Hebrew Fiction / The evil among us

Sonata

by Lily Perry Kinneret Zmora-Bitan (Hebrew), 206 pages, NIS 89

The greatest compliment one can pay to Lily Perry's new novel, "Sonata," is to say that it is even better than her successful 1988 book "Golem in the Circle." "Sonata" is a wise novel unlike any other Israeli fiction published in recent years, a story in which the searing pain is constantly balanced by the protagonist's black humor and the witty effect of her language.

"Golem in the Circle" set the pattern for Perry's subsequent novels. All of them have featured golems in a circle (the reference is to a local playground game of that name, where the loser becomes a "golem" ) - sensitive, intelligent characters whose distorted perception of reality prevents them from fulfilling their desires. Perry's characters repeatedly find themselves humiliated and defeated. At the same time, one can say that all of Perry's books are stories of character in which she tells the protagonist's tale in first person, in fresh and believable language.

"Sonata" returns to this format. At its center is the character Alexandra Soskin, who has become embroiled in debt to people in the underworld, debts from which she tries in a single energetic action to save herself. In the hope of obtaining her fair share of her family's property, Soskin hires a lawyer. In order to pay his fees, she borrows money from a relation and from friends in her apartment block in Bat Yam. When the court rules that her brother is the sole rightful heir to the family inheritance, Alexandra is left with no assets and with debts ballooning day by day. Ultimately, she decides to transfer the title of her apartment to an underworld type, who in return, she hopes, will allow her to sail away to the Greek island she's been dreaming about for a long time.

The story takes place over the course of just one night, during which Alexandra sets out on foot from Bat Yam to Ashdod with the aim of consummating the deal and disappearing from Israel once and for all. She is accompanied on her journey by Sonata, a Holocaust survivor of 74, who from time to time has been hospitalized in the closed ward of a psychiatric hospital. Sonata understands that Alexandra's plan is hopeless and can lead only to disaster, but Alexandra is already in a state beyond either despair or persuasion. Readers cannot help but feel sympathy for her tortured character, and they cannot but fear for the fate toward which she is so energetically heading, blindly and with a sharp tongue.

Perry provides fine descriptions of neighborhood life in the Bat Yam housing projects, many of whose residents are Holocaust survivors; of the dark and sinister expanses of sand between Bat Yam and Ashdod; and of "the evil country" in which Alexandra and Sonata find themselves. "An evil country," Sonata says time and again, like a kind of musical motif characterizing the book's first chapters, and Alexandra talks repeatedly about Israel's "sick center," in a complementary recurring motif. (Sonata herself is named for a Haydn sonata, and her name tempts one to consider the connections between the novel's structure and that of Haydn's sonatas, but I won't expand on that here. )

The evil begins in the family circle, when 3-year-old Alexandra is deposited into an orphanage by her mother. Only after relatives intervene does the mother agree, after Alexandra has already been in the orphanage for a year and a half, to take the stammering, broken child back home. It is Motti, Alexandra's brother, who gets all the love in the family - as well as, ultimately, the family property.

In Alexandra's eyes, the evil of the state is embodied mainly in lawyers, bank clerks and underworld types, with whose aid she has tried to extricate herself from her debts. Sonata is less specific on this matter: "For 20 years she has been watching the news on an old television, and every evening she has been astonished at what an evil country it is. All the time it has to be taking something from people, even from the compensation payments due survivors. Even the sea that belongs to all the people has been taken by the country for itself and handed out to a few hotels. Even this little sea, this poor little Kinneret, it takes for its own fooleries and what's left it gives to a few thugs, an evil country." The evil is thoroughly manifest in the way the gangsters exploit the protagonist's naivete.

Impelled by anger

	The Bat Yam promenade. Perry marvelosuly reconstructs the Hebrew of Holocaust survivors there.
	Photo by: Avshalom Halutz

The novel's great strength, however, lies not in its social criticism, but in Alexandra's character. The girl whose mother rejected her, who was repeatedly threatened with being sent back to the orphanage, has become a woman with a distorted perception of reality, who has difficulty functioning as either wife or mother. She is impelled by tremendous anger toward her mother and her brother, toward the government authorities that have cheated her, and toward the people to whom she owes money. Her desire for revenge is as strong as the despair that fills her. And yet we have before us an amazingly sensitive, intelligent, sharp-tongued and opinionated heroine. The intriguing combinations that are part of her personality - assertive confidence mixed with tremendous fear, aggressiveness and vulnerability, intelligence and the ability to survive balanced by utter naivete, a judgmental and critical nature offset by blindness that can lead only to disaster - makes for a fascinating character.

As in her previous novels, Perry succeeds in transmitting the character's human complexity by use of the first person, which she uses to get across the protagonist's dialogue and innermost thoughts. This gives rise to text that is not boring for a single moment, a text that combines new and familiar uses of language: "I am looking for a break in the clouds through which to direct the prayer that will come from the depths of my heart and my innermost feeling. I find a place, but old words slip in, words from the past, scrambling words of supplication, absolution, forgiveness or great redemption. I can't manage to get into the narrow spaces that open for me in the sky."

Here we have naivete and artlessness alongside self-awareness and sensitivity, and this combination is communicated by means of both original descriptions and banal expressions ("from the depths of my heart," "great redemption" ) that represent the promises of consolation and salvation. In other places, the effect of the encounter between the heroine's innovative language and the cliches she employs is a kind of parody of the societal expectations and rules expressed in those cliches.

Confused and angry, Alexandra fires in all directions, expressing a wealth of paradoxical truths: "It's the people dearest to you who know how to hurt you better than anyone," she muses. Later, she notes that "if not for the debts, it seems I wouldn't know the tremendous power there is in the evil that is so readily accessible to some of the people dearest to me." And also concerning close relatives, Alexandra stuffs a few pictures of her daughters into her knapsack and explains to Sonata: "Only family and the people dearest to you can really be strangers to each other."

These truths are often put forth in an amusing way. Sonata, who unlike Alexandra is not afraid of lawyers or bank clerks (only of policemen ), says policemen wear uniforms "so they won't be prisoners." For her part, Alexandra tells Sonata about her second husband, who has "most probably finished flushing the toilet and couldn't fall back to sleep. That's how it was with him regularly, every Sunday: He'd get up at 4:30 in the morning and walk around half-asleep. In Tel Aviv they call this calm, you understand?"

As in her previous books, Lily Perry marvelously reconstructs the Hebrew of Holocaust refugees living in Bat Yam, as well as the language of underworld characters. This reconstruction, too, often has a witty effect.

"Sonata" is a wise novel, which combines sharp social criticism with a convincing and touching depiction of two of the victims of a tough and cruel Israeli society. The characters' special way of seeing things and their style of speech add an element of wit and amusement that doesn't detract at all from the seriousness of the subject matter.

Prof. Avraham Balaban is a poet, writer and literary scholar. His most recent book is "Nine Mothers and a Mother: Representations of Motherhood in Modern Hebrew Fiction," published in Hebrew by Hakibbutz Hameuchad.