Zeruya Shalev searches for universals in The Remains of Love

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      The temptation to politicize everything that emerges from Israel is understandable. Even Israeli writers are subject to this scrutiny: if they’re not overtly political, their work must contain some sort of covert commentary, we think—and in our defence, it often does. When the writer in question has been wounded in a terror bombing, as Zeruya Shalev was in 2004, there’s an even more compelling reason to think that the work has been shaped by circumstance. If it’s not commentary, it must be therapy, right?

      Not so fast.

      “Writing for me, it’s not a therapy,” says Shalev, reached at home in Jerusalem as she’s packing for a North American book tour in support of her fourth and latest novel, The Remains of Love. “It’s not a consolation. It’s bigger than that. It’s my destiny, and it’s very demanding work. It needs a lot of strength, even though I enjoy every minute of it.

      “I never treated writing as a way of comforting myself or to help myself, even when I was injured,” the upcoming Jewish Book Festival’s featured artist continues. “Some of my friends are writers and they used to come and visit me and they wanted to encourage me, so they said, ‘Well, now you can finally finish your book. You have nothing to do, anyway. You are lying in bed, you cannot go out: just write, and write about what happened to you.’ And I tried, I tried, but I just couldn’t write, and I was very scared that maybe I will never write again, because after facing death, having dead bodies around me, the world seemed so meaningless. I could only go back to writing after half a year, when I was physically recovered.

      “I’m telling you this to explain that writing is a very important issue in my life, and I never do it as a therapy. But one of my biggest wishes is that my books will be therapeutic for other people. I know that it happens from time to time. I hear from readers that my books help them to understand themselves or to solve some of their problems, and for me this is consolation, this is great. For me, it’s the best compliment, that my books can help the reader. Because they are so intimate, they create intimacy between the reader and the book, between the reader and his own life, his health. This is one of my goals as a writer.”

      Anyone dealing with the recent or impending death of a parent, with the crumbling of a marriage, or with the emotional distance that inevitably separates parents and children will likely find solace in The Remains of Love, for these are among its main themes. It’s not an easy read, however. Shalev is unflinching in her evisceration of self-obsessed Dina Horowitz and her marginally more likable brother, Avner, whose mother, Hemda, is drifting between the past and the present as she prepares for death. Their memories, bitternesses, and fears meld together in a kind of tripartite consciousness, created through the interweaving of the separate inner monologues.

      “I pay a lot of attention to style,” Shalev says when asked about her penchant for very, very long sentences and free-associative connections. “Maybe it’s because I started as a poet, and when I moved to prose it was very important to me not to leave poetry completely, but to try to put it into my prose. This is the voice that comes from me, inside.

      “This very intimate style of writing creates, maybe in a paradoxical way, a kind of universality,” she adds. “I don’t try to make it universal. It was a complete surprise for me when my first novel, Love Life, became kind of an international bestseller. Since then, I’ve travelled a lot and I’ve met a lot of readers, and so many readers have told me that I was writing about them. It really makes me realize that we are all the same. It doesn’t matter so much if you live in completely different situations, because our inner landscapes might be close.”

      Elements of The Remains of Love are specifically Israeli: Hemda’s kibbutz upbringing, the Palestinian situation (which Avner, as a human-rights lawyer, is trying to alleviate), and the general “breathlessness” of a society that is under extreme pressure from within and without. At its core, however, is the notion that we all have a heart—and that it can only breathe when it is open to love.

      Zeruya Shalev appears at the Jewish Book Festival’s opening gala on Saturday (November 22), at the Norman Rothstein Theatre. See the JCCGV website for details.

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