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Asterai, by Omri Tegamlak Avera. Tel-Aviv: Yediot Akhronot/Sifrei Khemed Books, 2008. 284 pp. 88 NIS.
To say that Western Jewry has romanticized the idea of the Falasha (Amharic for “exiled” Jews) of modern-day Ethiopia would be a gross understatement. Indeed, the very origins of the Ethiopian Jews are symbolically charged with an elusive historicity: on the one hand, their mythological beginnings have been traced to the supposed union between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; on the other, many legal branches of Judaism consider their communities to be the descendants of the lost tribe of Dan, said to have resettled in Egypt before moving further south. The latter hypothesis was espoused by a number of rabbinical authorities from the time of the Second Exile up until the modern era, when, as early as 1876, European Jews began to undertake serious efforts to bring their Ethiopian brethren back into the fold, mainly by attempting to bring them to Palestine. Individual Ethiopian Jews began to trickle into Israel from the 1950s onward, although it was not until the mass airlifts of the 1980s and early 1990s (organized by the Jewish Agency in order to rescue Ethiopian Jewry from civil war in the Horn of Africa) that their existence became known to the Jewish world at large. Since that time, their integration into Israeli society—while idealized from afar—has been, in all reality, a painful process at best, the result (among other things) of a series of disparate cultural norms, and, quite significantly, the pervasive absence of the voice of the Ethiopian community in Israeli public discourse. Fortunately, this is beginning to change, most notably in the realm of cultural production.
Omri Tegamlak Avera’s recently published book, Asterai, is the first novel to be written in Hebrew by an Ethiopian-born Israeli Jew. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which involves the familial and religious life of Beta Israel, as the Ethiopian Jewish community refers to itself, as seen in the first person through the eyes of the adolescent boy Fetgu. The second part of the book involves Fetgu’s new life in Israel, offering an infrequently seen glimpse into the private life of Israel’s most impoverished Jewish group. The third is an extra-literary history of Beta Israel, told according to the versions handed down by the Ethiopian sages.
Fetgu’s life in Ethiopia is centered on his family’s raising of sheep, since, like most Jews in Ethiopia, they are prevented by their Christian neighbors from holding fertile lands. From a religious perspective, their spiritual practices differ somewhat from commonly known Ashkenazi or Sephardic Judaic practices. For instance, the majority of the Jews in Fetgu’s community do not live near any house of worship, and therefore pray at home without needing to form a minyan [prayer quorum]; the faithful of the community are led by a priestess; and, like their non-Jewish neighbors, whose worldview is imbued with animism, the members of Beta Israel are constantly on the look-out for the koloch and koleh, shape-shifting demons who inhabit the surrounding nature. Fetgu promises his grandmother, a seemingly clairvoyant woman, that he will remember all of these customs when Beta Israel is finally led back to Jerusalem, as the grandmother has envisioned. Most significantly, Fetgu’s grandmother makes him promise to learn, before his departure, as much as possible about the enigma of the Asterai, the divine bird with whom “gifted” members of Beta Israel can speak, in a kind of expanded consciousness that the grandmother calls “sfat haelohim” [the language of God] (p. 42). The bird also takes away the sins of the community during the so-called “Asterai fast” of Yom Kippur. When the boy’s family is about to begin the dangerous trek across the Sudan, the Asterai implores him to bring seeds of wheat from Ethiopia to be planted in the Land of Israel. Fetgu obeys, but from this point on, his trouble communicating with the Asterai becomes more and more pronounced, as he loses hope in the divine power of the bird in the face of the starvation, murder, and corruption encountered by his family at the Jewish Agency transit camp.
Once in Israel, Fetgu’s community is bewildered to discover that Israelis speak poorly about Muslims, with whom the Ethiopian Jews had lived in peace for generations. They are also incensed that, despite earlier assertions, much of the official religious establishment does not believe that the members of Beta Israel are authentically Jewish. To make matters worse, many of the children in Fetgu’s neighborhood refuse to even physically approach the Ethiopian youngsters, calling them “kushim masrikhim” [stinking Negros] (p. 200). Confronted by this unexpected reality, Fetgu, like many of his fellow Ethiopian immigrants, falls into what Yehuda Amichai has famously called a “malkodet moledet” [homeland trap]—an existence that is defined by institutionalized discrimination, feelings of ethnic inferiority, and social malaise. The series of humiliations that follow have become stereotypical lore among immigrant groups in Israel, and yet are described here with such anguished candor that their depiction almost makes up for the stylistically weak narrative and the overly documentarian tone of the second half of the book.
There is a substantial gap of some fifteen years in the story, about which we only know the following: that Fetgu’s life has descended into chaos since the news of his grandmother’s death. The Asterai has become nothing more than a distant memory from his childhood. And then, one day in a forest near Haifa, the Asterai finally returns to him. The bird informs him that she is not the same Asterai whom he saw in Ethiopia, since that one died after witnessing the sufferings of Beta Israel. This one has come to tell him not to lose hope. The bird reminds him of the wheat seeds which he took with him from Ethiopia, and he subsequently plants them in the field of a kind, native-born kibbutznik who looks after him (and whose name, Yehudah [Jew] intimates a long-awaited, symbolic acceptance back into communal identity). In this final gesture of respect and friendship, the farmer also allows Fetgu to complete an intertextual circle, since, according to Part 3 of the novel, the Asterai told Jeremiah to bring wheat seeds with him from Eretz Yisrael to the land of Kush [modern-day Sudan] along with the Ark of the Covenant.
All in all, this is a difficult book to read, and not merely because its primary purpose (the promotion of sub-cultural awareness through thinly veiled, autobiographical testimony) is presented in the form of a particularly Western, modern genre (the novel), the anticipated components of which belong to a different literary tradition entirely. Stylistic concerns notwithstanding, the real pain one feels while reading Avera’s book is the tangible doubt regarding the prophecy of Jeremiah (31:16), which the author quotes repeatedly: “And there is hope for thy future, saith the LORD; and thy children shall return to their own border.” This seems, in retrospect, like a vain hope, considering the plight of Beta Israel in their current reality. However, as the Asterai initially tells Fetgu, the dream is “hametziyut haamitit” [the true reality] (p. 51). This leaves the reader to wonder, regarding the position of the Ethiopian Jews in Israeli society: Will the dream and the reality converge?
Nathan P. Devir
Middlebury College
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