A. B. Yehoshua is an Israeli writer, important on the literary scene as much as on the political one. Writers often shed better light on complex situations than political analysts do, as his first book demonstrates — a collection of novellas published in Israel in 1970. We present here the first four of them.
Le silence obstiné d’un poète (A Poet’s Obstinate Silence), the first novella, describes the relationship between a poet and his son. The old poet has stopped writing. His two daughters, married, live in another city; his wife is dead. His last child, unwanted, born to the aging couple, is mentally handicapped. He lives alone with this son in silence, in the mutual incapacity to speak to one another, to show one another the slightest tenderness. He ends up accepting that this son who shames him should hold the status of a harmless simpleton, socially tolerated on condition that he render small services and serve as a scapegoat. One day he notices that his son has learned he had once been a poet. His son will not understand the beauty of his texts, but those texts have themselves become foreign to him; the words he wrote no longer stir any emotion in him. Then the son, playing at being a poet, throws back at the father his own cruel caricature. One day, taking literally his father’s words criticizing his old drafts, he sells them to a junk dealer. He laboriously writes a few verses, copying out fragments of his father’s old texts. His passion at first amuses and flatters his father, then becomes persecutory for him, because it reveals what had been hidden (“I had no idea there were so many things I would have wanted to write back then.”), and because he signs his “poems” with his father’s first name. By the story’s end, all that remains for the father is to sell his house and flee abroad.
This novella allows for multiple readings. I will favor one. A. B. Yehoshua warns the reader against the dangers that threaten an individual or a country. The renunciation or the loss of creative desire, the forgetting of what we have been, of what we once wished for, produce idiots no longer inhabited by dream (“Heavy, clumsy … but in no way lost in dreams.”) nor by memory (he has made the slashed photographs of his dead mother disappear). We do not want to recognize ourselves in them (“He does not resemble me; the two of us have nothing in common.”), we are ashamed of them, they force us to break off old friendships. The same goes for the incapacity to transmit to our children the desire that was at the origin of their life and our passions from before their birth. But faced with the new generation, fathers must take responsibility for their past choices, their shortcomings and their errors. They must also accept that generation as it is, different from their expectations, from their dreams, from themselves. This new generation need not ape them; it must find its own way/voice between sterile rupture and servile imitation. In the disaster described here, the father bears his responsibility, the son his.
Trois jours et un enfant (Three Days and a Child). A student-teacher, at an impasse in his thesis, agrees to look after for three days the young child of a woman he once loved. He will display a genuine, semi-conscious sadism and death wishes toward this child, poorly masked by an excess of gifts and activities. The author suggests a few explanations for this behavior. Jealousy, the bitterness of love, the feeling of impotence and of his life’s failure. No more than the old poet can the young teacher bear children. Both refuse to recognize themselves in them, to acknowledge that they are part of their history and that their speech, however clumsy, deserves to be heard (“The effort I have to make to understand him tires me and wears me out.”). This attitude leads to violence, received or given, whatever masks it may borrow.
Face aux forêts (Facing the Forests). A belated student, unable to finish his history thesis on the Crusades, accepts the post of fire watchman in the heart of a forest artificially built up out of donations. The forest quickly becomes for him a place outside of social and temporal location. The present repeatedly intrudes upon it — with the coming of his father, of donors, of campers who excite his impotent desire, of his old mistress — as does the recent past — the forest was built on the ruins of an Arab village whose inhabitants were killed. This village appears on the old maps, but who still remembers it, who agrees to acknowledge it, to say it. The handyman at the watch post is an Arab whose tongue has been cut out. He hides petroleum in the four corners of the forest and will set it ablaze before autumn’s end. The ruins of the village will then appear amid the charred trees. The student leaves again, but “in his so familiar city, he has become a stranger.”
The character is as sterile and impotent as the previous ones, incapable of entering adulthood, of taking on responsibilities, of finding a just position in relation to the Arab (blind to his preparations, drawn by a solidarity of the excluded, fascinated by the fire). The forgetting, willed or not, of the recent past and of the conditions under which the country was built (“They cut out his tongue during the war. Who — one of his own or one of ours? What does it matter.”), the will to erase the traces of those who lived there before, the failure to know them, induce a dangerous impotence in the face of hatred and the desire for vengeance. The novella suggests that the danger comes from within: from the first inhabitants whose rights were not recognized, from the excluded and the marginal of society, from the gradual dissolution of family and social bonds, of the sense of identity and collective belonging, from organizational and technical malfunctions, from excessive confidence in security measures, from the failure to understand the other, his language, his ways of thinking, from the non-transmission between generations.
Raz-de-marée (Tidal Wave). A prison, built on an island, is regularly submerged by a tidal wave and each time rebuilt. Warned of the coming flood, the director entrusts the guarding of the prisoners to the most recently hired warden, who is to flee, alone, by boat at the last moment. This warden, a fanatic, accepts this “honor” with pride, and asks only to keep the director’s two enormous dogs, too tame and pampered for his taste for their guarding function. When the moment to leave comes, he cannot bring himself to leave the prisoners in ignorance of the “Regulations.” Before abandoning them he gathers them together to read it to them. This initiative will prove fatal to him: the prisoners seize the keys, and it is he who will remain alone on the island, with the dogs — turned wild again — for his only companions, dogs of which he will become the victim before the waters cover him over.
What to make of it? It is dangerous to be too sure of one’s strength. Even old prisoners, worn down by years of prison, and bourgeoisified dogs can prove the strongest. One must not persist in building structures or institutions that repeatedly reveal their fragility, their unfitness for their function. The law alone, however ancient and rigorous, does not suffice to pronounce the just and good decision. Leaders must assume their responsibility to the very end and not unload it onto underlings, however enthusiastic these may be. No warden is a machine, none escapes the effects of his unconscious, which may drive him to identify with his enemies (“Sometimes the urge takes me to enter one of the cells and to sit, like them, on my stool.”). Enthusiasm and fanaticism will never replace the intelligence of the heart and the mind, but they can produce results contrary to those expected.
The book, set against current events, still seems as relevant as ever.
Daniel Oppenheim, January 24, 2003