Motti (14 page)

Sarah Rosenthal Sarah Rosenthal Sarah Rosenthal. Sarah Rosenthal of blessed memory. Of blessed memory. Sarah Rosenthal, may God avenge her. Sorely missed. Woe is us for we have been broken the crown of our head is fallen the righteous Sarah Rosenthal. A gentle woman pure of heart. Sarah Rosenthal may her virtue protect us. Here lies Sarah Rosenthal. Sarah Rosenthal born Hebrew date passed away Hebrew date fell in the course of duty. Taken from us before her time who will console us. Sarah Rosenthal passed away Hebrew date daughter of Puah and Moshe oh grief and bitter wailing. The precious woman Sarah Rosenthal Sarah Rozenthal. Rozental. Sarah Rosenthal beloved mother loyal daughter loved the beauty of the land. Sarah blasphemous writing Rosenthal a swastika sprayed in paint. Sarah Rosenthal the writing hard to read. Sarah Rosenthal a quote from an Amichai poem loved and was loved. Here lies Sarah Rosenthal a woman of valor and an inspiration to all. Sweet in her ways, observant in her good deeds. Sarah Rosenthal gone but not forgotten. God-fearing Sarah Rosenthal of blessed memory. Sarah Rosenthal daughter wife of, sister to, mother. Modest was she Sarah Rosenthal blessed among women. Princes have persecuted me without a cause but my heart stands in awe of thy word, consider my affliction and deliver me for I do not forget thy Torah, teach me O Lord the way of thy statutes and I shall keep it to the end. Here (here) lies Sarah Rosenthal. Here she lies.

The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning—there could be human beings to whom all this was alien. (They would not have an attachment to their words.)—And how are these feelings manifested among us?—By the way we choose and value words.

How do I find the “right” word? How do I choose among words? Without doubt it is sometimes as if I were comparing them by fine differences of smell:
That
is too…,
that
is too…—,
this
is the right one.—But I do not always have to make judgments, give explanations; often I might only say: “It simply isn't right yet.” I am dissatisfied, I go on looking. At last a word comes: “
That's
it!”
Sometimes
I can say why. This is simply what searching, this is what finding, is like here.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations

Menachem continued to pay the property tax, even though they hadn't spoken since. Perhaps only two or three times, awkwardly. And no one had been in the apartment for years. He cleaned it quite well before he left, even the stale air will dissipate after a night or two with the windows open (it will return to the global cycle, atoms commingling with atoms, molecules with molecules and so on). Motti closes the refrigerator door and plugs it back in. He puts a sealed bottle of water he bought specially in the freezer, a bottle that he bought on the way over. For two years he didn't have really cold water. In the morning he'll be surprised to find it didn't freeze. He'll open the bottle, drink a bit, choke on the cold for a moment. In the instant that its lid is unsealed, when the outside is let in, frost will spread throughout the water, from top to bottom all of it will be colored pale white. Many things wait until a place is found for them. The sight is so beautiful, beautiful and private and surprising. Motti will not share it with anyone.

In any case, he urinated, the toilet doesn't flush, some kind of residue there, and what sort of way is this for characters to meet, it's totally pathetic, pardon me, turned on the faucet, the water ran and filled up the basin, he washed, again the water ran to fill up the basin, he sat a moment, showered, dressed, went out to the convenience store to buy food and toilet paper. And when he returned a young woman stood, beautiful as he imagined, in the entrance to the neighboring apartment. Ariella? They moved, said the new neighbor. Where did they move to? asked Motti. Don't know, said the new neighbor. They moved. Will you come over for coffee later? Meet Benjamin and the kids.

Went into his place and wandered through the rooms. Sat down in one and sat down in another, sat on the bed maybe half a minute, got up again, wandered around. In the end sat in the living room, put his ear again up close to the cold wall. Out of habit.

They say it's never too late to become someone else. And in another life he could have been a different person, only there isn't another life.

And do you know what? Perhaps in the end he did meet the grown-up, perfect Ariella, and she was everything he dreamed of, even more, and they had a life together, a good, long life, and they had children or didn't have children, in any event they raised many dogs and even traveled abroad regularly, maybe adopted a cat or two as well, performed good and important deeds, their days were full of joy, why not. In the end they died, of course. When you go on long enough, all stories end in death. But there could definitely be some sort of happy ending here, I promise. The problem is just knowing where to stop.

Israel is not the easiest place to live. Indeed, this country confronts its highly diverse population with a similarly varied set of difficulties. A very partial list includes national conflict, ethnic tension, and religious strife, all three of which are often described as intractable. But this almost unimaginable difficulty presents certain advantages to writers, even or especially writers of fiction. The world, after all, finds difficulty fascinating. At home and abroad people want to understand the difficulty that is Israel, want someone to give it all a name, want to read the words of a writer equipped to tie it all up with a poetic flourish. Readers from Korea to Brazil are searching for someone capable of positioning a few well-drawn individuals against that wide canvas of historical, political, social, and religious overabundance (also known as “the Conflict”), thereby making this overabundance a bit more intelligible. This is how the novel, as a genre, compensates for its fictional status, how it manages to constitute a form of knowledge despite never having happened: it takes the political and the historical and translates them into the personal and the biographical so that the individual reader can finally understand.

The global desire to understand this bottomless difficulty is remarkable. There are seven million people in Israel (depending on how you count—even the straightforward matter of counting inhabitants is far from simple over there), which is roughly the same number of people who live in Bulgaria or Honduras. But how many of their writers get translated into English? In the last twenty years over five hundred book-length works from Hebrew literature have been published in English.
1

But this worldwide interest comes with strings attached. People read Hebrew writers primarily to get The Story. The big one. The national one. Or the religious-cum-national one. People read for the epic story, the one with all those wars fought over and against that possibly mystical two-thousand-year-old backdrop. Israeli writers can be critical, their stories can be ironic, tragic even, so long as they include The Story.

In this regard the book before you disappoints, or, more accurately, disobeys. Take Asaf Schurr's
Motti
, change the names of the main characters, switch around another fifty words scattered here and there, and delete, by my count, a single three-sentence stretch (describing a dream of all things), and this novel could be set in any of a thousand cities around the world. Unless I'm way, way off here (or unless you're one of those readers who thinks absolutely everything is an allegory
2
), I'd say that this book, despite the language and country in which it was written, is not about Israel. It just isn't. This in itself is noteworthy. The very absence of Israel in this Israeli novel does tell us something about contemporary Israeli culture,
3
but contemplating the presence of this absence only takes us so far. To understand
Motti
, one must look elsewhere.

 

So what is
Motti
about? Plot summary won't really explain it. There's a man (Motti), a dog, a friend, an object of affection, an accident, and an extremely difficult (there's that word again) decision. Even for a short novel, not that much really happens. As such, some readers will dismiss
Motti
for failing to tell a conventional story (if they didn't already dismiss it for failing to tell The Story).

But this book most certainly should be understood as a novel, and a novel tapping into one of the genre's central traditions.
Motti
is a novel riddled with self-consciousness. Asaf Schurr—or Asaf Schurr as implied author—is everywhere in this book, reflecting on the story being told, interrupting the story no longer being told, and drawing attention to the contrived nature of the project of novel writing as a whole.

This approach to the form, this refusal to let the story simply be, this impulse to draw back the curtain, is a tradition stretching back to what may well have been the very first novel, Cervantes's
Don Quixote
. Unfortunately, the gradual resurgence and apparent ubiquity of this gesture during the last half century—following a longer stretch that included nineteenth-century realism, during which period this narrative strategy receded—has lead many people to mistake it as a recent (and thus trivial or frivolous) trend. Nowadays the self-conscious novel is often identified, categorized, and then dismissed as “postmodernist” (or, even worse, as “pomo”), and that's that. Such thinking seems to believe that the “serious novel” and the “postmodernist novel” occupy mutually exclusive categories.

But identifying a strategy at work in a novel is not the same as explaining the meaning of either. In other words, not all self-conscious novels are created equal. Indeed, the technique is remarkably flexible, which explains, in part, why novelists have returned to it again and again throughout the genre's four-hundred-year history.

Motti
is most certainly—to quote Robert Alter's description of the self-conscious novel in general—“the kind of novel that expresses its seriousness through playfulness.”
4
Though even this may be overstating Schurr's interest in anything smacking of the antic. In contemporary American fiction, the appearance of the writer in his or her own plot, or even the mention of a third-person narrator's self-awareness within a narrative, often operates as a distancing gesture. Through this move the writer flaunts a certain cleverness, demonstrates his or her mastery of the genre's many incarnations, or simply compels the reader to recognize the underlying absurdity of fully caring about this illusion we call fiction.

By contrast, Asaf Schurr employs this strategy with almost dead-pan candor. As I read it, this novel's many self-conscious asides seem the product of pure, unadorned honesty and sensitive, lucid contemplation. Put differently, this novel is in large part an oddly humble reflection on writing, on imagining a world, and on trying to make sense of our real world through an extended exercise that relies on nothing but words. Schurr's “playfulness” is perfectly sincere and thus raises the emotional stakes of the narrative. He might spoil the illusion that is his story, but this is a small price to pay for the multi-dimensional clarity and unlikely wonder this novel offers again and again. As he says at the end of his preface about the book to come, “everything is on the table and in midair the table stands.”

I suspect that this tendency toward self-consciousness reflects one of Schurr's central motivations as a writer, but Schurr and/or his narrator are hardly the main characters in his novel.
Motti
revolves, as its titles suggests, around the eponymous protagonist. Schurr's Motti is quite nearly a loner. He has a dog, a single friend, and an infatuation with his neighbor, Ariella. Beyond this we know virtually nothing about his external reality. No mention of family, no mention of his relationship to the city or country in which he lives. From a slightly different and uncharitably critical perspective, we could even say that Motti is an incomplete character.

But Motti comes to life for the reader through our access to his inner world, where we find him endlessly preoccupied with his possible futures. In particular, Motti thinks about his future life with Ariella, about the passion they'll share, the difficulties they'll encounter, the family they'll make, and the inescapable end patiently waiting for both of them. Much of the events in
Motti
never happen at all, not even within the novel's imaginary world. Instead, we learn about Motti's life by learning about all the lives he imagines himself living in the future. Motti is hardly a hero in any conventional sense, but the reader identifies with him nevertheless, since we all live so much of our lives in the private ether of our endless speculations.

By casting as his protagonist a master of anticipation, speculation, and fantasy, by allowing possible futures to dwarf the immediate present again and again, Schurr reveals what it means to be a novelist in the first place. Or, from a perhaps more telling perspective, allows us to see the extent to which all of us are novelists of a sort: preoccupied with crafting our plot, overwhelmed by the burden of choosing from among the endless possibilities, and hard-pressed to come up with anything even approaching a satisfying ending. By portraying his protagonist in this way, Schurr both motivates his own asides and vindicates the frankness informing this playfulness as well.

 

I detect a certain inescapable melancholy at the center of all this, a feeling somewhere between despair and sorrow stemming from a shared failure to experience our external worlds as richly as we experience all the private events in our minds that never quite happen. The external real, it seems, will always pale next to the internal unreal. The main consolation, at least in Schurr's case, seems to be expressing this last sentiment so poignantly.
Motti
's ultimate achievement (and the reason I hoped to translate it) is its language, which is at once precise and daring, sober and inventive, self-deprecating and ambitious. In a book so small that covers so much novelistic territory that has apparently already been covered (and dismissed as not just covered, but as exhausted, too), the pitfalls are numerous. But by finding just the right word time after time, by establishing and maintaining a singular tone located somewhere between amazement and defeat, Schurr justifies his refusal to follow so many often-imposing novelistic rules.

None of this is to say, of course, that all Hebrew novels, let alone all novels, should be like
Motti
. We should continue to read Hebrew novels to get The Story, we should read Yehoshua, Grossman, and Castel-Bloom if we really want to understand what life is truly like over there. But we should make room for something else, too, something utterly different, something concerned with a rich inner world somehow prior to the great, messy world outside. That a person could maintain the sensitive faculties necessary for detecting and then transcribing the elusive and fragile language of this private territory, all while living in that overwhelming and difficult reality called Israel, is all the more reason to read
Motti
with a serious and generous eye.

TODD HASAK-LOWY
, 2011