From an Israeli master, one final gift
Ronit Matalon, author of “And the Bride Closed the Door” Image by Iris Nesher
And the Bride Closed the Door:
By Ronit Matalon, translated by Jessica Cohen
New Vessel Press, $128 pages, $15.95
Ronit Matalon died just one day after she received Israel’s prestigious Brenner Prize for her novel “And the Bride Closed the Door.” Matalon’s daughter, who accepted the prize for her mother, drew a parallel between the disappearance of the bride — the novel’s central character — and her mother’s absence from the award ceremony. But now, there is a new presence: the novel in an English translation by Jessica Cohen, just out from New Vessel Press.
Matalon, who died at 58, was in many ways a unique presence in contemporary Israeli literature. She was the daughter of Egyptian immigrants; though her parents were atheists, Matalon herself attended synagogue as a child. Her work includes snatches of Arabic, her parents’ native tongue; here, Cohen, who was awarded a Man Booker Prize for her translation of David Grossman’s “A Horse Walks Into a Bar,” smartly leaves the Arabic transliterated as-is, so the English-language reader can hear the Arabic spoken by grandma, too.
“And the Bride Closed the Door” is a very short, very fast novel, or perhaps more accurately, a novella, which drops the reader into the plot and the central problem immediately. The central problem, of course, is a bride who simply won’t open the door to her room on her wedding day. Cohen captures Matalon’s breakneck pacing in this translation, and the reader is gripped from the very first moment. Here, for instance, is the novel’s first paragraph:
“The young bride, who had been locked in her room in utter silence for more than five hours, finally made her announcement, then repeated the astonishing declaration three times from behind the closed door, through which four pairs of ears listened anxiously and with the utmost devotion. ‘Not getting married. Not getting married. Not getting married,’ she recited in a flat, almost bored voice that sounded extremely distant and nebulous, like the final vapors of a scented cleaning spray.”
This is a deeply Israeli novel, both because of what is present — stress; economic difficulty; pointless effort; argument as communication; humor; and a lot of absurdity, all packed into a closed space — as well as what is absent. The poignant absences, apart from the bride, include the bride’s sister, killed in a terror attack, which creates the widowed mother’s fear of losing two daughters, not just one. And indeed, losing it all.
What that hinting at absence captures, and the reactions that absence creates, is how much of contemporary Israeli life is influenced by those who are gone: those dead or maimed from terror attacks and wars, as well as the millions of dead in the Holocaust. Then there is the history of the harrowing violence endured by Mizrahi Jews — those from Arab countries, like Matalon’s family, such as the nine Jews hanging in Baghdad’s central square in 1969, their corpses tortured; evidence that Baghdad — a city which was 40% Jewish at the start of the 20th century — could no longer be home. When these Mizrachi Jews left for Israel, sometimes with a lone suitcase or nothing but their lives, they often faced discrimination in a system which favored Ashkenazi or European Jews, or those who came from Christian countries rather than Muslim ones.
Matalon, who in interviews compared the plight of Palestinians to the place of Mizrahi Jews in Israel, includes an essential scene where a Palestinian comes to the rescue of the Israeli family in trouble with a bride who won’t open the door — taking a chance by breaking the law to do it — and is then punished for his action. That part of the book movingly offers the reader a window into the absurdity and can’t-figure-it-out political impasse of contemporary Israel, a reality which often includes daily interaction and friendship between people who are supposedly bitter enemies. Here’s a snippet of dialogue that captures that lived familiarity, which is rarely depicted in English-language media reports. “He has a good friend, Adnan, from the Palestinian Authority’s electrical company, and this Adnan brought in one of their vehicles in for repairs at the shop. So Avner says maybe Adnan can come out here with his truck, and it won’t be any trouble. No trouble at all. Adnan owes him a favor — lots of favors — and he’ll do it.”
As I read that section, I thought of Matalon’s remarks to Le Monde in 2016, when she said that the fundamental characteristic of Israeli society is denial, and that it is “a prisoner of its own rhetoric on security and victimization.” But soon after, the novel ends and I was baffled by what felt like a non-ending — a sudden departure, almost like Matalon’s untimely passing. Or perhaps, the sudden absence of peace initiatives despite the desperate need for them.
“And the Bride Closed the Door,” by Ronit Matalon Image by New Vessel Press
This reading experience made me think about what we consider an ending. Interestingly, different languages and cultures have a different sense of ending a story, and it is possible that Israeli culture is becoming more comfortable with a non-ending as an ending. On a recent theater binge in Tel Aviv, I noticed how many plays just ended, in a sudden way; when I asked an Israeli playwright who spent half the year in Europe about it, she said she too had noticed that Israeli theater now had more of that kind of ending than its European counterparts. But this refusal to explain it all, this avant-garde comfort with the baffling and unanswerable in the world is also part of what makes some readers so passionate about Matalon.
In this novel, she lays out the absurd, the painful, the real — and then just exits. For readers who eagerly await every new Matalon novel — she had to explain to persistent interviewers that first of all, she doesn’t write unless she has something to say, and second, it takes her a while to write a book — this last book is a last gift. For readers who have never encountered Matalon, this very fast novel is an extremely accessible place to start, and an opportunity to begin to understand both Matalon’s literary stature and the complexities of contemporary Israel.
Aviya Kushner is The Forward’s language columnist and the author of “The Grammar of God” (Spiegel & Grau) and the forthcoming “Wolf Lamb Bomb.” Follow her on Twitter @AviyaKushner
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