Maiden voyage

Set in 1920s Jerusalem, this tale of a young woman with artistic leanings is an engaging yet flawed consideration of the meeting point between the observant world and creative urges.

By AKIN AJAYI
Jerusalem 521 (photo credit: www.goisrael.com)
Jerusalem 521
(photo credit: www.goisrael.com)
Twelve-year-old Esther sees beauty all around her; what she wants more than anything else is to capture the transient splendor of the world for all time, by drawing and painting. When she spots a gecko recumbent upon a windowsill, she wonders to herself at the fragile translucence of its skin. How, she wonders, did God capture this fragility? But this is folly for a prepubescent girl in Jerusalem of the early 20th century, as she is reminded swiftly. To draw and paint is to be guilty of the sin of idleness; if that were not enough, there is the Second Commandment to reinforce the wrongness of her desires: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything.”
Beyond this, the world of young, observant women of the age was anchored around a set of reference points much removed from those connected to art and creativity: Piety and poverty, virtue and patience, the first menstrual cycle, an arranged marriage and the uncomplicated mitzva of reproduction as a means of strengthening the community by numbers.
Such was the life of a Jerusalem maiden.
Jerusalem Maiden, American-Israeli Talia Carner’s third novel, is a sporadically engaging yet frustratingly flawed consideration of the meeting point between the observant world and creative urges. The book revolves around the cloistered world that young women such as Esther inhabited, girls on the cusp of womanhood but with nothing to look forward to but autonomy and femininity denied, the promise of an unfulfilled life.
Esther belongs to small Jerusalem klal, a community preoccupied with the imminent arrival of the Messiah to the exclusion of all else. Poverty is a way of life.
Boys aspire to become yeshiva bochers, talmudic scholars whose knowledge bestows prestige upon their families. Girls, once they begin menstruating, become fair game for the shidduch, married off in choices that reflect the communal status of the families.
Esther has some luck on her side – if one considers glimpses of an alternate life luck.
One of six children, she is close to her father – closer than one might expect of daughter/father relationships of the time – and dotes upon her four-year-old brother, Gershon. Unusually her education is at a “mixed” school with classes in English, where Esther mingles with “Sepharadi Jewish girls who spoke Ladino and Arabic,” and “secular girls – heretic Zionists all of them – who spoke the sacred Hebrew.”
It is here that Mlle Thibaux, her French teacher, discovers her talent for painting, and encourages her to explore it further rather than leaving it fallow. The teacher’s gentle encouragement opens up to Esther the power of her own creativity; she also, inadvertently, exposes Esther to the power of her incipient femininity. Thibaux’s teenage son, Pierre, interested in art himself, is bemused by the restrictions that Esther’s beliefs place upon her. Despite herself, Esther feels unfamiliar stirrings within; but the guilt at betraying herself and her community is a constant reminder of the impossibility of her dreams.
Despite efforts to the contrary, marriage eventually arrives – to Nathan, a wealthy merchant who is not only a stranger to her community, but who lives in Jaffa, far away from the sanctity of Jerusalem. This is punishment for her past misdeeds, she believes, for her self-absorption in matters that have betrayed her and her community.
And so she leaves, perceiving herself an outcast, to serve her penance.
Jerusalem Maiden is enriched by the lush, descriptive writing with which Carner adorns Esther’s story. Mentions of cerulean skies and staccato movements are not out of place; a “pillowed landscape” enticing Esther to “stroke a canvas with the softest gray and a touch of hidden blue” fits the mood of the story perfectly.
But this only underscores less satisfactory efforts at individual and group characterizations.
Early on, an unsavory episode between Esther and an Arab merchant anticipates the depth of their representation throughout the book. This is no bad thing in itself; after all, historical fiction’s first responsibility is fidelity to established historical fact. But it does place the reader on notice. And the unrelentingly negative depictions of the haredim, Zionists, Goys, rigid and lacking nuance, begin to grate after a while.
To be fair, the nihilism recedes somewhat when Esther, married and with children, impulsively decides to visit Paris. Her trip, ostensibly, is to take up her husband’s invitation to travel with him on a grand tour of Europe while he goes about his business. But in fact, it is an excuse, an opportunity to satisfy a gnawing hunger within her, to discover whether she can accommodate piety, guilt and the stifled urge for self-actualization through art.
There is the obvious argument that Carner’s depictions are mediated through Esther’s eyes, representations of how she was brought up to engage with the world.
I’m not so convinced. Despite Esther’s willfulness, petulance and self-indulgence, she comes across as being too goodnatured – too good, actually – to preserve such a jaundiced view of the world. The observations about the various communities are recorded dutifully, but as if the author has no real affection for them. True or not, that is a matter for the author alone; it is just that it becomes a problem if she wants a reader to spend so much time with them.
But this is incidental. Esther’s existential challenge is forced to the surface in Paris: duty, obligation and guilt, or love and creativity.
The choice is never clear, which doesn’t surprise because one way or another, something meaningful to Esther will be irrevocably lost as a result of her decision. It is a suitable ambiguity, something that one wishes might have run more consistently through the book.