Amos Oz
(Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1994)
Fima is set in Jerusalem in 1989. The novel was first published in Hebrew in 1991 and translated into English in 1993.
In the years that have followed the publication of Fima, the world has seen the Oslo Accords, the establishment of the Palestine Authority, the withdrawal of Israel from Gaza and large portions of the West Bank, the murder of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu.
But there are still massacres and a dreadful loss of life, both Israeli and Palestinian. In 1989, the time of the novel, Israel was led by Yitzhak Shamir of the right-wing Likud Party. Israel’s present prime minister, Netanyahu, is also of the Likud.* Yasser Arafat is still the Palestinian leader and still, as Abba Eban pointed out, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. While Arafat continues to enjoy the support of most Palestinians, in spite of well-documented and massive corruption in his administration, about half of Israeli voters see Netanyahu as dangerous, divisive, and anti-peace. The same percentage had the same view of Shamir in 1989.
Amos Oz is among those Israelis who fear the hawkishness of Netanyahu. Unlike most Israeli left-wing doves, however, he sees Netanyahu’s election as regrettable but understandable. Oz’s attitude is easily comprehended in the light of an interview he gave to The Times (October 24, 1990).
“You must understand that for years Israel has undergone a collective Salman Rushdie experience. In other words, we have been living under a death threat issued by Muslim religious leaders and Arab politicians, which has never been withdrawn. This would have been enough to drive even the sanest society insane, and we are not the sanest. We have been through persecution, oppression and isolation. What is surprising to me is not that so many Israelis have become hawkish, but that so many Israelis have managed to remain politically sober and realistic.”
Amos Oz has for years played a prominent role in the Peace Now movement, arguing that both Jews and Palestinians have a legitimate right to a homeland and that some form of compromise is essential. He sees obstacles to such a compromise on both sides: he sees successive Israeli governments as stubborn and inflexible and Arafat as both cruel and stupid. Oz finds it remarkable, however, that Israel, faced with outrageous provocation and judged internationally — outside the United States — by a wickedly unfair double standard, has remained as democratic and devoted to a peaceful solution as it has. For all its blemishes, Israel has responded with relative restraint to unending murderous atrocities within its own borders. No other nation — and certainly no Arab nation — would have exercised such self-control. Nevertheless, Amos Oz, like Fima in the novel, knows that, if peace is to come, it will involve the giving up of land, land hard won by Israeli blood in wars forced upon it by its Arab neighbours.
Amos Oz is a sabra, a native-born Israeli. He was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a fervently Zionist family. At the age of fifteen, he renounced right-wing intellectual Zionism and city life to live on a kibbutz, to live what he believed was the healthy life of a peasant soldier on a socialist commune. He was a kibbutznik from 1954 to 1990, at which time he left the kibbutz for the desert town of Arad so that his chronically asthmatic son could benefit from the clean, dry desert air.
It was on the kibbutz that the writer changed his family name from Klausner to Oz, “strength” in Hebrew. After taking his degree at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he began to write short stories. His writing was, in part, a glorification of Hebrew, a tribute to the Jewish state’s ability to resurrect a language that had not been used as a means of communication between people for two thousand years. Unfortunately, his deliberate use of little-known, esoteric words became a barrier to the reader’s comprehension, even that of an educated Israeli reader.
Amos Oz has modified his passion for Hebrew over the years, but, although he speaks perfect English, he has continued to write in Israel’s national language, and I note that in Fima his protagonist is frequently irritated by clumsy and unacceptable constructions in Hebrew.
Amos Oz’s protagonist is Efraim Nomberg Nisan, known to everyone as Fima. The reader is going to spend five days with him in 1989 Jerusalem, and much of the time will be spent in Fima’s mind.
At the beginning of the novel, we receive a remarkably unflattering portrait of the book’s central character, but we know at least, as Fima watches himself in the mirror, that this is a man who accepts his appearance, who is aware of his blemishes.
In the mirror he beheld a pale, rather overweight clerk with folds of flesh at the waist, whose underwear was none too fresh, who had sparse black hair on white legs that were too skinny in relation to the belly, and graying hair, weak shoulders, and flabby male breasts growing on a chest dotted with pimples, one of which was surrounded by redness. He squeezed the pimples between his forefinger and thumb, watching in the mirror. The bursting of the pimples and the squirting of the yellowish pus afforded a vague, irritable pleasure. (p. 8)
Fima views his body “not with disgust, despair, or self-pity, but with resignation.”
He lives in Jerusalem, on a “shabby road at the southwest edge of Kiryat Yovel, a row of squat blocks of flats jerry-built in the late ’fifties.” (p. 5) He is fifty-four years old, divorced, and living in a disorder and squalor that go far beyond what we would normally think of as acceptable bachelor conditions. “Fima’s kitchen always looked as though it had been abandoned in haste. Empty bottles and eggshells under the sink, open jars on the countertop, blotches of congealed jam, half-eaten yogurts, curdled milk, crumbs, and sticky stains on the table.” (p. 58) He is smelly, rarely changing his shirt or his underwear, and his clothes are so torn that he often has trouble putting his coat on. Nothing mechanical will obey him, and his daily routine is a catalogue of small disasters. He is a character out of traditional Jewish folk stories, either the shlemiel who always spills the tea or, even worse, the shlemazel on whom the tea is always spilled.
Yet Efraim Nomberg Nisan, or Fima, comes from a privileged background. We will learn, in bits and pieces, that he was born in the thirties in Jerusalem to Baruch and Lizaveta Nomberg. (Fima will add the name Nisan later.) Fima’s father fled the Bolshevik Revolution for Prague and, later, for what was then Palestine, where he established a successful cosmetics factory and became a strong Zionist and a founding member of the Herut Party.
Our friend Fima — for it is difficult not to feel sympathetic towards him — had a comfortable, middle-class, Zionist upbringing. He received a B.A. in History from the University of Jerusalem in 1960 before beginning what his friends call his “billy-goat year,” a frenzied 365 days of creative and sexual energy.
So frenetic is this one brief period that it is worth enumerating the exploits.
Fima meets a French girl, a Catholic guide for tourists in Jerusalem, and pursues her all over Europe. To give himself time for the chase, he tampers with the call-up date on his military identification card and is jailed by the Israeli authorities. His father intervenes with a senior Israeli official to get his son out. Fima meets the official’s wife, eight years his senior, gets her pregnant and away from her husband, and then leaves her for a three-month stay in Malta. She loses the baby while he writes poetry and marries the woman who owns his Maltese hotel. After three months of marriage, Fima abandons his wife to go to Greece. In the Greek mountains, he meets three Israeli girls hitchhiking. In an idyllic episode, they sing, dance, and wear flowers. Fima falls in love with Ilia, sleeps with Liat, and marries Yael after taking all three girls home to Jerusalem to meet his father.
In August 1961, after Fima and Yael Levin marry, Fima’s father buys them the apartment at the edge of Kiryat Yovel. At this point Fima’s frenzy of action comes to an abrupt halt. Apparently incapable of further activity, he gets a menial job at a gynecological clinic, a position far beneath his qualifications, and produces the occasional political article for the newspapers, particularly Ha’arets. He appears to have retired into a life of the mind, his body exhausted by his billy-goat year.
His wife, Yael, is intelligent, hard-working, clear-sighted, and ambitious. After putting up with four years of Fima’s indecisions and revisions, she goes off to the United States to work as a researcher for Boeing. Fima, by now completely mired in an interior world of confused thought, refuses to go with her and the inevitable happens. Yael meets a normally functioning human being, an American Jew, Ted Tobias. She and Fima lose touch after the divorce, but when she and her husband come to live in Jerusalem in 1982, they bring with them their three-year-old son, Dimitri, known as Dimi.
Both Fima and his father are enchanted by Yael’s son, and Fima becomes the constant babysitter while Baruch Nomberg becomes a loving surrogate grandfather. Fima and Dimi become inseparable: Dimi is unusually intelligent and highly perceptive and can supply logical, sensitive, and often very funny endings to Fima’s wildest and most imaginative stories.
Fima’s love for Dimi, however, does nothing to change his way of life. He still lives in filth, and action is still sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought. For the nearly twenty years since Yael left him, Fima has been debating, and the debate takes place largely in his own mind. He often envisages himself as Israel’s prime minister, calling his cabinet to order to explore the possibilities of peace with the Arabs. He occasionally leaves the kingdom of his mind for endless, unresolved arguments with his father, and his father is a worthy opponent.
Baruch Nomberg, a long-time widower and a lover of beautiful, elegant older women, is a fascinating character. A brilliant raconteur, he can, without pausing, tell five different stories, all intertwined, each slipping easily into the next and each making a different moral point: “For fifty years now he has been conducting an extended seminar with Jerusalem taxi drivers on Hasidic tales and pious stories.” (p. 67) He must indeed be a brilliant and compelling speaker; my own experience with Israeli taxi drivers is that it’s impossible to get one of them to listen even for a moment.
Baruch is a generous man. He frequently leaves money in the pockets of his indolent son, and in his will he has a bequest to the ultra-orthodox for their Zeal for Torah Orthodox School and a similar bequest to the progressive, secular Society for the Promotion of Religious Pluralism. Baruch enjoys the vigour of argument, and he is willing to subsidize the ongoing and healthy conflict of views by giving money to both sides.
An activist in the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Baruch has lost none of his right-wing views. He has all the prejudices of those European Ashkenazi Jews who first came to settle Palestine. He trusts neither Arabs nor those Sephardic Jews who came to Israel out of the Arab countries after 1948 and again after 1956. Fima remembers how Baruch used to tease his wife about her attraction to Oriental food in the Sephardic market. Baruch called it her love for The Thousand and One Nights and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
When his son points at the alleged injustices committed by Israel against the Arabs of the territory occupied by Israel after 1967, Baruch has his answer ready.
“Baruch, you are blind and deaf. We’re the Cossacks now, and the Arabs are the victims of the pogroms, yes, every day, every hour.”
“The Cossacks,” his father remarked with amused indifference. “Nu? What of it? So what’s wrong with us being the Cossacks for a change? Where does it say in Holy Scripture that Jew and gentile are forbidden to swap jobs for a little while? Just once in a millennium or so? If only you yourself, my dear, were more of a Cossack and less of a shlemazel. Your child takes after you: a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” (p. 74)
Baruch is impervious to his son’s left-wing protestations. When Baruch attacks the Arabs for having forty states “from India to Abyssinia,” including Iran, and for denying tiny Israel’s right to exist, Fima stamps his foot in frustration, howling that Iran and India are not Arab states. Baruch remains unfazed:
“Nu, so what? What difference does it make to you?” the old man intoned in a ritualistic singsong, with a sly, good-natured chortle. “Have we managed at last to find a satisfactory solution to the tragic question of who is a Jew, that we need to start breaking our heads over the question of who is an Arab?” (p. 74)
Fima is profoundly sensitive to the suffering of Jews during the Nazi period — his thoughts and dreams are beset by images of Ha Shoah, naked, skinny children and uniformed men separating men from women — but he hates those “who went on and on about Hitler and the Holocaust and always rushed to stamp out any glimmer of peace, seeing it as a Nazi ploy aimed at their destruction.” (p. 10) He cannot see history as a justification for aggression: “ ‘Does every battered child have to grow up into a violent adult?’ ” (p. 94)
Fima fears the brutalization of Israeli society: “ ‘These are hard times everywhere. We spend all our time trying to repress what we’re doing in the Territories, and the consequence is that the air’s full of anger and aggression, and everybody’s at everybody else’s throat.’ ” (p. 37) He sees that what he considers an insensitivity to Arab suffering is transforming itself into an insensitivity to all human relations. Bosses are curt to workers and medical staff to patients, and there is an “aggressive rudeness … in the bureaucracy, in the streets, in bus queues, and most probably also in the privacy of our bedrooms.” (p. 159)
When his beloved Dimi participates with his friends in the cruel sacrifice of a stray dog, Fima “had a vivid picture of the last blood oozing from the gaping wounds, and the final spasms of the dying creature. In an instant illumination he realized that this horror too was the result of what was happening in the Occupied Territories.” (p. 154) He writes a newspaper article on how insensitivity, violence, and cruelty flow backward and forward from the state to the Territories and from the Territories to the state, and he is horrified to find that he reacts more intensely to the death of Jewish settlers’ children than he does to the death of an Arab boy. “Can a worthless man like me have sunk so low as to make a distinction between the intolerable killing of children and the not-so-intolerable killing of children?” (p. 203)
Fima doesn’t accept the answer the Almighty gave to Job, that the limited intellect of humankind can never understand the cosmic plan that the Creator has for His creation. Fima seeks to understand everything and the moral implications of everything. There is nothing, whether it be trivial or important, that does not concern him, nothing that he does not worry to death for its underlying meaning. When he leaves a café and promises the proprietress that the weather will “brighten up soon,” he frets about the moral justification for his promise. (p. 16)
Fima has three great friends, Tsvi Kropotkin and Uri and Nina Gefen. Either during visits or with twenty-minute phone calls, he harangues them incessantly on U.S. politics, magic realism in literature, Islamic fundamentalism, the Iran-Iraq war, Chekhov, and evolution.
When Nina Gefen, in an occasional fit of missionary fervour, comes to clean Fima’s apartment, transforming it within half an hour from “Calcutta into Zurich,” Fima “would lounge in the doorway … debating with Nina and himself the collapse of Communism or the school of thought that rejects Chomsky’s linguistic theories.” (p. 58) On such occasions, Nina and Fima sleep together, Nina because Uri is seeing other women, and Fima because Nina wants him to. Fima never acts, he reacts. A large part of his failure to act derives from his belief that all human endeavour is ultimately pointless. When he creates within the confines of his mind an Israeli of the future, an imagined Israeli whom he calls Yoezer and with whom he has debates, he always ends the discussions with the reflection that we’ll all be dead in a hundred years.
Fima’s conscious attempt to pay due attention to every single thing that happens in the world is a prelude to what he calls The Third State of Being. The first state is sleep, the second is being awake, and the third state, to which he aspires, is a state of supreme awareness, where the mundane details of life die away and ultimate truth is revealed in the oneness of all things. Fima knows that he can never attain that level and recognizes it as an abstract intellectual concept, but the doomed attempt to reach The Third State of Being (the title of Fima in its original Hebrew) provides his only motivation for continuing to live.
Before I read Fima, I would have guessed that a man who for nearly twenty years did nothing except argue the moral dimensions of everything with friends, strangers, his father, and God would be a terrible bore. But the truth is that I, like Fima’s friends, find his apparently unrelated observations fascinating. I can think of few novels that I’ve been forced to put down every few pages to think through a point such as those made by Fima on his journey to The Third State of Being. During a phone call to his friend Tsvi, for example, Fima wonders why the German writers Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll always refer to the Nazis as “they,” although both served in the Wehrmacht, wore the swastika, and gave the Hitler salute. “ ‘Whereas,’ ” continues Fima, “ ‘I, who have never set foot in Lebanon, who have never served in the Territories … regularly say and write “we.” “Our wrongdoings.” And even “the innocent blood we have shed.” ’ ” (p. 176)
I spent some time thinking that one through, and the result seemed to me valuable. It is true, I think, that Israelis accept collective responsibility for their country’s actions and mistakes in a way that the citizens of few other countries do. If an Israeli sees his country as committing an immoral action, the knowledge of that crime becomes a personal burden. For an Israeli the crime is the punishment. The knowledge that one’s country has done wrong is the punishment for that wrong, and the Israeli does not slough it off by saying “they” instead of “we.”
Amos Oz has always argued with the critics who see his novels as allegories, although reviewers have nearly unanimously considered at least two of his earlier novels, My Michael (1968) and Black Box (1988), to be allegories of the modern state of Israel. Oz prefers to see them as the record of individual experience. It seems to me possible to have it both ways. Certainly, Fima is a complete and wonderfully complex creation, but it is surely possible to read into the novel observations on the human condition in general and on Israel in particular. I am thinking specifically of the cockroach episode.
Fima is holding his shoe, about to dispatch a cockroach “strolling toward him, looking weary and indifferent.”
The shoe froze in his hand. He observed with astonishment the creature’s feelers, which were describing slow semicircles. He saw masses of tiny stiff bristles, like a mustache. He studied the spindly legs seemingly full of joints. The delicate formation of the elongated wings. He was filled with awe at the precise, minute artistry of this creature, which no longer seemed abhorrent but wonderfully perfect: a representative of a hated race, persecuted and confined to the drains, excelling in the art of stubborn survival, agile and cunning in the dark; a race that had fallen victim to primeval loathing born of fear, of simple cruelty, of inherited prejudices. Could it be that it was precisely the evasiveness of this race, its humility and plainness, its powerful vitality, that aroused horror in us? Horror at the murderous instinct that its very presence excited in us? Horror because of the mysterious longevity of a creature that could neither sting nor bite and always kept its distance? (pp. 78-79)
After peering into the mysteries of race hatred, Fima decides not to kill and closes the door of the cupboard gently, “so as not to alarm the creature.”
If Oz does not want the reader to see his novels as allegories, then he should not write passages like this, a penetrating analysis not just of the roots of anti-Semitism but of the fear of “the other” that informs all prejudice.
At the level of individual experience, however, Fima’s failure to kill the cockroach is one more example of how, Hamlet-like, he is so paralyzed by thought that action becomes impossible. He proclaims his own irritation at his inability to act: “What have you done with life’s treasure? What good have you done?” (p. 111)
This great intellect, housed in an unexercised and unfit body, is capable of great tenderness. When he thinks back on his marriage to Yael, his memories are erotic and touching and beautiful. When he dreams of his mother, who died when he was ten, the images are poetic and beautiful: “Death had made her light and lovely. It had endowed her movements with grace but also with a certain childlike awkwardness. The sort of mixture of agility and clumsiness that is seen in newborn kittens.” (p. 114)
Fima is so different from his father, Baruch Nomberg, but despite their political differences there is a great bond of love between them and more similarity than either would admit. It is even suggested physically: Fima “opened his eyes and saw his father’s brown hand.… Then he realized that the hand was his own.” (p. 11)
We should consider the implications of Fima’s name. It is a diminutive of Efraim, and we remember from Genesis that Efraim (Ephraim) was the younger son of Joseph, who was the son of Jacob, who was called Israel after his struggle with the angel. We remember too that Jacob/Israel set his grandson Efraim above Efraim’s brother, promising that “he and his seed shall become a multitude of nations.” (Genesis 48:19)
Oz’s protests notwithstanding, it is surely not too fanciful to see Fima not only as an individual but also as an allegorical figure. The family name that Fima took for himself, Nisan, is not only the first month of the Jewish calendar; it also means, in Hebrew, “banner,” “emblem,” or “symbol.” If Baruch, a Jacob-like figure, represents the Israel of 1948, in the creation of which he played a role, then Fima can surely be a symbol of modern Israel.
We remember how fond Fima’s friends are of his “unique combination of wit and absent-mindedness, of melancholy and enthusiasm, of sensitivity and helplessness, of profundity and buffoonery.” (p. 27) We remember Fima’s obsession with the moral implications of every action. He is the embodiment of modern Israel, torn always between two extremes.
What other nation has daily demonstrations for and against every governmental decision? Close non-Jewish stores on the Sabbath? Demonstrations for and against! Fire back at Hezbollah in Lebanon? Demonstrations for and against! Withdraw soldiers from Hebron? Demonstrations for and against! Change the legal definition of who is a Jew? Demonstrations for and against! I can think of no other country so concerned with the morality of every single issue. The French government could blow up much of the South Pacific and Syria could murder twenty thousand dissidents with far less outcry in either France or Syria than an Israeli government would experience in Israel if it were to propose that El Al fly on the Sabbath.
Fima longs to regain his lost innocence, “an inner craving for the child, the youth, the grown man out of whose womb the chrysalis emerged,” (p. 8) just as Israel must long for an earlier time when issues were clearer — in 1948, for example, when it was fighting for its very existence. The child Dimitri echoes that longing when he tells Fima of how he would like to sail away to a desert island, in the Galapagos perhaps, where life is simple.
What Yael says to Fima is true of both Fima and Israel: “ ‘[T]hose eyes that were alert and dreamy started to fade and now they’ve gone dull.’ ” (p. 165) What has happened to the “ ‘soulful, dreamy young man who inspired and entertained three girls in the mountains of northern Greece’ ”? (p. 164) She might as well have asked what happened to the glory and clarity of the dream of 1948.
There is no doubt in my mind that, at an allegorical level, Fima, with all his blemishes and loss of innocence, is Israel. When he walks past Shamir’s residence, he imagines going in to debate the necessity of compromise with the Arabs. Doesn’t every Israeli see himself as the equal of any Israeli leader? Every taxi driver we meet in the novel has an immediate answer to all of Israel’s problems, if only the prime minister had the good sense to listen, and we are told how in the early days Fima’s father, Baruch, used to argue with Ben-Gurion on the street.
Fima is both the individual and the symbol, but, in either role, he is treated compassionately by Amos Oz. We note the similarity to Oz’s idol Anton Chekhov, whom Fima adulates and who is mentioned three times in the text. Chekhov also created characters who acted rarely and talked incessantly. The trick of genius is to make the reader care about people who think much and do little. Surely we do care about Fima. Certainly, he sleeps with too many women, but it is only when their husbands have ceased to pay them attention and it is rarely Fima who initiates the relationship. Typical is his meeting with Annette Tadmor in the office where he works as a receptionist.
“Why aren’t you looking at me?”
“I don’t like to cause embarrassment. There, the water’s boiling. What’s it to be, then? Coffee?”
“Embarrassment to yourself or to me?”
“Hard to say exactly. Maybe both. I’m not sure.”
“Do you happen to have a name?”
“My name is Fima. Efraim.”
“I’m Annette. Are you married?”
“I have been married, ma’am. Twice. Nearly three times.”
“And I’m just getting divorced. To be more accurate, I am being divorced. Are you too shy to look at me? Afraid of being disappointed?” (p. 39)
Fima doesn’t stand a chance. This must be the wittiest seduction scene since Anne Bancroft had her way with Dustin Hoffman. Annette Tadmor is a wonderfully complex character. As she tells Fima, she worked hard at her marriage for twenty-six years, putting up with the dullness of a husband whose only answer was “Azoy?” (“So?”) to anything she said. The final indignity came when it was he who had the pathetic mid-life crisis, walking out of a marriage in which he claimed he was suffocating.
When Annette and Fima first make love he ejaculates prematurely, but Annette consoles him the next day by complimenting him as the best listener she has ever met. She comforts Fima, concerned about his inadequacy, the way women have comforted men, poor insecure sexual creatures that they are, since the beginning of time.
Middle-aged men in this novel do not emerge as well-balanced human beings. Fima’s friend Uri Gefen bolsters his fragile masculinity by myriad affairs, while the dreadful Dr. Eitan at the clinic takes out all his frustration in verbal cruelty visited upon his nurse. Yael, in her strength worthy of her namesake in Judges who slew the Canaanite oppressor, (4:21) makes the point succinctly to Fima. She has had her affairs during her marriage to Ted Tobias, but she doesn’t whine about their significance. She is too busy being a tower of strength to her husband, her ex-husband, her ex-father-in-law, and her son.
“I can’t feel sorry for you. I don’t want to be a mother to you all. That child, he’s always scheming for something.… You’d think we’re bringing up a prince here. And then you come around all the time, driving him crazy and making me feel guilty.… Don’t come here anymore, Fima. You pretend you’re living alone, but you’re always clinging to other people. And I’m just the opposite; everybody clings to me.… Once, when I was little, my father the pioneer told me to remember that men are really the weaker sex. It was a joke of his. Well, shall I tell you something, now that I’ve missed my hairdresser’s appointment because of you? If I knew then what I know now, I’d have joined a nunnery. Or married a jet engine. I’d have passed on the weaker sex, with great pleasure.” (pp. 261-62)
Much of the novel contains this kind of tribute to the strength of Israeli women and lament on the frailties of men. Oz has commented often on the double burden women must bear, and not only in Israeli society.
For all of Fima’s inadequacies, his acute awareness of everything around him provides great pleasure for the reader. There are marvellous descriptions of his walks through Jerusalem. One such excursion is in the Old Quarter, the Bukharian Quarter.
In three or four hours from now the siren would be wailing here to herald the advent of the Sabbath. The bustle of the streets would subside. A beautiful, gentle stillness, the silence of pines and stones and iron shutters, would spill down from the slopes of the hills surrounding the city and settle on the whole of Jerusalem. Men and boys in seemly festive attire, carrying embroidered tallith bags, would walk calmly to evening prayers at the innumerable little synagogues dotted around these narrow streets. The housewives would light candles, and fathers would chant the blessings.… (p. 280)
Oz evokes the joy of Friday activity with a few brilliantly chosen details:
The whole neighborhood was pullulating with feverish preparations for the Sabbath. Housewives carried overflowing shopping baskets, traders hoarsely cried their wares, a battered pickup with one rear light shattered like a black eye maneuvered backward and forward four or five times until miraculously it managed to squeeze into a parking spot on the pavement between two equally battered trucks. (p. 278)
Fima remembers the Sabbath cooking of his childhood, and he reminds us how vivid are the senses of children:
The smell sometimes began to fill the world even on Thursday afternoon, with the washing and the scrubbing and the cooking. The maid used to cook stuffed chicken’s necks sewn up with a needle and thread. His mother would make a plum compote that was as sweet and sticky as glue. And sweet stewed carrots, and gefilte fish, and pies, or a strudel, or pastries filled with raisins. And all kinds of jams and marmalades, one of which was called varyennye in Russian. Vividly there came back to Fima, as he walked, the smell and appearance of the wine-colored borscht, a semi-solid soup with blobs of fat floating on the surface like gold rings, which he used to fish for with a spoon when he was little. (p. 272)
The Jerusalem passages alone are worth the price of the book.
At the end of the novel, after five days of Fima’s internal debate and external argument, with action remembered but not undertaken, we arrive at “the sad event” of the first sentence of the novel. Baruch Nomberg has died suddenly while in the company of two lady friends. All of Fima’s friends, including Yael and her husband, are gathered in Baruch’s apartment to commiserate with Fima and to witness the reading of Baruch’s will.
Apart from bequests to various and competing charities, the bulk of Baruch’s estate goes to his son, “who is adept at distinguishing good from evil, with the hope that henceforth he will not be content merely to distinguish but will devote his strength and excellent talents to doing what is good and refraining so far as possible from evil.” (p. 315) It is Baruch’s plea to his son, and by extension to the Israel of which Fima is the emblem, to use the understanding of morality, of good and evil, not merely as intellectual exercise but as the basis of righteous action.
The last lines of the novel indicate a great pessimism on the part of Amos Oz about Israel’s future, for Fima responds to his father’s instruction with “Be good, but in what sense?”
But there was an annex to Baruch’s will in which he left a modest apartment building “to my beloved grandchild, the delight of my soul, Israel Dimitri, son of Theodore and Yael Tobias.” (pp. 315-16) Dimi’s full name came as a shock; it was the first time it was used in the novel. It was then that it came to me: if Baruch represents the Israel of 1948, and Fima is the emblem of Israel in the 1980s, then Israel Dimitri is the Israel to come. I remembered then that, three times in the novel, Dimi is described as albino and as having crossed eyes. I also remembered what Dimi once said to Fima: “ ‘It’s not fair: you can choose who you marry but you can’t choose who your parents are. And you can’t divorce them either.’ ” (p. 145) The full significance of that final assembly in Baruch’s apartment became clear to me. All of them, Yael, Ted, Fima, the friends — even Baruch, present in spirit — are his parents, his forebears, in the sense that each has contributed or will contribute to Dimi’s growth. His eyes are crossed and he looks in two directions. Which will he choose? Will Israel look to war or to peace? In his lack of pigmentation, Israel Dimitri is like the outline of a person in a child’s colouring book. Every one of the parental figures will colour in one part until, at some time in the future, the portrait of a new Israel will be complete.
I remembered, too, what I should have remembered earlier: that with Rimona’s son in A Perfect Peace (1983) and Boaz in Black Box (1988) Amos Oz had used a child with multiple parents before as a metaphor for Israel.
Finally, I remembered that Efraim, Fima’s full first name, is not only a name, but also a Hebrew word meaning “fruitful,” and I put together the names of the three generations, Baruch Efraim Israel. In English, it translates as “Blessed be a fruitful Israel.” Amos Oz may protest all he wants against the labelling of his novels as allegories, but it is hard to see the benediction as no more than coincidence.
Fima is an allegory, yet Oz has succeeded at the same time in fulfilling the prime duty of the novelist by creating a fascinatingly complex character who never existed before and who moves through a world that is all too believable. Fima has joined the little world I carry in my mind, a world peopled with memorable individuals created by great novelists.
I am grateful to Oz for the character of Fima, and I am grateful for two other things, both very personal. Before I read Fima, I was never able to articulate precisely the great joy I find in my grandchildren. In Baruch’s will, he describes Dimi as “the delight of my soul.” I have used the expression ever since, although my gratitude is really to Oz’s wonderful translator, Nicholas de Lange. In the original Hebrew, Oz wrote “light of my soul.” The improvement — and I believe it is one — is by his translator. It is not blasphemous for a translator to fine-tune; “the wine-dark sea” is Chapman’s phrase, not Homer’s.
My other debt to Oz is for the brilliantly evocative walk Fima takes in the Old Quarter of Jerusalem. It brought back so clearly a similar walk I took in Jerusalem in 1981, and a moment in that walk when I said to my wife, Pearl, “I feel as if I am coming home.” It took me ten years to work out the implications of that moment — I was already becoming like Fima — but at the end, unlike Fima, I acted. I undertook conversion and became a Jew.
There is much to be thankful for in this exquisitely written novel. I think of that lovely moment when Fima ends his walk through Jerusalem: “The early evening twilight had begun to gild the light clouds over the Bethlehem hills. And suddenly Fima realized sharply, with pain, that another day was gone forever.” (p. 295)
How precious life is!
*As I reread this book review, first given in 1996, I am depressed by how little has changed by 2003. If I replace Netanyahu by Sharon and if I add Arafat’s unbelievable refusal of Barak’s offer of land for peace in the summer of 2001, I might have given this talk last week.