“The day my husband became pregnant, his lover fell asleep and couldn’t be woken up for seven days. In the second week, the longest he could stay awake was exactly quarter of an hour.” Sibylle Canonica reads hastily with casual laconicism, an almost snotty tone. A chortling laugh keeps coming from the public gallery, and flashes of a subtle smile flash across Zeruya Shalev’s face. In the Munich Marstall everything is arranged like one of those usual “glass of water readings”: something to drink is available for Shalev, Residenztheater actress Canonica and presenter Rachel Salamander. And the evening runs smoothly according to the classic rules; Welcome, questions, answers, text passages, closing words, applause, signing. And yet everything is special.
The Israeli writer’s books – over the years people have gotten used to a somewhat lazy consumer attitude when reading them. Because Zeruya Shalev has reliably delivered one world bestseller after another since her “Love Life” trilogy was published in the noughties. Sensitive, sharp, virtuosic novels about women trapped in toxic couple relationships, identity crises, and about Israeli society in all its complexity. And now, for the first time in German, this disturbingly different book, “Not Me”, her first novel, published in Israel in 1993.
The country’s critics (gender would definitely not be appropriate here) reacted with gasps and helpless aggression. What was this about, this furious emotional journey of a young woman overwhelmed by her role as mother, wife and daughter? In addition, it is characterized by a formal excess, a game with the confused ingredients of literary postmodernism, refusing all the rules of linear narrative action, neurotic, obscene, somehow unreadable.
In a conversation with Rachel Salamander, Shalev reveals how these hostilities deeply hurt her as a 32-year-old young mother and drove her into a creative crisis. And how her marriage fell apart after the book was published. For more than 30 years she wasn’t even able to open the book and fended off all requests from publishers to republish it. After writing her last novel, which in German is called “Fate” and delves deeply into Israeli history, she suddenly felt courage and curiosity to pick up her debut again. “As if a circle had closed.”
A text made for the theater
For the first publication in German (Berlin Verlag), Shalev worked closely with her congenial translator Anne Birkenhauer and, as she says, made a few “gentle changes”. However, without taking away from the text its raw directness and its overwhelming nature. It is a text that you have to hear and want to see in action. A stage text. Made for the theater today. Sibylle Canonica has gelled a taste.
A woman leaves her family. Does she do that? Was your little daughter kidnapped? Of soldiers? Through a tunnel? After October 7th, after the massacre of the Israeli population by Hamas terrorists and the hostage-taking, this reads like a nightmare coming true. When she wrote her book in the early 1990s, Shalev says, there were terrorist attacks. She herself later survived a suicide attack on a packed bus in Jerusalem, seriously injured. But now, it is as if one hears the echo of the entire Jewish history in the events of October 7th. In a few months, Zeruya Shalev reveals, her more than 30-year-old novel will also be republished in Israel.
In her country her voice is heard and she uses it. For the hostages. Against the government. In mid-January, Zeruya Shalev spoke at a demonstration in front of 300,000 people in Tel Aviv and addressed Benjamin Netanyahu directly: “Bring her home now, otherwise we can’t call this place our home.” She couldn’t sit at home and wait.