"The Dawning of the Day: A Jerusalem Tale" by Haim Sabato, translated from the Hebrew by Yaacob Dweck, The Toby Press, 2006, 181 pages, $22.95.

Ezra Siman Tov has a secret - a dark, sinful secret. He hides from it, but it intrudes like a specter on his peaceful life in the Jerusalem community of immigrants from Aleppo (Halab). "For several years he wept and pleaded for his sin to be pardoned, and he scrubbed and scoured the stain with all his might. But every year during the penitential days it seemed to him as though his sin returned and stood mockingly before him: You think that you have erased the stain. You err."

Ezra is the central character in Haim Sabato's latest novel, now available in English as "The Dawning of the Day" (originally published in Hebrew as "Keafapey Shahar"). A rabbi and co-founder of the hesder yeshiva [combining army service and study] in Ma'ale Adumim, Sabato's works focus on religious themes. Here, he presents a spiritual journey in which Ezra faces his troubled past. A simple soul living in an old neighborhood of Jerusalem, Ezra delights in the performance of everyday religious duties like donning tefillin and reciting psalms. He enjoys the camaraderie of his fellow Aleppo Jews in their neighborhood synagogue, and gains fulfillment through respectful relationships with admired sages. He and his wife Sarah enjoy a peaceful life together, with his brother-in-law, Doctor Yehudah Tawil, "marvel[ing] at the depth of the affection between them."

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In contrast, Tawil, a scholar of Hebrew poetry at a university, is frustrated by his colleagues' failure to appreciate his work. His disdain for Ezra's naivete and lack of scholarship moves the plot forward. Although Ezra is largely satisfied with his spiritual existence, the secret he harbors from his past threatens to disturb his tranquility, providing additional tension.

In the second chapter, Sabato introduces an intriguing thesis: a writer can rewrite the script of a life story, as if to play it back with a more auspicious ending. Such a rewrite might erase the error of Ezra's youth. Ezra suggests this process when recounting his guilt to an unnamed Agnon-esque Jerusalem writer:

"Ezra suddenly turned to him and remarked, 'Listen to the following story. It happened fifty years ago.' Suddenly Ezra asked, 'What do you say? How do you as a writer think this story ends? Is there any way of putting it right? Does it have a happy ending? After all, the story belongs to you as if it were clay in the hands of a potter. Would it really be impossible for you to find a remedy for this man?"

To the translator's credit, the signs of traditional Jewish repentance themes are visible in English: many will recognize "clay in the hands of a potter" from the Yom Kippur liturgy, while the plea for a "remedy" resonates with the concept of tikkun in Hebrew.

The 20th-century Jewish thinker, Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, postulated in his essays on Yom Kippur that "repentance is a retroactive tikkun. The process of retroactively returning to an event exists only in the mind and not in the material world." If the concept of repentance were not so saturated with religious connotations, we might think of it in terms of the classic science-fiction device of the time tunnel. Ezra suggests that the writer travel in this time tunnel back to the pre-sin moment, then move forward along a different track to produce a positive ending.

Does Ezra succeed in convincing the writer to ghost-write for him an alternative life-story? Ezra himself eventually writes his way to a new place in life when his blind friend, Rahamim, pressures Ezra into studying with him. While Ezra's study is rudimentary, it transforms him from passive listener to active student/teacher, and from storyteller into story writer.

One day Rahamim said, "You recount such pleasant stories, you should write them down so they are not forgotten. That same night, when he arrived home, he sat at the table, took out a notebook and wrote down the story he had recounted to Rahamim. He said to himself, 'I will write just one story.' As he was writing he was reminded of another story. The hour he spent writing was very dear to him, and a particular sweetness filled his entire being. Before long, a pile of notebooks filled with his stories lay on the table."

In general, in Sabato's fiction, plot is less important than style, atmosphere and mood. Like his other novels, "Dawning" is a slow-moving journey to another time and place. For readers with the patience to appreciate this painstakingly crafted novel, the depictions of significant moments in Ezra's spiritual journey together compose a rich and satisfying experience.

Sabato's multi-level Hebrew is a challenge for the translator, and Dweck has successfully picked up the gauntlet. For example, the word bakashot plays a key role in the book. "The term is so crucial to the novel," says Dweck, "that I felt it would be irresponsible to leave it in italicized Hebrew. At the same time, 'petitions' or 'supplications' doesn't quite pick up the resonances of the term. Much of the force of the word comes from its performative context, since the bakashot are sung. Finally, after several months, I settled on 'dawn hymns' as a way to evoke both the poetic and performative resonances of the term."

Sometimes, however, awkward tense constructions and overly literal renditions of literary Hebrew expressions will grate on the English reader's ear. Apropos style, Sabato must have special keys on his Hebrew keyboard for rare Hebrew expressions such as korat ruah, which appears half a-dozen times. Dweck variously translates this term as tranquility, affection, and satisfaction (as in the description of Sarah and Ezra above). This reflects Sabato's style of eschewing strong emotions and preferring a subtle, restrained manner that evokes Guy de Maupassant or Kazuo Ishiguro.

A recurring challenge of Sabato's works is their specialized nature: They do not always succeed in breaking out of the Orthodox world into a wider Jewish readership, or beyond. His second novel, "Adjusting Sights," was able to reach the secular Israeli audience and was even produced as a film. Undoubtedly, this was because its central issue was the Yom Kippur War, an event that cut across Israel's sharp religious-secular boundaries. "Aleppo Tales," his first novel, which drew on Sabato's heritage as a descendant of Syrian Jews, did not have the same impact. Perhaps the esoteric subject matter in "Dawning" will pique curiosity outside the religious community.

Sabato does not reveal Ezra's "sin," nor does he describe the catastrophe Ezra experienced, until the end of the book. But are the crime and the punishment related? Perhaps the author purposely misleads us into following his character's supposition that they are metaphysically connected. Possibly, Sabato means for us to decipher the real reason for Ezra's suffering: He is too long-suffering and overly pious, for example in ignoring "kosher gossip" that turns out to be cautionary advice. What matters in the end, for Ezra, and apparently for Sabato as well, is the process: Study leads to writing, and then to rewriting, repentance and possibly redemption.

Jessica Setbon and Shira Leibowitz Schmidt are collaborating on translating the autobiography of Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, "Do Not Raise Your Hand Against the Lad."