Spirits, lies and prison

Secrets, lies and prison Nathan Englander’s newest novel delves into the Israeli psyche and some of the country’s darkest tales.

By ELAINE MARGOLIN
nathan englander 521 (photo credit: Juliana Sohn)
nathan englander 521
(photo credit: Juliana Sohn)
Nathan Englander, the cocky and clever wunderkind we remember from a few years ago who wrote What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, has grown up. Something seems radically different about his outlook.
His earlier works focused on American Jews and their ongoing angst about their identity, the Holocaust, latent antisemitism, and the enticement of assimilation. His new work, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, takes us to an entirely new realm. Englander has long expressed an affinity for the Israeli Leftist movement, but his new work shows a growing empathy for the voices that emanate from the Right; voices that understand the unending fragility of Jewish survival everywhere.
His brilliant new work explores two competing worldviews and transforms them into a page-turning political thriller that is riveting. There is Prisoner Z, an idealistic young man from Long Island who comes to Israel and agrees almost haphazardly to join the Israeli intelligence services.
The story was inspired by the real- life Prisoner X case, a young Jewish Australian man who was recruited to work for the Mossad until he was charged with espionage and detained for just under a year until his death.
Nobody knew about his capture, his imprisonment, or his suicide until the story broke in the Australian news three years later.
Englander’s Prisoner Z, meanwhile, uncovers intelligence in the field that results in an Israeli military maneuver that takes out terrorists along with several civilian casualties. Rocked by the outcome, he is stunned into committing an unforgivable act. He reveals himself to his Palestinian contact, and offers to try to figure out a way to even out the score; without even realizing what he is offering.
His action results in his imprisonment by the General, whose depiction is based on the life of Ariel Sharon.
The General locks up Prisoner Z in isolation in the Negev desert in 2002, leaving him guarded by his lover Ruthi’s son, a lost soul of sorts, who bonds with Prisoner Z; each of them buried in their own malaise.
No one is aware of Prisoner Z’s whereabouts except for the General and Ruthi and her son. He has been wiped off the map. He remains jailed for years, unaware that the man who has ordered his lock-up has been lying in a state of “limbo” for years in a hospital bed after suffering a stroke. Ruthi remains by the General’s bedside around the clock, berating the doctors for ignoring him, and praying for his recovery.
Englander jumps back and forth in time, from 2002 in the field to 2014 with the General in his hospital room and with Prisoner Z, to different moments throughout the General’s life.
Trapped in his state of limbo, the General is thinking about his beloved wife Lily, who never comes to his hospital bed. He likes remembering her, along with the foods she would bring him; huge bowls of figs and salted almonds.
He is taunted frequently by the memory of a gunshot sound; the one that accidentally took his young son. The memory of this sound shakes him, and he is by all accounts, an unshakable man. He distracts himself from thoughts of this tragedy with thoughts of his beloved Israel; the country he still wants to save if only he could stand or speak or communicate with those around him. He believes he was close to accomplishing his best work; but then the stroke took him down. Down, but not out. His mind still works; he is certain of that.
Everything about the Jewish state still thrills him; the Jewish pilots he hears flying overhead, the army that continues to flourish, the technology they keep inventing faster than anyone else. He remembers the dagger his father gave him when he was just a young teenager. The other boys received fountain pens, but his father gave him a dagger, as if he already knew whom he would become. The man who taunted death. The brilliant strategist. The fearless warrior who watched over his troops as if they were his own blood. The man who had fought in the front lines of every Israeli war leading the charge.
But memories of such revelry are always interrupted by the sound of the gunshot that took his boy. He recalls visiting the blacksmith who made him a wall mount for the gun that would cause such destruction. He did not know there was still a bullet in it.
It had been a trophy from the Syrian war. He remembers how honored the blacksmith was to have him visit; how hard he tried to impress him. He liked the blacksmith and was happy that day.
“If this wasn’t the dream of Israel incarnate, the General thinks, watching.
Here is this man, hammer to the anvil, the socialist dream, the hot sparks flying, the iron embers sitting red, sticking like mosquitoes to the leather of his bib...” Who could have known that day that this wall mount would carry the weapon that would take his young son? He cringes at the thought of it.
Englander’s portrait of the General is marvelously complex and engaging.
He shows the General to be heroic, yet sensitive. And reflective, too. Nothing like the brute he was often called by enemies and admirers alike. We feel Englander’s admiration for him and hear hints of envy in his portrayal.
This is a man who was larger than life, but grounded too. Grounded by an instinctual reflex to protect the Jews.
Grounded by his need to persevere and triumph. A man capable of making split-second decisions who didn’t need to second-guess himself. A man filled with certainty about the purpose that guided his life.
Soon we are back in 2002 with Prisoner Z, before his capture. He is hiding in Paris and leaves his desolate apartment to go eat, knowing that to do so is foolish. He finds a restaurant where he can order “a plate of hummus and a little chopped liver, for some smoky eggplant salad, a kibbeh, a fat square of salty feta. He will – marrying together the two halves of his self – have a warm pita and a basket of rye bread.”
The food is delicious, but he is distracted by the beauty of the waitress, unaware she has been sent to entice him. They are soon kissing in his apartment and he is later explaining to her his state of duress. He trusts her even though they have just met, and tries to explain to her what he did as a frantic act “undertaken in a desperate, last-ditch fugue state and driven by his good-hearted intent to do what’s right.” She listens quietly and tries to comfort him.
In a flash, we are back in the hospital with the General whose mind is working overtime. He is remembering the things said about him. Particularly about the massacre in Qibya. That he was reckless and overzealous. That he did terrible things. Ben-Gurion had summoned him for an explanation which he refused with a stubborn silence. He remembers Ben-Gurion patiently waiting for him to speak but finally leaving him with inspiring words that sustain him now.
Ben-Gurion told him, “The world always hates us, and always has. They kill us, and always will. But you, you raise up the price…. Don’t stop. Don’t stop until killing a Jew become too expensive for even the rich and profligate man. That is your whole purpose on this earth.”
Once again, we are back with Prisoner Z. It is 2014. He has been locked up for 12 years and is now flirting with madness. In some ways, he seems to be a younger version of Englander, who fled Long Island and his Orthodox upbringing at 19 for Jerusalem where he went with utopian longings that he claims in interviews were dashed by the futile efforts for a lasting peace.
Englander’s mother had always overprotected him and warned him that the world was a dangerous place, but he felt at first strangely liberated in Jerusalem; free from the shackles of Orthodoxy that had squelched him.
And yet, still vitally Jewish and finally comfortable as a Jew. A new experience for him.
Englander, just like Prisoner Z, can’t seem to understand what happened to the euphoric dreams of his youth.
Where did they go? Because Englander seems certain his dreams have disappeared into an invisible mist. He remembers being bullied in his Long Island town by the gentile kids until one day he removed his yarmulke and escaped being victimized. It was a brazen act for an Orthodox boy, but he felt empowered by his ability to step into another identity at a moment’s notice, and escape harassment at the same time. He loved the feeling. Just like he loved the feeling of being Jewish in Israel.
But his dreams were soon dashed by the realities being acted act all around him. Just like Prisoner Z, who believed he was doing a good thing for the Jewish state, and then realized he was in way over his head and he did something terrible, almost without realizing it. It was a moment’s rashness, but his betrayal of his fellow Jews led him to the cell he now sits in; the cell with no escape hatch.
Yet, we do not hear too much sympathy in Englander’s narrative voice for Prisoner Z. Englander paints him as foolish. A naïve man-child; full of youthful rebelliousness and an idealism that has always proved fatal for the Jews. We hear Englander’s condemnation of him; and understand that subliminally he is condemning his own younger self. Englander seems to now embrace the gritty realities of Jewish life without reticence. The dangers that are present. The battles that must still be fought. The war against the world’s condemnation that must still be won.
Englander has produced a masterpiece of literary imagination that seems to mirror his own evolution.
From the overprotected little boy in Long Island to the middle-aged man and father who now looks at the world through a far more nuanced lens. A vision that shuts out utopias of all kinds as mere mirages. Instead, his focus stays primarily on the General whose hands are often splattered in blood; his own and that of his soldiers. A man the world remembers as almost mythical in status, for he refused to back down from the assaults that kept coming, even sometimes from his fellow Jews. He had the strength to ignore the shifting winds of political compromise and negotiation and always keep his eye on the one ball that really counted: Jewish safety and survival.
Now, it appears, so does Nathan Englander.