Godthreads and Poetry

There are modern scribblers, from John Steinbeck to Bob Dylan, John Barth to Tim Rice, who have fashioned modern parables out of the ancient cloth of the Bible. Few are the writers, however, who are so thoroughly familiar with the texture of the language and image that they can weave their allusions seamlessly into modern stories. Fewer still are those who can sift out the God-threads and make biblical poetry shine in all its secular human-formed splendor.

In America, where Jewish culture is to be had with the slice of a knife and a schmear of cream cheese, it is sometimes difficult to rate the value of such writing. Perforce it is Israel--a country that has spent half a century struggling to divide church from state, where it is still legally impossible for a Jew to be married by anyone other than an orthodox rabbi--that has become home to most of the Jewish writers wrestling on the side of secularism.

A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman and Amos Oz are perhaps the three best-known heavyweights on the humanist team. And in his deceptively light and easily read novel, “The Same Sea,” Oz scores an impressive and moving victory for the myths and poetry of de-deified Jewish culture. Mixing poetry with prose and language from the “Song of Songs” with images from the Gospels in a series of first-person letters and confessions, Oz tells the story of ordinary people in an extraordinary manner. Here, toward the end of the book, is how Oz summarizes his tale:

*

Here is how we could sum it all up. A man is at home. His son is not here.

His daughter-in-law is staying with him for the time being. She

Goes out. Comes back. She has someone in the meantime. He’s doing well,

Sleeps with her when he’s free, a smart lad, who comes and goes. *

The man is Albert, a 60-year-old accountant. His home is the seaside town of Bat Yam, where he lives alone mourning the death from cancer of his wife, Nadia. The prodigal son is Rico, who, with the wandering instinct of Jews and Israelis, needs little more than his mother’s death to set him on the road to Tibet and Buddhism in search of spiritual answers.

The daughter-in-law, Dita, is in reality only a former girlfriend of Rico. But Albert, in an attempt to protect her from the advances of untrustworthy producers and his son’s best friend, takes in the nubile girl, a would-be screenwriter, beds her in Rico’s room and in Nadia’s nightdress. Dita is the seductive flame of the novel, inciting mortifying lust in Albert and just plain lust in the other men she encounters and jealousy in older women, shining as a distant beacon for the wandering Rico.

Her seductiveness is as pluralistic as that of the Shulamite woman in “Song of Songs,” the bride of Solomon, who has taken various forms, over thousands of years of interpretation: as Eretz Yisroel, or the Promised Land; the Shekinah, or female form of God; or as a simple hot babe from down south. “Song of Songs,” in fact, is the soundtrack for many of the monologues that make up “The Same Sea.” The dead Nadia hears its refrain in a flashback to her and Albert’s courtship, when he “kept on and on trying to explain something in economics. Instead of words like credit side, debit side, Nadia heard, My sister, my bride. And when he spoke of bulls and bears she translated, You have doves’ eyes.”

Later, she sings: “Night after night, my widower weeps on his pillow, where has she gone/whom my soul loves. My orphan child is wandering far, conjuring omens./Child bride you are their wife, you have my nightdress,/you have their love. My flesh is wasted. Set me as a seal.” Lest the reader wonder from whence cometh Dita’s willingness to share her abundant presence with her boyfriend’s father, Oz takes us to the Himalayan province of Ladakh, where Rico finds it is common custom for a bride to marry several brothers of a family. What’s good for the Buddhists is apparently good for the Jews, and the thought of Dita sharing the lonely apartment of Albert is not only comforting to Rico but also spiritually and cross-culturally titillating.

Sometimes the Bible returns as simple humor, when the Book of Matthew meets the Book of Roy Orbison, on balance sheets: “Many send in their accounts. Only the lonely know how to be accurate.” Sometimes, as when Oz plays with Psalm 1, it returns as farce: “The humble settler who has never settled himself in the seat of the scornful will die in August of cancer of the pancreas.... The seat of the scornful has been closed down, and in its place they’ve opened a shopping mall.”

In this land of settlers and shopping malls, not only the language but the mythical champions of the Bible are close at hand, chief among them King David, the great chameleonic hero of the Jews, with enough personalities to satisfy the Lubavitchers and the seculars--boy bard, adolescent warrior, teenage masseur, middle-aged adulterer and king. Even Dita, as attuned as she is to popular culture, has ingested enough of David to fit him into her Israeli weltanschauung. For Dita, David is an unlikely king in the ultra-Orthodox city of Jerusalem. “It would have been more fitting for him to reign in Tel Aviv,/to roam the city like a General [Retd.] who is both a grieving parent/and a well-known philanderer, a loaded high-liver and a king/who composes music and writes poetry and sometimes gives a recital,/’The Sweet Psalmist’, in a trendy venue then goes/off to the pub to drink with young fans and groupies.”

Woven into this neo-biblical novel is the voice of the narrator, a man of roughly the same age as Albert, also orphaned, also living alone. A famous writer, like Oz himself, he shares the acquaintance of a carpenter with Albert and spends an insomniac night chatting with Dita at the hotel reception desk where she pulls the graveyard shift. He is both creator and actor. He writes sometimes in verse and sometimes in prose. There is nothing new under the sun, and Oz is not the first to pull postmodern tricks with interactive narrators. Yet with this narrator, he suggests an interesting and original riddle: Is it hubris or chutzpah to imitate God the writer of the Bible if you don’t believe he exists?

“The Same Sea” recognizes that, for a people familiar with biblical language and biblical image, for whom the mythology of the Middle East is as much a part of the textural history of their lives as the Scud missiles, the brownouts and the discos of Tel Aviv, the wealth of this library of knowledge can produce literature that is both spiritually moving and secularly provocative.