Thinking of Israel

‘Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960,’ announces the opening sentence of Amos Oz’s challenging, complex and strangely compelling new novel. The story itself is easily summarised. At its centre is Shmuel Ash, a rather woebegone young man who abandons his university studies in Jerusalem when his girlfriend leaves him and his father withdraws his financial support. At a loss for what to do next, Shmuel takes up a job which requires him to live in a rickety, isolated house surrounded by an air of almost hermetic secrecy; and to provide tea, company and, most crucially, conversation for an old invalid named Gershom Wald, whose life is almost entirely confined to his study, and to vociferous telephone exchanges with old sparring partners and friends. The other inhabitant of the house is an enigmatic and very aloof woman named Atalia, who treats Shmuel with abrupt, but to him highly seductive brusqueness. Such plot as there is involves gradually unfolding revelations about the house’s inhabitants, and the halting progress of the relationship between Atalia and Shmuel.

But the plot here is not the point. Judas belongs to a genre not much practiced in English fiction — the novel of ideas, in the lineage of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Thomas Mann; and its drama inheres not so much in realist narrative or action, as in its suggestive Jerusalem setting — cold, rainy, poor and, in that in-between period, featuring both abandoned Arab villages and nostalgically European cafés — and in the intensely philosophical conversations between the novel’s main protagonists. The extended debate conducted in Gershom Wald’s dusky study revolves around quandaries which originated in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, but which for the inhabitants of that symbolically laden city continue to have existential relevance: the identity of Jesus; the identity of Judas; the mutual prejudices and fears between Christians and Jews; the ease with which the persecuted turn into persecutors (with both positions being potentially occupied by Christians, Jews and Arabs); the fascinating history of Jewish writings on Jesus; and, informed by and informing all of these, the identity of modern Israel.

Perhaps as part of the novel’s intention to counter facile oppositions or stereotypes, the interlocutors in these complex, dialectical dialogues are described in curiously, and sometimes disturbingly, ambiguous terms.