BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Waxing Poetic Over Waning Lives and Love in an Old-Age Home : THE WAY TO THE CATS <i> by Yehoshua Kenaz</i> , Translated by Dalya Bilu; Steerforth Press, $20, 325 pages

A novelist must possess courage and artistry in generous measure to win readers in a story set in an old-age home, but that’s exactly what Israeli novelist Yehoshua Kenaz has done in “The Way to the Cats,” a grim, sometimes appalling but ultimately redeeming account of men and women whose only offense against humanity is that they have grown old and infirm.

“The Way to the Cats” is the story of Yolanda Moscowitz, a retired French teacher in Israel, who finds herself in a “rehabilitation center” after an operation. The hospital is rather like Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward,” a place where the nurses are as callous as prison guards and the patients have forfeited not only their freedom of movement but their dignity.

“Nazi!” Mrs. Moscowitz screams at a less-than-gentle attendant who washes her hair. “This isn’t a Jewish hospital, it’s worse than Treblinka here.”

Kenaz, a journalist with the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, brings a certain matter-of-factness to his novel, a brisk and mostly unsentimental description of the dreadful particulars of life in an old-age home. A cry for the bedpan, if answered too late, becomes a moment of humiliation; a massage is the occasion for a secret moment of intimacy; a trip to the bathroom becomes a life-and-death matter because consequences of a fall are so dire--in fact, Mrs. Moscowitz awakens one morning to see a corpse in the doorway to the bathroom.

“I’ve already told you a thousand times: I don’t mind dying,” says Allegra, a dying woman who has befriended Mrs. Moscowitz. “And I don’t mind if it hurts a bit then either. There’s only one thing I’m terribly afraid of: that I’ll die alone, in the dark, in an empty room, without a single soul next to me.”

Into the rehabilitation center comes Lazar Kagan, younger and more vigorous than the other patients, a flamboyant painter who has been injured in a bus accident and lands among the suffering elderly. He’s a vivid and beguiling figure--Kagan quotes Baudelaire, smuggles liquor into the hospital, flirts gallantly with Mrs. Moscowitz and offers to sketch her portrait.

“Suddenly she felt as if his fingers were touching her face, stroking it as they had stroked the page,” Kenaz writes, “and she didn’t know which was stronger, her fear and revulsion at the touch or the wish to learn how to give herself up to it.”

“The Way to the Cats” begins to transform itself into a love story, but it’s a peculiar and unsettling tale that strikes unexpected sparks of passion, as Mrs. Moscowitz struggles to understand the odd emotions that she feels toward Allegra, the doomed woman who washes her laundry, and Leon, an enterprising young hospital attendant who inexplicably plays at seduction, and--above all--the enchanting and exasperating Lazar.

Kenaz is remarkably adept and at ease with the unlikely setting of his story, and “The Way to the Cats” quickly draws us into the most intimate spaces of Mrs. Moscowitz’s rich, if troubled, inner life. So vivid is the figure of Mrs. Moscowitz, and so lyrical is Kenaz’s prose, that we are tempted to forget that she lives within a ravaged and failing body--but Kenaz refuses to allow us to forget.

“There was nothing in it to remind her of herself,” Kenaz writes of Mrs. Moscowitz’s encounter with her own reflection in a bathroom mirror.

“Its expression repelled her, all the tiny wrinkles at the corners of her lips and around her eyes, and the bigger wrinkles on her cheeks and chin looked to her like cracks on a frail and precious vessel that had fallen and broken into bits, and which diligent hands had tried to piece together again.”

Kenaz must have known that he was setting himself a daunting task when he decided to tell the story of a sick old woman in a convalescent home. “The Way to the Cats” is not an easy book to open. But the reader who makes the effort will be quickly rewarded with an engaging and accomplished novel of surprising tenderness and even a kind of grace.