"Adom atik" ("Ancient Red") by Gabriela Avigur-Rotem, Kinneret-Zmora-Bitan, 568 pages, NIS 94

"Don't wear the holiday dress, / Don't ever laugh / Around you there will be flattery and seduction and banter, / ... And I am on a line, like a hawk circling" threatens the jealous husband in Natan Alterman's poem "The Joy of the Poor," from which Gabriela Avigur-Rotem chose the epigraph to her new book. The compulsive attitude, one of perennial sexual conquest and ownership, that the "man of darkness" displays vis-a-vis his wife, who wishes to laugh and dress up for the festival of life - this attitude reflects Avigur-Rotem's novel, centering on the powerful, deathlike hold of the past on the present, and the insight that only from the grave can one observe and understand the present.

The novel's plot follows the everyday life of Ra'anana, her mother, Ruhama, and her friend Tze'ela, and their attempts at having relationships with Barry, a divorced architect. Although they all seek to turn their backs on the political-public existence of Israel at the end of the 20th century, their stories are all trapped inside the violent reality around them. At the beginning of the novel, Ra'anana embarks on a mission that her mother sends her on: to extricate the photographs of Hayaleh, the mother's sister, who committed suicide, from her still-living husband. Meanwhile, in a panicky telephone call, Ra'anana's grandmother shouts into her ear that Yitzhak Rabin, "Rosa's boy," has been murdered. At the end of the novel, Ra'anana's extended family celebrates the grandmother's 100th birthday in her house in the Galilee, while in the background Israel's Arab and Jewish citizens are rioting against each other.

	Advertisement

The chapters in the novel that concern the past describe the passions and lives of well-known historical figures from the Second Aliyah (wave of immigration) and Third Aliyah (1904-1923). In stark contrast to the fictional characters of the present, these real figures from the past devote all their energy and vitality to shaping the public reality of their time, while pushing their own everyday routines to the margins. The interweaving of chapters depicting the past and the present reflects the novel's main theme: that the present does not materialize from nowhere; it grows out of the "soil" of the past. The graveyard is the place of intersection between the past and present, between the dead and the living, between the political and the personal, and it indeed constitutes a central space in this work.

The action in the first chapter about the past takes place on October 9, 1917, the day when Sarah Aaronsohn [a World War I pro-British Jewish spy, who committed suicide after she was captured by the Ottoman authorities] was buried in the cemetery at Zichron Yaakov. Ra'anana and her good friend Tze'ela, the young women who feature in the novel's present-day plot, are touring cemeteries in northern Israel, in Rosh Pina and Kfar Giladi, because Tze'ela is researching gender discrimination in graveyards: Men have erect headstones proclaiming their name and occupation, she finds, while women's tombstones are flat and their inscriptions concern only their connection to their husbands. Barry, wanting "to kill two hours of waiting," comes to the cemetery at Kibbutz Kinneret to examine the possibility of building "a bridge connecting Kinneret to the cemetery on the lakeshore - it will all become one tourism project." The cemetery at Zichron is the place where Tze'ela and Barry meet during their hesitant first flirtation; toward the end of the novel, Ra'anana's entire family meets in the cemetery on the anniversary of Hayaleh's suicide.

Another way of realizing the encounter between past and present, between the living and the dead, is through photography. The figures of the past, with all the promise contained in their youthful portraits, appear in the book as the subjects of photos. And so, for example, the book features two pictures of the poet Rahel Bluwstein. One is from 1913, "before ... her love, her illness, her return," and shows her out in the open, turning toward the camera and holding on to a man who is leaning by her side, her entire demeanor suggesting confidence and successful assimilation. The second, later, picture shows her seemingly trapped between the walls of the room and her desk, the knowledge of death already stamped on her face. Yet another confrontation of past and present, of living women and dead ones, surrounds the photograph of Sarah Aaronsohn. In a university course described in the book on "The Innate Contradiction in the Reality of the Victimized Femme Fatale," female students pass the picture between them, each one speaking of the silent image in a way that reflects their own present-day perspective: "She could stand to lose a few pounds"; or, "She is leaning forward as though she wants to break out of the picture."

Fact and fiction

An important role is given to the photograph of Haya-Shoshana Bogen [a Second Aliyah pioneer, who committed suicide]: "A young woman, her eyes closed, lies on a stretcher covered by a sheet that bears a loose wreath of eucalyptus branches, surrounded by ... pioneer women in white kerchiefs." This photo creates an analogy between two women who share the name "Haya[leh]-Shoshana." Both are young women, pregnant, unable to contain the distress of their femininity, and both choose to take their own lives. One is an obscure historical figure from the Second Aliyah, the other is a fictional character, an "absent presence" in her family's history.

The existential, essential identification of the later Hayaleh with the earlier Haya also finds realization in a photographic space: In one of her works, revealed only after her death, the fictional character shapes her life and world as a photomontage of Haya Bogen's photo: "Hayaleh had pasted her own face over that of the dead pregnant woman." The Hayaleh of the narrated present is the hidden thread that runs through the novel, its plot and thematic core. The task of publishing her photos as an album for the birthday of the grandmother of Ra'anana, the narrator, also runs through the entire book. Forced to "speak," Hayaleh's photos express a private and communal feminine distress; they are the negative, the dark side, of the well-illuminated, familiar, male and hegemonic Zionist story.

The real Haya represents the feminine immigrant experience, both in terms of the fulfillment of the Zionist vision and of victimization. The fictional Hayaleh's photographic technique, which reflects her world view, is that of photomontage; her raw materials are "hundreds of photographs from the pioneer era." In her work the artist-photographer uses typical (male) representations of the Zionist story - a watermelon, barefoot men holding tools - into which she inserts, in a kind of subversive re-reading, the female portrait that was once left out of the picture. This creative act expresses the complex poetics of the book, and it is analogous to the way in which Avigur-Rotem herself connects the story of the past to the story, and purpose, of the present. In this photomontage-style novel, the author wishes to retell the Hebrew history of the last century, to give a voice and an image to the silenced female figure. And so the woman in her book is transformed from an anonymous "maiden," who weaves clothes for the men to wear - the role of women since the era of Penelope - into one who wears the woven fabric herself and gives shape to reality.

On her 100th birthday, the grandmother- matriarch, Tzofkeh, receives as a present the photo album "Chayaleh's Life." It contains the story of a living-dead woman, the silent victim of the Zionist masculine narrative. The end of the novel is also written using a photomontage technique, which resonates with the ending of Yosef Chaim Brenner's novel "Mikan umikan" ("From Here to There"). The endings describe a drop of water about to fall, an old woman lighting a fire in the stove while baking pita bread, and the presence of thorns crowning the characters. In Brenner's novel, the thorns crown the men, the heroes of the Second Aliyah, while in Avigur-Rotem's work the crown of thorns is transferred to the female dynasty - grandmother, daughters and granddaughters. The story of the Second Aliyah ends with Brenner's famous line, "The existence was an existence of thorns. The account had yet to be settled." And Avigur-Rotem answers him, speaking to the female characters: "Did you hear the news? It is not over, this whole business, it seems to be only beginning."