Novel Approaches to the Truth

...Consequently, besides the truth sought by Rivlin there is the matter of variant interpretations of reality by husband and wife...

...Her novels include Mara: Master of the Return and The Jewish War...

...The two novelists grapple with the perceived falseness of fiction in markedly different ways: Yehoshua seeks to draw out meaning and universal principles from imagined constructs...

...Boundaries are of course particularly relevant to Israel, and especially were in post-Oslo 1998, the year Yehoshua began this book and when much of the action takes place...

...A similar effort to transcend the constraints of fiction is made by the prize-winning Spanish writer Antonio Munoz Molina with Sepharad (Harcourt, 381 pp., $23.00), richly translated by Margaret Sayers Peden...

...He asks the reader to feel what it must have been like to be Baruch Spinoza excommunicated in Amsterdam, Primo Levi on the train to Auschwitz, Jean Améry fleeing from Austria—and also "a frightened child on his first day of school," or "a Spanish Republican who crosses the French border in 1939 and is treated like a dog," or a patient just diagnosed with a fatal disease that effectively exiles him from the human community, like Franz Kafka "discovering with amazement that the warm liquid you are vomiting is blood...

...By a daring act of imaginative empathy, the author penetrates the novel in the life of the other while at the same time remaining in absolute control, organizing, structuring, selecting each detail, large and small, so that it bears his personal stamp...

...In the chapter called "You Are...' Munoz Molina requires the leap of the reader, too: "You are not an isolated person and do not have an isolated story...

...I am terrified by documents, passports, certificates that can be lost, doors that I can't open, borders, the inscrutable or threatening expression of a policeman or anyone wearing a uniform, displaying authority...

...In Sepharad, Munoz Molina tackles the problem from precisely the opposite direction—by rooting himself in real experience and moving from there, in a leap of imaginative empathy, to art...

...the political and social boundaries between the Jewish Israelis and the Arab Israelis, and also between the last two and the Palestinians...

...He ranges obsessively from the past to the present and then back across the tortured terrain of human suffering—whether brought on by private loss and disappointment, or wrought by the political struggles in the Western world that bloodied the last century...

...constitutes a perceptible motif throughout, most strikingly in its violation...

...Münzenberg is hanged one night in 1940 in a French woods and left to rot, betrayed by a spy for Stalin, Otto Katz, an old friend of Kafka, one of the many links throughout this book to another writer who shunned conventional fiction forms...

...For two or three years," Munoz Molina writes in one of Sepharad's strongest chapters, entitled "Münzenberg," "I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater...

...starting with intimate, interfamilial boundaries, and then...

...You are every one of the different people you have been...

...But truth, and an emphasis on its liberating power, is where the novel starts and finishes...

...In the process two parallel created worlds emerge, evoking an illusion of reality the reader can sink into safely and easily with pure delight...

...He dismisses, as does Sebald, many of the artifices of craft more traditional authors accept—in particular transitions that can end up as clutter or filler...

...It wasn't time that freed you from traps...

...Sebald, especially his earlier novels, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo...

...Yehoshua to appear in English, The Liberated Bride (Harcourt, 568 pp., $27.00), masterfully translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin...

...Freeing himself in this fashion from accustomed literary expectations, Munoz Molina shifts easily from first to second to third person in no special order, projecting his own voice and those of others, speaking as a man or a woman, young or old, famous or obscure, and employing unimpeded any material that inspires him—written texts, his travels, his personal life...

...That may account for the note to reviewers accompanying the latest book by veteran Israeli novelist A.B...

...With tender and affectionate good humor, Yehoshua portrays characters who remain endearing despite of their flaws—the envious and intrusive Rivlin...

...Yet Münzenberg, as Munoz Molina brings him sympathetically to life from the pages of a book he found in a store in Charlottesville, Virginia (Stephen Koch's The End of Innocence), was a vivid figure of enormous vital energy, a German Communist whose public career as a mass propagandist and professional revolutionary was played out against the great political tyrannies of his day...

...You are anyone and no one, the person you invent or remember and the person others invent or remember...

...and of her entire clan, including grandma and grandpa, on both sides of the Green Line...

...The Palestinian and Israeli Arab world, darker and more mysterious, contains many of the elements of magic realism...

...Communism and Fascism, the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War...

...I lose sleep imagining it was you and I on that train...

...Munoz Molina, in this extraordinary work, is something akin to a sacristan, the title of his first chapter...

...By the book's close, readers are given confirmation of what most will have suspected all along, though Rivlin himself is never allowed to share our satisfaction in learning what actually undid the marriage...

...That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario...

...Munoz Molina dispenses with nearly every one of those well-honed practices in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the late German writer W.G...

...Nonetheless, the attempt to plumb fiction in quest of objective truth, human and moral, social and historical, is intrinsic to both works—not only in the stated intentions of their authors, but also within the pages of the novels themselves...

...It was truth," Rivlin declares...

...To solve that mystery, he makes repeated trips from his home in Haifa to Jerusalem, to the hotel owned by the family of his former daughterin-law, Galya...

...Yehoshua's affirmations about boundaries notwithstanding, it is the search for truth that palpably pulls together the trajectory of his narrative and its conception...

...He enters the dark inner space where the secret vessels are kept, and then comes out into the light of day to testify...

...Like Sebald, Munoz Molina rejects a straight narrative line, moving seamlessly in concentric circles that close in on the reader like a bull's-eye...

...But all of this strangeness, all of these contrivances in the service of a more profound truth, lie well within the known territory of fiction, eliciting a familiar pleasure along with a familiar dismissive mistrust, a distancing and disbelief...

...The cumulative effect of Munoz Molina's true tales is devastating...

...These themes—of persecution, exile and memory—preoccupied Sebald as well, and both authors are shocked over and over again by how past suffering can be totally erased, leaving no trace in memory or on the cold face of the earth where it occurred...

...For each writer redemption comes through art, whether it is the starting point toward truth, as it is in The Liberated Bride, or its destination, as is the case in Sepharad...

...It is a world that whispers to Rivlin, through whom we enter and experience it...

...What sets them firmly within the domain of fiction is that the reality they convey is mediated through a single creative sensibility...

...The voices and stories that make up Sepharad tell "true tales," a characterization put forth by Henryk Grynberg, who worked through imagined lives in a similar way, for the subtitle of his collection, Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories: True Tales from the Holocaust and Life After...

...He is reinvigorated when he becomes the beneficiary of a young colleague's papers...

...Such associations, deeply satisfying for the reader in and of themselves, unify the book almost physically the way its preoccupations unite it conceptually and emotionally...

...Here, too, the depressed, bedridden Samaher believes she is a horse, her cousin Rashid's nephew is mistaken by hunters for a fantastic creature known as a lambcat with tragic results, and a singing Lebanese nun faints in ecstasy at the end of each performance, thrilling her audience...

...As strange as the fact that this man once existed," Munoz Molina writes of Willi Münzenberg "is the fact that there is almost no evidence of his sojourn in the world...

...Tova Reich, a fiction writer and literary critic, is a longtime contributor to the pages of The New Leader...

...Thus a sense of the line between past and present, Arab and Jew, husbands and wives, parents and children, etc...

...they were revelations in the present, with no before or after...

...Here, among us Arabs, you can bathe in the true river of time...

...The protagonist, Professor Yochanan Rivlin, an "Orientalist" in the Near Eastern Studies Department at Haifa University, is blocked while writing a book on the sources of Algerian terror during the 1990s...

...This focus applies equally to the book's major subplot—the professor's turn to literature for the historical truth about Algerian terror—and to its central story—his obsession with the collapse five years earlier of his son Ofer's marriage and his need to find out what really happened...

...The external symbols for that linkage are perhaps the long trains Munoz Molina repeatedly refers to that drew all of Europe together—the cattle cars delivering Jews to the death camps, the sealed car bringing Lenin to Russia...

...In The Liberated Bride it is actually a major element of the story, with consequences for the unfolding plot and the interplay of characters...

...Until Yosef Suissa's death in a Jerusalem suicide bombing, he sought to understand the "secretive Arab soul" through popular literature and poetry...

...The connection to Kafka is further reinforced through Münzenberg's wife, Babette Gross, whose sister, Margarete BuberNeumann, was handed over by the Soviets to the Germans and ended up in the Ravensbriick concentration camp with Milena Jesenska, Kafka's lover, to whom he wrote the letters that have since become immortalized...

...His life ends ignominiously ("You will die of your Leftism," Lenin once said to him), like that of Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial...

...Throughout his interconnected chapters that span the major atrocities and tragedies of 20th-century Europe, he links the sufferings of the well-known and the unknown, from Franz Kafka and Primo Levi to a village cobbler in Spain and a crippled Holocaust survivor in Tangiers...

...He takes comfort, however, in learning that between Ofer and Galya the truth has been established, rendering his grieving son, if not yet happy, at least "a morally free man...

...his controlling wife, Hagit...

...of Samaher, an Israeli Arab who is one of the title's "liberated" brides, whom he enlists to translate from colloquial Arabic the folk literature he requires for his research...

...The themes that surface with intense urgency from constantly revisiting the same scorched ground are intimated in the book's title, taken from its final story, "Sepharad," the Hebrew word for Spain, with its evocation for Jews of the Inquisition and the expulsion of 1492...

...This stepping out of oneself and opening up to become someone else is ultimately the necessary imaginative leap for fiction, the basic technique without which there can be no art...

...In a postscript to what is unfortunately only the second of his 13 novels available in English, he tells us he "invented very little in the stories and voices that weave through this book...

...The Jewish Israeli world is contemporary and rational, secular and enlightened (there is "excessive enlightenment," Rivlin observes at one point...

...Rivlin's pursuit of this line of analysis—of extrapolating truth from fiction—is one of the major forces driving the novel forward...

...The animating idea Munoz Molina invokes, in one form or another, is that "There's no limit to the surprising stories you can hear if you listen to the novels in people's lives...

...He becomes increasingly enmeshed in the lives of Suissa's widow and father...

...Munoz Molina struggles to apply his creative intelligence to observed reality...

...As Münzenberg and Babette board a train to leave the Soviet Union forthe last time, Munoz Molina, in an act of profound imaginative empathy, becomes one with them: "I feel their anguish...

...His "intention," he explains, was to explore "the question of boundaries, in all its aspects...

...of his old mentor, Professor Carlo Tedeschi, and of Tedeschi's wife Hannah, the "translatoress" of medieval Arabic poetry...

...The Liberated Bride's, overarching thematic concerns— truth, freedom and, less compellingly, boundaries—are conveyed through traditional and accessible fictional devices: A solid third person narrative unwinds in logical order over the course of one year against a single landscape, Israel, brought to life with absolute authority by an immensely skillful storyteller...

...And it is compounded by an unyielding insistence on the part of Ofer, not very different from his father's, on the truth he witnessed with his own eyes...

...Tedeschi, the tyrannical hypochondriac, to cite just a few...

...What transpires in the Jewish world may perhaps be best classified as a comedy of manners...

...He enters the dark inner chambers of the hotel's haunted basement where Ofer had glimpsed what destroyed the marriage...

...The terrible vision, Galya maintains, could only have been a fantasy...