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Light Falls, by Evan Fallenberg. New York: Soho Press. 2008. 229 pp. $12.00.
Evan Fallenberg is best known for his wonderful translation of Meir Shalev’s novel A Pigeon and a Boy. Fallenberg’s debut novel, Light Fell, is an ambitious work touching on love between spouses, lovers, and parents and children; the conflict between homosexual desire and adherence to halakha; and the impact of parents’ decisions on their children’s lives. Unfortunately, it is also a major disappointment: the novel is plagued by implausibility, underdeveloped characters, and writing that pretends to lyricism but more often falls into mawkishness.
It is 1996 and Joseph, a literature professor, invites his five estranged sons to Shabbat dinner in his Tel Aviv apartment to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Twenty years earlier Joseph had precipitously left his modern Orthodox moshav and his wife, children, and elderly father after falling in love with Rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig, a famous Torah scholar. His love was requited, but Yoel proved to be irremediably conflicted by his obedience to halakha. After only four months, Yoel committed suicide. After twenty years, and despite living with another man, Joseph is still not over Yoel. Against this backdrop, the action shuttles between Joseph’s preparations for the dinner and the lives of his ex-wife and sons, and culminates in the dinner party and its aftermath.
The events leading to Joseph’s life-changing decision are unconvincing. Joseph falls in love with Yoel while hearing him give a talk, and Yoel is equally smitten before even speaking with Joseph. The author scrambles to establish an antecedent for Joseph’s homosexuality by having him suddenly remember being aroused at furtively witnessing anonymous sex in a men’s bathroom while a graduate student at Harvard a few years before. The episode comes off as both gratuitous and improbable: why is it necessary that Joseph’s desire for Yoel not be his first homosexual urge? And if this incident was so important, and took place so recently, why had Joseph forgotten about it so completely?
Though Yoel agonizes over their scandalous relationship more than Joseph, both realize that they are moving into dangerous and uncharted seas in a time (the 1970s) and community (Israeli Orthodoxy) uncompromisingly hostile to homosexuality. Ultimately, Yoel cannot reconcile his adherence to halakha with his homosexual desire.
The love scenes between the two men are wrapped in gauzy film, as if Fallenberg is afraid to offend or arouse. For all their love’s transgressiveness and heartbreak, the portrayal of their relationship lacks substance and even borders on melodrama. On their last day together, “they did, in fact, for the first time become one [have anal intercourse]. Joseph felt as if the chasm at the very center of his being had been filled with Yoel’s love, and he rejoiced in his newfound wholeness and contentment.”
Fallenberg can certainly muster an elegant sentence. Following a rich description of Joseph’s cooking prowess, the author writes: “His desserts are the talk of his circle, designed to leave his panting guests cursing themselves for poor pacing.” However, the book is studded with passages of failed lyricism. For example, when Joseph first locked gazes with Yoel: “[Joseph’s] vision blurred, and all he could see were these two eyes, cannonballs hurtling through the murkiness of his mind. It was the first time Joseph knew for a fact that he had a soul, because these eyes had reached it, surrounding and assessing it. He at once sensed his own soul’s shape and depth and density. He could hear nothing but the roar of the cannonballs, and his legs seemed to grow roots below the marble floor.”
Even passages that do not strain for lyric heights ring false. Shortly after Yoel’s death, Joseph visits Yoel’s house unannounced and asks to speak with his widow. “My husband’s lover and assassin. How odd to be meeting you,” are the widow’s first words to Joseph. “Don’t look so surprised, Monsieur Licht. He told me all about you and your filthy relationship the day before he slashed his wrists. . . . This has all been terribly hard on my children but, frankly, I’m glad he killed himself. What he did with you, the acts you . . .” Her voice breaks off. The scene, which continues on in an unconscious parody of B-movie dialogue, is mercifully brief.
Despite the author’s attempts to register its depths, the men’s relationship feels hurried and schematic. Perhaps this is because Fallenberg wants to focus on Joseph and his sons. Populating the story with so many and such dissimilar children affords ample opportunity to examine the impact of Joseph’s choice from a range of perspectives. Unfortunately, it is a squandered opportunity. Fallenberg does not present well-developed characters, but rather types representing a cross-section of Israeli society: the resentful underachieving oldest son, the boy who unthinkingly becomes a career soldier, the son who embraces ultra-Orthodoxy, the lost son who joins a fanatical group of West Bank settlers, and the apostate fashion model.
The climactic Shabbat dinner threatens to veer out of control even before Joseph unburdens himself, for the first time, to his sons. They are still not fully prepared to understand the difficulty of Joseph’s choice, the reasons he took it, and the pain it has caused him, because they are wrapped in their own pain occasioned by Joseph’s abandonment: the rumors that Joseph left because his wife and his father were having an affair, the shame when the truth behind Joseph’s actions was revealed, the difficulty of growing up without a father present, and the claim by Daniel, the oldest son, that his mother attempted suicide shortly after Joseph left. Hearing this claim, Joseph realizes “that every actor in his life has a different interpretation of [his relationship to Yoel], each to suit his own needs.” This is a valuable insight, yet it strains credulity that twenty years passed before it occurred to him.
The novel’s contrived character is particularly evident in the final scene, when Daniel delivers a letter from Yoel to Joseph, sent on the day of the suicide. The letter is a clumsy device that allows Joseph to miraculously free himself from his old lover’s spell and fully embrace Daniel. Well, maybe not miraculously, as the letter shows that Yoel saw their relationship in a particularly unflattering light: “I am sick with sin. I have discovered G-d’s true purpose in bringing us together: He has tested me and I have failed. . . . There is only one thing for me now: to mete out the prescribed punishment and join Him in the World to Come. Save yourself, Joseph.” Joseph tears the letter up, tossing the fragments off his high-rise terrace facing the sea. “‘You see, son,’ he shouts over the roar of wind and sea, his arms spread wide, ‘sometimes you just have to let go!’”
I wanted to love this novel because it deals with such compelling subjects: desire, filial and paternal love, our duties to God, ourselves, and others. And what could be more deliciously incendiary than a love affair between a Torah scholar and another man? I also have high regard for translators who step out of their craft’s shadow and into the light. I only wish that Fallenberg had offered a novel that demonstrated talent on par with his considerable skill as a translator.
Joel Streicker
Central American Resource Center (CARECEN)
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