100 Friday, April 11, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS BOOKS Amos Oz' Perfect Peace Adds To Israeli Catalogue BY JOSEPH COHEN Special to The Jewish News are classic in their real and im- If you were to ask anyone to list Israel's most important ex- agined treachery. In their youth in the 1930s, ports, the likelihood of its novels being included in a catalogue of Yolek kept Hava from living out products for foreign consumption a fantasy with a love-crazed would be fairly remote. No one Russian, Benya Trotsky. Spur- would think to mention them. red by his insane jealousy, Yet, like Swiss watches, Israel's Trotsky shot up the kibbutz one novels have a built-in quality night with an antique revolver, which makes them especially at- managing to miss all his targets tractive. That is certainly the including the kibbutz' only bull case with Amos Oz' new novel, and himself. Trotsky abandoned the kibbutz but not before he A Perfect Peace. It strikes me as had put Yonatan's paternity an Israeli export of surpassing into question. worth. The "Trotsky Factor" reap- A Perfect Peace is on a par with Yehuda Amichai's best pears a generation later. Dis- poems and short stories, and the enchanted with his strong-willed novels of Oz' popular contem- father, Yonatan decides to leave poraries, Aaron Appelfeld and the kibbutz altogether. He in- A. B. Yehoshua. He shares in vites a newly arrived, young common, particularly with idealist, Azariah Gitlin, to move Amichai and Yehoshua, an in with him and his wife, understanding of the pervasive Rimona. The result is that the impact of the • desert on the paternity of Rimona's third child people who live in its midst. It is also undetermined. Yonatan is unconcerned about the men- is a singularly powerful force. Oz knows the desert well. Its peculiar mystique suffuses his book. The shifting sands and wadis come alive and function as yet another character, in much the same way that the city of Alexandria plays a living role in Lawrence Durrell's age a trois he has established, as Alexandria Quartet. Through its he prepares to leave in search of shifting, shimmering lures, the a perfect peace. Seeking sur- desert beckons to all. Both those cease for his own soul, his who hearken to these summons leave-taking is designed partly 'and those who resist them are to punish his father and partly beset by madness. to atone for his (Yonatan's) sins Indeed, the arteries and the in having coerced Rimona into veins of A Perfect Peace are fil- aborting her first child, which led with a throbbing, pulsating led to the stillbirth later of a madness. Its origins are located second one. in the socialist dreams of the The perfect peace Yonatan inhabitants of Kibbutz Granot, really wants is death. He leaves settlers in Palestine from pre- without a word in the middle of Holoctlust Eastern Europe, who the night, disappearing into the set out as pioneers to reclaim Negev, determined to slip into the land. They sacrificed every- the fabled long-abandoned rose- thing to succeed, and in succeed- tinted city of Petra. He knows ing they created not only a all too well that marauding model socialist farming commu- Arabs living- in the desert nity but a monstrous obsession wastes will track, catch, vilely which consumed them and torture and kill him once he has alienated their children. This crossed into Trans-Jordan. Like madness manifests itself in mar- Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm ital strife and generational con- Lowry's Under the Folcano, flict. Out of these discords come Yonatan moves relentlessly massive quantities of guilt. It through the final hours of his propels the problems of the pro- life, passionately copulating tagonist and his family into our with a whore before walking consciousness so thoroughly we toward his self-ordained trap. are soon totally absorbed by But while Firmin goes to his them. They break against our death, Yonatan at the final cerebral shores with all the dis- moment comes to his senses in a ruptive fury of an unexpected, marvelous scene in the desert intense migraine headache. shooting his gun wildly — the At the center of that migraine Trotsky factor again — before is Yolek Lifshitz, the kibbutz turning back, choosing life. Tha rising action of the novel secretary, a founder, a member of the Knesset, and a legendary with its dramatic climax is su- hero mentioned in the same perbly controlled by Oz. The breath with Ben Gurion and book's negative impact, oc- Levi Eshkol — the novel is set casioned by its various in- in the mid-1960s when Eshkol sanities, is greatly ameliorated was prime minister. Now aging by the astuteness of the author's and sick, Yolek is, on the one insight into the Israeli psyche hand, assailed by his own which requires that the' story be doubts about his life and princi- grounded in reality rather than ples, while, on the other hand, romance. The kibbutz is trans- he is subjected to the bitter formed by the insistence on Remember the 11th Commandment: "And Thou Shalt be Informed" ,12.73;%•; N.04. 'Y NN - 1 . "A Perfect Peace" by Amos Oz. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (11 y 1 You've read the five books of Moses. Isn't it time to try the Fifty-Two Issues of the Detroit Jewish News? It may not be holy, but it's weekly! And such a bargain. To order your own subscription call 354-6060. tirades of his wife Hava, and the disheartening defection of his son, Yonatan, who rejects his way of life and authority. The battles between husband and wife and between father and son Ntitititriii.JVAIMAAJtHiesalikimItsIalibeWs wave ******* e•is eras•sqrairalerare airvri...teil I 11 :4' realism into a.microcosm of the universal human condition. In dealing with the human condition, Oz shows himself to be a master of narrative strategies. /10PI.4