There is a barbershop on Ben-Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. The unnamed narrator of Yitzhak Shalev’s novel passes it one day in the 1960s and catches the scent of an aftershave lotion he has not smelled in 20 years. It stops him cold. He steps inside, half expecting to find his one-time teacher sitting in the barber’s chair. The man there is someone else. The narrator hurries out. But the scent follows him, and for the rest of the afternoon he wanders the divided city, tracing the borders of his own memory.
The Gavriel Tirosh Affair is a novel about the presence of an absence. Gavriel Tirosh appears for less than a year in the lives of five Jerusalem high school students in the late 1930s. He teaches them history. He trains them for combat. He vanishes. Decades later, they are still trying to make sense of what he meant and what he cost them.
Shalev, who lived from 1919 to 1992, published this book, his only novel, in Hebrew in 1964.
The story is set during the “Bloody Events” of 1936-1939, a period of Arab attacks on the Jewish population.
The Jewish leadership’s official policy was havlaga, restraint. The Hagana would defend settlements when attacked but would not pursue perpetrators or retaliate. Some Jews rejected this approach and formed breakaway groups, including the Irgun. They believed that restraint signaled weakness, that it encouraged further violence, and that the British would only respect strength.
Into this world comes Gavriel Tirosh, a 28-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany, hired to teach history at an elite Jerusalem high school. He arrives with a suntan that surprises the students, green eyes that captivate them, and an aftershave lotion that the narrator, years later, can still smell.
He teaches them the Crusades. He makes them write research papers. He takes them on a class trip to the Galilee. On a steep trail to the ruins of Montfort Castle, he outruns them all without trying. That is when they begin to understand that their new teacher is not like the others.
Missions that blur the line between education and combat
Tirosh forms a small group: Aharon, Dan, Yair, Aya, and the narrator. He trains them in marksmanship, fieldcraft, and tactics. He teaches them to move through the night without fear. He sends them on missions that blur the line between education and combat. His methods are unorthodox. His aims are ambiguous. His sister was murdered in Germany. He has no patience for Jewish accommodation or Jewish passivity. He believes the Jews of Palestine are making the same mistake as the Jews of Europe, and he is determined to break the pattern. Before leaving his kibbutz to become a teacher, he told a friend: “Enough of forging iron! It’s time to forge souls!”
Near the end of the school year, during an operation in the Arab village of Shuafat, Tirosh disappears. The students finish the year without him. They join the underground. They fought in the War of Independence. They build families. They grow middle-aged.
Shalev writes in the first person, and the narrator’s voice carries the weight of hindsight. He is looking back from 1964, some 16 years after the establishment of the State of Israel. The country exists. The war was won. But something has been lost.
The narrator walks past the ruins along the armistice line that divides Jerusalem and sees in them a reflection of the ruins inside himself. He realizes that he and his surviving friends “were all blurry facsimiles of Gavriel.”
The novel deals with the narrator’s obsessive searching for Tirosh. He goes to the train station to watch passengers arrive. He walks the aisles of theaters and cinemas, scanning faces. He catches the scent of Tirosh’s aftershave lotion. Years pass. He names his son Gavriel. The searching never stops.
This elegiac tone runs through the entire novel. It is a story of bereavement. In her foreword, academic and political activist Ruth Wisse notes that the novel “partially joins the literature of bereavement, filled as it is from start to finish with mourning for the absent teacher and other departed people and expectations.”
Tirosh succeeds in changing his students. He prepares them for a fight they had to win. But he also leaves them with something unfinished, a wound that does not heal.
The book was controversial when it appeared. It gave voice to the Irgun and the Lehi, “Stern Group” at a time when Israel’s Labor establishment controlled the national narrative. Menachem Begin, former leader of the Irgun, would not become prime minister until 1977. Shalev was writing against the grain.
But the novel is not ideological. It is personal.
The narrator neither defends Tirosh nor condemns him. He simply cannot let him go. Tirosh appears for a few months and shapes the rest of his life. That is the mystery at the heart of the book. How does one person exert such power? What makes a teacher unforgettable? What does it mean to be changed by someone and then abandoned by him?
There are passages in the novel that linger. The description of the narrator wandering through divided Jerusalem, searching for traces of a past that no longer exists. Shalev does not overwrite. He trusts the reader to feel what he does not say.
Hillel Halkin’s translation preserves the spare quality of the prose. He makes small changes where necessary to help American readers understand references to the Yishuv and the underground movements, but he avoids footnotes, which he finds cumbersome. Yiftach Ofek’s historical introduction provides context for readers unfamiliar with the period.
Although The Gavriel Tirosh Affair was originally published 60 years ago, its English translation surfaces at a moment when Israel is once more divided over questions of force and restraint, when debates over how to respond to violence feel as urgent as they did in the 1930s.
The novel does not offer answers. It is a story about people who made choices under impossible circumstances.
Wisse notes that before the category of young adult fiction existed, The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night “were among the teen books of our generation.” This novel belongs in that company.
It is set in high school, and it’s about high school students facing choices that will define their lives. It speaks to the students living those years now as much as to adults looking back on them.
The narrator ends where he began, walking through Jerusalem, following the trail of a memory. He never finds Tirosh, but he never stops looking.
THE GAVRIEL TIROSH AFFAIR
By Yitzhak Shalev
Translated by
Hillel Halkin
The Toby Press/Koren Publishers Jerusalem
252 pages; $20