The Sequoia Children (Yaldei Hasequoia), by Gon Ben Ari.
Zmora-Bitan, 493 pages, NIS 94
I read a book by Gon Ben Ari, "The Sequoia Children." I read for days on end, I entered, I left, I was enthusiastic, I was angry, I was in it and I wasn't in it, and now I'm writing somewhat like the book. A cross between the Book of Job and a book of jokes, a letter from another world, a bit of new and original thinking together with selections from the weekly magazine Time Out, perhaps like the Latin quotation, "I do not like you, Sabidius; I cannot say why."
Maybe I don't know what I liked about the book that I didn't understand. Fact: I couldn't tear myself away from it. Maybe what I read was a huge circle that is located in the background of the book, the circle from Nahalal, that same circle that surrounds the moshav, or the circle of Israel and Czernowitz in the Holocaust, or a circle of wisdom and beauty and go know, maybe I read a masterpiece but from a different school, from a new school in which I didn't study and therefore I wasn't able not to finish it. This young man, Gon Ben Ari, has written an amazingly beautiful, brilliant and powerful riddle, but for me, something was missing there, I was missing in it, I read a book that wasn't read in me, a kind of riddle too wonderful for me, larger than me or smaller than me, beautiful, brilliant, strange, but what exactly is this book? I don't understand.
There's a story about a family in Nahalal, there's someone who invented a medical formula for eternal life, there's a Danish mother who writes "plays" and there's a son who is searching for a way out of something, and who is unhappy, mischievous and dear and nice and not always comprehensible. He has a sister who can't express herself, there are the Sequoia Children, who will live for 1,000 years, although by the end it turns out to be more complicated. There's the boy's father, who is a farmer, there's the grave of Moshe Dayan, there's a girl who is the daughter or the granddaughter of someone who isn't her father or her grandfather, and there are Jews in Czernowitz and in the granary, dead, alive, being killed, being tortured. And there's a rabbi who is rewriting the Bible.
The boy's mother has disappeared. Why? I don't know nor do I know how it actually happened. Sentences, each of which could have been included in the most advanced hall of quotations and has yet to be written. The book is an introduction to another book that is located deep inside this book. Evasive, cunning, the book is full of knowledge, wisdom, but I'm too small to get to the bottom of it. All I can do is pray from the prayer book that Gon Ben Ari writes and discovers that it reaches some god who may be in the book and may not be.
Japanese zeppelin
What do I know? On the one hand, perhaps if I could live today inside the imagination of the writer, to be his age, to eat at McDonald's, which when I was the writer's age would have sounded to me like a Japanese zeppelin; or to be a maven about sexual relations (which when I was a boy we thought took place only in the movies and that our mother had never had sex ) maybe I would understand more. But on the other hand, why is it necessary to understand? Are the books of the Bible understandable? After all, there's no explanation of how the barren Sarah is given to Abimelech the king of Gerar and returns pregnant after a year or perhaps nine months. Maybe times were different then and were calculated differently, because after all it happened before the giving of the Torah and Abraham could give meat and cheese to the angels who came to him, and if Isaac is Avimelech's son, will he be bound for a sacrifice because of him?
After all, Gon Ben Ari's entire world is enigmatic, mischievous, mysterious and new. There are several young writers today who are totally different from one another. Take Dvir Tzur, who writes in a totally different way but with amazing power and rare beauty, and Alex Epstein, who has published a new book that is enigmatic, brilliant, sweet, funny, composed entirely of crumbs of what others turn into thick novels. Each of the two writers is different from Ben Ari, but together they reflect variety. But also some kind of different beginning, some determined revelation in light of the world in which they live - but my elderly generation may not have the tools to really understand them.
"The Sequoia Children" is a letter from a bizarre world. It's so bizarre that its enigmas drive you crazy. I finished reading it and I thought, I'll write that the enigma is always richer than the solution, that the question is always more interesting than the answer, and that a question is only one aspect of the benevolence of the unknown. This book is interesting but also disturbing; suddenly I felt how old I am, how unable I am to understand this girl who writes letters to her dead grandfather and to Grisha, who carried his friend on his shoulders during the entire Holocaust, or maybe vice versa. If there really is a sequoia drug and I live for 1,000 years and then I meet my 505-year-old great-grandchildren and we talk, then maybe we'll understand one another, and maybe not.
Ben Ari, like Tzur before him, has launched a new, different path. I don't know if I have the tools to understand these paths, but I like the way the young writers are assailing a world with which I'm unfamiliar, and the way that after reading them - Epstein, Tzur, Ben Ari - it seems less foreign to me.
Maybe I've learned something and, one day, if I live, I'll know what the author knows; the past of the future that comes after the past that had no future, the one I lived in until this book punched me in the stomach, and I may start drinking again; and this time not 777 brandy, which was only sandpaper to Alterman's throat, and Zach's and mine, but something new: Chinese whiskey from Czernowitz - my father was once born not far from there.
Yoram Kaniuk's book "Life on Sandpaper" was published recently in English translation (reviewed on Page 18 of this issue). His book "Confessions of a Good Arab" was recently published in a new Hebrew edition by Yedioth Books.
