Apollo

Lavie Tidhar | Adama | Apollo | 400 pages | 6,99 GBP

It is a bitter irony of the literary world that precisely now, as Israeli society is tearing itself apart, Hebrew literature is falling silent in the German-speaking world. While cultural commentators are discussing whether German fiction publishers are not in fact participating in a cultural boycott by simply hardly translating anything at all, Adama by Lavie Tidhar seems to make a stand: a novel that refuses to be softened, that tells the story of Israel not as a fatal abstraction but as a deeply rooted, painful, bleeding reality. And Tidhar can afford to do so - he writes not in Hebrew, but in English, has been winning awards for years, is internationally established and thus is one of the few Israeli authors whose voice has survived the current translation dip unscathed.

Perhaps the surprising power of this novel lies in this distance. For Adama is not a diaspora view, not a political essay with narrative accessories, but a kind of family siege, a thriller set in history's underbelly of history. It is also the chronicle of a decline: the decline of the kibbutz, and with it perhaps the idea of a different, better Israel. Tidhar takes his own family history - that of his mother, who came to Palestine as a displaced person from Germany - and from it constructs a prismatic novel that reads like a mixture of Batja Gur's crime novels (which also dissected isolated sociotopes, such as psychoanalysts, literary scholars or members of a kibbutz, with their own rules), the Israeli television series Fauda and Peter Buwalda's Bonita Avenue - only nastier, more garish, more uncompromising.

From the beginning, Tidhar's prose is on full display. Esther, one of the book's female characters, stands "framed by the small bedroom window", a dull halo around her exhausted face, and asks for a cup of tea "with a slice of lemon, like at home". The reply is harsh: "Our home is here." It's this constant jolt, this tug-of-war between longing and dogma, that runs through Adama. No one is allowed to be weak, no one nostalgic, no one sentimental. And yet everyone is.

At the heart of the story is Ruth, a Hungarian-Jewish Zionist who arrives in Palestine in 1946 and establishes Kibbutz Trashim like a commander of utopia. For Ruth, the kibbutz is "holy ground", Adama, her life's work, to be defended at all costs, with "violence and murder" if necessary. Her tough actions initially appear as a strength but later become poison, and therein lies one of the novel's greatest achievements: Tidhar shows how an ideal meant to protect people can ultimately destroy them.

Israel's history of violence is not merely the backdrop, but the driving force of the narrative. The novel spans from 1945 to 2009, through British Mandate troops, the Nakba, several wars and social upheavals. However, the political never remains abstract; it permeates the bodies and lives of the characters. In one of the most powerful passages, Ruth reflects as she works in the heat: "They had to do all this... so that their children could one day walk on green grass, in a land that belonged to them and no one else." Utopia is neither romanticised nor denigrated. It is portrayed as toil, physical labour, a struggle against rock, dust and drought - and as a progressive moral blindness.

Younger generations now see the kibbutz as a mistake, a dead end. Another narrator observes the present and thinks: "It was the same with the kibbutzim and the state... Socialist wasps in a capitalist body: but now both are ailing." This image - a state dragging its former founding myth around with it like a redundant organ - is so succinct and apt that it resonates like a whisper.

Adama is also a crime novel: people disappear, old scores resurface, and the moral ambivalence that accompanies the construction of the kibbutz later returns as a fatalistic element. The structure is reminiscent of Batja Gur, but Tidhar's tone is rougher, less ironic, less analytical - more Fauda than cultural supplement. One character could actually be played directly by Lior Raz: full of anger and fatigue, always on a knife-edge between duty and explosion. And the entangles family that Tidhar depicts is very much in the tradition of Peter Buwalda in its complexity, brutality, comedy and ruthlessness.

The novel does not stop at the victim-perpetrators of the founding generation. Shosh, a Holocaust survivor, is seen by the "Tzabarim"(those born in Israel) as both "a victim and a suspect". And her teacher's comment - "There is no a-d-a-m-a without d-a-m... no country without blood" - runs like a dark thread through the book. Shosh "was sick of blood" - another sentence that lingers like a wound.

The emotional impact, however, lies above all in the disintegration of the kibbutz itself. The meetings escalate, the younger members no longer want to put their children in communal houses, "you didn't realise it yet, but the kibbutz was dying". Ruth fights against this as if it were a law of nature. But time chips away at her ideals, the revolution at her children, and when her son Ophek comforts her - "You still have me" - he thinks only of fleeing. This tension between attachment and the desire to escape is one of the most accurate descriptions of Israeli family reality that we have read since Amos Oz.

Because Adama naturally stands in the shadow of the great Israeli uber-novel A Tale of Love and Darkness, one of my favorite books in years, as it attempts to not only narratively explain the rifts that pervade Israel, but also to heal them. Tidhar doesn't achieve this epic, cathartic totality - but he doesn't want to. What he writes about is the slow betrayal of an idea. The kibbutz utopia becomes corruption, folklore, dead weight. And there is an astonishing power in this narrative. The private is never separate from the political, the political never separate from the body, the body never separate from the land.

Adama is a novel about the impossibility of remaining innocent. A novel about families who self-destruct because of their very love for each other. A novel about a country that is re-invented and fails again with every generation. A novel about the stubbornness of history and the tenderness that bursts forth when everything seems lost.

And it is - in its harshness, its tenderness, its historical accuracy - one of the most ambiguous, exciting novels about Israel of recent years. Tidhar doesn't tell the big myth like Amos Oz, but the smaller, messier, more intimate one - precisely the strength of this book.

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