A Winter's Tale

By ERIKA DREIFUS

HUMAN PARTS
By Orly Castel-Bloom
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
232 pages. Key Porter Books. $24.95.

“It was an exceptional winter,” begins Human Parts, a winter during which it seemed “it had always been cold in Israel.”  And beyond the unsettling weather, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process “collapsed like one of the buildings whose roof gave way under the weight of the snow.”  It was a season when “suicide bombers took with them into the bosom of death people who had left their homes to go about their affairs,” when “people who had wrapped themselves up well against the cold before leaving home, and felt more or less protected, were blown to pieces in nearby streets….”

Such is the setting for Orly Castel-Bloom's Human Parts, originally published in Hebrew in 2002 as Halakim Enoshi’im.  The novel's focus on terror attacks was timely when it was first published, and the topic continues to be all too relevant with the release of the book's English translation. 

Castel-Bloom traces the lives—in parts—of several characters through this exceptional winter. They include Liat Dubnov, who dies of the Saudi flu also afflicting the populace, and her brother, Adir Bergson.  We, follow, too, Iris Ventura, Adir’s former girlfriend, a divorcee struggling to make ends meet while raising her three children, and his current love, Tasaro Tasana, a recent arrival in Israel from Ethiopia.  And then there’s the Israeli President, whom we see mainly on his way to funerals.

A remarkable realism pervades this novel, to the point that this reader found herself cringing nearly every time a character boarded a bus—would this journey be the character’s final one?   Castel-Bloom is not known for an especially realist style, nor did she initially intend to write a novel so directly affected by the Al Aksa intifada.  But as she explained to the New York Times’s Samuel G. Freedman in June 2002:  “When I was writing, there was an attack every day or two, and, God forbid, it gave one a kind of inspiration.  To contribute my point of view, to use my capacity as a writer to describe this epoch.  History became so invasive that I had to stick with reality.”

Born in 1960 in Tel Aviv, where she currently lives, Castel-Bloom studied film at Tel Aviv University and began publishing in 1987. Her writing has won numerous prizes; she has been named one of the 50 most influential women in Israel.  Some of her better-known books include Dolly City and The Mina Lisa.  Although her work has been widely translated in Europe and elsewhere, she remains largely unfamiliar among American readers; her English translations have been published in Britain or, as in the case of Human Parts, Canada.

This is odd, because Human Parts will be of particular interest to American readers.  For one thing, in a post-9/11 nation where Homeland Security issues are now part of our lives, scenes like the one in which Iris Ventura alerts a bus driver to the presence of a fellow passenger, “a man of Middle Eastern appearance with a large canvas bag on the seat next to him” may now seem—on many levels—uncomfortably familiar.

Further, the United States and its culture are present throughout Human Parts,as they are present in the lives of many Israelis.  Adir and Liat are orphans, we learn, because their mother “had been killed…on a trip to the United States.  She had slipped on seaweed in one of the canyons there and fallen into the abyss.”  As for the Ethiopian immigrant:  “If there was anyone in the world whom Tasaro had to thank for her knowledge of Hebrew, which wasn’t at all bad, it was Ricki Lake, and Tasaro’s desire to understand what they were all yelling there, both from the studio audience and the guests on the show.”  At times Castel-Bloom seems to suggest parallels between Israeli and American culture, particularly in her discussions of racism.  The book’s conclusion, however—a flashback to the President’s visit to his daughter at Harvard the previous fall—is simply puzzling. 

Still, Human Parts offers Anglophones an excellent opportunity to access the work of this important Israeli writer, and to understand, on some level, the effect of the current violence on the lives of Israelis.