Book Review : A State of Innocence Duly Punished

His Daughter by Yoram Kaniuk; translated from Hebrew by Seymour Simckes (George Braziller: $17.50; 293 pages)

How to describe Yoram Kaniuk’s dark and complex vision of Israel, other than to say that he sees it as a state of innocence that will be justly punished?

Greek tragedy or biblical; Prometheus seeking fire for mankind and being chained to his rock and corrosive eagle; Adam and Eve seeking the fruit of knowledge and being cast out. For Kaniuk, Israel represents a noble venture and a fatal transgression.

Others among Israel’s finest novelists have voiced the uneasy conscience of a society set up as a rightful happy ending to a 2,000-year story of oppression, and wonder whether it has become the beginning of a second oppressive story written in Arabic. None, I believe, has treated the subject with the rigor and brooding intensity of Kaniuk.

Profundity and rigor, not to mention brooding, are not the automatic equivalent of art. There is no question that Kaniuk is an artist; a mixture of poet, novelist and unappeased searcher.

In “Confessions of a Good Arab,” he made a near-masterpiece. Two mutually exclusive worlds achieve a raging, almost thermonuclear fusion in the person of a man who is half-Arab, half-Jew, and who fights and celebrates himself. It is as if, without abandoning a single twinge of pain, the eagle had become Prometheus.

An Indirect Presence

In “His Daughter,” the Arabs are an indirect presence but the theme is the same, tunneling deeper. So deep, so knotty, so contorted does it get, in fact, that the art all but disappears. The diver has sunk out of reach of his air hose; the characters are conscripted in their roles as fighters in Israel’s war with itself.

Brigadier Joseph Krieger, an old military hero, becomes a political scapegoat in a controversy over military brutality. Joseph is honest, decent, and a man of legendary courage. He is a hammer, a veteran of the times when Israel gloried in its lightning strikes, a cultivated Israeli version of John Wayne.

His superiors, maneuvering between military demands and the increasingly complex considerations involved in dealing with West Bank resisters and world opinion, have found in Joseph both a useful weapon and an embarrassment. They would like to protect it but not to the point of sticking their necks out. Too proud to answer charges he knows are false--he is blamed for sacrificing one of his own officers in the demolition of an Arab house, and of shooting a prisoner--Joseph resigns.

These things are a shadowy background. They establish Joseph, who swims to keep fit, cleans house and cooks for his daughter, as the Israel of the innocent armed vision. He will be punished by the things he has done in all purity and valor; by his victims, by the complexities and corruptions that a dream acquires when it becomes a state.

Miriam, the daughter, serves in the army. She is Joseph’s light, his inheritor. She treats him with a rancor and contempt that is more than post-adolescent rebellion. It is more than the pain of a daughter forced to choose between a passionate, unfaithful mother who has left home, and her kind but abstract and faintly inhuman father.

Child of Vision

Miriam, in fact, is the child of the vision, and forced to deal with the pain and contradictions that it has created for the young; for the soldier, for example, who finds himself blowing up West Bank village houses.

She is obsessed with the ghost of one young soldier who died protesting the army’s actions in the occupied territories. His name was Isaac--we remember the son whom Abraham meant to sacrifice--he served under Joseph and he died trying to rescue an Arab woman from a house that Joseph had ordered blown up.

Through Miriam, who is torn apart in the process, the ghost of Isaac will become Joseph’s scheming nemesis, plotting revenge for his own death and, beyond that, for the deaths of the Arabs trampled by the vision.

The book’s action centers around Miriam’s disappearance. It is a mystery full of false trails, concealments and inexplicable panic. As Joseph searches, all of modern Israel seems to be accomplice to a conspiracy he can’t fathom.

There is Isaac’s dissolute brother, a television star who was Miriam’s lover, a young army captain, Joseph’s former wife, and others, all of whom seem to know something about the disappearance.

Divergent Paths

There are Joseph’s two childhood friends and old comrades-in-arms. One has become chief of staff, the other the head of the intelligence service. They love him but they are estranged; each in his own way serves an Israel that is no longer the country of the idealistic sabra-warrior. Joseph is too pure for the generation of power, too blood-stained for the generation of protest.

Eventually, Miriam and Joseph are destroyed in different and ironic fashions. Isaac has his revenge but it brings no peace to his spirit nor any resolution to the moral questions that, Kaniuk believes, are ripping his country apart.

To speak of the theme of “His Daughter,” unfortunately, is largely to speak of the book. It is a murky, allusive discourse whose mysteries are simply packages, which, when opened, contain new lumps of discourse. Joseph, through all the complex and dimly seen plots that swirl about him, is trying to save his soul and his honor, but his effort resembles an autopsy more than a resurrection.