Personal and Political Borders

By SIMONE ZELITCH

THE LIBERATED BRIDE
By A.B. Yehoshua
544 pages. Harvest Books. $27.

Marriage is a powerful metaphor. It poses countless challenges as partners change over time and revisit their commitment in light of the people they have become. It is not surprising that A.B.Yehoshua has fixed on marriage as the central theme in The Liberated Bride, his new novel about contemporary Israel and Palestine. The results are heartbreaking, all the more so given that the novel was written just before the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the outbreak of the Second Intifada. This dense and beautiful book holds out hope for coexistence, but in the end, it is a plea for letting go.

The novel follows Rivlin, a Jewish professor at the University of Haifa, a man who has no sense of boundaries. During an Arab wedding in the Galilee, when the bride, his student Samaher, leads him to the bathroom, he cannot resist running an Arab comb through his hair or dabbing his forehead with a mysterious perfume. Rivlin returns to Samaher's village and sleeps in a strange bedroom until the end of Ramadan, only to end up crossing a checkpoint to spend the night in a monastery near Jenin. Yehoshua often refers to Rivlin simply as “The Orientalist,” echoing the title of an influential book by the late Edward Said, a Palestinian social critic. Rivlin is an outsider fascinated by an exotic culture and his fascination seems, at least in part, like condescension.

Perhaps more dangerous is the emotional boundary Rivlin crosses when he searches for the cause of his son's divorce. Rivlin finds himself drawn, again and again, to the Jerusalem hotel where this son, Ofer, lived with the owner’s daughter. Rivlin himself has never recovered from this divorce—primarily, he claims, because Ofer, now living in Paris, will not reveal what happened. The hotel itself, though owned by Jews, now caters to Christian pilgrims, and in its own way, it has become more alien than the Arab village. Vulgar tour groups of Americans overtake the dining room as Rivlin tries to pry information out of the staff over plates of decidedly unkosher seafood.

Rivlin does not see himself as a someone who needs to learn to mind his own business. As a scholar, it is his job to seek the truth. Working with Samaher, he compiles Algerian articles and poems from an Arabic-language magazine published in the period when the country was a French colony. Like Israel, Algeria was settled by men and women who thought of themselves as pioneers creating a new home in an empty land. The poems and tales translated by Samaher feel like riddles. Somehow, if Rivlin could make sense of them, he would be closer to understanding the relationship between occupied and occupier, between Palestinian and Israeli.

The riddle of that relationship deepens as the novel progresses. Although good sense tells Rivlin to stay away from the West Bank, he cannot resist. During one heady Christmas eve, he attends a cultural festival in Ramallah where a Palestinian poet and a Jewish academic engage in a recitation of ancient Arab poetry. The communion between the two is absolute, and in one of the most moving moments in the novel they engage in simultaneous translation.

Thy soul merges with mine
                        As with fragrant musk, amber
            Touch mine and it’s thine.
                        Thou art me forever.

However, such is the ambivalence of Yehoshua’s vision that this scene is immediately followed by another performance, arranged by Samaher, that complicates the matter—an Arabic version of “The Dybbuk,” the Yiddish play about a bride possessed by the soul of her rejected bridegroom. The merging of souls, lovely as it may sound, can be a form of violation. Is the performance of this haunting play a commentary on Israel and Palestine? Is it a reflection of Samaher’s loveless marriage? Is it meant to shed light on Rivlin’s son, Ofer, and how after his divorce he was driven out of the paradise of the Jerusalem hotel, only to live like a disembodied spirit as a security guard in Paris? This rich novel forces us to consider all of these failed relationships and to discover what each one tells us about the other.

The Liberated Bride is concerned with separation. It is no coincidence that Yehoshua has recently become a vocal supporter of a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and the creation of a security wall that follows the Green Line. A committed Zionist, the author has defended his position by arguing that Zionism is about national sovereignty, and that national sovereignty means clear national borders. The Liberated Bride is, in part, a novel about what becomes of Israelis and Palestinians when those borders are ambiguous. Appearing now in English nearly three years after its publication in Hebrew, it has never been more timely.