Change of venue - Haaretz

Subscribe to Print Edition

Sun., November 11, 2007 Kislev 1, 5768

Israel Time: 04:57 (EST+7)

web haaretz.com

Back to Homepage

Print Edition

Diplomacy

Defense

Arts & Leisure

Real Estate

Jewish World

National

Advertising

Magazine

Week's End

Business

Opinion

Rosner's Domain

Anglo File

Books

Travel

del.icio.us

Digg It! new

Last update - 04:54 11/11/2007

Change of venue

By Omri Herzog

tags: Syrian-African Pift Valley

Veha'aretz shata, (The Land Is Sailing) by Haggai Dagan, Xargol/Am Oved (Hebrew), 180 pages, NIS 79

Haggai Dagan is not a writer to avoid exploring new territory or traveling through time, nor is he an author who submits to the dictates of political correctness. His novels deal with journeys that seek to illuminate Israeli reality, as well as imagine its liberation from the social and ideological shackles that may restrict, censor or paralyze it. His new book, "Veha'aretz shata," continues this exploration boldly: Dagan sends Eretz Israel off on a search for a new mythology, but he goes beyond the motion of the protagonists or the story's own movement between past and future, and takes the land itself on a journey.

	Advertisement

A great fracture runs through this novel's middle, separating its first and second halves. It's a fracture of both plot and style, marked by a dramatic earthquake that cracks open the Syrian-African Rift Valley and sends the Land of Israel sailing through the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. More than the characters that inhabit it, Eretz Israel is the main protagonist of this novel. Tired of its given role, one that soaks its soil with fear, violence and obtuseness, the country seeks to shake off the burden of sanctity and sacrifice, the burden of the mythic history that desecrates the life taking place within it. And so the land sets out on a journey across the waters, a journey that disconnects it from its sanctity and takes it to other regions, northern and chilly, where the national, religious and racial fire consuming it can be extinguished.

"Elad's mother never liked olive oil." With these words the novel opens, pointing from the start to the rift that has opened between the Israeli Jew and the territorial mythology surrounding his country. In the opening scene, Elad, the hero, travels to a class reunion at the kibbutz he grew up in, and along the way he notices the thinning olive groves of the Lower Galilee. The olive tree signifies the Israeli struggle for spatial assimilation, as well as this struggle's typical strategy. The groves dwindle away, and ancient olive trees are frequently uprooted, set on fire or stolen. Some are sold as ornaments for squares and yards, to be replanted near the pseudo-antique vases that decorate Israel's public space, a distasteful expression of our ancient claim to the land. "The olive groves grow out of this land as though they were growing into its depths," Dagan writes, "their trunks clenched, as though the groves were self-evident, as though they were necessary."

But neither the leaves nor the trunks of the olive trees are self-evident, even if the country's inhabitants treat them as such. They mark the fracturing of the Israeli landscape, which is sacrificed to the violence that supposedly seeks to protect and preserve it. The landscape adorned by the trees is that of "the edges of summer that lie unraveled by the side of the road, like torn electrical cables that no one comes to fix, there's no money and the public doesn't care - and everything lies there, forgotten, neglected, blackened." And so, too, Israeli society is trapped by the heavy antiquity of the olive trees, staggering under the burden of "helplessness, of stubborn and tormented growth within the acid and bitterness of others, within the stubborn, protective silences that build up like rings of wood."

The novel consists of two parts: The first focuses on Elad's journey to his class reunion. He is torn with longing for the girl he loved as a boy, Violeta; it was a powerful, stormy adolescent love, which taught him to tread the paths of her body and know its every hill and valley. The love he felt for Violeta, whose real name is Stav (autumn), blends with his love for the purity and innocence of the land, as conveyed in the poems of Haim Hefer, Nathan Yonathan, Avraham Shlonsky and Yehiel Mohar, which are quoted and alluded to throughout the book.

But Violeta does not come to the event; she is scuba-diving on the other side of the world. As Elad leaves the reunion, drained, he and the country are both struck by disillusionment, disabused of the dream that the past can be recreated, or even re-encountered. The earth shakes and quivers, and the story of the journey begins.

Unfamiliar utopia

"The land broke away and embarked on a long trip, trembling with excitement, renewing itself for the journey, wiping away roads and bridges, causing buildings, parking garages and shopping centers to crumble. The land shook off all that had been piled onto it," and in the course of the journey its layers crack, and the buried past rises like the dead, demanding satisfaction: "From the ruins there suddenly rose clumsy Crusader walls, Abbasid arches, a Byzantine colonnade, Roman columns, disarray and defeat and rocks collapsing onto each other." The land, unable to contain any more, vomits out its history, the mythology that has raped it with a dress of concrete, with firing ranges and unfulfilled promises.

And, along with history, the country's inhabitants are also spewed out: the people who worship the metaphysical idea of the land and cannot understand how the King of Kings "is doing this to us," having brought the Jews back after two millennia of exile; as well as the people who shroud the country with an intellectual verbiage of disconnection, hedonism and deliberate obliviousness. With a certain gleeful cruelty, the "Gilman girls," those leftist female students who can be found at Tel Aviv University's humanities building, are described "floating on the water in a colorful tumult, hitting the waves with their designer handbags, swept out of classroom windows," and leaving behind them and behind Tel Aviv as a whole only a trail of expensive shoes.

The story of Elad, who finds himself sailing on the trembling soil into the unknown, is blended with the stories of the people he meets: Chasia, who works at the museum that commemorates the Palmah (pre-state Jewish strike force), a threadbare character haunted by fear of the Nazis, part schizophrenic, part clairvoyant; Re'ut, the young Jewish woman from the West Bank settlement cluster of Gush Etzion, who has an erotic love for the land and who unknowingly sacrifices this simple, beautiful love on the altar of the land's consecration and conquest; Zuckerman, a formerly Orthodox insurance salesman preoccupied in the most pragmatic way with his chances of making a fortune off the crisis. Each of them has a different kind of relationship with the land, and each relationship contains within it something that is at once false and right. Dagan does not judge his characters, and so he escapes the trap of didacticism that such an apocalyptic act might create.

Dagan gives a solemn meaning to the nostalgia for good old Eretz Israel, which exists in the collective fantasy, in the old songs and photographs, more than it did in historical reality; clearly, the author is pained by the geopolitics of contemporary Israel, but at the same time he treats it with complete irony. His utopia, which involves the replacement of Israel's mythology by another mythology (and the book explicitly notes the essence of the new mythology, when the land finally arrives at a safe harbor), rules out anything that is already familiar to Israeli culture. The gods of the new, cooler territory have long ceased fighting, and there is not even any way of knowing whether they are still alive. The new territory is so remote from the Mediterranean heat that the nostalgic yearning to return to the past is clearly without any possibility of fulfillment. This country, "exhausted, worn out, bedraggled by history," must now, anonymously and patiently, begin to study itself anew. The motto of this lovely, turbulent and unstable novel, a verse from Ecclesiastes, says it clearly: "Do not say, why were the former days better than these? For you do not inquire wisely concerning this."

Omri Herzog is co-editor of "Popular and Canonical: Literary Dialogues" (in Hebrew), published recently by Resling.

Bookmark to del.icio.us


	Remembering Yasser
	PA Chair Mahmoud Abbas unveils a $1.75 million mausoleum for Yasser Arafat.


	Spiritual spat
	U.S. synagogue ties with 'women priests' draws ire of Catholic church.

Today Online


	Jessica Balaban: Why should world Jewry aid Israeli Arabs?
	Responses: 189


	Jacob Victor: Mukasey is the latest victim of the malaise of U.S. Jewish leadership
	Responses: 148


	Israel, PA agree future deals conditional on carrying out road map
	Responses: 217


	Top Hamas official: We'll conquer W. Bank if Israel withdraws
	Responses: 168


	Israel seeks fresh Holocaust reparations deal with Germany
	Responses: 368


	M. Firillas: Pakistan turmoil raises specter of an Islamic bomb
	Responses: 71

Rosner's Domain

18%, 28%, 46%, 52%: how many really support military action in Iran? (WTR)

Annapolis dictionary: P is for photo-op

Rosner's Guest: Why not a women's Talmud?

Poll: Should American Jews have a voice in shaping Israel's policies?

More Headlines
03:10 Israel: No more Egyptian guards needed on border


03:57 Mausoleum of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat unveiled in Ramallah


21:46 IDF wounds militant, two civilians in strikes on Gaza rocket squads


04:13 Anti-fascists block Nazi march in Prague's Jewish Quarter


04:21 Evangelicals raise specter of 'Islamofascism' to rouse voters


23:23 Teachers` union rejects latest offer by state to end strike


02:16 Priceless clocks stolen in museum heist found 24 years later


01:11 Psychiatric hospital kept mum about sexual assault in mixed ward


00:59 Pulitzer Prize winning author Norman Mailer dies at age 84


01:48 Justice Ministry opposes bill blocking pardon of Yigal Amir