By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen(Trans: Sondra Silverstein)
Pushkin Press, £10
When we first meet Yaakov Markovitch, he is serving in the Irgun in 1940s Palestine. Early on, he strikes up a friendship with Zeev Feinberg. The two could not be more different. Markovitch is quiet, ordinary, "gloriously average". Feinberg is larger-than-life, a creature of appetites, whether food or sex. Imagine Porthos in The Man in the Iron Mask played by Gérard Depardieu. That's Feinberg.
At first, it seems as if this powerful, moving novel is going to be a rom-com. Feinberg craves sex and lots of it. Markovitch is his innocent sidekick. But the mood darkens. In due course, they both end up married: Feinberg to Sonya, who is more than a match for him, and Markovitch to Bella, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. This is when things start to get complicated.
There is a third couple in the small, rural village: Avraham Mandelbaum, the slaughterer - like Feinberg, a giant of a man - and his wife, the beautiful Rachel, a refugee from pre-war Vienna. Add another force of nature - Ephraim, deputy leader of the Irgun - and you have the central cast of characters.
Gundar-Goshen moves expertly between them, weaving a fascinating plot, part love story, part historical novel, and always gripping. The writing is sometimes beautifully evocative and there are perhaps half-a-dozen moments when your mouth will open in astonishment at some dramatic twist.
The novel switches smoothly between gentle humour and darker, more powerful emotions. Gundar-Goshen has a gift for shifting tone and keeping several threads going, moving from one relationship to another, weaving in and out of the big background history of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the birth of Israel. This is subtle and never overdone. Gundar-Goshen keeps her eye on the central characters, as they fall in and out of love.
Strikingly, although they fall in love and marry, they remain alone, afflicted by terrible sadness, each for different reasons. The village remains the centre of the story but characters flee: to post-war Europe or to the big city, Tel Aviv or Haifa, to find love, fulfilment or to serve the new Israel. Though often on the move they usually return to the village.
There is something very simple, almost biblical, about the storytelling and the tragic choices the central characters face. This is not a "state of Israel" novel. There are no significant Arab characters. It is a human story about love, requited or unrequited, and passion. Its central theme is how distant we can be even from our wives and husbands. Her characters all have secrets that they can't or won't share, with consequences that will define their lives. This is a promising debut by a very talented young Israeli writer.
