The Best Israeli Novelist You’ve Never Heard Of

Shalev’s new novel deals with memory, in an Israeli setting.

Shalev’s new novel deals with memory, in an Israeli setting.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

In preparation for his talk next week with the Israeli novelist Meir Shalev, Daniel Menaker had some work to do. Menaker, the former editor-in-chief at Random House who will interview Shalev at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, knew the author’s reputation well, but had not read much of his work.
So Menaker raced through a copy of Shalev’s latest book “A Pigeon and A Boy” (Schocken), which won Israel’s most prestigious award, the Brenner Prize, in 2006, and the National Jewish Book Award when it was published in translation here the next year. Menaker immediately called up Caro Llewellyn, the director of the festival, to tell her what he thought: “You know, he’s an absolutely marvelous writer,” recounted Llewellyn, who said she had

not been expecting Menaker’s call. She said Menaker was sorry he had not read more of Shalev’s work before.

The same goes for most readers outside of Israel. In his home country, Shalev is mentioned in the same breath as David Grossman and Amos Oz, Israel’s two most renowned writers. And though his novels steadily appear in translations abroad (in over 20 languages no less), internationally he is still a lesser-known name. It is perhaps all the more surprising since his work has both literary cachet — dense as it is with biblical allusions and classic literary themes — and is also deliriously entertaining. Shalev, to put a finer point on it, is a funny writer.

In an essay he published for The Independent in London, on the occasion of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Jerusalem in 2000, for instance, Shalev mused on the Church’s shifting vehicular tastes. “The Messiah was ‘meek and sitting upon an ass,’ but his vicar rides around in a Mercedes four-wheel drive with gilt hubcaps,” he wrote. “No doubt about it, Christianity has come a long way.”

When asked in an interview from Israel what he thought accounted for his relative obscurity outside of Israel, Shalev said it might be his politics. Not that his views are radical — left or right — though they are liberal; it’s just that he does not write novels about them. “I guess it’s because I’m less active politically,” he said. “That puts you in the focus of the international community.”

There is a lot of truth in that, particularly in recent years, as contemporaries like Oz, Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, have publicly called for a re-energized peace process. In 2006, for instance, those three writers organized a press conference calling for a cease-fire during Israel’s war with Lebanon. It is well-known that Grossman’s son Uri died three days later, while fighting in that war.

To be sure, Shalev often voices his political views in the column he writes for the Israeli paper Yediot Achronot. But he asks his editors not to translate his columns online and says that he prefers his novels to explore broader, more universal themes. “I like to see myself more as a writer who writes about classical literary themes — love, revenge, memory,” he said. “I don’t want my literature to promote my political ideas and I don’t want my politics to promote my literature.”

A recurrent theme explored in much of his work is how memory transforms our sense of ourselves, as well as history. In what is perhaps his most revered novel, “The Blue Mountain” (1988), his first, Shalev poked fun at the utopian visions of Israel’s early pioneers by retelling one family’s saga from various generational viewpoints. In “Esau” (1991), another early success, he did a similar thing with a Jerusalem family that went back 15 generations.

And in his latest novel “A Pigeon and A Boy” — again, much like the novels “The Loves of Judith” (1994) and “Fontanelle” (2002) that appeared before it — Shalev shows how memory can both enliven and depress a human’s experience. He weaves together the tale of a boy killed during Israel’s War of Independence with the middle-aged narrator Yair Mendelsohn’s search for “a home and a story” — his dying mother’s advice for a meaningful life.

In an early scene, Mendelsohn, a tour guide, must show around a brusque and boisterous American Jew who had fought decades ago in the 1948 war. “Stout and suntanned as only Americans can be,” as Shalev describes the man, the tender story Mendelsohn ends up finding comes from this outwardly callous guest. “His mind was shelves of memory, while mine were rolls of conjectures,” Mendelsohn writes admiringly when comparing himself to his guest.

When critics have taken issue with Shalev, it is usually for being repetitive. “As a novelist, Shalev is now manufacturing derivative Shalev,” Gershom Gorenberg wrote in a review of “Beveito Bamidbar” (1999), which also retold a story about village life. But for the most part, readers and critics have found his richly detailed, multilayered stories reminiscent of the great Latin American magical realists: Borges, Marquez and the genre’s current star, Roberto Bolaño. “His style is sui generis,” said Ariel Hirschfeld, who teaches literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “But I think it has something to do with the magical realists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”

Shalev says that he appreciates the company but isn’t sure the comparison is apt. Instead, he said his most conscious influences are Russian novelists like Mikhail Bulgakov, who infused biblical imagery into a contemporary social narrative, most famously in “The Master and Margarita.” He also mentioned Melville, and for a similar reason.

Despite the breadth of his literary knowledge, Shalev mostly avoids talking about himself in that company. Instead, he would rather focus on experiences from his personal life that inform his writing. Chief among them are his grandparents, Russian immigrants to Palestine. “They were always telling stories,” he said, “of the snow and the village and the Russian music and the rivers.”

His mother’s family lived on Israel’s first moshav, Nahalal, which was founded in 1921 and is still a revered place in the country’s history. He was born there, too, in 1948, but moved when his father took the family to Jerusalem. The city he later found somehow empty — dead — as he described it in both The Independent essay and his nonfiction book “My Jerusalem” (1998). The city’s inhabitants were arrogant, particularly since Israel recaptured the Old City in the 1967 war, which he fought in. The place had become a soulless tourist attraction. Only in Jerusalem, he wrote, could you find a synagogue with the sign: “A holy place! No pissing!” Anyway, he went on, “How much impact can you make on a city which King David invented, where Jesus was crucified, that Bulgakov wrote about?”

Not surprisingly, many of his novels take place in a small Israeli village. They often display details that might be gleaned from an intensely imaginative but perhaps intellectually under-stimulating childhood. Cows, canaries and hummingbirds display anthropomorphic traits; twins are discernible only by the opposite swirls of their hair; a Jewish man falls in love with a huge, blond Central Asian woman after fighting in a war against the Turks.

It’s worth noting that he has also written more than a dozen children’s books and will be on a panel discussing children’s literature at the PEN festival, too. (He will also give a lecture on the state of Israeli literature at Columbia University.) But perhaps most interesting is that for much of his adult life he had never written a book. He was a popular television host for years before writing his first novel, “The Blue Mountain”, when he was 40. It became an instant best-seller and immediately altered his career plans.
Now 61, Shalev said success was only part of the switch. “The truth is, and most writers won’t tell you this, but it’s true, I write because I have to,” he said. “I didn’t think I was doing the right thing with my life [on television]. I wanted to write so I didn’t feel like I wasted my life, like I lived a whole life for nothing.”

Meir Shalev will give a free lecture at the Altschul Auditorium at Columbia University on Monday, April 27, at 8 p.m.; he will speak on a free panel discussion about children’s literature at the Instituto Cervantes on Wednesday, April 29, at 4:30 p.m.; and he will be interviewed by Daniel Menaker at the Center for Jewish History on Thursday, April 30, at 7 p.m., for $15. Visit www.pen.org for more details, or call (212) 334-1660.

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