Borderlife

"Dorit Rabinyan wrote a beautiful novel about a love affair between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, and the novel was so good that a committee of professionals asked to put it on the school curriculum. The Education Ministry eventually decided to ban it, however, because they said: this is a love affair between a Palestinian and a Jew, and we are afraid of them because of ‘hitbolelut.’ This is a Hebrew word. In English it means ‘assimilation’, but it is a specific word that we use in Hebrew, which we only use about the assimilation of Jews with other nations. It means that you’re afraid of Jews marrying non-Jews and that then the Jewish religion or culture would be destroyed, because it would be mixed with other cultures. They argued not to have the book taught in schools because it’s not the kind of idea we want to teach our children. “The best way to make a novel a bestseller is to say that nobody should read it” Of course, the best way to make a novel a bestseller is to say that nobody should read it. All the teenagers who never read books said: ‘OK, this is a book that we’re not supposed to read,’ and then they ran to the shops and bought it. The fact that you ban a novel because it deals with a love affair between a Palestinian and a Jew — it is one of those moments where you don’t know whether you’re supposed to laugh or cry. If you think of Romeo and Juliet—the famous example of forbidden love—they both, in a way, give up the whole concept of being a Capulet and a Montague; they just want to be together. What’s so good about All the Rivers is that the characters don’t give up their identity. They’re not saying: oh we don’t care about Israelis and Palestinians, we just love each other. The woman is a Zionist—she wants an Israeli state—and the man cares about Palestinian issues — he wants a Palestinian state. They don’t put aside their political disagreement. They love each other, but they still hold their national identity, which is very complex and very beautiful at the same time. By starting the novel in New York, Dorit Rabinyan set it on neutral ground. It makes them both foreigners — they both have people looking at them because they are of eastern origin, and this is soon after 9/11. They are both the ultimate other for the Americans, and this is something that keeps them together. I don’t think that their relationship could start if he was living in a village near Ramallah and she was in Tel Aviv — then they’d never meet. In Israel, we do have some couples of Palestinians and Jews, it does happen, but it is a forbidden love, an impossible love. Yes, definitely. People understand the power of literature. They understand that Dorit Rabinyan’s novel shows a love affair between people, whom we are taught are enemies. The Palestinian schools teach them that we are the enemy, and our schools teach our kids that they are the enemy. I think the people who are afraid of this novel are the people who understand that literature can change the way people think about things — which is both pessimistic and optimistic. The Hebrew writer Amos Oz once gave a beautiful lecture about this. He said that for years you could read in Hebrew, but only the religious script. He said that Hebrew became alive again the first time somebody wrote a love letter in Hebrew — not a prayer, but a love letter: a boy trying to tell a girl that he wants to be with her. He said that’s the first time that people could really live inside the language. Amos Oz was the first generation of Israeli-born Hebrew writers, and I’m the third generation of Israeli writers, so I was born into Hebrew. For me, this is not such a miracle, this is just the language I was born into. But it does strike me each time I open the Bible that these are the same words. I mean, I am writing the same words that were used 3000 years ago and that is amazing. Right now, while we are talking, it is the middle of the night in Tel Aviv, and I’m sure you have a dozen writers sitting in their apartments, writing novels that will be published in a year from now, and the beautiful thing about literature is that I don’t know what these novels are going to be about. You have this writer right now writing the word ‘end’ at the end of his novel, and none of us knows if this novel will be like the novels that we’ve talked about, or part of the canon, or if it will be something completely different. You can never tell."