Judas

by Amos Oz

This book is also written by an Israeli.  This author was recommended to me by Eli, the Israeli we met in Monterrosso.  I am not sure what to make of the book.

The story is about a young Israeli student who has a breakdown because: his parents can no longer afford to fund his education, his girlfriend dumps him to marry a former boyfriend his socialist network has collapsed in disarray and his studies into Jewish attitudes to Jesus seem to stalled.  He quits school against his profs advice and much  to the dismay of his family.

He sees a notice on a bulletin board looking for someone to be a companion to a senior, invalid for a few hours each evening in exhange for room and board and a small salary.  He goes to the house and is offered the job on condition that he will not disclose anything about the house and its inhabitants to anyone.

The house is inhabited by a young woman (owner of the house) and her father-in-law.  The young man's job is to sit with the old man in the evening and listen to him talk, or talk to othes on the phone, reheat is supper and make him tea.  The young man learns that the old man's son was a brilliant mathematician with a great future who got carried away with the war fever in Israel and ended up getting tortured and killed.  The woman's father was a government official who resigned/was rejected from the cabinet of Ben Gurion because he believed in the one state solution, not two state. 

The book spends a lot of time discussing the role of Judas as a traitor, was he a a traitor ot the Jews?  As one character comments, if there had been no Judas there would be no Christianity.  The young man continues to read scholars and their opinions about Judas.  He also researches the newspaper archives for information about the woman's father.  He learns that many people feel her father was a traitor because he associated with Arabs in his attet
The young man finds the woman fascinating and despite the warnings of the old man not to, he falls in love with her.  She disregards him at times and toys with him at others.  He learns that the woman seems to hate all men because of what men did to her husband.  The old man does not agree entirely with the ideas of the woman's father but he is angry that men fight and that his son died as a result.

The young man falls in the house, banging his head and breaking his ankle.  The woman nurses him back to health but then tells him it is time to leave, he cannot hide there forever, he must find a girl, get a life.  He doesn't want to do this but does leave.  Rather than going home he boards a bus and heads to one of the new settlements thinking he may get a job as a security guard or something else.
The book ends with him standing in a village near the settlement "And he stood there, wondering".

I am not sure what to make of it, there was lots to think about in terms of what did Judas really do and expect, what was his responsibility for what happened to Jesus and the consequences for the Jews.  There is the parallel between Judas being considered a traitor (and all Jews being hated by Christians as a result) and the woman's father also being considered a traitor for not pushing for Israeli rights and control.  The young man has tried to hide from the world, has seen the pain and disfunction which the war has caused the woman and the old man.  Is it possible he will learn from them and try to change? affect change? I would hope so but he didn't seem to demonstrate any effort to want to change.

Falling Out of Time

By David Grossman

The author is an Israeli who just won the Man Booker Internationa Prize for his latest book.  This is a very interesting book.  It is written part in poem and partly in prose.  The narrator is a local official who has been tasked with documenting the activities in the village.

The book starts with an elderly man who has lost a son several years before in a street battle.  Suddenly one day he decides to leave his wife and start walking around the village looking for his son.  He starts to circle the town.  His action also seem to inspire some changes in the behaviour of other citizens, a Cyclops who is attached to his desk, who has lost his child, a woman who is a netminder who has lost he daughter, a school teacher who also lost a chld and the village official who also lost his daughter and the Duke, the boss of the official.  With the exception fo the cyclops the people start circling the city in larger circles until they encounter a wall.  They hesitate at first and then start to dig in the soil until they have dug graves for themselves.  They climb into these graves.  But in a while they climb out.  It seems that they have accepted the deaths of their loved ones.

A sad story but with beautiful language.