FATE

The sudden appearance of her ex-husband Mano’s daughter, Atara, whom she has never met, stirs unsettling memories for Rachel, a 90-year-old veteran of the Jewish underground.

Atara Rubin, a Jerusalem preservationist, has always thought her abusive father was incapable of love. But on his deathbed, mistaking her for Rachel, whom he divorced many decades ago, he says loving things to her—a shocking moment for Atara, who becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth about him and his mystery woman. A private investigator finds Rachel in a West Bank settlement, but the old woman panics over talking to the daughter of the man she never stopped loving—the man with whom, as members of a paramilitary group opposed to the British occupation, she was emotionally scarred by a horrific bombing that killed a dozen of their co-fighters. Atara has her own big secret. She has never told her two sons about her first marriage or the countless affairs she had before meeting their father, Alex. When the hypercritical Alex is sent home too early from the hospital with a stomach ailment, recriminations and self-recriminations fly. Ultimately, the bereft Atara is comforted by Rachel—the past reaching out to the present through a fog of collective trauma. Shalev’s extraordinary follow-up to Pain (2019) spans an era in which Atara could envision a peaceful “merging of cultures” between Jews and Arabs and an ultraviolent era, as Alex says, in which it can be difficult to see Israel surviving for more than a few generations. The novel is most affecting in depicting the emotional price paid by children of war. “You lectured us endlessly about love for the land, but you didn’t love your own family,” rages Rachel’s son Yair. Without raising her own voice, Shalev powerfully laments a past that never fulfilled its promise.

A bold, sometimes devastating effort by one of Israel’s leading novelists.