, I allow myself to state with a high degree of confidence that although he has built a beautiful home for himself in the Alto Mino region, but to paraphrase Yehuda Halevi's well-known song - his home is in the West and his heart is still deeply immersed in the East.

Almost every morning, and sometimes even several times a day, he pours fire and brimstone on everything that happens here, meaning that the political and social reality in Israel still continues to burn in his bones.

It seems that even from there, a few hours' flight away, he did not give up on the hope of fundamentally changing things here and returning the country and the country to the best and right path in his eyes.

But this book is, as mentioned, about Portugal.

Serna is a very curious man who does not let go of any detail, starting with what happened in Portugal during the reign of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who ruled Portugal for thirty years, through unforgettable lines about the poet Pessoa and ending with the life history of Marilia, the young woman who lived in his house He and his current partner have settled.

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To the full article

He leaves no detail out of his hands.

Yigal Sarna (Photo: Orit Mord)

If there is anything truly vital, it is Serena's curiosity and love of life.

Together with his new partner he wanders through abandoned houses, empty palaces, dark cellars.

I eat fruits that grow wild.

Day after day he gets used to his new home, adapts it to his measurements.

Peeling off walls, exposing ancient stone, moving objects, adding a stove, carpet.

A chair by the stove.

The eyes of the neighbors fill him with love and the new house protects him.

And in the beautiful lines that he patiently piles on the page, the downside of the book emerges to some extent - this text is mostly "tourist", meaning that most of the time it caresses the surface of reality and is not really written from it.

It seems to me that Serena would be the first to admit that the inquisitive eyes of the lover with which this rich and beautiful book was written are also afflicted with a well-known type of blindness.

And from here to the Israeli point - it seems that this book expresses to a large extent, also according to the reactions it receives on the social network, a kind of despair about life here in Israel.

For me, as someone who is only a few years younger than Sarna, this is very sad news.

A little more than two months ago, the writer AB Yehoshua passed away, who in many respects, to put it somewhat crudely, was the high priest of Zionism in the innocent and primary sense, and of the concept of exile as an immanent blue within Jewish existence.

It seems that with his departure another one of the guardians of the walls who were somehow summoned to defend this line of thought left us.

More and more people, at least from the social circle that surrounds my peers, express a deep sense of alienation to everything that grew here, and therefore also develop a kind of great, almost unrestrained fascination with other landscapes, such as those that appear in this book.

And on another level: exactly forty years ago, director Danny Waxman's excellent film "Khamsin" was released, which deals, among other things, with the strained relations between Arabs and Jews and the persistent struggle for land expropriation in the Galilee.

The film ends with a terrible and violent event, really bloody, yet the director Danny Waxman makes sure to end with a sort of "whip" that is a little more optimistic - rain falls over the field where the violent event took place, and a tiny tree grows where the blood was spilled.

To express myself in a somewhat crude and simplistic way, I would say that for Serena the reality is sometimes simple: a good name and a bad mouth.

It is true that this description is not a little against the nature of the book, which as mentioned has a really fascinating exploration of landscapes and other people, but I admit that throughout the reading I could not really free myself from this oppressive feeling.

And beyond one literary analysis or another, it seems that we really need Serena's compassionate gaze here, like the rain at the end of the movie "Khamsin".

A forgiving and soft look, which will also pave a tunnel of hope.

Who knows - maybe in the next book.

"House in Portugal" / Yigal Serna.

Pardes Publishing.

292 pages.

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