Novel about kibbutz life unsatisfactory

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This article was published 28/05/2011 (5590 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Last Rain

By Edeet Ravel

Viking Canada, 256 pages, $32

THIS novel about Israeli kibbutz life circa 1960 could have been fascinating. Instead, Canadian-Israeli author Edeet Ravel has penned a gimmicky, unengaging and disappointing work.

It is so unsatisfactory, in fact, that it is difficult to believe that it is from the same author who wrote the remarkable Ten Thousand Lovers.

A Governor General’s Literary Award finalist in 2003, Ten Thousand Lovers was the debut novel in Ravel’s Tel Aviv Trilogy, which also includes Look for Me and A Wall of Light. Like this trilogy, Ravel’s latest book is set in Israel.

The novel’s primary narrator is six-year-old Dori, who lives with her siblings and parents, Naftali and Vaarda, on Kibbutz Eldar. Naftali and Vaarda are North American idealists who moved to the fledgling kibbutz (or collective settlement) in Israel’s northern Galilee, three miles from Lebanon, shortly after the creation of the Jewish state in 1948.

Dori is clearly a fictionalized version of Ravel, who, like her protagonist, spent the formative years of her childhood on a kibbutz in the northern Galilee before moving back to Canada with her parents.

Given that Ravel, who lives in Guelph, Ont., is essentially writing an account of her own early years, she manages, for the most part, to capture Dori’s voice accurately, relaying a child’s sense of wonder, fear and confusion about the world around her.

Listening to the jackals howling in the mountains as she lays in bed at night, Dori muses, “The enemy is dangerous no matter what but most animals won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.”

The majority of what Dori shares with readers, however, is much more mundane than this. Adding to this frustration is the fact that these lacklustre musings are interjected by an odd assortment of other voices, reflections and ruminations, most of them equally uninspiring.

The few gems among them include an account of attempts by Israelis to walk to Petra in Jordan, and the diary of a young man dating from 1922. In this diary, the anonymous author writes, “[W]e must direct our efforts first and foremost to creating a new society and living our collective lives in the most profound way possible.”

While the kibbutz system flourished in Israel for many years, the new society that its earliest pioneers dreamed of was influenced by the realpolitik of living in a country where so many other imperatives vied for their attention. Ideas about living collectively and creating a new society took on much greater meaning after 1948 and 1967.

These of course are some of the very issues that Ravel addressed so well in her Tel Aviv Trilogy, a fact that makes this new book seem so much weaker by comparison.

Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg writer who lived in the western Galilee in 1981.