To Have Loved And Lost

Settler Leader Emuna Elon’s debut novel encompasses politics — but is surprisingly ambiguous in its conclusions.

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

Shlomtzion Dror comes from generations of women who’ve faced tragedy and shattered love. Her mother’s grandmother Malka found true love with her husband in late 19th-century Russia, but her husband was forced to divorce her, according to Jewish law, after 10 years of childless marriage. Shlomtzion understood that neither ever really stopped bleeding after they were torn apart.

Malka returned to her parents’ home and then accompanied them to Jerusalem, where she married another star-crossed soul, a rabbi whose first wife left him for a Polish soldier. She soon gave birth to a daughter who, years later, also could not live with the man she loved, but instead married another, and gave birth to seven children, including Shlomtzion’s mother. She, too, was

part of this chain of broken love.

Shlomtzion’s own tale of unfulfilled love and yearning is spun by Israeli activist Emuna Elon in her compelling debut novel, “If You Awaken Love” (Toby Press). Published four years ago in Israel and now translated by David Hazony, the love story is also a spiritual coming-of-age story and a novel of ideas set between the Six-Day War and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin.

As a young girl, Shlomtzion, the daughter of a university professor, meets Yair Berman, the orphan son of a distinguished rabbi who was raised by his grandparents. They grow up together as soul mates, both committed to changing the world and to settling the land of Israel. He becomes a yeshiva student, and she learns from the rabbis’ wives. After Yair’s military service, when they decide to marry and ask his rabbi for permission, it is, shockingly, not given. And when they go to see a kabbalist to decipher the meaning, he says, “Heaven rejoices, but the hand of a righteous man holds back this match.” Yair then breaks up with her.

Yair goes on to marry, have a large family and build up a settlement community. Shlomtzion marries, gives birth to a daughter, quickly divorces and moves to Tel Aviv, where she becomes an architect. She abandons the religious life of her youth but never stops thinking of Yair and his rejection. The families connect again, two decades later, and many secrets are revealed.

Laced throughout the novel are phrases from the great biblical story of unfulfilled love, the Song of Songs, where the lovers keep missing each other. Shlomtzion explains that in the biblical story they deliberately don’t allow their love to be fulfilled, that they make every effort not to find one another.

“Maybe because one shouldn’t awaken love before it is desired. Maybe they just understand that the world isn’t ready for a love like theirs,” she says.

The author explores how love gets lost, how lives play out and how decisions ultimately get made in life, while she captures the rhythms of Shabbat and of religious life in the city and in the settlement. In the background are the conflicting poles of Israeli politics and the threat of violence and war, with parallels between the personal and national stories.
Emuna Elon is known to be a woman of strong right-wing beliefs; in fact, she’s probably the most visible Israeli woman in the settler movement. Her husband is Knesset Member Benny Elon, who heads the National Union Party. But she’s written a love story with political undercurrents, and the politics are not at all what one might expect. In her fiction, she seems much less sure of having all the answers than she does in her very public life. Perhaps the most sympathetic character in the novel is Shlomtzion, who comes of age as part of the settler movement, but becomes a middle-aged divorced woman with leftist leanings in Tel Aviv.

Elon turned to fiction after many years of teaching, writing political columns and children’s books, running a right-wing publishing house with her husband and serving as a television spokesperson — all that in addition to raising six children in the settlement of Beit El, which is a half-hour from Jerusalem, adjacent to Ramallah.

“The main thing I like, and I need, about writing literature is that it’s not black and white. I can finally express the complexity of it all. In the newspaper columns I have to be very clear, black and white, voicing my opinion,” she told The Jewish Week in an interview last month while she was visiting New York City with her husband. “In literature I can let myself really indulge how unclear everything is.”

“I can’t not write about this,” she said, referring to life, religion and politics in Israel. She doesn’t think that a novel should carry a message, but she does want to convey that nothing is definite.

“To believe in God is to ask yourself if He exists. I live in Israel and you ask yourself every second if you have to be here and why,” she said.

“Living in Beit El, believing in God, wearing this hat on my head every day — I do it all wholeheartedly. Writing a novel gives me the chance to say how painful it is. How all this is one big unfulfilled love. The existence of human beings on this earth is unfulfilled love, in all its aspects.”

Elon’s mother was American; her father, the writer and teacher Pinchas Peli, was a 5th-generation Jerusalemite. Elon was born in Jerusalem, then spent some years growing up on the Upper West Side, attending New York City’s High School of Music and Arts. She married Benny Elon, whom she knew through their youth movement in Jerusalem, when she was 19.

She’s in love with the Hebrew language — its depth, meaning, the roots of its words and the shapes of letters. For her, writing fiction is “like trying to really get hold of the essence of what it means to be alive.”

On the novel’s dedication page, she thanks her friend and teacher Amos Oz, who introduced her to her Israeli publisher. They met while speaking together on a public panel and then engaged in a 10-year correspondence.

“We had and still have a very fierce argument,” she recounts. “He’s sure that I and my people are endangering Israel. I’m sure that he and his people are endangering Israel. But we’re good friends. We talk and write about life and literature.”

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