An Explosive Stasis

By BEZALEL STERN

THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT
By Margot Singer
216 pages. University of Georgia Press. $24.95.

The Pale of Settlement, a new book of nine interconnected short stories by Margot Singer, begins and ends with a bang. I am not speaking in metaphors. The book begins, as it ends, with a literal explosion. What happens in between the bookended bombs sets Singer’s book apart from anything I have yet read of the Israeli experience as seen through American eyes.

Here are the book’s opening words:

“The bomb went off downtown, near the entrance to the Haifa Carmelit subway, at 5:27 on a Friday morning in late June. It blew up a white Fiat and shattered the plate glass windows of the Bank Hapoalim branch across the intersection. It exploded a streetlight, two signposts, and part of the stone wall bordering the sidewalk…The pavement was covered with bits of twisted metal and broken stone.”

Vivid, evocative writing. The reader, at least this reader, waits to hear the number of casualties, readies himself to be pulled in to a world of pain. But the death toll never comes. “The Voice of Israel reported in its nine o’clock broadcast,” this on page two of the book, “that no one had been injured in the blast. Other than a disruption to traffic, everything was functioning as normal. Only a few commuters, stepping out of the Carmelit station into the daylight, noticed the smell of burned rubber.”

Singer’s book, she makes immediately clear, focuses on the often unnoticed tragedies of living in a perpetual war zone—the emotional explosions that rock the world of the men and women who live in Israel and the distance-suffering of those who care about them. (The subtle and marked allusions in the quoted passage to Wallace Steven’s poem “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” will remain unmentioned here, excepting to say that they do, in fact, exist.)

Singer, in the pages following that first explosion, highlights the fact that the most tragic events in life are often those that occur when nothing happens. It is a theme she follows throughout the book, giving her stories their most poignant moments, while, at times, often at the same time, causing some frustration on the part of the reader. In a world of uncertainty, people strive to feel each other, sometimes erotically, sometimes passionately, but no one seems to be able to truly know anyone else in these stories. Nothing can progress beyond a certain point. One begins to realize, after a while, that nothing really happens.

The book’s chief protagonist, Susan, is a vaguely Israeli American Jew (her parents moved to America before she was born) who returns again and again—physically as well as mentally—to the tarnished promised land that continually haunts her. A journalist, Susan tells other people’s stories without having a cogent story of her own. She lives, it seems, solely through the stories of other people. The tragedy of her grandparent’s lost innocence when they were forced to flee Germany for Palestine before the Second World War. The horror her mother conveys to her of her abusive grandfather. The alternately mystical and mundane lives of her ex-lovers.

While Susan spends most of her life in America, it is her family in Israel, in both the micro sense of her close relatives and the macro sense of her coreligionists, that occupies her thought. Thus, while on a quasi-spiritual journey in Nepal, all Susan thinks about is that the grungy man at the table across from her is Israeli. The thought brings her comfort, but even so, Susan feels disconnected: “She could walk over and say Shalom, but then she’d be stuck explaining that she didn’t really speak Hebrew after all.”

And that, after all, is the tragedy of the American Jew’s relationship to the Israeli, and it is a tragedy that Singer aptly conveys. Feeling an intrinsic bond with a people that she has nothing, really, in common with, Susan ends up with nothing at all (the Israeli, at the end of the story, steals Susan’s watch, her Israeli grandmother’s legacy).

This stasis is the tragedy of the book; it is also what keeps this fine, tenderly written book from being a great one. Susan’s story may be beautifully told, but it is not, finally, all that interesting. Watching Susan watch her family in Israel live can get somewhat dull.

Indeed, the final explosion in the book has Susan, anxious and worried, email her cousin in Israel. “[H]e does not reply. At a distance, it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Perhaps the language barrier is too great. Or perhaps he simply doesn’t want to correspond.” While their lives are central to Susan, Susan’s own life is peripheral to theirs. By the book’s end, the explosions that rocked Susan’s consciousness throughout its stories have taken their toll. Susan has worried and fretted and wasted her life doing so. She is left with nothing but memories of the past, hazy recollections of a country and a people to whom she finally realizes she is only tenuously connected.