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Feb. 3, 2012
Life in the conditional tense
Pamela Peled’s novel is a love story with geopolitical undertones.
STEPHEN SCHECTER
Pamela Peled, South African-born Israeli author of the novel For the Love of God and Virgins (Miriam’s Legacy Publishing, 2010), will be in Vancouver this month to talk about her book. The novel is a cry from the heart, at once personal and public, part love story, part history lesson, woven out of loneliness and yearning and joy for what Israel is, and was supposed to be, once Jews returned home.
The heroine and narrator, Jennifer Meyer, has taught English at an Israeli school for years. Twenty years earlier, her husband had been shot by terrorists while taking visitors to Israel on a tour of the Sinai. The daughter with whom she was pregnant is now grown up and Jennifer feels something is missing in her life. Outside her house something is also missing – the peace promised by the Oslo Accords. The Second Intifada is raging and the world is anything but sympathetic to Israel. One night, watching television, Jennifer sees a journalist again talking about the cycle of violence and decides she has to go and seek him out to put him straight about things. She does, but what ensues is not at all what she had in mind when setting out. And so begins her love story with David Saunders, a Jewish English journalist, who is covering the Middle East for his London-based news company. He, too, is a widower, having lost his wife in the 9/11 attack.
Jennifer is a worrier; David is not. Jennifer is outraged and anguished by the liberal West’s abandonment of Israel; David keeps telling her it’s complicated. Eventually, they get married. Jennifer resigns from teaching and, once the kids from their blended marriage have adjusted to life in Israel, starts working with her new husband on a book about how events in the Middle East are reported. They are going to call their book Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story. After the first chapter is excerpted in a British Sunday paper, David winds up being kidnapped on assignment in Gaza. For the last third of the book, Jennifer waits, along with the reader, to find out if her husband will return home alive. While she waits, we see again what it is to live in Israel today – to see, feel and understand from the inside.
On one level, this book is a typically modern love story, replete with e-mails whose tempo moves the story along. It arrives unexpectedly. “You think,” the narrator writes, “at forty-six, that your heart has forgotten where your ribs are.” Still, it starts up because not to start is to condemn both writer and reader to inactivity. As it unfolds, we learn about much more than the workings of the human heart. We learn about the biology of human emotions and about the long torturous history of the Jews and England, stitched together by Shakespeare and Edward I, king of England. We learn how language, too, shapes the stories we tell, and how temperament plays its part in determining in what conditional tense one winds up leading one’s life. We learn about the etiquette of jihad warfare and the mindset of progressives in the West, Jews and non-Jews alike, who traffic in moral equivalence, let alone indulge in Israel apartheid slander.
But there is also more. There are evocative and loving descriptions of Jerusalem, where “the stones woke up each dawn,” and details of its history: wry observations about the difference living in Israel makes, where Sunday is not the day of rest, but the first day of the workweek. Observations that extend to the different perspectives of men and women on matters big and small, such as what gets you out of a bath with your lover after your first night together. But also to the overriding difference in this book which haunts the narrator as it haunts the author: the difference between Israel and London, between the Zionist state that arose as living reproof of European antisemitism and the European humanism to which its intellectuals, the author included, are still attached. “I love London,” Jennifer keeps saying, surprised herself at how much she likes it, even as the talk she gives there on behalf of her kidnapped husband degenerates into an anti-Israel hate fest, after which her mother-in-law, weeping, comments: “What’s happening to the world? We can’t even go to a lecture anymore in peace.”
One wonders what the author’s lectures in Vancouver will be like. Those interested would do well to read Peled’s book and ponder if living in peace is simple or complicated. If you can have both London – or Vancouver – and Jerusalem.
Peled will give two talks here on Monday, Feb. 13. She will appear at the Weinberg Residence at 3 p.m. and at Congregation Schara Tzedeck at 7:30 p.m. She will also participate in a Philosophers’ Café panel discussion on Jewish Love, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 7 p.m., at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture.
Stephen Schecter PhD, is a sociologist, poet, lecturer and performance artist currently living in Vancouver. His forthcoming book, Grasshoppers in Zion: Israel and the Paradox of Modernity, will be published by Mantua Books in March 2012.
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