House Arrest
By Noa Yedlin
Translated by Shira Atik and Evan Fallenberg
New Vessel Press, 424 pp.
New Vessel Press, the acclaimed independent publishing house of fiction and narrative nonfiction in translation, has done it again. After producing a string of blockbusters by Israeli women (and some men), including Ronit Matalon’s And the Bride Closed the Door and Maya Arad’s Happy New Years and The Hebrew Teacher, publisher Michael Wise has given us the arresting (pun intended) House Arrest, a satire by Israeli writer and journalist Noa Yedlin. The story revolves around Elisheva Fogel, the arrestee of the title and the mother of three adult children, Daphna, Barak and Eitan, who display varying degrees of arrested development. As the novel unfolds, their personalities and conflicts illuminate what it was like to grow up with Elisheva as a parent.
Elisheva is a larger-than-life character, an upper-class professional woman with a vivacious wardrobe, a sharp tongue and many career accomplishments, the most recent being the creation of a large nonprofit foundation based in London that promotes peace, primarily but not exclusively between Palestinians and Israelis. Elisheva and her husband Ben-Ami Fogel live in a beautiful house in Jerusalem in a socially competitive neighborhood of other beautiful old houses. “They loved Jerusalem with all their soul—as much as one could love it and still be a leftist,” the narrator observes.
Seemingly out of nowhere, at least from her children’s point of view, Elisheva has been accused of financial shenanigans to the tune of 3.4 million shekalim (about $1.16 million) related to her foundation, and a police investigation is underway. Elisheva is put under the titular house arrest to await her trial (although she’s not actually confined to her house for very much of the story). Elisheva’s children and their spouses and ex-spouses gather around her to provide psychological support while adamantly seeking Elisheva’s legal exoneration and aggressively striving for her maternal love. They struggle to determine whether Elisheva is guilty and how the family can help her avoid jail time if she is, in fact, charged with a crime.
To help us keep the characters in the Fogel family saga straight, Yedlin opens with a list of 14 people, a list that I found myself referring to continually. It’s a swamp of names, maybe too many. Even the list isn’t always enough; readers should keep a notepad nearby—as I did—as the story unfolds and whole new casts of characters appear.
Seemingly out of nowhere, at least from her children’s point of view, Elisheva has been accused of financial shenanigans to the tune of 3.4 million shekalim, about $1.16 million, related to her foundation, and a police investigation is underway.
Barak, from whose viewpoint most of the story is told, is the middle child, a mediocre academic whose ex-wife Yifat is an extremely successful real estate developer. In an epigraph to Part One, Yedlin offers an illustrative sample of Barak’s scholarship by providing a synopsis of his Ph.D. thesis:
Among other findings, 70 percent of those interviewed believe, with a high level of confidence, that “rational thinking is inherently repressive,” and more than 80 percent are fairly to highly confident that “science has no superiority over other accounts of nature and reality.”—“Anti-rationalism and Anti intellectualism in New Age Culture,” Doctoral Dissertation of Barak Fogel.
Reading a 424-page book through the mind of Barak (whose name ironically means “lightning”) is like reading Proust’s contemplation of a madeleine. Barak’s sentences seem to go on forever. Often they conclude with “not,” which then requires a rereading. Barak frequently does not tell the truth about his feelings, so that the sentences describing those feelings can take a sudden U-turn: “Well that doesn’t surprise me after the way you talked to her in there; even though it did surprise him.”
Barak’s mind spins, takes a stand, then takes an opposite stand; he decides to act, doesn’t act, then drives home to review his day. And yet, I found him to be a sympathetic character, a well-meaning nebbish, an ineffective and earnest guy not made for the hustle of contemporary Israel.
Most of the punctuation in House Arrest consists of commas, not periods. I’m amazed at the skill of the translators, the experienced Shira Atik and Evan Fallenberg, who found just the right words to serve up the satire. For example, early in the book, Barak, his sister Daphna and his brother Eitan are passengers in Barak’s car and are trying to understand what their mother is accused of. Daphna says:
No, really, think about how wild it would be if it were true. I mean, let’s look at this rationally. There’s no way she squandered three-point-four-million shekels in the last few years…If you ask me, Mom couldn’t have spent half that amount in her entire life, which basically means that the woman is sitting on, I don’t know, let’s say she spent a million and a half, let’s indulge her, okay? That would mean that she’s sitting on two million shekels, which, bottom line, belongs to us, especially if she ends up in jail. Unless it all goes to the lawyer. And Eitan said, Why do you always have to ruin everything?
Yedlin spent 25 years as a journalist and knows Israeli TV and newspapers intimately, especially the Friday weekend editions that can skewer as well as educate. Many of her novels have been adapted for TV, and a stage version of House Arrest is now playing at the Beit Lessin Theater in Tel Aviv. In real life, Haaretz’s weekly magazine supplement, mentioned frequently in House Arrest, named Yedlin one of “66 Israeli Women You Should Know.”
I would agree. And if you are an impatient reader who can’t wait to find out if Elisheva is guilty or not, be patient. The ending is, well, arresting.
Shulamit Reinharz is professor emerita of sociology at Brandeis University. She was the founding director of the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and the Hadassah Brandeis Institute.