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Last update - 12:36 04/08/2008 Fiction First cut is the deepest By Rifka Dzodin Tags: Judith Katzir  Dearest Anne: A Tale of Impossible Love, by Judith Katzir (translated from Hebrew by Dalya Bilu) The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 314 pages, $15.95 (paperback) Reading the English translation of Israeli author Judith Katzir's second novel (from 2003) reminded me of something I heard once about judging books by covers. Just about everything I could infer about "Dearest Anne" before actually reading it -- from the banally sensationalist melodrama of a plot described on the back, to its subtitle, to a seemingly minor detail such as the thick glistening plait of hair adorning its cover, a half-baked ode to innocence -- prepared me to absolutely revile this book. Nonetheless, even if for most of its first two-thirds, "Dearest Anne" indeed seems like an intellectual's version of a Danielle Steel novel -- an over-the-top romance created primarily to satisfy the imaginations of bored housewives -- by the end, the book overwhelmingly redeems itself as a thoughtful, mature and even heartbreaking work. Advertisement The book is narrated by Rivi Shenhar, who at the earliest point in the story is a precocious and prickly 13-year-old, but who ends the tale as a pensive author, wife and mother in her 30s. The narrative begins with the adult Rivi attending the funeral of Michaela, the Bohemian literature teacher, married for appearances only, with whom she shared a two-year-long love affair, starting when Rivi was 14, an affair that would largely define the person she would grow to become. After the funeral, Rivi returns to the spot in the woods where she and Michaela would escape to all those years ago, the spot where Rivi also buried the diaries in which she chronicled her relationship with Michaela. Now, overwhelmed by the experience of returning home for the funeral of her first love, Rivi urgently retrieves the diaries and begins to read. Most of what follows comes straight from the pages of the diary. Rivi's tale is that of a young woman coming of age in 1970s Haifa. In a less than successful gimmick, Katzir has the Teenage Rivi address her entries to Anne Frank (hence the book's title) taking joy in delineating the similarities, however tenuous and general, she finds between them, from the difficult relationship she shares with her mother, to her precocious intellectual and sexual curiosity. Katzir sets the stage for Rivi and Michaela's affair by neatly setting up various personality traits and experiences in Rivi's life meant to make their union seem plausible. Parental abandonment? Check. Early and extensive sexual self-exploration? Check. An unusually early interest in feminist literature? Check. After Rivi's parents divorce, she is left to live with her cold, judgmental mother, while her father abandons her for a new life. Shenhar (or rather Katzir) then dedicates an entire entry to her sexual awakening, which started at the unbelievable age of 4, when she first began regularly indulging in the pleasures of her own body. In what could be seen as either daring or excessive, more than four pages are devoted solely to descriptions of masturbation, and Katzir uses such cringe-worthy metaphors as the "fluttering of little wings" to describe her enjoyment. From this entry, the reader is meant to gather that Rivi is mature for her age, and comfortable with her body, so that by the time she meets Michaela, she is long ripe and ready for the picking. Unfortunately, the Rivi depicted is too old and too comfortable with herself to be believable, making it seem as though there's more of Katzir shining through the character than the girl herself. This is also reflected in Rivi's penchant for feminist literature. What 13-year-old Israeli girl has Erica Jong and George Eliot in her personal library? By using the medium of the diary, Katzir doesn't have to create a naturalistic atmosphere from within which the events would unfold. She just makes Rivi talk, saying all the right words at the right times, just as the plot needs them, with less thought given to whether such words benefit or detract from her wholeness and believability as a character. Teacher's pet Rivi's infatuation with Michaela begins as run-of-the-mill adolescent admiration, the sort that is so intense that it likely has a hidden element of sexual or romantic attraction underneath its more platonic upper layers. Rivi is desperately seeking a replacement mother: a female worth emulating who can also guard her from the evils of the world and tell her how wonderful she is. Michaela, on the flip side, is looking to create a copy of herself, someone through whom to relive the lost youth that she mourns bitterly all the way to the end, of both the book and her life. Rivi quickly becomes the teacher's pet, taking every opportunity to show Michaela that she is worth all of the attention Michaela showers upon her. Michaela ups the ante by breaking the socially accepted barriers early on, holding Rivi's hands and kissing her head. Michaela ultimately removes any doubt about her intentions with a sudden kiss on the mouth and later on, when she tries to put the moves on Rivi in a more significant way, coaxes her with the alarming declaration that she's only 14 on her ID card, which smacks uncomfortably of the typical line of persuasion used by hardened pedophiles. Together, Rivi and Michaela build a world of "us versus them" -- women versus men, Bohemian intellectuals versus the square bourgeoisie -- in which they shelter themselves from any stray thoughts of wrongdoing in their romance. They are no longer bound by the rules of normative life, and their love, or so they seem to feel, exists above the morals of a dull and paternalistic society. When Rivi and Michaela are eventually found out, Rivi struggles to prevent herself from blurting out to the accusing school principal, "so now you want to rob me of the poor man's lamb, to punish Michaela for the love that saved my life, don't you know that love is sexless and ageless and pure and holy, a gift from God like life itself, so how can it possibly be regarded as a crime?" In this way, even in presenting the romance, which in legal terms amounts to nothing more glamorous than statutory rape, Katzir offers a morality play that creates its own brand of morality, one that allows a sympathetic love story to blossom in legally and ethically problematic terrain. This naturally raises difficult questions for the reader. A male fantasy? The morality constructs exhibited throughout the book change drastically. As long as she focuses on teenaged Rivi and her diary, Katzir glamorizes the student-teacher affair, with many flowery, detailed descriptions of her and Michaela's sexual experiences and the supremacy of their undying love. I was at one point struck with the thought that the teacher-student affair, although meant to be erotic, seems more like some sort of soft-core porn male fantasy than a tale worthy of being published by The Feminist Press. As soon as the diaries end, and the adult Rivi returns as narrator, however, the moral compass takes a turn north, as an older and wiser Rivi questions how Michaela, with whom she has kept in touch, could have allowed herself to enter a relationship with an underage student: "Yes, for years this was the story that I told myself: I fell in love with you with a great love, which swept you along like a river. My love was like a force of nature. It left you no choice ... I said to myself that when I reached your age, I would understand how you allowed yourself to choose the way you did. And when I reached your age then, I knew that I would never allow myself." Adding to the change in moral climate, Michaela suffers a long list of seeming "punishments" for her behavior, culminating in an early death from breast cancer. This severe shift left me confused about Katzir's perspective on the issue. On the one hand, Michaela transforms from a vibrant, intelligent free thinker to a sad, regretful old lesbian who drinks too much and mourns her lost potential. Largely for this reason, the book came under fire from Israel's LGBT community when it first appeared in Hebrew. It was seen as "a return to 1950s sacrificial lesbian novels in which evil lesbian protagonists were punished in denouements that included suicide, madness or a recuperation of heteronormativity," according to an afterword by Hannah Ovnat-Tamir. Although by adding this character shift, Katzir indeed seems to be making a value judgment about the relationship, she has also devoted the majority of the book to elaborate, largely positive descriptions of it. It could also be possible, however, that Katzir is not actually casting her vote on either side but, rather, is more interested in exploring the way the characters feel and behave in each stage of this emotionally charged scenario − how each of them changes with the years and the accompanying experience and perspective. Indeed, at its core, "Dearest Anne" isn't just about an explosive affair between a barely teenaged girl and her married female teacher, as the blurb on the back would have us believe. Rather, the book is a treatise on the relativity of time and an elegy for its passing. For all of the characters, time moves far faster than they are prepared for, and they are lost in its overwhelming current. Ultimately, Katzir succeeds in making us mourn the passing of time in our own lives, by infusing each of her characters with the sort of wisdom that can only be gained through years of regret, a wisdom so real and palpable that it feels like we earned it though our own trials. Life, she seems to be saying, is like a sweet, melancholy joke, like that which Woody Allen tells in "Annie Hall," a film that Rivi gobbles up in the book. Two old ladies are sitting in a hotel "and one of them says ?The food here's terrible,' and the other one says, 'Yes, and the portions are so small'... . He says that's how he feels about life full of loneliness, suffering, misery and sorrow, and all over too soon." Rifka Dzodin is assistant to the editor of Haaretz English Edition's weekly arts and entertainment supplement, The Guide. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Gilad, forgive us On Rosh Hashanah, Noam Shalit says abduction happened 'on Olmert's watch.' Rosh Hashanah wishes Obama calls to achieve 'peace, security for Israel' on the Jewish High holiday.   1.   My opinion 13:44  |  N. Miyara 30/09/08

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