The Mature Mr. Megged

By DAVID MOGOLOV

Foiglman
By Aharon Megged
277 pages. Toby Press. $19.95.

As a reader ages, one’s favorite books tend to shift away from powerful manifestos and scathing comedies, toward more contemplative, careful, and difficult volumes. Among writers, a similar pattern prevails. Their masterworks tend to come from the latter trends, when they’re mature enough to avoid the common error that Paul Auster describes in Leviathan, of a young writer “manipulating his characters to underscore his ideas rather than letting them create the action themselves.” Aharon Megged’s novel is not in service of his ideas. It is not even distinctively “about” any one thing, as a novel about writers or a novel set in today’s Israel would likely be. Instead it is a portrait of a man’s life, free of heroes and villains, or political agendas. Competing priorities consume the attention of the narrator, Zvi Arbel; in turn it is a story about personal loss, identity, friendship, and isolation.

For most American Jews, Foiglman is worth reading simply as a novel set in contemporary Israel that doesn’t focus on handful of issues that consumes our national media coverage of the country. One of Megged’s greatest accomplishments in the book is his focus on other matters of great weight for his countrymen, at a time when the perception here is that only fear and violence are of concern to Israelis. Despite the impression that we may have, life is going on in Israel, and Foiglman might tip us off to what that life is about.

In Arbel’s story, a reader can feel both foreign and native. For all the peculiarity of the specifics, they are only instances of the common elements of a literary life. The friendship between Arbel, an Israeli professor of Jewish history, and the Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor Shmuel Foiglman is uncomfortable, nonreciprocal, and utterly familiar. This is not an idealized paean to friendship. Arbel is not a warm or giving person, and his initial involvement with Foiglman is opportunistic; Foiglman’s birthplace, a tiny Polish town called Zamosc, was the site of pogroms on which much of Arbel’s research and reputation rest. Foiglman, for his part, sees in Arbel an opportunity to have his poetry translated into Hebrew, a goal to which he attaches much of his hope for acclaim and respect.

And much as the novel concerns the antagonism between two conceptions of Jewish identity, exemplified by the difference between the two friends’ native languages—Foiglman’s Yiddish is as flexible as his Diaspora wandering (his son remarks that Foiglman “sees himself as a bird of passage”) and Arbel’s Hebrew is as resolute as his confident Israeli rootedness—Megged hasn’t created characters who concern themselves primarily with the contradictions of their history. Arbel looks back across the story not to answer the question of who he is, but to discover how his attention was tragically diverted away from his wife and family to focus on the career of an odd old European man. Telling his story in the months that follow the funerals of Foiglman and Nora, Arbel’s wife, he is so immersed in the gritty details of life that his larger points are made, more often than not, inexplicitly from the whole.

For all of their differences, Arbel and Foiglman have much in common: they are both history-obsessed writers, whose preoccupations contribute to the failure of their marriages. Each has a resentful, distant son whose behavior and attitude is directly in response to the foibles of his father. Foiglman’s refusal to come in from the cold of Europe has pushed his son, Irving, further into the cold: he’s rejected Judaism and both of its languages entirely, and become something of an anti-Semite. When they meet in Arbel’s Tel Aviv home, Irving talks at length about the uniformly “disrespectful and socially unacceptable” conduct of Israeli students at Oxford, and later tells him that “Your original sin…is perhaps the State itself…whatever followed from there.” As distant from his own father, Arbel’s son Yoav is a career Israeli military officer who resents his father’s study of history, saying to his mother, “I’m depressing him? His line of work depresses him! He found an occupation that can only make you cry!” Yoav’s concern for history and questions of identity only extends to its military utility. Zvi and Yoav speak to each other only via their wives, or in cursory conversations, lest they attack each other angrily.

Amid the sadness of the funerals and Nora’s suicide, Megged finds moments of anger and absurdity: the attendees of a Yiddish poetry reading boo the guest of honor simply for thanking Hebrew-speaking benefactors; Irving coldly purports that his father was nostalgic for the Holocaust, as if such a sentiment were separable from his own loathing; Arbel and another mourner join the wrong funeral procession during Foiglman’s service. At other moments, Arbel’s excitement bubbles over, as he is reminded of the joys he’s experienced: academic discoveries, memories of Yoav’s wedding, the episode in which he arranged for Foiglman’s translations (“I felt as if I were the poet, I was Foiglman, and I was walking on air. It was as if the whole weight of scholarship was lifted from me…the poems themselves seemed to have taken over my whole being.”). At these moments, Megged’s optimism trumps even Arbel’s dour perspective.

Clearly, if Megged had a purpose for writing Foiglman, it was not to make a political statement or to place himself on one side of a culture war. The novel is too full, too mature to serve as any sort manifesto. He’s succeeded as Philip Roth did with The Human Stain, or as J.M. Coetzee with Disgrace: he’s credibly balanced competing ideas and worldviews, avoiding pat simplicity even where it sometimes makes for maddening equivocation. The maturity of his fiction justifies Foiglman’s selection for the 2003 Israel Prize for Literature. Complicated questions are raised and explored in the novel, and Megged never lets those issues become more important than his characters. We can only hope that this English translation is successful enough to convince American publishers to introduce English speakers to more of his work.