Adam Shav el Beito

(AManReturnsHome),byDan-BenayaSeri
KeterPublishing,233pages,NIS89
By Almog Behar
D
an-Benaya Seris voice is lucid and
unique, so much so that it is pos-
sible to say with certainty that, with
respect to the combinations he creates in
his writing, there is none like it in Hebrew
literature today. His language is that of
the Sages, nourished by rabbinical writing
from the time of the Gemara, in homiletic
and legal commentary, up until our own
times. He does not, however, try to pre-
serve this language in all its purity, nor is
he afraid to integrate the language of the
present into it, as indeed has always been
acceptable in the texts of the Sages.
This writing is sometimes, but incorrect-
ly, called Agnonian in its style, and there
have been critics who have called Seri the
Yemenite Agnon. This is because, for edu-
cated secular readers of Hebrew, out of all
the deep founts of writing in this type of
language the longest-lived of all the lay-
ers of Hebrew, the most flexible and per-
haps the most beautiful Agnon is the only
one who remains.
The plots of the stories that make up A
Man Returns Home are extreme and often
heart-wrenchingly cruel; for instance, a
child hears stories of loss from his father at
bedtime, while his mother is suffering from
a serious illness (and this is a relatively ten-
der moment ). The tone in which the plots
are set forth is weary with the weariness of
generations, of someone who has already
witnessed all the wonders of the world and
writes about them as though commanded to
do so as though he is patient, but also as
though he has already managed to conceal
his own wonder at the events.
Seri was born in Jerusalem in 1935. His
first book, Grandma Sultanas Salted
Biscuits (1980 ), was greeted warmly and
became a significant surprise at the time,
with respect to its language and its content.
A Man Returns Home is Seris sixth book,
but the first to declare itself an autobiogra-
phy of the writer, in which memories of his
childhood are adapted into short stories.
The stories themselves move without
clear boundaries between truth and imagi-
nation and visit times and places that have
been prominent in his works of fiction,
particularly the Bukharan neighborhood of
Jerusalem in the 1940s and 1950s, when the
author was growing up. Before cracking
open this latest book, the reader wonders
how Seris literary cruelty, which moves
away from literary compassion toward pa-
rodic exaggeration, will adapt to an autobi-
ography describing his mother and the fa-
ther who was killed when Seri was a child.
What will Seri, who loves to tell about ugly
people who suffer for most of their lives
from terrible marriages, do when he turns
to talking about his own family? What will
he do with the grotesque characters and
the plots that are unwilling to submit to the
laws of cause and effect or morality?
At the beginning of his emotional preface
to the volume, Seri writes that the book is a
testimony to the neighborhood of his child-
hood, which stood on the poor margins of
the wealthy Bukharan quarter, in a place
where God had not yet divided the waters
from the mud ... simple wooden doors that
were never locked before those who came,
like the tent of our Father Abraham. With
these words, Seri promises readers that
this time there will also be room in the book
for beauty, childhood innocence and even
nostalgia: In our shady, ancient neigh-
borhood, there was one wonder above all
people. Not just any people and not week-
day people, but people of the Sabbath, who
even in their terrible poverty kept hidden
in their hearts, in an ancient rite, one of the
36 measures of grace that their Creator
had sent down into the world laughter.
However, readers realize quite quickly
that these promises cannot be completely
fulfilled, because he tries to rebuild, even
if from its ruins, the old and enchanted
home of the days of my childhood ... to
listen, as then, to the Sabbath hymns that
Father had concealed in Mothers flesh
meaning that ultimately, his nostalgia can-
not be complete because he is looking back
at his childhood home from the present,
when that home lies in ruins.
In Seris retrospective look at his family,
and also when he tries to replicate his naive
point of view as a child, the harsh forces
of reality take up considerable space, and
even love does not prevent him from mak-
ing scornful and ironic observations. His
father is described in the book as a man of
small stature. Modest, submissive, some-
times to the point of being self-deprecat-
ing, a description that fits many of Seris
characters. Seris mother envisions her
husband a skinny man to whom she al-
ways tried to feed many pitas and orange
marmalade as a sort of lost pair of trou-
sers for which she was always looking for
suspenders lest they fall down; she warns
him to walk about the house only in thick
socks so that, heaven forefend, the mice
would not make the mistake of looking for
the cheese between his toes.
For his part, the father tells the child
that the verses of A Woman of Valor
from the Book of Proverbs, which are tra-
ditionally recited in praise of the wife be-
fore the Sabbath eve meal, constitute the
only hymn that God invented for the conso-
lation of ugly women.
He wasnt intending to ridicule Mother,
writes Seri. Mother was always a beauti-
ful woman. Maybe a little fat.
Childhood, the realm of enchantment and
innocence, is also the moment of rupture.
For Seri, that moment came four months
before his bar mitzvah. On the morning of
the eve of Passover, 1948, it was as though
the Tablets of the Law were broken on me
again, he writes. On that same clear, pure
morning, free of any terror, my father, as
the times would have it, set out to open
his grocery shop and purvey from it the
products for the holiday to his customers.
However, his kosher path was truncated
by the bullet of an Arab sniper, which hit
him in the back and slew him on the altar of
Elijah the blacksmiths shop.
The boy became a man, but not thanks
to the joyous bar mitzvah of which he had
dreamed: If there is a moment in a boys
life in which he is torn from his childhood
and becomes a part of the crude world of
adults, that was the moment when I brought
to my mouth the first slice of bread after
that news.
However, even the harsh experience
of orphanhood is something to which Seri
cannot relate without a bit of humor. For
example, during a visit to his aunt and her
family, he meets the neighbors daughter, a
girl who was white, amazingly Ashkenazi,
who becomes his first love. He relates that
on that night he couldnt sleep and perhaps
for the first time since Father was killed, I
did not cry over him. Perhaps in my heart I
even rejoiced in his death, because like the
Yemenite children, no doubt the Ashkenazi
girls love orphans.
Worse than Ashkenazim
This girl, whom the narrator plans will
be his wife, becomes a model for relations
with other Ashkenazim who are worthy
of affection. In Seris stories, Ashkenazi
identity, like Bukharan identity, typically
symbolizes wealth and arrogance. Thus, of
someone who turns her nose up, it is said
that she thinks that God made her from
the egg of an Ashkenazi, and in his second
book, Birds of the Shade, when one of
the female characters describes pregnant
Mizrahi women, she says: Thats how they
are, lazy. Spoiled, and sometimes, God help
us, worse than Ashkenazi women. They
just eat. Hakham Duek, one of the charac-
ters in A Man Returns Home, considers
Ashkenazi women to be not really Jewish.
Blond gentiles who come to the neighbor-
hood as tourists to disturb the tranquility
there are called Ashkenazim and a son who
runs away with an Ashkenazi girl and mar-
ries her symbolizes breakage and a fall.
The resentment and fear of Ashkenazim,
the glue that unites the various characters,
are sometimes replaced by envy, such as
when a boy turns over in his mind the pos-
sibility that his father was Ashkenazi, or
when a family rejoices because the daugh-
ter is even more successful at an Ashkenazi
school than her Ashkenazi classmates.
In retrospect, Seri discovers that the
power to tell stories was bequeathed to
him by his father. On the Sabbath, his fa-
ther would become different, changing his
clothes and sitting down to tell his children
on the stone steps of the gate to the old
house a story for the Sabbath, always the
same story, always the same tale. He never
omitted a word, he never added a letter, as
though in his hands they were fragments of
the Tablets of the Law ... the story of an or-
phaned shepherd boy in Yemen who one day
wandered beyond the fields with his sheep,
and a pack of wolves came and attacked his
flock and devoured him as well. This death
returned every Sabbath until one time the
authors elder brother had the audacity to
ask their father to have mercy on the shep-
herd, and the father replied: Wolves, too,
have an appetite of their own.
From the distance of years and tears,
Seri confides to his readers, I know that it
is possible that it was this tale that engen-
dered in me, many years later, the sickly
power to put together, like my father, tales
and stories from screams and tears.
Only after his fathers death did Seri dis-
cover that he had not fully known him and
that his father had written stories in secret
and discarded them. His mother collected
them in a crate after her husbands death,
thinking they were letters. God, how my
mother suspected nothing all those years,
Seri writes. My father did not, after all,
write letters. Ever. He wrote only stories.
A tortured writer in the tattered trousers
of a Yemenite olive seller. Sitting and writ-
ing, sitting and writing. Thats how he was
always, with despondent eyes, a torn look.
Swallowing the letters in his wrath.
AlmogBeharistheauthorofAnaMinAl-Yahud(IAm
FromtheJews),publishedbyBabel.
12 BOOKS )""3&5; April 2009 April 2009 )""3&5;
Of someone who turns
her nose up, it is said
that she thinks that
God made her from the
egg of an Ashkenazi.
In his sixth book, novelist Dan-Benaya Seri, who writes of Yemenite immigrants in a
language rich in allusion to Jewish learning as a whole, tells the story of his own Jerusalem
childhood, filled with bitterness and pain but tenderness and humor too
Hebrew Fi cti on
Look back in anguish
Jerusalem's Bukharan
quarter in the 1950s.
"A place where God
had not yet divided the
water from the mud."
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