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Sun., February 17, 2008 Adar1 11, 5768

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Last update - 19:21 17/02/2008

One direction home

By Ruth Margalit

Tags: Israeli books, Meir Shalev

A Pigeon and a Boy ("Yonah Vena'ar"?), by Meir Shalev (translated from the Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg), Schocken Books, 320 pages, $25

"Some people shoot - themselves or others - but I went to find myself a home." This disturbingly honest statement, with its sarcastic offhanded qualification, recurs throughout Meir Shalev's imaginative and absorbing novel. At once a period piece and a contemporary tale, the book examines the delicate workings of family relations and of learning to move on while the past is ever-present. Anyone can find part of themselves in this book, yet, in a sense, "A Pigeon and a Boy" could not have taken place anywhere in the world but in Israel.

The novel's distinct "Israeliness" is disarming. Present-day narrator Yair Mendelsohn is reminded of his first childhood home, in Tel Aviv, as he takes a nostalgic stroll down the city's streets to a musical medley of accents; a secular family moves to Jerusalem in the 1950s and experiences a very peculiar Yom Kippur in the holy city; a pair of would-be lovers enjoy a lazy, drunken summer eve on a northern kibbutz in the 70s, with war and loss looming above it all. And, most important, there is the persistent search and yearning for home - both then and now.

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Shalev's local tale achieves allegorical, quasi-mythical proportions, proving once again the author's well-deserved place in the Hebrew canon. The successful adaptation of such localness for the English-speaking reader makes Evan Fallenberg's translation (which, it was announced last month, is the recipient of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award for fiction) a sheer triumph.

"'And suddenly,' said the elderly American man in the white shirt, 'suddenly a pigeon flew overhead, above that hell.'" The book's opening lines immediately thrust the reader into a sphere filled with suspense and the urgency of a story waiting to be told. Learning, as the reader only later does, that the scene described is that of a man unfolding the heroic details of a battle that took place many years earlier, during the 1948 War of Independence, one cannot help but wonder why the speaking voice is that of a foreigner, of an American. Why does the narrator feel the need to remove himself from these events? These lines also lay out a dichotomy of light and darkness that will accompany the novel to its end: a bloody war, on the one hand, in which "the winner is more surprised than the loser," and a pigeon, a speck of light, on the other - ascending above the battle scene, heading home.

The frame story sets up the novel's two parallel narratives. The first tells the moving tale of a love story set in the 1948 war, between two teenaged pigeon handlers - an awkward-looking boy from a kibbutz, whom everyone calls "the Baby," because of his childish appearance, and a beautiful blue-eyed girl from Tel Aviv, whom the author refers to as "the Girl." Gasping his final breaths on the battlefield, the Baby dispatches one last pigeon to his beloved, carrying a secret that is revealed only at the very end of the novel.

Alongside this story, Shalev integrates a second narrative, featuring Yair, a contemporary middle-aged protagonist, a tour guide catering especially to birdwatchers, who embarks on a mission to buy a house for himself, as his marriage to an American heiress gradually unravels. Yair finds himself thrust once again into the path of his childhood girlfriend Tirzah, now the contractor of his new house, and is awarded a second chance - at finding both a home and real love.

Surprisingly, it is the first plotline that is the more delicately woven and credible of the two. The one describing Yair's search for home strikes the reader as being metaphorical rather than actual. The Baby and the Girl, on the other hand, despite having generic names and an impossibly dramatic love affair, are complex characters, grounded in time and place. In telling their story, Shalev accomplishes the difficult task of being nostalgic without sliding into sentimentality.

"Pigeons need to love their home; otherwise they won't return to it." Shalev's recurring image of the pigeon as a symbol for home comes through, ironically, even better in translation. The Hebrew term yonat doar literally means "postal pigeon," while the English term "homing pigeon" conveys the Baby's clever insight that, despite common belief, the pigeon does not know how to navigate, but rather understands "one direction only, and its name is 'homeward.'"

The novel's main characters all share in the quest for a room of their own. Yair does not feel at home in the lavish confines of the Tel Aviv house he shares with his wife ("The home I have been living in for 20 years belongs to my wife, was created in her image, and is her ally"); just as his mother before him had felt suffocated in her marriage to a bourgeois doctor in Jerusalem, and nurtured secret yearnings to return to the sandy plains and blue waters of her native Tel Aviv. In the parallel narrative, too, the Baby is sent to fight a bloody battle, when all he longs for is to return home to the Girl he loves.

Shalev personifies the concept of home and treats it like an additional character in his book - a love object, if you will. In one of the most heartening scenes, Yair recalls how, before moving to Jerusalem, his mother used to make him and his brother greet their Tel Aviv home whenever they returned to it. "'Hello, house. You two, say hello to the house, too,' she would instruct us: 'And listen closely, because it will answer back.'"

The personal pursuit of each character can also be seen on a larger scale, as a subtle allegorical reference to the young nation's search for a national home, mirroring perhaps the 1917 Balfour Declaration's promise - not of a Jewish state, but rather of a future national home. This national home for Shalev is an all-inclusive one, featuring young and elderly, "new agers" preparing for an end-of-army trip around India, American Jews who made aliyah and even Chinese foreign workers.

The father is wittily nicknamed "Yordad" (another smart translation of the original "Avikhem"), the name by which Yair had always heard his mother refer to his father while growing up (as in "Tell your dad that I am waiting for him. Recount to your dad what we saw in the street today"
). Yordad stifles the unconventional spirit of his wife and causes her to disengage from her Tel Aviv home, as a result of which she eventually leaves her family; an abandonment that would haunt Yair throughout his adult life. When Yair later recounts his mother's habit of listing and counting the "fors" and "againsts" related to any decision she has to make, he can't help wondering aloud, "what did you count then, Mother? What does one count before leaving one's home?"

When words run out

The share of loss that is embedded in the Israeli experience is treated by Shalev with gentle humor and familiarity. When Gershon, the son of the Mendelsohns' close family friend Meshulam Fried, is killed, the father cannot bring himself to articulate the tragedy, or even fully to relate to it. He keeps referring to the death as, "ever since Gershon," without actually stating the words that follow. ("Ever since Gershon, I'm nothing but memories.")

Shalev's minimalist approach to words and language plays an important role in the novel. True love, Shalev seems to be saying, begins when words themselves run out. Such is the case in the coded correspondence between the Baby and the Girl through the homing pigeons, in which they only write messages like "Yes and yes and yes and yes," meaning, Yes we are in love, Yes I miss you, Yes I have not forgotten, Yes I remember. So, too, in a way, is the structure of the novel as a whole, addressed as it is by Yair to his mother - a letter that is left in mid-air, unfinished.

Like an onion, "A Pigeon and a Boy" has countless layers of allusions waiting to be peeled and analyzed. The most obvious one comes from a well-known children's poem of Haim Nahman Bialik, from which the title of the novel is taken: "and a pigeon with a boy, still knocking at the gate." Not only does the image of the boy and the pigeon match the narrative of the pigeon-handling Baby, but the notion of the knocking at the gate, as well as the rest of the poem in which no one answers their call, emphasize the idea of war as a hopeless cause. Furthermore, a close reading of the poem suggests that the focus should be the pigeon rather than the boy. Might the pigeon, then, be the real protagonist of this book, too?

In addition, the recurring act of dispatching the homing pigeons invokes the biblical story of Noah's Ark, like the image of the impending war as a deluge threatening to disrupt the daily routine of human life. However, the most powerful source of reference in the book is, unexpectedly, the New Testament, namely, the Christian narrative of the virgin birth of Jesus, connecting, as it does, a virgin, a pigeon and a future baby boy. (To say any more would spoil the ending.)

Shalev, then, conducts a conscious dialogue with other masters of Hebrew literature, as well as tackling the myths and symbolism imbued in the Scriptures. However, the most compelling aspect of his novel remains the psychological one, as the male characters seem to be mere extras in a show run by powerful women. Meshulam's daughter, the opinionated Tirzah; Yair's authoritative and calculating wife, Liora, and above all his rebellious free-spirited mother make for a true literary feast.

Ruth Margalit is on the staff of Haaretz.com

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