The Liberated Bride

Yohanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.
When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.
Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life.

PART I

A Village Wedding

HAD HE KNOWN that on this evening, on the hill where the village held its celebrations, an evening suffused by the scent of a fig tree bent over the table like another, venerable guest, he would again be struck-but powerfully-by a sense of failure and missed opportunity, he might have more decisively made his excuses to Samaher, his annoyingly ambitious M.A. student, who, not content with sending him an invitation by mail and then repeating it to his face, had gone and chartered a minibus, after first urging the new department head to make sure the faculty attended her wedding. It wasn't just for her sake, she said. It would be a gesture to all the university's Arab students, without whom-the cheek of it!-the department would count for nothing.

His wife, Hagit, who knew all too well how weddings had depressed him in recent years, had warned against it. "Why do you need the aggravation?" she had asked. "But they're Arabs," he'd answered mildly, with the innocence of a man pursuing an academic interest. "As opposed to what?" she had wanted to know. "Human beings?" "On the contrary...on the contrary..." he had tried defending himself, at a loss to explain how Arabs, although not among the many objects of his envy, could be more human than anyone else.

Yet the snake of envy, his companion of many years, had slithered after him here too, to the little village of Mansura high up in the Galilee, near the Lebanese border. It had lain coiled in the incense of the glowing grilled lamb and writhed to the Oriental music that, despite its sobbing grace notes, secretly aspired to the savage disco beat of a Jewish wedding party-and now, as the student bride presented him not with the seminar paper she was a year late in finishing, but with her groom, it injected its venom.

Many hands had done their best to beautify Samaher, causing him to wonder for a moment whether he was looking at the same woman who had taken nearly all of his courses for the past five years. High heels and a swept-up hairdo had made her taller, and her usually restless eyes, chronically resentful when not anxiously scheming-the eyes of an active member of the Arab Student Committee-were smiling and relaxed. She was also without her glasses, and her eyes were heavily made up with a kohl so unusually tinted that he suspected it of having been smuggled across the border from Lebanon. A bright rouge masked the pimples that wandered as a rule from her cheeks to her throat and back again, and her long wedding gown bestowed a harmony, if only for a single night, on a figure not known for its sartorial coordination. Brimming with pride at having enticed him, the most senior and eminent of her teachers, to honor her and all Araby with his presence, she extended a hand quivering with excitement to his wife.

"So this is the teacher who's so annoyed at you," laughed the groom, pumping his hand in what could have been either an acknowledgment of Samaher's flightiness or a warning that she now had a protector. It was the same young man-taken by Rivlin for a maintenance worker rather than a future husband-who had stood every day last winter in the corridor outside the classroom waiting for their seminar to end. As if to atone for an error of which he alone was aware, he rose from his seat and congratulated the new husband cordially. Yet even as he did so, the cruel fate of his son, the young husband rebuffed, stung him sharply. So strong was the surge of resentment and jealousy that he at once sought out his wife-who, however, was laughing gaily at some remark. Such sentiments, although by rights she should have shared them, were unknown to her. Her glance, when he finally caught it, conveyed not so much sympathy as vague reassurance, plus a warning that he had better not get into one of his bad moods among all these people trying so hard to be hospitable.

It was being slowly spun out, Samaher's wedding, on the twilight of a bashful summer night, to the friendly warmth of young Arabs, many of them students from his and other departments at the university, who had gathered in their little autonomous kingdom, the borders of which were being drawn, stealthily but steadily, amid the pinkening hills of the Galilee. Now, telling a bearded young qadi in a gray cloak that she didn't want her Jewish guests to feel deprived, the bride asked him to repeat a shortened version of the wedding ceremony-which, they were surprised to hear, had already taken place in the bosom of her family a few days previously. It was an opportunity to still the wailing music, leaving the hill so shrouded in silence that the distant boom of an artillery shell fired across the border in Lebanon sounded like part of the reenacted rite.

2.

AS THE EVENING deepened and the music resumed its beat, and little lanterns were hung from grapevines trellised above tables spread with colorful piles of appetizers that were followed by copper trays of juicy, red-hot lamb, he was overcome by regret, not so much for having accepted Samaher's invitation as for having willingly surrendered his freedom of movement for the convenience of a prearranged ride. Two hours had passed, and none of the faculty showed the slightest sign of wanting to depart-least of all their organizer, Ephraim Akri. He was the new department head, a swarthy Orientalist who, though forced by the religious scruples proclaimed by the skullcap he wore to forage carefully through the little plates in search of kosher morsels, was so full of high spirits that he demanded-whether as a gesture to his hosts or as a boast of his own fluency-that even his Jewish colleagues speak to him only in Arabic. In fact, they were as taken with the bucolic atmosphere as he was. Hagit, always quick to adjust, was genially absorbed in the conversation around her, following it with interest and laughter and occasionally making a remark, or even uttering a single word, that was sure to leave an indelible impression.

Fated to spend more time at the wedding than he had intended, he decided to go for a walk-the sooner the better, before any more of the tender meat with which his plate kept being piled metamorphosed into his own flesh. He ambled over to the sweetly smoking spit to inspect the remains of the incandescent lamb, then joined a line of guests waiting by the rickety door of a makeshift outhouse. A nattily dressed young man, introducing himself as a construction worker who had labored on the professor's new duplex apartment in Haifa, tried escorting him to the head of the line. Before they could reach it, however, Samaher, who had been keeping him under surveillance, came to rescue him from the indignity of queuing up for an outdoor toilet by leading him to more dignified facilities.

"We live right near here, Professor Rivlin," she cajoled him, as if his presence at her wedding would be incomplete without a home visit. Before he knew it he was being led by the bride, hobbling on her unaccustomed high heels, past houses and courtyards and down a dark, narrow dirt lane. Her wedding gown showed signs of disarray, and its lace ruff, which had slipped from her slender shoulders, smelled faintly of fresh perspiration. In the pale moonlight, the polished nails of her hands and feet looked like large drops of blood. Barely two years ago, he recalled with amusement, this same vivacious young lady had had an attack of religion and sat sternly through his seminars in a long-sleeved black dress and large kerchief. It had been only a passing phase, however.

A horse whinnied. Once again he felt the ache of that other, wasted wedding that had come to naught. It made him want to rebuke his student guide.

"It embarrasses me, Samaher, to hear you tell people that I'm angry at you without your also explaining why."

She stopped in her tracks, blushing with pleasure. "But how can you say t

Born in Jerusalem, A. B. Yehoshua is the widely acclaimed author of Mr. Mani and Open Heart. One of Israel's preeminent contemporary writers, he lives in Haifa.

When his new research assistant turns out to be a young Arab woman from Galilee, an Israeli professor rethinks issues both political and personal. From one of Israel's top writers. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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Yohannon Rivlin is a senior professor at Haifa University, an engaging scholar who travels in both the Jewish and the Arab worlds. At the opening, he attends the wedding of a talented female graduate student (an Arab from Galilee), which sets him wondering (he does so easily) about the curiously failed marriage of his son. Visiting his ailing mentor in the hospital, he learns of the death of his son's former father-in-law, causing him to renew ties to that family. As the mystery of the failed marriage deepens, Rivlin comes by a valuable cache of papers shedding light on his research area, Algerian history. He enlists the help of the new bride, whose marriage has question marks of its own, in translating and sorting the papers. The title word liberated is both ironic and informative (new bride, ex-bride, and so on), and a high point of the book is the interplay between Rivlin and his wife, Hagit, a judge. This is a great read from one of Israel's premier authors, by turns profoundly funny and simply profound-there's a deep understanding of interpersonal relationships regardless of geography. Strongly recommended for all fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/03.]-Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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As he has proved in acclaimed previous novels (Mr. Mani; Open Heart), Yehoshua is a keen observer of social and political realities, and a subtle writer capable of reflecting complex situations in events of daily life. Here, what at first appears to be a bittersweet comedy of domestic manners set in 1990s Israel morphs into a searching exploration of a politically divided society in which decent people, both Jews and Arabs, try to live peaceably with each other. To be sure, this is a small segment of Israeli society: the Israeli intelligentsia, represented by Professor Yochanan Rivlin and his wife, Hagit, a district judge, who live in Haifa, as well as educated Arabs in Galilee villages whose existence is circumscribed by the rules of occupation. Many mysteries shimmer beneath the narrative's surface. Underlying the affectionate domestic banter of Yochanan and Hagit is Yochanan's obsessive quest to discover what went wrong in the short marriage of their son and his wife, a quest complicated by a horrifying secret the sundered couple have vowed not to divulge. Meanwhile, an Arab graduate student of Yochanan's, whose wedding begins the narrative, seeks to earn her degree by translating the works of contemporary Arab poets collected by an Israeli scholar killed in a terrorist bombing. The threat of violence, while acknowledged by everyone, is not in the forefront of the plot, which is more concerned with the complacency of intelligent Israeli Jews in the face of the plight of their Arab neighbors. The grand achievement of this trenchant novel is its quietly provocative and deeply important consideration of how the desire for liberation of various kinds is inescapable in human nature. Although one character speaks in measured terms of "the abyss we are all about to fall into," it is the simple aspirations of ordinary people that illuminate the larger issues. Author appearances in New York; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago. (Nov.) Forecast: Yehoshua's status as a major contemporary writer will gain added luster with this novel, which will appeal to discriminating readers. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.