Homesick

"Homesick starts with a couple who’ve decided to move in together. They are both students: one is studying in Jerusalem and the other in Tel Aviv. Right in between the two cities there’s a village called Castel and they move in there together. Usually that’s where love stories end — they live happily ever after. Eshkol Nevo, however, decides to open his novel here, and shows what happens when you decide to build a home together. He asks, ‘How can somebody be in a home without feeling at home? Can you be homesick in your own living room? Can you miss the person you love, when you’re lying next to him in bed?’ I think he does a brilliant job of writing this relationship – the very intimate, sensual and very beautiful relationship of these two students. Nevo also writes about what it means to be homesick from an international aspect. Not far from these two students is a Palestinian worker. He knows that this village used to be an Arab village, which his family fled in the war of ’48. He actually has a key to the family house from ’48. He just looks at the students, at their lives, and he has his own homesickness, which is the national one. We have a 2000-year history of being homesick. Jews were away from Israel, living in the diaspora for so many years. They craved to get back to Israel and they longed for it and they wished for it, and then suddenly they got it. The question is: what happens when you finally get what you want? I think you can get a little bit crazy because there’s this terrible clash between fantasy and real life. It’s like the Odyssey : you have Odysseus’s really long journey to get back to his wife, but then he goes back to the house he left, and he realises this is not the same house, and this is not the same wife, and this is not even the same Odysseus. It was the main reason I wrote the novel. I heard the true story which inspired One Night Markovitch — there really was this operation of Jewish men who went into Europe to save women by marrying them and bringing them to Palestine, where they were then supposed to get divorced, and there really was this man who went all the way to Nazi Europe to rescue a woman, but then refused to give her the divorce when they got to Israel. In Judaism, if you don’t give the woman the divorce—the ‘get’ in Hebrew—then she is forced to stay married. When I heard about this, I thought: wow this is the biggest metaphor for contemporary politics in Israel that I ever heard. This idea that somebody is trying to do something right—and I think an Israeli state is something right—but ends up doing wrong: it ends up holding by force somebody, some territory, or some other people."