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Overview
Elinor's comfortable life—popular newspaper column, stable marriage, well-adjusted kids—is totally upended when she finds out that her estranged uncle is coming to Jerusalem to give a speech asking forgiveness for his decades-old book, Hitler, First Person.
A shocking novel that galvanized the Jewish diaspora, Hitler, First Person was Aaron Gotthilf's attempt to understand—and explain—what it would have been like to be Hitler. As if that wasn't disturbing enough, while writing this controversial novel, Gotthilf stayed in Elinor's parent's house and sexually assaulted her "slow" sister.
In the time leading up to Gotthilf's visit, Elinor will relive the reprehensible events of that time so long ago, over and over, compulsively, while building up the courage—and plan—to avenge her sister in the most conclusive way possible: by murdering Gotthilf, her own personal Hilter.
Along the way to the inevitable confrontation, Gail Hareven uses an obsessive, circular writing style to raise questions about Elinor's mental state, which in turn makes the reader question the veracity of the supposed memoir that they're reading. Is it possible that Elinor is following in her uncle's writerly footpaths, using a first-person narrative to manipulate the reader into forgiving a horrific crime?
Gail Hareven is the author of eleven novels, including The Confessions of Noa Weber, which won both the Sapir Prize for Literature and the Best Translated Book Award.
Dalya Bilu is the translator of A.B.Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and many others. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Israel Culture and Education Ministry Prize for Translation, and the Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew-English Translation. She lives in Jerusalem.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781940953038 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Letter |
| Publication date: | 02/10/2015 |
| Edition description: | Translatio |
| Pages: | 375 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Dalya Bilu is the translator of A.B.Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and many others. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Israel Culture and Education Ministry Prize for Translation, and the Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew-English Translation. She lives in Jerusalem.
Read an Excerpt
Lies, First Person
By Gail Hareven, Dalya Bilu
OPEN LETTER
Copyright © 2008 Gail HarevenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-940953-03-8
CHAPTER 1
THE GARDEN OF EDEN AND WHAT CAME BEFORE
1
First of all we have to plant the Garden of Eden, because without the Garden of Eden there is no serpent; without the boughs of the apple tree to hide in, the serpent is nothing but an eater of dirt, of no greater significance than a snail or a worm.
Therefore, let there be a Garden of Eden!
And in fact, why "let there be"? There was a Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden existed. Because why shouldn't I call what I had a "Garden of Eden"?
Let's begin with a Sabbath day of unutterable sweetness. The smell of figs bursting with ripeness, in the enclosed garden of the house. Clouds sift the gold of the sun through the leaves of the grapevine hanging over our heads. Oded rolls a Sabbath cigarette from the grass he's been growing in pots ever since our sons grew up and left home. On weekends he likes smoking a joint or two, and for me, a non-smoker, he pours a glass of wine. I roll the glass between two fingers and observe the rays of the sun refracted in the liquid red, and my husband, relaxed, rubs the bottle against my upper arm, sliding the glass over my tiger face. Twenty-six years we've been together, and his enthusiasm for my tattoo has not waned, and it seems it never will. If not for him I would have had this totem surgically removed a long time ago, because there is no fear in the Garden of Eden, and a woman has no need of a totem to brandish. But Oded loves my tiger face, and I don't want to deprive him of anything.
The Garden of Eden. A muezzin calls the faithful from inside the Old City. We don't understand the words, and we enjoy the sound of the voice rising and gathering in the distance. The golden Sabbath time stretches out around us without a point of reference—perhaps it's morning now, perhaps it's twilight—people whose lives are as good as ours don't need points of reference.
Our financial situation is comfortable, some might say excellent. The firm in which Oded is a partner with his father is stable and successful. Money is saved, property accumulated, and if my husband should decide or be obliged, God forbid, to stop working, neither we nor our sons will want for anything.
The hand that casts the dice blessed us with two healthy, handsome, clever, and sensible sons. Within a few years they will both do well, each in his field, and in fact are doing well already. Nimrod in Atlanta, as an exchange student from the Israel Institute of Technology. Yachin is also in the United States, in Seattle at the moment, overseeing some project of the aviation industry. When Yachin was born I was twenty-one, Nimrod is less than two years younger than his brother, and I was happy with them both and thankful that I had not given birth to daughters.
My body is intact and strong and still able to take pleasure in the very fact of its existence. Without difficulty I carry baskets full of the earth's plenty from the market, and cook meals without effort for twenty or thirty of our friends.
My appetite for sleep is as voracious as that of an adolescent girl: ten, sometimes even twelve hours a day. Sleep tastes sweet to me, on no account should my greed for it be seen as a sign of depression.
My husband is in the habit of introducing his wife as a writer, and this is one of the few things about him that annoys me. Writing a column in the newspaper doesn't make a person a writer. I have had two offers to collect the columns of "Alice in the Holy City"—both by reputable publishers—for a book, and I turned them both down, even though my husband and my sons were very keen for me to accept them.
Oded, who mainly reads detective stories, tends to admire "literature" and "writers" in general whereas I, who read a lot, know what good literature is and how it incites the mind, and I have no pretensions to being what I am not. I was fond of my puppyish Alice, I enjoyed most of our walks round the city together, but I am not persuaded that her adventures are worth a book. The "Alice" columns enriched me with lively encounters and gave me a measure of fame too modest to arouse the envy of the gods—and this is no doubt another element of our happiness.
Paradise. Wine and pot, grapes and olives. Actually, no olives. We don't have an olive tree in our garden. Figs. A fig tree. And a good man planted underneath it. Successful sons. Professional satisfaction. Friends. Perfect weather, and a heating-air-conditioning system that protects us when the weather is less than perfect.
Who or what did I forget?
Menachem, Chemi, a patient patriarch, in his old age at least, whose health is also excellent.
Rachel, my blue-eyed mother-in-law, a practical angel with a beaming face.
Shaya, my father, whose flowery letters from Italy I didn't keep.
My sister Elisheva, who has gone to ground somewhere in the American Midwest.
And my dead mother.
When she deserted us I was too young to understand that my Garden of Eden would only grow on orphaned ground. I was young and raging, I raged a lot, until in the course of time I got over it. There is no room for rage in Paradise, and if a little surliness appears from time to time, it quickly disappears again. And thus on our languid, wine-drenched Sabbath day we experience no painful feelings. We mostly experience gratitude toward the invisible hand that allotted us a vine and a fig tree, and even more so gratitude to ourselves, for even if we didn't plant them, we knew how to tend them and make them thrive.
Leafy shadows dance in the light breeze. The taste of wine in my mouth, and in the air the fragrance of figs flavored with pot. The cellphone rings in the Garden of Eden, and his voice rises from it, the person who, for most of my life, I have been trying to forget.
"His voice" I say, but the truth is that I didn't recognize the voice. The phone rang, I thought of letting it ring, but on the screen I saw that it was an overseas call, and even though we had spoken to the boys earlier in the day and I didn't think it was one of them, I answered the phone, because overseas calls can't be ignored.
He asked into my ear "Can I speak to Mrs. Brandeis?" He spoke in English, even though he knew Hebrew and I knew him as a Hebrew speaker.
I replied: "Elinor speaking."
"Hello, Elinor." He said my name—and only then: "This is Aaron Gotthilf."
I didn't utter a word and for some reason I didn't hang up, either. Mutely I held out the phone to my husband, who took it immediately and refrained from asking me "What?" or "What's up? Who is it?"
I heard: "Oded Brandeis speaking," and then a long speech on the other end of the line. I saw Oded narrowing his eyes, absentmindedly putting out his unfinished joint, and then very aggressively: "My wife has no desire to talk to you. This conversation is unwanted and I must ask you not to call again."
Quick to react, he jumped in between us, but too late; the reaction came too late. Aaron Gotthilf had searched for and found me, he knew my private phone number and my married name, which had often, too often, appeared in the newspaper. His thoughts were occupied with me, his desires pawed me, and he could do it again whenever he wanted to.
I went on sitting when Oded got up to stand behind me and put his arms around me, but I didn't lean back.
"What did he say?" I demanded. The embrace that restricted my movements made me feel uncomfortable.
"It seems he's on his way to Israel," Oded sounded apologetic, "it seems that some idiots or other have invited him to a conference. He said that he'd very much like for you to agree to meet him. And I say, listen, Elinor, what I say is this: I say let's just forget about him, let's forget about this phone call. That man and his conference—they're not relevant to anything."
"Did you understand what he wants?" I removed one of his arms from my breasts.
"What he wants? I don't know. He was ... not exactly equivocal, cautious I'd say. He mentioned his grandchildren, he has a couple of grandkids in New York. You know what, I think, yes, I think that somehow he wants a connection with us. However incredible it sounds, he wants a connection. He repeated twice that he's already an old man."
"I don't want to hear it," I said and removed Oded's other arm. "It's not relevant."
"No," he echoed, "that person is no longer relevant."
"Stop calling him a person," I corrected him. "He's not a human being at all, and I don't want to hear anything about him because it's got nothing to do with anything. Just remember that I'll never, ever, not even when he's dead, forgive him for existing."
2
Oded says that I brought up the rape the first time I went out with him. But I remember clearly that the subject didn't come up on the first date, only on the third, and argue that his memory is changing the order of events for dramatic effect. In any case, there is no disagreement between us regarding the scene that followed.
I told him whatever I told him—not much—and then I said: "That's it. That's what happened. Just don't think that I'm going to tell you anything more about it, go into details, I mean." And he, in obvious confusion, replied: "Sure. Of course." And then he asked me: "Why?" Because what else could he say?
"First of all because it's my sister's rape, not mine, okay? That's the first thing. And apart from that ... Never mind."
"Apart from that—what?"
"Forget it."
"No, tell me."
"Apart from that you're a man. Can you honestly tell me that you never fantasized about rape? Can you tell me that your imagination never wanted, even a little, to look and see? That's not a real question, so you don't need to answer it."
It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all. Oded Brandeis, salt of the earth, black belt in the gifted students track of the University High School, graduate with the distinction of a paratrooper commando unit, volunteer in a legal clinic in the Negev—Oded Brandeis was offended.
We met during the end-of-year exams, and the guy took the evening off to drive me to a spot on top of the Mount of Olives where he had only taken one girl he loved before. He brought a pique blanket for us to sit on and a bottle of white wine, and offered me the nocturnal view as if it belonged to him and he was free to give it away for nothing.
If people in this world got what they deserved he would have given me my marching orders on the spot. After jumping on him like that I deserved to have him cross me off the map. But in our world people don't get what they deserve, and the sudden ferocity of my attack didn't prompt him to get rid of me, but somehow made me more interesting in his eyes. Later on, when he dropped me off outside my apartment next to the market, I apologized, and he accepted my apology like an aristocrat: he made the broad, sweeping gesture of a man who can permit himself anything, even a crazy woman, even though it was clear that he was alarmed. Because not only was my ferocity intimidating, but my entire manner of speech. I said: "My sister was raped and she went mad"; "went mad" I said and not "was traumatized" or "suffered a mental breakdown."
The laws of attraction work deceptively: things are not what they seem. Beneath every marriage contract another document lies hidden, written in invisible ink that only time reveals, and with Oded and me time worked fast on what was hidden from sight.
When we met, Oded was about to complete his studies and was making up his mind whether to do what it was obvious to everyone he would do after he finished making up his mind: first, clerking for Judge Brenner, who was a friend of his father's, and from there straight to his father's office to take up his position as the third generation of the firm. But the third generation had, in his words, "second thoughts about the path," and his thoughts wavered between joining legal aid, changing to studying history, or maybe something else, even more revolutionary, exactly what he didn't know himself.
When he met me it seemed that he had found his rebellion: a rebellion with spiky hair, a tiger face on its arm, and the exaggerated halo of a kind of desperate kamikaze pilot. Everything about me looked romantic to him: studies leading nowhere in the English Literature department, missing classes, the day I forgot to get out of bed for an exam, the small literary prize I received for a dubious volume of poetry—most of the copies of which I succeeded in destroying in later years. My squalid apartment, the wall I peeled pieces of plaster off, the bits of plaster on the bed, the empty vodka bottles—everything seemed romantic, even my orphaned state was perceived as romantic. I was not the girl suitable to be taken to Friday night dinner with his parents, and precisely for that reason, only a little more than a month after we met, he took me to his parents' house.
Wise people, Menachem and Rachel, very wise. Is it possible that they read the message in the invisible ink? Did some intuition tell Rachel that the girl in the see-through green tank top with the chopped hair who bit her nails in public till they bled—this girl would give her two grandchildren within the space of three and a half years? And that she would always, always gratefully accept her help in raising them, to the point where their house and ours appeared to be one unit, whose rooms were only accidentally scattered around the town?
Perhaps they were nice simply because it was their nature, certainly Rachel's nature. And perhaps they considered that any opposition on their part would only fan the flames of their son's rebelliousness.
Whatever the reason, when I accompanied Oded's mother to the smell of the pot roast in the kitchen, she took the empty soup bowls from me and put them down, and then, with a twinkle in her eyes she stopped to admire my tattoo: she had never seen one close-up. How beautiful, like an artistic piece of jewelry, even more beautiful, more integrated, definitely more beautiful than jewelry—and with her little hand she stroked my tiger face.
"It suits your arm very well, but tell me, isn't it awfully painful to have it done?"
Suddenly feeling faint from the smell of the food I shrugged my shoulders, and she, without removing her hand, added something jovial about how much we women were prepared to suffer for the sake of beauty, perhaps it was a question of education, but what could we do? That's the way we were. She too would like to have a cute little tiger like mine, but she was too old already, and anyway she lacked the courage.
Oded sometimes jokingly claims that that I fell in love with his parents before I fell in love with him. Maybe this is true and maybe it isn't, but in any case, according to my mythological memory, on that Friday night I already lay down my arms. The cleanliness, the white cleanliness of the house acted on me like a drug as soon as I walked through the door. Without my noticing it made me feel disgusted by the filth of my own apartment, and what's more it made me yearn for something I had never had and of whose absence I had never been aware; for even before I took up residence in my squalid cave in the marketplace—in my parents' home, in the boarding school, in all the places where I had ended up, there was nowhere that was really clean, and it was only when I stepped into the quiet whiteness of the Brandeis residence that I could look back and be revolted, and only then did I begin to yearn for this new wonder.
The comfortable cleanliness, which was deep but not sterile, the vaulted white ceilings, the solid, welcoming wooden furniture—everything invited me to lean back, to close my eyes, and sail to a land where nothing bad had ever happened. And I closed my eyes and sailed to that Neverland, because after she had turned my tattoo into an ornament, Oded's mother went on calmly stroking me without hurrying to the stove. She traced the lines of the predator's face with her finger, touched the bared fangs, and in parting also gave its nose a friendly little poke. And with this gentle poke I fell asleep and I went on sleeping for a long time, until Aaron Gotthilf came back to ambush me and invade my dreams. For with the passing of time I had succeeded in banishing him from my dreams as well as my waking thoughts.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lies, First Person by Gail Hareven, Dalya Bilu. Copyright © 2008 Gail Hareven. Excerpted by permission of OPEN LETTER.
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