Haaretz–June 5, 2009
The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven (translated from the Hebrew, “She’ahava Nafshi,” by Dalya Bilu)
Melville House Publishing, 331 pages, $16.95 (paperback)
For the narrator and protagonist of Israeli writer Gail Hareven’s novel “The Confessions of Noa Weber,” life begins at 17. Her childhood, she tells us in the first pages, is “too boring” to say anything about. And more important, from her point of view, it fails to explain the central story she wants to tell — how she wound up hopelessly in love with a man who offers neither partnership nor any semblance of love in return. This is hardly the kind of relationship one might have expected for Noa, a respected feminist and author of a series of novels that star a gun-wielding, crime-fighting private investigator — who, in an apparent homage to Rex Stout’s creation, PI Nero Wolfe, is named Nira Wolfe.
When Alek, a soulful Russian immigrant to Israel, beckons to the 17-year-old Noa from across the room of his student apartment in Jerusalem, she is entranced. Now, 30 years later and no less enthralled with Alek, though she is one of many women he is involved with, she finds herself trying to come to terms with her feelings — but they cannot be explained by reason or psychology. Her love for Alek is “beyond time and space,” a “disease” that even now, after all this time, she hasn’t quite managed to understand, nor reconcile with her public persona. “The problem isn’t that he’s unworthy, but that perhaps it isn’t worthy to love anyone the way I love him,” Noa explains.
That feeling is in part what compels Noa to keep her love a secret from most of the world for three decades. During that time she dashes off to see him in Moscow (where he travels often as a reporter), and sneaks him into her apartment in Israel when he visits. Their affair is conducted in a world set apart from their real lives, away from the gaze of potential critics, including the people closest to her. For Noa this means having to negotiate two parallel and conflicting existences — one public, the other solitary and private; one based on principles and ethics, the other driven by emotional desire and longing.
At the age of 47, Noa decides to finally expose her private self in a written confession — the book we have before us. Through words, she hopes to expel her love from her system and free herself from her life-long obsession. If she is not quite successful in taming her feelings, which in fact only grow deeper as she writes, Noa does manage to define them both for herself and for us.
“The Confessions of Noa Weber” is the first of Hareven’s books to be translated into English; she has previously written several novels, short stories and plays. Winner of the prestigious Sapir Prize in Israel when it was originally published, in 2000, Hareven’s novel gives us an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between our private selves and our public identities, love, and religious yearning within a secular Israeli context. In other hands, this material might feel trite, but Hareven has managed to write an original love story, as told by a fresh, provocative character who one grows to care for increasingly.
‘Beckoned with two fingers’
When Noa meets Alek, she is just a few months shy of being conscripted. It is 1972, and Alek is a university student who spends his evenings hosting activists at his apartment, where they passionately debate the role of the Organization of African Unity, as the smell of patchouli wafts through the air. Though she arrives with another man, by the end of the night she is won over by Alek, who beckons her with two fingers from across the room. It’s the kind of gesture suited to calling a child, or a waitress, Noa admits, but that doesn’t stop her from succumbing. “Is the girl not aware of this?” Noa asks, referring to herself in the third person. “And how she is. And nevertheless — oh, the shame of it — she gets up.” These conflicting voices never subside, which makes her love all the more tragic.
The rest of the plot, and there isn’t much, happens fast — Noa moves in with Alek, they get married as a formality to free her from her army service, and then she gets pregnant. Though she understands that Alek doesn’t love her, Noa decides to keep the baby — in large part because she thinks it will be a way to strengthen her hold on the peripatetic Alek, who is already antsy. By the time Noa returns home from the hospital, however, Alek is already on his way to Heidelberg — he ends up moving to Germany and then France, without even sticking around to meet his daughter, Hagar.
It’s not that Alek is uncaring. He simply is not cut out for a conventional relationship, or fatherhood. Alex visits sporadically and develops a distant relationship with Hagar, but he and Noa, though they never divorce, live separate lives. He drops in when he pleases, and she never refuses him, because as much as her feminist values — not to mention common sense — rejects such an obsession for a man, her soul can’t help it. Love, Noa explains early on, can be thought of as compulsive thinking: “The thought buzzes and buzzes like an insect stuck to a wet picture.”
Hareven’s characters are multi-dimensional, and that’s what makes this bizarre love story at least somewhat believable. And yet, at times I still found myself searching for a more rounded explanation of Noa’s love. But she isn’t interested in understanding her feelings so much as in expressing them — she chooses confession over therapy, dismisses psychology, and wants to situate her love outside time and space. It may be that Noa simply isn’t capable of understanding herself, or that Hareven is trying to suggest that love, no matter how normal it seems, is ultimately inexplicable. But Noa’s love isn’t normal, and I found myself wanting precisely what Noa (and maybe Hareven as well) rejects so adamantly: an attempt to understand what compels a woman to spend her life devoted to a man who is barely present. Instead, Noa simply admits her deeds as if there were no other way, as if there were nothing that could shed light on her choices, as if fate or God were guiding her hands. Whether this is the character’s limitation or the author’s is hard to tell, but either way, the book feels weaker for it.
‘Deaf to God’
The novel’s original title, “She’ahava Nafshi” (“Whom my soul loves,” a phrase from Song of Songs), hints at the kind of love Noa is talking about, and why it proves so hard to manage. Hareven uses this love story in part to paint a picture of contemporary, secular Israel, with all the ironies and contradictions that have emerged over the last few decades. There are the Russian immigrants of mixed heritage. There are the Hagars, who seek spiritual sustenance and optimism — and move to New York to find them (she goes there to become a rabbi). And then there’s Noa, who claims to have been born “deaf to God” but finds herself hanging out in churches in the Old City and listening to Gregorian chants during sex, though she views them as dissociated from religion. Her spiritual longing is repressed and gets channeled through her relationship with Alek. Her love verges on religious devotion, and her spiritual yearnings are bound up with her love. During sex with Alex “it seemed that [heaven] had opened and that lux, lux, lux perpetua was illuminating my soul, whose dubious existence I don’t admit to either.”
In this pseudo-religious context, it isn’t surprising that Noa chooses confession over therapy. One confesses in order to purge oneself of sin. And as secular as Noa is, and she is adamantly so, she sees her feelings for Alek as a kind of sin. Not because they violate a religious code, but because they imply an emotional dependence that undermines her feminist principles.
Noa’s love is a double-edged sword — she simultaneously wants to and doesn’t want to hold on to it. On the one hand, she is enslaved by it, but at the same time, it sustains her and frees her from being dependent on other men, from having to live in the world as other women do. Though she develops a reputation for being “a tramp,” she never becomes emotionally attached to another man. “The paradox of love is that it enslaves you to one person, and by so doing, liberates you from other things,” says Noa. “It liberates you to the point of indifference, and that is the only true liberty.”
What Noa can’t be, she projects onto her fictional detective, the supremely independent feminist lawyer who takes on the plight of Palestinians and the trafficking of women alike. Nira Wolfe “has no longings for children, and, needless to say, for a husband either,” and so doesn’t feel conflicted living a life dictated by her principles. But for Noa, real life is more demanding — her ideas take her in one direction and her emotions in another.
In public, Noa Weber appears to live the most independent of lives, free of attachments. But her private self is another matter — a secret, solitary life of hopeless devotion. Both are equally authentic. The book is successful in part because Hareven refuses to simplify matters; she refuses to elevate one part of Noa over another, or to force her to choose. Being human is complicated — our desires are often contradictory — and the way we reconcile our beliefs with our emotional needs is inevitably a dirty business. Though the story is at times extreme, and not always entirely convincing, Hareven does a good job exposing our impurity without succumbing to the need to save her protagonist — from love, or from her principles.
Michal Lando 