Books
BOOK REVIEW:
Mei Haveradim "Rose Water",
a novel by Shmuel Aviezer
Published by Authorhouse,
presales@authorhouse.com
Now in English
"David liked two types of dates from among at least ten types he had tasted.
Elkhistawy, the softer, stickier brown-colored date that
tastes very sweet and is served in small woven baskets lined
with palm leaves; and Elbirhi, a cluster of yellow dates,
hard on the outside but soft on the inside. He didn't like
cheap dates, El Zihdi, the dry and wrinkled type eaten by
workers with large, round, flat pita bread to nourish them
and give them strength for their hard day's labor.
Basra is the best natural greenhouse in the world for growing
dates. The warm weather and high humidity ripens the fruit
that grows on the over eighteen million palm trees in an
area that produces over one hundred types of dates. Many
times during humid summers, David had woken up in the morning
with his sheets soaked through from the moisture that surrounded
his bed on the roof of the house."
The novel begins when David, the hero, is
finishing high school, during the early 1940's, and follows
his life until the early 1950's when he has arrived in Israel
and begun to make his way here. David's childhood in Iraq
was not exactly happy. Though his family was fairly well-off,
his parents were mismatched. His mother's father was a Rabbi,
and relations among the members of her side of the family
were rigid and inexpressive. To compound the difficulty,
the family was forced to move from
Baghdad to Basra because David's father, a customs clerk,
insulted an insolent and vindictive political figure without
knowing who the man was. This incident underscores the corruption
of Iraqi society and the precarious position of the Jews
in it. On a visit to Baghdad during his summer vacation,
David gets to know his father's extended family, many of
whom are relaxed music lovers. Although he enjoys the warmth
and spontaneity of these relatives, David is stifled by
the social conventions governing life
among the Jews of Baghdad. Drawn strongly to the opposite
sex, he cannot develop free and
natural friendships with girls, because that sort of thing
simply isn't done. During his summer
visit, David's aunt takes him to meet Farida, a relative
some two years older than David
whose father is a doctor. Farida is a daring and self-confident
young woman who has taken the
unconventional step of going to work in a bank, where strange
men can see her all the time.
David is strongly drawn to Farida and wishes to correspond
with her, but this is unthinkable.
She may be liberated enough to work in a bank, but she cannot
go so far as to receive letters
from her younger male cousin in Basra. Although he has done
well in his Matriculation examinations, David cannot obtain
a higher education. Opportunities for Jews are limited in
Iraq, and his father can't
afford to send him to England to study. For David, emigration
to Israel comes at just the
right time to save him from the narrow horizons of his milieu.
The material hardships of life in an aluminium shed in an
isolated immigrant encampment in the Judean Hills are bearable,
because David finds work where his abilities are appreciated,
and he enjoys freedom from the rigid conventions of Iraqi
Jewish life and the latent hostility of the Muslim majority.
Maybe not too good to be true, David is certainly too good
to be fictional. He is intelligent, hard-working, handsome,
musically talented, and self-possessed. Although troubled
by his parents' tense relations and his father's efforts
to control his life, he manages to slip past these emotional
obstacles without serious conflict. Attracted and attractive
to women, he also manages to keep his head and avoid destructive
relationships. As a character he is
not, therefore, entirely successful - after all readers
and novels are interested in inner turmoil, ambivalence,
ambiguity, and failures that are (or are not) overcome.
In fact, Mei Haveradim should be read as a memoir, not a
novel. It is written in an overly formal style with old-fashioned
delicacy in approaching erotic themes, and, as a memoir,
it is very successful. The full and detailed picture it
presents of Jewish society in Baghdad, including the kind
of houses people lived in,
the names they gave their children, and the kind of food
they ate, is fascinating. A fair number of Iraqi Jews have
written fiction based on similar experiences (notably Sami
Michael, Shimon Ballas, Lev Hakak and Eli Amir), usually
conveying a good deal of bitterness against Israeli society
for accepting
immigrants from Arab lands only grudgingly, misunderstanding
them, underestimating their abilities, and treating them
as second-class citizens. Unlike those authors, Aviezer
isn't at all bitter. As for his protagonist, Israel proved
to be a land of opportunity for him. After spending a few
years in Beit Shemesh he found work in the Bank of Israel
in 1955. There he was responsible for the printing of banknotes
and the minting of coins for more than 20 years, and he
has written many articles on numismatics. Aviezer writes
about his formative years without resentment or nostalgia,
but with confidence that they were interesting.
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