Orly Castel-Bloom’s latest novel has the distinctive feature of giving an exact account of what Israelis confront day to day: a schizophrenic situation in which terror and the everyday are woven together, far from any heroism.
Such is the message of this new literature reaching us from Tel Aviv, which Textile illustrates, alas, to perfection: Israelis are tired.
This weariness affects a society pulled in every direction, represented in the novel by the Gruber family: the father does research, the mother does business (in textiles), the daughter suffers heartbreak, the son goes to war.
The story might be nothing more than the fairly ordinary account of a slice of life — a parental couple coming apart, a researcher leaving for Germany for his work, a daughter let down by her boyfriend who changes her life, a son in the army, a fifty-year-old woman preparing for yet another cosmetic operation in her apartment in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods of Tel Aviv.
But from the very first pages, the reason for the cosmetic operations is given: it is impossible for Mandy Gruber to live through this appalling reality — knowing her son is in the army, risking his loss. “They turned my son into a sniper on the front line without asking my opinion, and I am incapable of facing this tension. I want to sleep, to sleep and to wake up younger and younger, one day after his discharge.”
Text, textiles, fabrics, weave: what is this book about?
About the seven operations Mandy has already undergone and the eighth to come? About the art of disguising oneself, of slipping away, of having oneself replaced, of “resembling a walking work of art”?
Or about time, which is the objective both of the terrorists and of the Israeli intelligence services when they decide to have a target eliminated: “That spring, simultaneity became a weapon in its own right in the permanent war. The terrorist organizations competed in the number of simultaneous attacks they were capable of carrying out, and each one had its virtuoso of simultaneity.”
Or about the way the young Da’el passes from shooting to ordinary life: “Da’el’s pulse was high, he was trembling and needed cocaine… As usual, he scrubbed himself under the shower for an hour, then lay down on his bed and logged on to the page where, the last time, he had broken off his reading of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black).”
Or about the revolutionary new fabric, made from spider’s web (sic), that Mandy’s husband wants to perfect in order to create the new TS (Terror Suits) that every citizen would don in the event of a terrorist attack?
Or about everyone’s efforts to exist more or less normally, most often pathetically, on the brink of tears and of the real, in a country grown so mad that having an eighteen-year-old son there makes you want to disappear?