Love Amidst Loss

By WENDY ZIERLER

The Loves of Judith
By Meir Shalev
Translated by Barbara Harshav
315 pages. Ecco. $25.

Once a year, the Jewish calendar dedicates itself to love. That day is the 15^th of Av, known in Hebrew as Tu B’Av. We learn from the Talmud that on the 15th day of Av, the daughters of Jerusalem put on white dresses and went dancing in the vineyards, and it was there that all unmarried men went looking for a bride. But this was no ordinary, light-hearted love-fest. The Talmud (Ta’anit 30b) links Tu B’Av with several somber anniversaries: the day that the Exodus generation, condemned never to enter the land of Israel, finally stopped dying in the wilderness; the end of the ban against intermarriage with the tribe of Benjamin after the heinous rape and murder of the pilegesh b’giva (the concubine of Gibea, Judges 19); the day the Romans finally let the Jews bury the dead from the rebel Jewish city of Betar.

Like Tu B’Av, Meir Shalev’s third novel K’yamim Ahadim (published in English translation under the titles The Loves of Judith and Four Meals) celebrates romantic and familial love against a backdrop of death and loss. The male protagonist of this novel is no stranger to misfortune; his mother Judith calls him Zayde (grandfather) to fool the angel of death, but she herself dies as a result of a freak accident, just one of the many calamities that strike the village of Kfar David. Zayde’s name, making him “his own grandpa,” so to speak, signifies a reversal of time, fortune and lineage. To make matters even more convoluted, three different men love Judith and claim Zayde as their son—a weird twist on the three avot (forefathers) of the Bible.

Meir Shalev himself has long been in love with the Bible, as evidenced by his Bible columns for the daily Ha-aretz, collected in the book Tanakh Akhshav (The Bible Today, 1985). Shalev confesses a particular infatuation with the story of Jacob and Rachel. “Of all the biblical heroes,” he writes in Tanakh Akhshav, “the only one I envy is Jacob. Not because he had many sheep or because he was the father of twelve tribes, but because of his first meeting with his beloved Rachel by the well.” K’yamim Ahadim takes its title from the description of Jacob’s love for Rachel in Genesis 29:20: “And Jacob worked for Rachel seven years, and they seemed to him but a few days[k’yamim ahadim] in his love for her”—and incorporates many of the heartwarming as well as heartrending aspects of the Jacob story.

Each of Zayde’s three fathers exhibits a different side of the biblical Jacob. The hardnosed cattle dealer Globerman, who ends all his statements with the word “period” and woos Judith by repeatedly trying to get her drunk, evokes the pragmatism of the biblical patriarch, his success as an animal breeder and his gritty, unsentimental dealings with his father-in-law Laban. The story of Moshe Rabinovitch (the second father), whose mother always wanted a daughter and therefore raises her youngest son Moshe as a girl, recalls Rebecca’s preference for Jacob over Esau and the description of Jacob as an innocent tent dweller. Though twice married, Moshe spends his entire life trying to recapture his girlish innocence, as represented by his blonde braid, cut off (against his will) at puberty. In the biblical account, when Jacob meets Rachel for the first time, he miraculously rolls a huge rock off the mouth of the well, enabling Rachel to water her sheep. Shalev’s novel features a gigantic rock that only Rabinovitch can lift. Ironically, it is under this legendary rock that his lost “girlhood” braid is finally discovered.

And finally, father number three: the poultry farmer Jacob Sheinfeld, who bears the name of the biblical forefather and embodies the power and pain of his great love. Though already married to an extraordinary beauty named Rebecca, Sheinfeld falls in love with Judith soon after she comes to Kfar David to work for the recently widowed Rabinovitch. With exquisite patience, Jacob pursues Judith’s love. “When God was passing out patience,” Jacob tells Zayde during one of the four gourmet meals he prepares for him, “I waited in line until everybody else didn’t have no patience to wait no more. That’s how it is with us Jacobs… Seven years for me is but a few days to wait.” Under the tutelage of an escaped Italian P.O.W.—the novel’s main story takes place right before the establishment of the State of Israel—Jacob learns to cook and sew and tango, all for the sake of luring Judith into marriage. Jacobs stitches Judith a white wedding dress, prints up the invitations, and cooks a magnificent banquet, but sadly, Judith never shows up to the wedding.

In Tanakh Akhshav, Shalev reflects on the two sides of the biblical love story. At the beginning of the story, the seven years Jacob spends working for Laban that are described as “but a few days.” But later in the story, Jacob looks back bitterly on those years of waiting, “By day, drought consumed me and frost by night, and sleep fled from my eyes.” (Genesis 31:40) The love stories in K’yamim Ahadim all demonstrate this same jumble of joy and despair.

Known by many as Israel’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Shalev dramatizes the mixed emotions of his characters using magic realism, a form that combines fantasy with realistic description. According to the critic Robert Alter, one of the common features of magic realism is that emotions are allowed to govern the physical realm. And so, in K’yamim Ahadim, Judith, lonely for a lost daughter and regretting past mistakes, adopts a barren heifer as a surrogate daughter, names her Rachel, and miraculously coaxes milk out of her udders. The escaped Italian P.O.W., anxious to blend into life in Kfar David, instantly learns to speak Hebrew and Yiddish as well as to imitate every animal and bird in the village. And Moshe’s sorrow over the death of his wife Tonya renders his body even more marvelously strong.

 “What can I tell you, Zayde,” Sheinfeld explains, “Sometimes grief is the best manure…there are always people who will turn their nose up at everything—a person in mourning shouldn’t look so good. But if you ask me Zayde, maybe that’s how a person heals himself.” Much the same can be said about the relationship between grief and joy in the Jewish calendar, with Tu B’Av, the Jewish love holiday, falling less than a week after Tisha B’Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples. In so doing, the Jewish calendar reflects an eternal optimism that even in the midst of mourning joy will certainly follow.

Reprinted with permission from the AVI CHAI Bookshelf, where birthright israel alumni can order free books and periodicals.