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Nov. 17, 2006
Raising hard questions
Two authors bring contentious figures into play.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
As an Israeli-Canadian deeply involved in the peace movement, novelist
Edeet Ravel has always felt it her duty to "try and do something
about the suffering and pain and deaths that the conflict is causing."
It's not a popular view in the Diaspora, as the author of three
books set in Israel – Ten Thousand Lovers, Look For
Me and A Wall of Light – conceded in a recent interview
with the Independent. "If I'm going to be judgmental,
I will have to say that the people who do the most (unintentional)
damage are those Jews who care about their own emotional comfort,
about feeling good, and not about helping the situation," she
said. "That is a huge problem in the Diaspora.
"Some people don't seem to care about peace at all, though
they see themselves as very pro-Israel. They are Israel's worst
enemies, I feel, as they seem to want the conflict and hatred to
go on forever and aren't looking for any solutions."
Ravel is a member of Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch, which monitors
crossings at the borders between Israel and the Palestinian territories,
and her fiction often reflects her political views. "Of course,
it's unfortunate when reviewers decide I'm 'the enemy,' don't bother
reading my books, and pour out some venom on the printed page,"
she said – adding that the range of views within Israel is
often more nuanced.
"I must say that of the hundreds of letters I've received from
readers, including former IDF soldiers, only two were from people
who were upset by my viewpoints," she noted. "People in
the intelligence community in Israel really like Ten Thousand
Lovers, I've heard through the grapevine. Thanks to the painstaking
research I did, I didn't goof on the facts, and they seem to like
my point of view in the novel – and my presentation of the
dilemmas they face."
Although Ravel, who now lives in Guelph, Ont., remains deeply attached
to Israel, she also believes it is possible to maintain a Jewish
life anywhere in the world.
Commenting on writer A.B. Yehoshua's assertion this past spring
that to be truly Jewish, one must live in Israel, she said, "There
are as many ways of being Jewish as there are people who are happy
to be Jews. And my own Jewishness expresses itself in a million
ways – not just one. But I do agree that in order to take responsible
positions about Israeli politics, it's important to read Israeli
newspapers, to be well-informed, to be selective about sources of
information and preferably to spend at least one hour at the Qalandia
Checkpoint."
Resurrecting Sigmund
Ask Catherine Gildiner, raised in a Catholic home and married to
a Jewish man for nearly 30 years, what the two religions have in
common and she has a ready-made response.
"They're both extreme and they're both very built on guilt,"
the author said in an interview. She pointed out that a large percentage
of writers are either Jewish or Catholic, "and I think a lot
of that is really from their background. There's Catholic school
for me and then there's Jewish parents to make up for all those
nuns!"
And yet, she said, it was a Jewish mother who gave Sigmund Freud
the confidence he needed to overcome poverty and his early disappointment
at being unable to pursue academia (in a letter, the University
of Vienna told him they couldn't hire him, as they already had a
Jew on staff).
Gildiner's novel Seduction is a thriller centred around both
Freudian theory and the ideas of another sometimes cast-off thinker,
Charles Darwin.
She said part of her motivation for the book was the discovery of
just how much the two men had been neglected in contemporary teaching.
Gildiner was alarmed, during a book tour of the American midwest
for her memoir Too Close to the Falls, to encounter school
children who'd never heard of Darwin because, under state-mandated
regulations, the teaching of evolutionary theory was forbidden.
"There's no one that said 'survival of the fittest' couldn't
be OK'd by God," she declared. "Not everybody can live
all the time, there has to be some rules. So who's to say that these
aren't God's rules? I mean, I don't buy it, but I don't think that
[religion and evolutionary theory are] mutually contradictory. This
is religious fundamentalism and I think it's really scary stuff."
Similarly, while working with PhD students at the University of
Toronto, Gildiner – who is still a practising psychologist
– was astonished to hear them say, " 'Oh no, no, no, we
don't read Freud. He is so dead white man.'
"I realized," she mused, "the extreme right is getting
rid of Darwin and the extreme left is getting rid of Freud. To me,
it's just really sad. I thought maybe if I write this book, there
will be a renewed interest."
Catherine Gildiner and Edeet Ravel will both speak at the closing
night of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, Thursday, Nov.
23, 7 p.m., at the Norman Rothstein Theatre. For more information,
visit www.jccgv.com.
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