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My life as a man By Neri Livneh Tags: Avirama Golan The protagonist of Avirama Golan's second novel is a man. "During these four years of writing the book, I often felt I was a man," she says. "I went to the gym and looked at the girls as though I were a man, observing their body parts and constantly thinking how charming and diverse and attractive they were and how each of them had something different to offer and how a man could go out of his mind in the face of this abundance. I truly pitied men for having to restrain themselves." Four years ago, immediately after the publication of her bestselling first novel,"Ha'orvim" ("The Ravens," published in German and Italian translations), Golan, a member of the Haaretz editorial board, started to work on a new novel whose protagonist, a man, discovers one day in midlife that he has become a woman. "The book's title was 'Change of Seasons,' and the idea was that he would be a man in one season and a woman in the next. But after a few paragraphs I got stuck and realized that I wanted him to stay a man." The result is "Simanei haim" ("Signs of Life" - published, like her first novel, by the New Library imprint of Hakibbutz Hameuchad, in Hebrew). Its protagonist, Eliko, a lecturer in literary theory in Tel Aviv, lies unconscious for six days in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What he experiences in those six days is described through the medical staff and the relatives who visit him, while Eliko's thoughts are conveyed through a stream of consciousness technique. This internal process recapitulates his life in reverse, from the moment of his breakup with his latest lover, his divorce from the mother of his children, his maturation into adulthood, his adolescent loves, and back to his birth in Jerusalem, the son of a beautiful Greek diva and a physician of Galician origin. Advertisement Why is your protagonist unconscious? "Because that is in any case the basic male condition, but a little more extreme. As a man, he understands nothing about his life. That is why I have him lying unconscious, so that we, at least, will be able to decipher something about his life. But it's hard not to see a certain type of irony hovering above this hero's head. You can laugh at him with me. You see that he is sometimes a dolt." And why is your protagonist a man? "I wanted to say something about this matter of being a man. It's not just the sexual meaning. What intrigued me was to understand what a man like this feels when he walks into a room and finds two women whom he feels threatened by, how he feels when he lectures to an audience in which there are women looking at him. My conclusion is that in the end we are not all that different, but the things that are different can become a literary journey. And it really was a very exciting journey, in a man's body, to feel in the most concrete way the structure of a man's body, not just his sexual organ but the whole body, the heaviness of the body, the big hands, and try to feel what he feels when he touches a woman." The women in the book are humorless nags who cannot be satisfied. "I hope you understand that this is not really how I see women. The women come out the way Eli sees them. They do in fact emerge as a bottomless pit. You know, some people complained that in 'The Ravens' the men came out terribly weak. Well, I thought they had to come out weak, because they are described from the viewpoint of two female protagonists. Here, the man at the center sees women and he can see them in only one of two ways: either he is madly attracted to them, or he is afraid of them. The problem is that the hero of the book cannot see women as whole human beings. If you are asking the meaning of a journey seeing through the eyes of a man, that is the meaning." So which is preferable, to be a man or a woman? "The conclusion is that I am very happy to be a woman, especially when it comes to sex. It is absolutely frightening to be a man; as a woman you don't face these tests all the time. They are constantly being tested. At the outset, when they are young, they get erections when they don't want to. We had a teacher who came to class in a very short skirt and crossed her legs in front of all those poor boys. Afterward, after they have met all the other challenges and are older ? thank God we now have Viagra. The fear of all my male friends, as we approached 40, was that they would not be able to satisfy their wives, who precisely then had reached a stage in which sex began to interest them again. They had finished raising children and had become liberated in the meantime, and maybe they also had an unmarried girlfriend who screwed nonstop, and that stirred their desire. But just then the husband was depressed because he didn't get promoted at work or his blood pressure went up, but despite all that he had to keep performing all the time. So it's a lot more fun to be a woman." Every two weeks, the petite, blue-eyed Golan takes part in rigorous training for competitive Melges sailing, using a small, seven-meter engineless performance boat - the fastest racing model in the world. Golan, for whom the training sessions provide peaks of happiness, invited me to join her, but then canceled the invitation when bad weather was forecast. "We went out to sea and at first I was really sorry you didn't come, because the weather was absolutely marvelous. But barely half an hour from shore, we ran into awful waves and the mast fell down and Ms. Golan had to jump into the stormy seas and try to lift the mast. At that moment I said to myself: What a pity I am not a man. After all, I am 58 years old, and in the previous generation, women of my age played with their grandchildren. I asked myself: What am I doing in the middle of the sea? My trainer, who is a sweet guy but a navy officer, too, laughs at me because I am a small person and almost his mother's age. There is something desperate about my stubborn insistence, throughout my life, on triumphing over all the men in the world." Maybe that's why you created a male protagonist - because you wanted to triumph over the male writers? "I suppose I wanted to cross the gender boundaries completely, because for a long time I haven't felt comfortable with what is known as women's literature. Writing about the intimate world of women doesn't suit me. I am more interested in literature where things happen. And I also know that I am a woman of 58, but that is not what I feel at sea. My bodily experience is that of a 15-year-old, and that is something I have had since I was a girl. It is not self-evident to try to lift a mast in a stormy sea, but it fills me with adrenaline, and according to the conceptual world we were raised in, that belongs to the masculine world, not the feminine one." Do you see yourself as a daring person who breaks conventions? "I have never understood what daring is in people's eyes, and what is not. What do people mean by daring? In my view, daring is courage, and what I consider courage today is to love and be faithful to the person you love. That is 10 times more daring than all this nonsense." Still, you had a partner who was 18 years younger than you, which is hardly usual. "At times, when I saw people reacting strangely, I understood that this was not the norm. I saw in the reactions of fellow women journalists a kind of voyeuristic pseudo-feminist enthusiasm because of the fact that I had a young boyfriend. That was of no interest to me then, and I continue to find it insignificant. If I had done things to enthuse other people, I think I would have wasted my life. Are we in a beauty contest or in 'A Star Is Born' [Israel's "American Idol"]? This is our life, and in life we hurt people and cause them pain; it's not some prolonged festival of gossip columns - and the fact is that the gossip columns were not very interested in me during that period. In fact, the gossip columns take little interest in me, and not by chance. All in all, I live a very private life." Golan, a mother of two, was born in Givatayim. When she was 14, the family moved to Jerusalem. "I took the news about the move to Jerusalem very hard, because I was a Tel Aviv girl. Jerusalem was a very small city and it has no sea, and I really loved the sea and the Yarkon [River]; the happiest day of my life was when, in a rowing group, we rowed out of the Yarkon to the sea. "And then I am taken to this small city where everyone knows everyone else and it's obvious that if I came from Tel Aviv I am a whore, because I wasn't in the Scouts like everyone else and I wore a short skirt. There was even one girl in the class who said she heard that I was a prostitute in Tel Aviv. Anyway, I arrived - this was 1964 - and it took me five minutes to fall madly in love with Jerusalem." In the book, too, there is the pretty girl who comes from Tel Aviv and so is considered a tramp, and there is Eliko's wife, who does a lot of shopping in Paris. Is that your favorite city? "I know Paris very well and also love it, but if you are asking about the places I especially love, then Greece is a place like that. It started when Haaretz sent me in 1996 to do a story about the subway and about Athens, which was then at the height of its ugliness, but I still fell in love with it instantly. That feeling has developed even more since I have been with Shmulik [Shmuel Shem Tov, her current partner], and we sail mainly to Greece." Golan's love for the sea and sailing did not fade in the wake of the move to Jerusalem. She admits that one of the reasons she fell in love with her ex-husband, whom she met in high school, was that he was an officer in the navy. "I fell in love with him, with his uniform, with his ship and with the whole navy," she says. Her encounter with Shem Tov, a communications executive, enabled her to deepen that love, which in turn deepened the bond between the two. "When I met Shmulik, who was then almost 49, he told me that by the age of 50 he wanted to sail across the ocean. For me, as a girl, sailing was my great love. So somehow, when we started to be together, it was very natural for me to go out to sea with him. But after the first time we sailed, when we got home I thought to myself that if I wanted to do it with him it could not be as the lady in a tiny bikini who lounges on the deck. So I went to learn how to be a skipper at a school called Azimut. Today we are a sailing couple. We are partners, and it is tremendous fun to go sailing together. On cruises, we have reached a stage where we stopped talking. There's no need. It involves a lot of teamwork and you learn important things about yourself." Plainly, Golan likes the protagonist of her new novel - a handsome man, highly educated, someone who is very attracted to women, who is unfaithful and irresponsible, but also lacks malice and cannot understand why the women in his life are always angry at him. The reader, too, at least this reader, also found herself falling in love with the book's hero, even though his psychic structure makes him totally unqualified for marriage. Would you fall in love with a man like Eliko? "You bet. Men like that, we fall terribly in love with them and say: With me he will be different. Then we realize it's not like that, and we're angry at him. Overall, I think the basic feeling men have today is that women are angry at them." It's not surprising, because Eliko is constantly cheating. "We all cheat. Eliko doesn't even actually cheat. He is ravenous for life, and throughout his life he is able to channel his hunger into two things: intellectual hunger and an obsessive quest for a woman's love. He is not one of these guys who just screw. He is constantly looking for the ultimate woman, who will love him terribly and not want commitment from him." Golan has never been alone (apart from one year, during which "I had one-night stands, of course, usually with very young men"). She admits that she, too, does not commit. What do you find in young men? "I think I am not a terribly developed person, and when I was divorced I felt, on the one hand, very old and out of things, but on the other hand like a sleeping beauty who woke up at the age of 18. Of course, there is also the fact that young men are physically more beautiful, but that is less important to me. You know, a few years before I met Shmulik I was sitting in a beauty salon and reading La'isha [a women's magazine]. There was an interview with a society woman from Haifa named Tzipi Rom, who was already 60 at the time and was photographed wearing only a large pashmina shawl. She said that one of the most wonderful lovers she had was a young man named Shmulik Shem Tov. I don't know why, but I remembered that story years after I met Shmulik, and I really laughed." What do you think attracts young men to older women? "I talked to Amnon Jackont, who wrote about the fact that his formative experience was being with a woman of 30 when he was 15. There are periods when you find an emotional haven in a relationship, and it's usually a relationship that has no future and exists only in the present. Tzipi has the warmest and biggest heart on earth. When, as a young man, you meet someone who envelops you, afterward you embark on life with thicker skin. It is very important for me to emphasize here that this is solely my interpretation of the story of Shmulik and Tzipi, and not the interpretation of either of them. I met Shmulik at a stage in which I thought I would not have another relationship. Of course, I knew I would have affairs, but I wasn't thinking about a relationship, and I was quite calm about it, because I have had enough love in my life." Enough love and enough sex? "You know, we belong to the generation that can say without mincing words that all the old wives' tales about how we lose our libido over the years are a lot of nonsense. True, there are women who are not interested in sex, but they weren't interested in it when they were young, either. The whole story about how women lose interest in sex as they become older was invented by men who feel threatened, men of the type who hate Hillary Clinton. Both physically and mentally, sex can only improve for women, because what's the story? The freer you are, and the less you care what people say, you can only enjoy it more, even if you don't look quite as good." Is it like that for men, too? "It depends which men. For wise men - not in the sense of education, which has nothing to do with wisdom - it should get better. Wise men improve over the years, like good wine, because they are attentive and not afraid, and because they understand that sexuality is in the head and has many facets and is not concentrated exclusively on individual performance, like at the age of 17." Can you understand why older men are attracted to young women? "The few I know who prefer younger women are in the category of stupid men. There is no doubt that externally, a young woman is more attractive, and there are some very smart young women, too. I think that the arrangement of an older man and a young woman can work only if the young woman truly loves him. Because age and gender make no difference in love. But the obsession for younger women is pathetic, because it usually stems from fear, from panic. It's like men who date models." Are you afraid of being left for a younger woman? "I have never been afraid of that, and besides, tell me - does it make a difference who you are left for? Maybe it's even harder to be left for an older woman." From Eliko's point of view, what is so attractive about women? "First of all, their diversity, the infinite possibilities. Each one has a different ass and different tits." And men are not different from each other? "Yes, but they have a lot fewer interesting organs. Besides, from the male point of view, women are indecipherable. They are at the same time both soft and very hard. Through Eliko I understood that the greatest longing of the man is to enter, to be inside and be swallowed up; but that is also very frightening, because once you are swallowed up you can get lost. There is something on the feminine side that exercises great control, in that you can accept into you the person who breaks within you inwardly, which is also the height of male yearning and fear." Did this new observation of women stir in you some fresh desire you hadn't known about? "No. Precisely in this matter of sex I am very enthusiastic about the notion of a man and a woman in bed. God had a real brainstorm there. But what I did was take all my memories of all the men I knew and use them to try to get right inside a man's body. It's very easy. In this matter I agree with Virginia Woolf, who said that when a person sits down to write, gender does not exist." Yet Eliko, who is a literary scholar, thinks there is a masculine voice; he writes about the disappearance of that voice in Hebrew poetry. Do you think the voice of men has disappeared? "Something has definitely happened in the last 20 years. The male hierarchy is threatened in all spheres, both social and literary. These days, women writers stand out far more than male writers, and I have no doubt that the threat to men is huge. I always wanted to be a boy, and my identification is with males. I am very empathetic to male weakness, and I think that now, at my advanced age - and especially when, until six years ago, I was only with men far younger than me - when I look at the men of my generation I pity them a little. "I have very good male friends with whom I have conducted a dialogue for years, and my feeling is that they feel constantly threatened and under attack. All the feminists will be angry at me, but I want to remind us that feminism was supposed to liberate both sexes. In recent years, men have had to be both sensitive and wonderful, also understanding, also change the diapers, and also have erections all the time, because when it comes to sex, they have to be a man's man. I see that as a very great loss for feminism, and the great Doris Lessing said it a few years before I did." And what about women - aren't there a lot of demands on them, too? "In the final analysis, all this feminist talk is imaginary, because at the root of the social concept, there is still the demand for the man to provide and have a career, and for the woman to be a good mother. I also think that the Jewish mother is totally nuts; the moment she has a son, she stops being a woman and becomes only a mother, so you get men who are mama's boys. All that, taken together, is screwing us." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Halimi, relived A Jewish teen is tortured where Ilan Halimi died in similar circumstances. Bus-bomb capital Four buses designed to thwart suicide bombings are tested in J'lem.

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