Pictures in paper

Like her previous publications, Nava Semel's latest novel to be translated into English has the holocaust at its core.

By BARRY DAVIS
nava semel 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
nava semel 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Nava Semel writes it like she sees it – and like she lives it. To date, 57-year-old Semel has published 17 books and written four plays, many of which address the subject of Israeli identity and how the new Israeli copes with the scars of the past, particularly the horrors of the Holocaust. Considering that she is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, this is only natural.
“My mother was in Auschwitz,” says the award-winning novelist and playwright.“She was one of the few to leave the camp by the front gate instead of through the chimneys.”
Semel’s mother was handpicked to be part of a task force of women who were marched to an aircraft manufacturing plant.
Around half of Semel’s output has been translated into English, including And the Rat Laughed, Who Stole the Show? and The Child Behind the Eyes. The latest to find its way into the queen’s English is Paper Bride, which was originally published in Hebrew in 1996 and is being put out by Hybrid Publishers of Melbourne, Australia. Like much of Semel’s oeuvre, the Holocaust features in a prominent place in Paper Bride.
As the daughter of survivors – her father, the late MK Yitzhak Artzi, was in the Jewish underground in Romania during World War II – Semel’s literary efforts naturally gravitated to the fate of European Jewry.
Her 1985 offering, Hat of Glass, was the first Israeli novel to address the issue of the children of Holocaust survivors and brought the writer the Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies’ Award for her pains. Semel says she hadn’t set out to produce a representative generational piece.
“I wrote it between 1980 and 1982. I wrote the book innocently, about young adults who are starting out on the road to life and about all the questions they have about the future. But by the time I got through half of the book I was shocked to discover that all the characters were children of Holocaust survivors – every single one of them.”
So, the book was about Semel. “Yes, that’s right, but I didn’t know that. All the characters have problems with seeing things through to completion. One can’t get married, another can’t have children, all had some sort of emotional block.”
In Hat of Glass, the only way out of their predicaments was for the second-generation characters to go to their parents and open their Pandora’s Boxes of memories.
“They had to bring their memory back home,” Semel explains. “I call it ‘memory on hold.’ The survivors put all their memories in a kind of safety deposit box and didn’t touch them until their children started asking questions.”
Semel found herself in a chicken-and-egg chronology situation. “The characters in the book had already started asking their parents about their Holocaust experiences, and I followed suit,” she says. “They did it before me.”
Paper Bride takes a different, more oblique, angle on the Holocaust. The newlyweds in the title are Jewish women from Poland whom the leaders of the Yishuv want to bring to pre-state Palestine via a loophole.
The events in the book take place in 1936, when there were already severe constraints on the numbers Jews who could enter the country with official “certificates.” The Jews found a loophole in the British restrictions, says Semel. “They found out that the wife of a Jew living here could come into the country. So one of the characters in the book is recruited to do his patriotic duty and marry four Jewish women from Eastern Europe.” The hero in question is a 20-something man named Imri who agrees to go to Poland and come back with a young bride, the idea being that after a while the couple gets divorced and Imri sets sail for Europe again to remarry.
“Dark clouds were gathering over Europe at the time – 1936 to 1938,” Semel explains, “and this was a good way of saving the Jews and getting them to the safety of Palestine. These ‘paper brides’ were not included in the British quota for Jews.”
In Paper Bride, Semel does a masterly job of recreating the intimate world of the Yishuv. The story evolves in a small moshav in the South of the country. There are all sorts of colorful characters. There is an unmarried rabbi who provides his herd with spiritual guidance while he is also on the prowl for a wife. There is also a fiercely communist baker who is so enamored with Mother Russia that he disdains anyone who drinks whisky instead of vodka.
Imri’s much younger brother, Uzik, lives much of his life in a dream world. There is social commentary dotted throughout the book, including the spotlight Semel shines on the more primitive aspects of the Yishuv, for instance in its constant striving for the ideal image of the Sabra – strong, intelligent and shot through with unquenchable heroism. Uzik, on the other hand, is dyslexic but is considered to be a shirker. In truth, Uzik has a lot to contend with. He was orphaned at a very young age and has to cope with his aunt’s mutterings to his late mother.
There is also an abundance of romanticism in the book. One of Uzik’s few friends is Muhammad, who lives in a nearby village and helps Uzik take care of the family beehives, and Uzik has a trusty canine sidekick called Johnny Weissmuller, named after the actor who portrayed Tarzan in the only movie Uzik has ever seen. Imri took Uzik to see the film on a wonderland outing to Tel Aviv – the big city – and Uzik maintains an ongoing dialogue with his silver-screen hero. There is some added intrigue, although there is no concrete evidence of any hanky-panky, when there appears to be some mutual romantic interest between a dashing Royal Air Force pilot from the nearby British base and Imri’s first wife and ex-wife, Anna. There is also some important interplay between Anna and a woman from the Arab village.
Through Anna, Uzik starts to learn something about the Jews of Europe and about the approaching catastrophe. “The book is very much about how we don’t see the writing on the wall when our world is about to collapse,” explains Semel, adding that the book is a very visual project. “The book is really a bunch of footage from a movie that Uzik tries to make to somehow enable his friendship with Muhammad to live on many years later.”
The introductory passage of the book describes Uzik’s thoughts many years down the line: “I won’t live forever. That thought, which seemed so obvious, struck me sharply when I tried to make a movie for the first time,” writes Uzik. “I tried to correct the flawed, cruel landscape reflected in the lens. A ridiculous attempt to compensate for small injustices, but even so, I couldn’t give it up.”