About the Night
Talshir, winner of the Nahum Sokolov Prize (the Israeli Pulitzer), writes her first novel here, the story of Elias, a Christian Arab, and Lila, a Jewish orphan born in Istanbul. The couple meets in Jerusalem during the summer of 1947, and their romance is soon torn apart, first by war, then by the division of the city they share. Lila is there by almost chance adoption; her only passion involved with the city over which so much blood has been shed seems to come from the vampiring of her lover’s deep family roots.
Talshir’s language often captures the physical feel of Jerusalem in stunning ways: a breath of air through a hospital window, the way Elias’s skin matches the city “more than many Jews she knew,” “the scent of chickpeas in water.” My quibble may be exactly what Talshir was trying to point out, although the conclusion doesn’t make it seem that way to me. “Deep, irrevocable love” of this ilk often finds a place in historical fiction where I think it a fantasy and an anachronism. Elias is more the realist when he marries the woman his family pushes at him during those 19 years of forced separation between the modern Montagues and Capulets of the Holy Land. Lila, with her “tiny circle of friends, few obligations,” conveniently without family ties, does not find such ties in the embryonic state of Israel. A return to such “love” for Elias happens when that state has taken everything else from him – lands, career, family. Lila cannot undertake the good works of her life – founding a home for pregnant single women (which would have made a more interesting story in its details) – until Elias returns to her. This “love” of gazing into eyes the modern nation state offers us seems a hollow shell, not much recompense for what we have lost.
