Haunting quest for meaning
By Ethan Bronner |
March 3, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WELL into the 1990s, tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel and thousands of Israelis headed to West Bank towns to shop and get their cars fixed. It was the era before proliferating barriers and checkpoints and Arab satellite stations. Palestinians watched Israeli television and understood Hebrew. If a Palestinian worker's son was getting married, he might well invite an Israeli colleague or boss - and that Israeli might well attend. The relationships were in some sense colonial, hardly between equals. But they were real. Each side was forced to face the fact that on the other were human beings with legitimate concerns, not merely enemies. There was a surprising, even poignant, intimacy to the conflict, something unimaginable today.
Michael Lavigne has chosen the dying days of that era - the mid-1990s - as the setting for his ambitious novel about the yearning for homeland and spiritual fulfillment. His central characters - a Russian-Israeli architect and his 13-year-old daughter; a Palestinian youth and his father - are linked in ways both conscious and unconscious, haunting one another's spaces, plotting with words and bombs and, occasionally, understanding one another as only enemies can. He mixes conventional storytelling with magic realism and switches narrators often.
"The Wanting," begins with a terrorist attack. The perpetrator is young Palestinian named Amir Hamid, who - after humiliating mistreatment by Israeli soldiers and frustrations at home - falls in with Hamas ideologues. They have him strap on a suicide vest and go in search of an Israeli bus that stops outside architect Roman Guttman's office. Guttman is hurt, with shards of glass in his arm and his face, and 10 others are killed; Amir is decapitated. But instead of getting what he expected - a heaven of "dark-eyed maidens and rivers of wine" - Amir ends up wandering the skies of the Holy Land watching Guttman and his daughter, as well as Amir's own father, deal with the aftermath of the attack.
Observing Guttman from his celestial perch, Amir complains the Israeli does not notice him. "You look at me but don't see," he says. "That's what all you Jews do. Oh please, yes, come, take my land because, after all, I do not exist. That's your story, isn't it?" It's a cunning summary of Palestinian rage: Amir has a point, but of course he is a ghost.
And in the wake of the attack, Guttman is given to similarly raw sentiments, a tribute to Lavigne's ability to get to the core of each side's emotions. The reality of the occupation is not hidden from the reader or from Guttman. But being the victim of a suicide bombing tends to sweep away subtlety. After leaving the hospital he asks a friend why the Israelis couldn't be left in peace:
"'It's a war,' she said simply.
"'War? What kind of war? Are we blowing up their buses? They didn't want us back in Russia; they don't want us here. Why don't we just walk ourselves right back into the gas chambers and make everybody happy'?"
"The Wanting" contains strong descriptive writing and considerable cultural context – in Russia, in Israel and in Palestine.
Lavigne knows how to evoke the volatile quest for meaning that affects so many in the Holy Land. As Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman of Jerusalem once suggested to me, taking the universe personally is "part of the thrill of living here, although it is also suffocating and overwhelming."
It is just this kind of ambivalence that animates this mournful book.
Michael Lavigne has chosen the dying days of that era - the mid-1990s - as the setting for his ambitious novel about the yearning for homeland and spiritual fulfillment. His central characters - a Russian-Israeli architect and his 13-year-old daughter; a Palestinian youth and his father - are linked in ways both conscious and unconscious, haunting one another's spaces, plotting with words and bombs and, occasionally, understanding one another as only enemies can. He mixes conventional storytelling with magic realism and switches narrators often.
"The Wanting," begins with a terrorist attack. The perpetrator is young Palestinian named Amir Hamid, who - after humiliating mistreatment by Israeli soldiers and frustrations at home - falls in with Hamas ideologues. They have him strap on a suicide vest and go in search of an Israeli bus that stops outside architect Roman Guttman's office. Guttman is hurt, with shards of glass in his arm and his face, and 10 others are killed; Amir is decapitated. But instead of getting what he expected - a heaven of "dark-eyed maidens and rivers of wine" - Amir ends up wandering the skies of the Holy Land watching Guttman and his daughter, as well as Amir's own father, deal with the aftermath of the attack.
Observing Guttman from his celestial perch, Amir complains the Israeli does not notice him. "You look at me but don't see," he says. "That's what all you Jews do. Oh please, yes, come, take my land because, after all, I do not exist. That's your story, isn't it?" It's a cunning summary of Palestinian rage: Amir has a point, but of course he is a ghost.
And in the wake of the attack, Guttman is given to similarly raw sentiments, a tribute to Lavigne's ability to get to the core of each side's emotions. The reality of the occupation is not hidden from the reader or from Guttman. But being the victim of a suicide bombing tends to sweep away subtlety. After leaving the hospital he asks a friend why the Israelis couldn't be left in peace:
"'It's a war,' she said simply.
"'War? What kind of war? Are we blowing up their buses? They didn't want us back in Russia; they don't want us here. Why don't we just walk ourselves right back into the gas chambers and make everybody happy'?"
"The Wanting" contains strong descriptive writing and considerable cultural context – in Russia, in Israel and in Palestine.
Lavigne knows how to evoke the volatile quest for meaning that affects so many in the Holy Land. As Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman of Jerusalem once suggested to me, taking the universe personally is "part of the thrill of living here, although it is also suffocating and overwhelming."
It is just this kind of ambivalence that animates this mournful book.
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