ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I am not having much luck with #WITMonth so far.  I abandoned the first two (highly regarded) books that I had on the TBR: Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki (meh) and The Vegetarian by Han Kang, (more violence against women).  And now I’ve made it all the way through Days of Peace by Rachel Shihor, translated by Sara Tropper and Esther Frumkin, but I nearly abandoned it too.  It is almost — but not quite — just another Miserable Marriage, and I have had enough of those.  This is the blurb:

Jerusalem in the early 1990s, just before the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Peace Accords and was assassinated by a rightwing ideologue shortly thereafter. Naomi, a former architect from secular Tel Aviv, has just married Jochanan, a religious doctor who emigrated from Sweden. Days of Peace follows Naomi through Jerusalem as she meets a rich cast of characters, from an Arab beggarwoman in a park on a Sabbath afternoon to a professor of biblical archeology on a life-long quest to produce a hand-lettered edition of the Bible. Kaleidoscopic scenes of the city pass: a ritual bath, a wedding hall, carpentry workshops, bookstores, Hadassah Hospital, a former leper colony, and more. As Naomi’s marriage deteriorates, she travels to Poland, where the sorrow over those lost in the Holocaust intertwines with her nostalgia for the early romance of her now-faded marriage. But as the drama unfolds in the divorce court back in Jerusalem, Naomi is on her ultimate search—to find her place in this historical city.

Written in deceptively simple, almost conversational prose, Rachel Shihor’s novel is a poignant layered portrait of a city, a newborn nation, and a young woman’s quest to find herself.

Naomi seems to be a passive observer in her own life, drifting into, and then out of, an unsatisfactory marriage.  You’d think that after all these years of feminism an educated architect would know that marrying an orthodox Jew would mean that she’d have to submit to the domestic impacts of that, and that as a secular Jew from Tel Aviv, she’d find that difficult.  But no, Naomi, goes along with it all, until on a trip to Poland she finally makes a decision and leaves him.

This moment of crisis in their marriage is signalled by her refusal to delay her departure to suit him.  This is the first time she stands up to him directly.

…I say, Jochanan, I am leaving here.  I have already arranged everything. On Sunday a taxi is coming to take me to Warsaw.  A driver has been found.  My husband understands immediately.  Is everything settled? he asks. Perhaps he expected this.  And this is what you were doing while I was away? Who recommended the driver?

After that he falls to musing. — It’s not that I don’t understand, he says finally, but I have one request, he hesitates, Go ahead, but just not on Sunday. Don’t cancel your plans, just postpone them. Tell the driver to come on Tuesday instead.  I want to show you more important things.  We have not yet seen the Jewish museum, and we will go to the plaza near here from which the Jews were deported to the concentration camps.  Let’s talk. — I went by myself to the deportation plaza, I say.

—And…? my husband asks.

—And I am leaving on Sunday. (p.139)

Days of Peace includes mildly interesting vignettes about all sorts of people in Jerusalem but what saved this novella for me was the descriptions of how Orthodox Jewish life impacted on their relationship because she did not share his religious beliefs. It’s not just a matter of having to keep a kosher kitchen.  The continuous cycle of religious holidays, with barely enough time to recuperate from their demands, was stressful.

From Purim to Passover is only thirty days, but what demanding days they are.  And I already know there is no hope.  No hope at all in this case.  My husband carefully opens a narrow metal box, stamped with metal strips, and cautiously pulls out a silvery sheet, and then another one. It is needed to wrap the entire kitchen, marble counters, work surfaces on both sides of the sink, gas burners and baking oven, for they are also called work surfaces.  They will be covered for seven or eight days, and the gas burners will be wrapped on both sides, front and back, and taped down at the edges. The aluminium foil is pliable and will not move once it is put in place, and the rest will be held down with Scotch tape.  (p.84)

It isn’t clear to me whether this practice is usual for Orthodox Jews or that her husband’s obsessive study of the rules with Mr Shapira is going to extremes, battling crumbs of leaven which he does not see but whose presence he assumes based on the testimony of law books and prayers.  It’s almost funny when they run out of foil to cover the fridge, and Jochanan has to content himself with just wrapping the handle.  But actually, it’s not funny.  If not for the religious rationale, we would call his husband’s dominance and demands and bullying, examples of coercive control.

Naomi starts to be anxious about the rapidly approaching holiday when they have not yet prepared anything for them to eat during the period when she is not allowed to cook. The store they go to is almost sold out, and the shopkeeper doesn’t hide his disdain when they buy some pita bread, even though leavened bread is not forbidden just yet.  Judgementalism is a constant in their lives, and while he relishes his quest for approval, it stifles her and makes her life lonely.

All marriages involve compromise and adjustment, but how could anybody who did not share these beliefs compromise with these extremes, without losing a sense of self? And though Days of Peace is written from Naomi’s point-of-view, it invites the same question for him.  His religious beliefs are crucial to his sense of self as well…

Without knowing much about Israeli culture, I suspect that Days of Peace exemplifies a battle for the soul of the country, a struggle between secular and Orthodox Israelis.  As I understand it from media reports here, it is Orthodox Jews who are building the illegal settlements that are inimical to any peace process with Palestinians, and they do so because of religious beliefs which sanction it.  And Israel’s conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condones it because he needs the support of the Religious Right to govern…

I think that is why Days of Peace is set in the hopeful early 1990s, when Yitzhak Rabin was re-elected on a platform embracing the Israeli–Palestinian peace process.

It was consolatory, then, to watch Rami and Bassam’s Peacebuilding Tour at an event hosted by Melbourne Jewish Book Week.

Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin are from ‘enemy’ sides but are self-proclaimed ‘brothers’.
Rami is a Jewish Israeli from Jerusalem who lost his daughter Smadar in a Palestinian suicide bombing in 1997, the same year Bassam’s daughter Abir was born. Bassam, who grew up in Hebron, was a former fighter who had spent time in an Israeli jail where he saw the film ‘Schindler’s List’ that changed his life. His daughter, Abir was tragically killed aged 10 years old, by the bullet of Israeli border police.

Their grief bonded the two and forged a joint path of dialogue and reconciliation, rather than hate and revenge, which is the subject of Colum McCann’s award winning book Apeirogon. (See my review).

You can watch their talk together here.

BTW It is my usual practice to indicate the year of first publication in the original language when it’s a translation, but this is not indicated in this Seagull edition, and I can’t find it online.  2019 is the year of the first English translation.

Author: Rachel Shihor
Title: Days of Peace
Translated by Sara Tropper and Esther Frumkin
Cover design by Sunandini Banerjee (who should be advised that small text on a dark olive-green background is hard to read).
Publisher: Seagull Books, 2019
ISBN: 9780857426994, hbk., 168 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased direct from Gazebo Books Australia in partnership with Seagull Books,$29.99

Please note that in the interests of social cohesion,
comments on all books set in Palestine or Israel,
and books written by Palestinian, Israeli, and Jewish authors are closed for the duration.
I have taken this action because of intemperate comments made by readers
who have ignored requests to refrain from commenting on the current conflict.