Scenes From a Marriage (Page 3)

Consumed with the past and adrift in the present, Rivlin is the latest iteration of a recurring Yehoshua hero whose prototype may be found in the unnamed protagonist of an early story, "Facing the Forests," written in 1962. Alienated from his fellow students and his studies alike, he takes a job for the summer as a fire lookout, guarding the proud emblem of Israeli rebirth from unexpected conflagration. He hopes to find the solitude required to begin a long-delayed study of the Crusades, "certain that there is some dark issue buried within the subject," from which he can "bring some startling scientific theory back from the forests."

When he arrives, however, he is distracted from his historical labors by the forest itself, and by a mute old Arab--his tongue cut out in the war--who maintains the lookout station. He watches the forest intently, keen to discover the smallest spark, convinced on more than one occasion he has seen the start of a blaze that never materializes. He watches the hikers who visit the forest--comparing them to a "procession of Crusaders"--and, "impelled by his duty to warn them," polices their small campfires. His relations deepen with the elderly Arab, who tries to tell the lookout "that this is his house and that there used to be a village here as well and that they have simply hidden it all.... his wives have been murdered here." In the end, the Arab sets the forest afire while the lookout turns a blind eye, watching with barely concealed satisfaction; the next morning, "the ruined village appears before his eyes; born anew."

"Facing the Forests" and Yehoshua's other early stories, collected in English in The Continuing Silence of a Poet, established him, alongside Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld, as a leading voice of what Israelis call the "generation of the State," a group of writers who came of age after the 1948 war, amid the relative security of the newly established country. Mounting a literary challenge to the prevailing collectivist orthodoxy of the "generation of the War of Independence," they ushered in a new wave of Israeli modernism, putting the individual--often alienated from the Labor Zionist consensus--at the heart of their fiction, exploring an emerging tension between humanism and Israeli nationalism. By the early 1970s, however, that consensus had begun to splinter, and Yehoshua's long-awaited first novel, The Lover, published in 1977, twenty years after his first stories appeared, finds an echo of this unraveling in the form of a Haifa family fraying at its seams.

The Lover revolves around Adam, a stoic auto mechanic consumed by his search for his wife's new lover Gabriel, a Parisian exile who returns to Israel to claim his dying grandmother's inheritance and then disappears in the chaotic first days of the 1973 war. The Lover, a kind of Hebrew As I Lay Dying--complete with six alternating narrators and an elderly woman, Gabriel's grandmother, on her deathbed--unfolds in a dreamy haze before and after the war, as the nation makes its uneasy reckoning with the sudden disaster. "It came upon us as a complete surprise," Adam intones in the novel's first pages. "Again and again I read the confused accounts of what happened, trying to get to the bottom of the chaos that ruled them." As his family falls apart--his wife with her lover, his daughter expelled from her school--Adam sleepwalks through his days.

Adam, we come to understand, is unable to recover from the blow to his marriage delivered by the death of their first son in a traffic accident: "We couldn't bring the boy back," he thinks. "We really should have parted." He is drawn to the lover out of a kind of devotion to his wife--"someone who would fall in love with her for my sake too," to give her the desire that he has lost. But soon the lover is missing as well, and Adam, adrift in the shambles of his disintegrating marriage, takes to the highways of the troubled country in a trancelike search for Gabriel.

In A Late Divorce, the searcher is Yehuda, a grandfather with three grown children in Israel, who returns from America to obtain a long-overdue divorce so that he can have a child with a younger woman in the States. Over the course of nine days leading up to Passover, each of them narrated by a different member of the extended family--think The Sound and the Fury here--Yehuda struggles to get his wife, Naomi, who has been in an institution since an incident in which she tried to stab him, to consent to his terms of divorce. Like a man stumbling blindly into his own past, the strength of whose bonds he does not recognize, Yehuda's visit sows disorder throughout the family--in a recurring theme for Yehoshua, he is, like Gabriel in The Lover, a disruptive guest from the diaspora.

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