Bienvenue and welcome back to Musée Musings, your idiosyncratic guide to Paris and art. This week, a review of The Hebrew Teacher, by Maya Arad, which will be published in a few days (March 19). I received a review copy at the end of November. What timing! Just as our collective horror at what had happened in Israel on October 7 was being crowded out by our horror at what was happening in Gaza. Which is still happening and which is roiling every sector of the world, from college campuses and art museums to municipal and federal governments in the U.S. and Europe.
Usually when I am reading a book, I take it with me wherever I go, to read while I am on the bus in San Francisco or in the metro in Paris. But I didn’t do that with this book, not with that title so prominently displayed on the cover. I didn’t want to get into discussions with random people on public transportation in either city, in either country. It’s been difficult enough finding common ground with my friends in Israel and my friends here.….
The book, written in 2018, is actually three novellas, the first of which gives the book its title. Hindsight being 20/20, if the author had chosen either of the other two novellas as the title of the book, I could easily have read it anywhere, nobody would have bothered me about a book called ‘The Visit (Scenes)’ or ‘Make New Friends’.
Some short stories by this author and excerpts of some of her eleven books have been translated into English, but the English translation of this book, by the award winning translator Jessica Cohen, will be the first of her books to be published in its entirety in English. The publisher is New Vessel Press, a publishing house dedicated to publishing books in English translation - in a new language, in a new vessel.
I have just finished reading the three novellas for a second time. I liked them the first time, although there were parts of the third novella that made me cringe. You’ll understand what I mean when you read it. Before I tell you about the novellas, here’s a little bit about the author. She has been heralded as “The finest living author writing in Hebrew.” The claim first appeared (I think) in Haaretz, a liberal Israeli newspaper and has became ‘fact’ through repetition. Wikipedia calls Arad the 'foremost Hebrew writer outside Israel.” Since I don’t know how many authors are currently writing in Hebrew nor how many of them are working outside of Israel, I can’t evaluate either claim.
Maya Arad left Israel in 1994, when she was 23 years old. Since 2002, she has lived in the United States. Called by one source, a ‘writer-in-residence’ at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford, on the Center’s website, she is listed as a Visiting Scholar. Which she has been since 2014. As I look at the Taube Center, there are faculty members who stay and visiting scholars and post docs who come and go. Maya Arad is one of the latter but she has stayed for 10 years. That’s a pretty long visit. This is what that’s probably about. Her husband is a professor in the Classics Department at Stanford. And the university wants to keep it that way. And one of the ways to do that is to find an academic affiliation for his spouse. That doesn’t mean that if Maya Arad was free to find a job anywhere, that she wouldn’t find an academic job somewhere. It just means that she’s at Stanford because her husband, who she has known since they served together as teenagers in the Israeli Army, has a tenured position at Stanford. It was the same for my mentor in the Art History Department at Stanford. Well that is to say, for her husband. She was the one who had tenure. And because the administration wanted to keep her, they found a job for him - in the History Department. It wasn’t a tenured job, but it was secure as long as his wife stayed at Stanford.
The first of the three novellas in this book is eerily prescient, set in the months following the Israeli-Hamas war of 2014. A war which resulted in the deaths of 73 Israelis (mostly soldiers) and 2,251 Palestinians (mostly civilians) and “unprecedented' (at the time) damage and destruction of civilian properties in Gaza. The 2014 figures pale in comparison to what is happening now, but the earlier war explains the novella’s first sentence, “It wasn’t a very good time for Hebrew.”
The person who wrote that sentence is Ilana, a woman in her late 60s who has been teaching Hebrew at a midwestern college for 45 years. In truth, enrollment in Ilana’s Hebrew classes had been declining for years. But after the 2014 war, the enrollment was at an all-time low. Which would be worrying for anyone, but for Ilana it is especially worrying because her job is one of those that sometimes just happen on college campuses. Positions that don’t come with benefits or guarantees or tenure. Positions that depend upon the goodwill of a department chairman. Ilana’s position has been less tenuous than it might have been, because her husband was a tenured faculty member of the university. But now he is retired.
When the woman who had been teaching Hebrew and Jewish literature returns to Israel, Ilana’s world falls apart. The obnoxious, arrogant young man the university hires to to teach Hebrew and Jewish literature is rude and dismissive of everything that Ilana does, every relationship she has built for the department over the years. For example, he won’t have anything to do with the campus Hillel Foundation. And he won’t have anything to do with the Israeli consulate. What he will do and does do is participate in anti-Israel demonstrations on campus.
This novella is both an exploration of the diminution in interest and support for Israel on American college campuses and a mockery of old guard academics trying to jump on the bandwagon of avant-garde trends in academia. And a lament for people who become redundant because their skill sets are no longer useful, their values are no longer cool. Here is what I wrote to Michael Wise, the publisher of this translation, after I read the first novella. “As someone who was teaching at university during a transition from art history told from the perspective of the 'Great White Men' to art history taught from any number of ‘isms,’ some of which were no better, maybe even worse, than what they were opposing, the university setting rings very true.”
Arad’s position at Stanford may be closer to Ilana’s than the tenure track position Ilana’s nemesis holds. But her politics align more closely with his. To him, Israelis who live in the settlements (lands taken from the Palestinians) do not live in Israel. And he supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, the Palestinian equivalent of the Anti-Apartheid Movement many countries imposed upon South Africa. When asked about her views, Arad said, “I am opposed to the occupation, in favor of dismantling settlements. I do not buy goods from settlements ….. If that is a boycott, then I too am boycotting.’ Indeed, “It wasn’t (isn’t) a very good time for Hebrew.”
As for the second novella, ‘A Visit (Scenes),’ this is what I wrote after I read it the first time, “I loved the second story. It was so well nuanced and the slow and not at all steady series of revelations was brilliant.” This novella plunges us into a visit only the visitor herself was anticipating with pleasure. Miriam, an Israeli woman in her mid-70s has come to Palo Alto to meet her grandson, Yonatan, the toddler son of her only child, Yoram, (who left Israel long ago for California) and his much younger wife, Maya. It’s a tragicomedy filled with cringeworthy references to the mores and manners of the current generation of well-to do-techies. A woman Miriam met on the plane from Israel and her daughter who lives near Miriam’s son, offer an alternative universe, one in which Miriam’s own values resonate.
We watch the visit unfold, in scene after scene (hence the title) in all of its painful awkwardnesses and disappointments. Initially we understand what is happening only from Miriam’s perspective. She's confused and disappointed. Why does baby Yonatan go to nursery school when his mom is at home. Eventually we learn that Maya is not the self absorbed mother we initially assumed. She is actually writing her dissertation. How well I remember the disapproving looks I got when I explained to friends who dropped by one day, that my daughter was at the creche because I was frantically trying to finish my dissertation in the little time I had before my teaching duties at the university (temporary) started up again. And the more I read, the more I began patting myself on the back, thinking about how well my mother-in-law and I got along. But then I remembered that I am in the other seat now, (almost) a mother in law now, to my son’s domestic partner, and my smugness completely disappeared.
Gradually, we begin to see events from Yoram’s perspective and then from Maya’s. Layer after layer of the unsaid and the misunderstood is peeled back. I think that what is finally revealed and unveiled will leave you as surprised as I was. This short, very satisfying novella is, among other things, a cautionary tale for not making assumptions, not rushing to judgement.
The first time I read the third novella, ‘Make New Friends,’ I wrote this, “I started and have had to stop reading the third piece several times. Visceral reaction, sense of foreboding. I feel as if I am watching a car crash in slow motion. I’m afraid to keep looking (reading) to find out who gets killed, who injured, who escapes relatively unharmed. Is it just me? Maybe.” Turns out, probably. Very close to home. Too close to my own memories, ancient and and not so old.
The second time I read it, I read the whole novella through to the end. It is so smart and so controlled. Cell phones and popular girls; gaining weight and sitting alone in the cafeteria at lunch. Doing group projects with your dad and going to the mall with your mom (and seeing the girls you wanted to go with, together, without you). As I read this novella, I wallowed in memories of what it was like to be my mother’s daughter, what it is like to be my daughter’s mother. This mother, with the help of her patient husband, (a tenured professor at the university, of course) gradually begins to understand what she is feeling, what she is doing and finally she begins to let go. Hint: It’s not only her daughter’s struggles that obsess her.
I am glad I read this book, even happier that I read it a second time. The first novella does consider specific issues, like the place of Jewish studies at American universities. But Arad’s descriptions of university politics is very wise and very funny. The second and third novellas will resonate with you if you are somebody’s mother or somebody’s father. If you have been somebody’s daughter or somebody’s son. In short, if you have ever been a parent or have ever been a child. I think that’s everybody. Let me know what you think. Gros bisous, Dr. B.