Israeli Litterateurs

...Nevertheless, by the time the translator returns from Bar-Nun's funeral (for which the Israeli government was typically obliged to schedule extra trains), we've come to know almost more than we want to about the country's senior literary establishment, and possibly not enough about Ezra Shultish...

...The novel ends with the dead writer's "The Yemenite Girl" given to us in toto...

...If I seem remiss in not outlining the plot, it is because, for all of Shultish's scurrying and agonizing, very little actually happens...

...Among these elderly European-bred litterateurs, those singled out for Leviant's sharpest barbs are the practitioners of the very arts that he has distinguished himself in (translation and criticism, most recently with his rendition of Chaim Grade's well-night untranslatable The Yeshivah...

...Efut of course we who communicate in such a lucrative language as English cannot begin to appreciate what an awesome burden it must be to follow the poet's or novelist's calling in the sole language divinely guaranteed to be eternal, yet to remain helplessly dependent for a wider reputation upon translators and commentators whose bare competence is too often a matter of blind luck...

...And it is precisely the atmosphere prompting such laments that is evoked with stinging yet affectionate irony in Curt Leviant's The Yemenite Girl...

...A member of this crew is the book's hero of sorts, Ezra Shultish?an American Hebraist, scholar, critic, and fiction-writer manque who has come to Haifa on an extended sojourn to lay siege, in his own dilatory style, to the great Bar-Nun...

...Today, however, given modern Israel's awesome output per capita of books and periodicals, one might incline more toward Ward Moore's amendment of the plaint: "Would that mine enemy had written a book review...

...The great writer's country, after all, not only consists of what Chaim Weizmann had called "2 million presidents," but is richly endowed with amateur and professional critics, debunkers and nudniks...

...Skillfully immersing us in a society where serious literature is felt to be no less a staple of life than hourly transistorized newscasts, Leviant does not concern himself so much with the slippery mysteries of the novelist's creative process as with the swirl of passions, schemes and careers that it gives birth to...

...and, more practically, to be somehow acknowledged by the Nobel Laureate as primus inter pares among the excess of would-be interpreters to the world...

...At the novel's center looms the devious, generous and almost sur-realistically unpredictable figure of Israel's Nobel-winning writer, Yech-iel Bar-Nun, whom only the dullest would be slow to identify with the late S. J. Agnon...

...Whatever Leviant's intention, I don't think this succeeds as mimicry, parody or comment—whether approving or ironic —on Shultish's skills as a translator...

...His goals are modest enough: an actual tape of Bar-Nun reading his famed short story, "The Yemenite Girl...

...some hint as to the real-life inspiration behind the story's enigmatic and tantalizing heroine...

...At the funeral, between tears of sincere grief, he vagrantly daydreams of a Bar-Nun Memorial Prize with himself as the most likely recipient, and is struck by the melancholy realization that while he would still be able to read Bar-Nun, "now Bar-Nun would no longer read him...

...The author, though, makes it easy for us to sympathize with Bar-Nun's elliptical efforts to protect his time and privacy...

...How very pleasant, then, to read a novel where old men's literary scuttlebutt is important, and where a critic's heart beats more dangerously in the presence of a great writer than when alone with a beautiful young woman...

...coauthor, "The Samurai of Vishogrod" Job's cry, "Would that mine enemy had written a book"—recorded long before the invention of movable type—leads one to speculate that even back in those simpler times the Holy Land was blessed with a singularly inbred and contentious literary life...

...It is by no means a bad production, but it is not credible as the work of a Nobel Prize-winning novelist...

...And not the least part of Leviant's achievement is that he makes one eager to reread Agnon...

...Bar-Nun's colleagues, critics, interpreters, and well-meaning parasites—Leviant looks at them as an explorer would look at exotic fauna —are a peevish and solipsistic lot, able in the same heartbeat to accomodate fierce admiration with an equally ferocious jealousy for Bar-Nun, the only one of them, in a country shamelessly promiscuous with its literary prizes, ever to have been tapped for the Big One...

...At the same time, while his portrait of the self-conscious Shultish is as unsparing as the view Saul Bellow casts on his Herzog, Leviant does reveal a fellow professional's compassion for the humble scholar-translator who, vampire-like, can survive only by sucking the blood of his betters—although Leviant has triumphantly proven in this, his first novel, that critics need not invariably remain artistic eunuchs...

...It may strike us as a little perverse that Bar-Nun, in good Talmu-dic style, pushes away Shultish with one hand while pulling him near with the other...

...On the other hand, when he recklessly invites comparison with the master, staging for us those ion-charged Israeli urban landscapes where the outcome of the simplest action or conversation may stretch dreamlike toward some infinite horizon, Leviant effectively evokes the spirits of Agnon and of Kafka (whom Bar-Nun, like Agnon himself, firmly claimed never to have read...

...In this oppressive atmosphere we can share Shultish's heartpounding suspense when confronted with such minor incidents as a misplaced tape cassette, a foolish piece of gossip, or a tepid yet somehow hugely erotic flirtation with a young Yemenite cleaning women, rashly suspected of having served as the model for Bar-Nun's story...

...And none of them, since the days of Moses on the mountaintop, has considered even a face-to-face relationship with the Almighty as sufficient reason to honor one man above his brothers...