Ahavot Asurot (Forbidden Love) by Amnon Rubinstein.
Zmora-Bitan Publishers (Hebrew ), 283 pages, NIS 89
One Friday early last December, the Culture and Literature section of Haaretz Hebrew Edition was devoted in full to the artist and writer Nachum Gutman, on the 30th anniversary of his death. One of the fragments included from Gutman's estate was written during the artist's visit to London, two years after the end of the British Mandate in Eretz Israel. Gutman described his positive impression of kind-hearted, pleasant Englishmen there, an observation that formed a stark contrast to memories of vulgar, arrogant sergeants and officers whom he had met during his service in the British army.
We encounter a similar contrast in "Forbidden Love," Amnon Rubinstein's new novel. The book revolves around one of the two real-life sergeants condemned to execution in July 1947 by the right-wing Zionist underground organization Irgun Tzvai Leumi (Irgun, or Etzel, for short), in reprisal for the hanging of three of its operatives by the British.
Rubinstein, a jurist, former politician and minister, and author of several previous novels, spins an imaginative tale depicting a love affair between Rivka, a young woman from Tel Aviv, and the gentle-spirited, soft-eyed British sergeant. Toward the end of her life, Rivka describes the episode to her daughter, Amalia, a professor of Russian literature at Tel Aviv University. Amalia decides to track down further details of the story. Her search lowers the mask that obscured the British soldier, who was depicted publicly at the time in the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community ) as a vulgar, arrogant character, disclosing his emotions, his inner world and family history. It also deflects attention from the tragedy of the hanging of the three Irgun men toward the tragedy endured by both the British soldier's family and his comrades in Palestine.
Rubinstein's book, which can be seen as a general protest against violence, presents a story about memory and relative truth, interweaving narratives of national liberation and private lives. The book's title hints at the difficulties faced by any young woman from the Yishuv who conducted a romantic affair with a British man during the Mandatory period; yet it seems the heroine's family members (apart from her brother ) displayed high levels of tolerance toward her decision.
When Rivka spills her heart before her death, she leaves her daughter with one unresolved riddle: Where did Amalia come from? As an academic, Amalia takes up the cudgels and seeks answers to the question of her patrimony in a determined, systematic fashion. Yet it seems the process of conducting the research is more significant than any answers it might yield. In a kind of encounter between life and literature, her research process leads the scholar toward an illicit romance of her own with one of her students. The love affair between a young Jewish woman from the Yishuv and a British soldier may not have been illegal, but it certainly deviated from the norms of Jewish society in Palestine. A love affair between a university lecturer and a student is forbidden under the rules of every institution, and perhaps also by law, even though in this case, it appears the university's rector relates to Amalia's situation in a compassionate, understanding way - comparable to the attitude borne by Rivka's family toward her relationship with the sergeant.
Some thinkers, for instance Nietzsche, have speculated that the realization of forbidden love sows the seeds of destruction for coming generations. The story of Oedipus exemplifies this idea. Do Amalia's family problems derive from such seeds of catastrophe sown in the past? Are the problems plaguing the State of Israel the result of seeds of violence sown in its past?
Border crossings
Forbidden love involves the violation of rules, and the crossing of borders. Yet this whole story involves border crossings, including physical borders. The British occupied Eretz Israel, ignorant of the ways of the land, and British soldiers who served here longed to return home, to their families. Meanwhile, the Jews crossed borders in order to fulfill the Zionist vision of the establishment of an independent state in the ancestral land; in so doing, they encountered local residents who viewed them as foreigners and invaders.
But not only physical borders are at play here in "Forbidden Love." The Sergeants Affair (as it was called at the time ) involves the encroachment of normative borders. National liberation fighters from the Jewish population related to the British as an illegal occupying power in Eretz Israel, and they argued that any action taken to hasten their expulsion was legitimate. The hanging of the Irgun men was thus viewed as an illegal act that warranted acts of retribution against British soldiers.
However, as in a Greek tragedy, violence begat violence; and this pre-state Zionist denial of the legitimacy of British rule here has been turned against us, in displays of violence no less powerful than those used by the Yishuv partisans, and perhaps more forceful.
Not long after the hanging of the sergeants, the Zionist dream was realized, and an independent state was established. Yet Amnon Rubinstein reminds us that a heroic narrative is always complicated, relative, multifaceted. In the background echo cries of liberation sounded by proponents of a Palestinian state; and fighters for this Palestinian cause have their own stories, their own families and their own love affairs.
Rivka, the sergeant's lover, who kept memories of her romance pent up within her heart, finally releases it before her death, transferring it to her daughter, Amalia. While trying to decipher her own life story, the daughter also undergoes a process of liberation. She is released from her fears. She feels reconciled with her family, with her love, with her past and future.
Amnon Rubinstein believes in the process of reconstructing the past. Identifying memories, real or imagined, personal or collective, constitutes, perhaps, the remedy for our ailments - in the end, we might be freed from the past's threatening shadows.
Nili Cohen, a professor of law and the former rector of Tel Aviv Unversity, is a member of the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities.
