A Contemporary Ecclesiastes

By WENDY ZEIRLER

THE SAME SEA
By Amos Oz
208 pages. Harcourt Brace. $24.

The Holiday of Sukkot has a split personality. The liturgy dubs Sukkot zman simhateinu, the time of our rejoicing. Under this name, Sukkot is a harvest celebration of thanksgiving, complete with waving willow, palm, and myrtle branches and fragrant etrogim (citrons).

But Sukkot also has a somber, autumnal aspect.  Sitting in half-roofed huts for seven days, exposed to the wind and rain, we are reminded of our vulnerability and our mortality.  Perhaps the most powerful articulation of this autumnal element is the custom on the intermediate Sabbath of Sukkot to read the biblical book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), an extended poetic meditation on the ephemerality and senselessness of human experience:

                “Utter futility—said Kohelet—
Utter utter futility! All is futile!
What real value is there for a man?
In all the gains he makes beneath the sun? […]
The sun rises, the sun sets—
and glides back to where it rises […]
All streams flow into the sea,
Yet the sea is never full;
To the place from which they flow
The streams flow back again.
 (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3, 5, 7, JPS translation)

In many ways, Amos Oz’s 1999 novel Oto ha-yam (“The Same Sea”) reads like a contemporary rendition of Kohelet. Like the biblical book, Oz’s novel is a series of interlocking prose poems—terse, taut, and arresting. Again like the biblical book, Oto ha-yam is filled with references to the inevitability of death and the seeming pointlessness of life. The novel centers on the Danon family—Albert, Nadia and Rico—and their assorted dead-end relationships. Albert’s wife Nadia has just died of ovarian cancer, but nevertheless lingers on as a character, indicative of the way in which death operates as a controlling force in the novel. Albert’s disillusioned son Rico has left Israel, his grieving father, and his writer-girlfriend Dita to find himself in the Himalayas, where he becomes infatuated, first with a middle-aged Portuguese prostitute and then with a street boy in Sri Lanka.

Perhaps the most articulate spokesman on the subject of life and love is the Narrator, a post-modern stand-in for Oz himself, who wanders in and out of the story, wondering how he came at this late stage of his career to write a novel in verse, and sums it up roughly as follows: “there is love and there is love. In the end everyone is left alone…We go and we come, we see and we want until it is time to shut up and leave. And then silence.”

Amos Oz is known the world over for his literary representation of Israeli politics.  Oto hayam represents a departure for Oz, not only in its experimental verse form, but also in the relatively inconsequential position accorded to issues of political or national concern. Here and there, the novel refers in passing to the peace process or to the failed “promise” of the Promised Land.  Toward the end of the novel, Oz allows Albert Danon to give the Narrator some sage advice on how to write about politics for the Israeli press: “…don’t forget that the human voice may have been created to express both protest and ridicule, but essentially it contains a considerable percentage of quite, precise speech which is meant to come out in measured words…Stay put in your house in Arad and try to write in a quiet way if you can.” Other than this, the novel remains personal rather than political, measured and quiet.

Ah—the personal is political, you say. Like Hemingway’s Eccelesiastes-inspired depiction of his “lost generation” in The Sun Also Rises, can’t we read the various futile relationships so convincingly depicted in this novel as an allegorical representation of the current Israeli generation and “situation”? The many biblical allusions in the novel, not only to Kohelet but also to Song of Songs and the stories of King David in I and II Samuel certainly indicate a desire on Oz’s part to project the Danon family story against the literary history of the Israelite nation and thus widen the significance of these somewhat neglected texts.

Perhaps. At the end of the day, however, what lends Oto hayam its singular power, prompting more than one critic to judge it Oz’s best work ever, is the spare, elegance of the writing and the precise registering of individual pain. There is much to be depressed about in this novel. Almost all the characters suffer great losses that together represent a kind of endless cycle of bereavement. Albert loses Rico to his Himalayan wanderings and Rico in turn loses his Sri-Lankan street-boy companion to the street. All of the characters in this novel are adrift, skeptical, and vulnerable.

 As such, in Kohelet-esque fashion, they experiment with potential sources of meaning: wealth and merry-making, fame, and wisdom. Exhausting all other possibilities, the biblical Kohelet concludes that all one can do in this life is fear God and keep the commandments. Oz’s secular variation on the Ecclesiastes theme ultimately comes down in favor of love and in the momentary insights that accompany the vocation of writing. “It wouldn’t be a bad thing,” muses the Narrator “to leave behind a few lines worthy of their name.” There are more than a few worthy lines in this novel. In the spirit of Sukkot, the Jewish harvest holiday, we give thanks.