November 5, 2020 35
The Sound of Our Steps
by Ronit Matalon, translated
from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.
Metropolitan, 369 pp., $35.00
The One Facing Us
by Ronit Matalon, translated
from the Hebrew by Marsha Weinstein.
Metropolitan, 296 pp., $7.99 (e-book)
And the Bride Closed the Door
by Ronit Matalon, translated
from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.
New Vessel, 137 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The Israeli writer Ronit Matalon, who
died in 2017 at the age of fifty-eight,
was the author of fragmentary but
sweeping family novels. She was also
a fierce advocate for the rights of Pal-
estinians and for the advancement of
Mizrahim—Jews of Middle Eastern
or North African descent, many of
whom arrived in Israel in the 1950s
and encountered discrimination and
difficulty integrating into the nascent
society, which was dominated by Ash-
kenazi Jews of European origin. How
can her novels, which are seemingly
compact, hermetic, and inward-facing,
be squared with that public activism?
Quite simply: when one is raised in a
family of Egyptian immigrants con-
signed to the back pages of history, put-
ting them and others like them on the
page can serve as a moral act.
The Sound of Our Steps, Matalon’s
third novel, opens with a child, up late,
waiting for her mother to come home:
The sound of her steps: not the
heels tapping, the feet dragging,
the clogs clattering or soles shuf-
fling on the path leading to the
house, no. First the absence of
steps, the creeping dread in antici-
pation of her arrival, her entrance,
the loaded silence, measured by a
twelve-minute unit of time, her-
alded by the next-to-last bus stop-
ping, the 11:30 bus from which she
would descend.The anticipated entry of the mother—
throughout the novel her children refer
to her as “the mother” behind her
back—inspires terror. She works two
jobs as a house cleaner and as the care-
taker of a youth center, and tornadoes
into the family home (no more than a
large shack, similar to the one Matalon
grew up in) in various stages of rage.
She throws a vase, or swipes a pot off
the stove, “or she hit us, with a broom,
shoe, mop, hammer, the base of a lamp,
a kitchen towel, her hands. Or she
screamed.” The narrator, who refers to
herself as “the child”—in her family,
she explains, she is “the eternal third
person”—regards the mother with pity,
believing her violence to stem from a
perpetual state of being “not-home”:Twelve hours of work, four hun-
dred plates in the Rosh Ha’ayin
school cafeteria, twenty-something
cauldrons, three hundred chairs
arranged in the student center in
the afternoons, after the cafeteria,
a few pounds, a few pennies, an
ironed handkerchief doused with
cheap lavender water, the kind she
bought by the pint.This opening distills Matalon’s con-
cerns: a sustained examination of a
single household with biographical sim-
ilarities to her own, headed by a dom-
ineering and charismatic matriarch; a
child, elsewhere depicted as a young
woman, who is part of that family but
outside it, cataloging their goings-on
with longing and contempt; and the
subtle ways in which the language of
labor and politics—the “not-home”—
can seep into the living room. Matalon
once lamented that the stereotypical
female writer is one who is “all womb
and belly, who deals with family, with
love—not with the public sphere.”
Her novels nullify that distinction.
Family is public, she shows us, and it
can also be used to address broader
issues of immigration and estrange-
ment. There is a tender moment in that
opening scene when the child observes
her mother’s hands, which have been
coarsened from overuse, and notes,
“Femininity had been sacrificed to this
rough place, to its new, rough, male
humanity.”That place of “male humanity” is
newly founded Israel, where the child’s
parents settled after leaving Egypt.
They are put up in a township outside
Tel Aviv, built on dunes surrounded by
orchards. The description evokes paral-
lels with Matalon’s hometown of Ganei
Tikvah, an area of prefabricated homes
that had been set up by the Jewish
Agency for immigrants from Yemen,
Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Romania, and
Poland—a “model of the melting pot,”
as a newspaper article described it in
1960 (but one without running water or
electricity in its early years). At night,
the homes are indistinguishable from
one another, sowing confusion, so the
child’s father, whom she calls by his
first name, Maurice, hatches a plan: he
asks his male neighbors to each erect
a flagpole on his roof and string to it
one of his wife’s nightgowns. I can still
visualize that neglected transit camp,
with women’s garments fluttering in the
wind to indicate who lives where.
This flicker of a story is among the
few that the child possesses of her fa-
ther. His political grievances had cost
him a good job with the Labor Minis-
try, we are told, and also his marriage.
Doesn’t home come first? his wife de-
mands to know. “My principles,” Mau-
rice replies. The biographical echoes
are again unmistakable: Matalon’s fa-
ther founded a Tel Aviv movement af-
filiated with the Israeli Black Panthers
that protested on behalf of working-
class Mizrahim; he was once quoted as
saying that his wife divorced him be-
cause of this work.
Matalon doesn’t pass judgment on
which parent’s vision is morally justi-
fied, nor does she have to: Maurice is
an unreliable presence, materializing
every couple of years for several fit-ful days. He buys the child a copy of
David Copperfield, telling her that “it’s
the first book to read,” but leaves it on
the bus he takes to see her. One day, the
child walks into her mother’s bedroom
to find Maurice, lying on his back with
a cigarette in hand. Her mother, “in her
better work clothes for the afternoon
job,” is kneeling at the foot of the bed,
her face buried in his stomach: “His
other hand, the one not holding the
cigarette, stroked her head, not stroke,
dug, stirring her thick hair, into the
skin of her scalp.”
This is as close to sexual as the novel
gets. The plot, such as it is, is filtered
mostly through the child’s eyes. Chap-
ters are short—just the whiff of a mem-
ory—with copious hedgings: “I think,”
“maybe.” (Of the mother’s shoes:
“I think they were brown or maybe
black.”) A scene’s concluding phrase
or image often reappears as the title of
the subsequent chapter, so that the form
itself movingly enacts the process of
recollection. One chapter ends with the
mother dipping “yesterday’s bread” in a
cup of tea with milk and, sure enough,
the next chapter is called “Tea with
Milk.” We’re on Proustian time: not
so much moving forward as backward.
Something as minor as the narrator
writing out the word “once” can set off
five consecutive scenes—titled “Once
(1),” “Once (2),” “Once (3),” “Once
(4),” and “Once (5)”—as loosely con-
nected as the clippings in a scrapbook.
Not all of those clippings are vital.
Matalon tends to repeat and digress—
one gets the sense of journaling more
than editing. Still, certain images lodge
in the mind. One is of the narrator’s
mother, days before her death, empty-
ing the little metal locker next to her
hospital bed, which had been overflow-
ing with chocolate, cookies, and fruit.
She asks the narrator for a small cup of
oil. “‘What oil?’ I didn’t understand,”
Matalon writes. “Any oil will do,” the
mother says. She proceeds to dip a tis-
sue into a plastic cup of cooking oil and
rub it against the hinges of the locker
door, to stop it from jamming.
After she is done, she turns to her
neighbor, an Arab woman from the
West Bank whose little children are
huddled on her bed and regard the nar-
rator’s mother with trepidation. The
woman’s locker is empty; on it are four
bottles of cola. “Come, I’ll oil yours,
too,” she tells the woman. She places
three of the bottles inside the locker
and passes “her hand over the white
surface, wiping away the rings.” If
there is a better definition of grace than
a dying woman making herself usefulWomen Not at Home
Ruth Margalit
bail, reallocating police budgets, de-
criminalizing drugs, and reenfranchis-
ing the formerly incarcerated, there is
hope that ending immigrant detention
might be added to the rallying cry.
Recognizing this alignment of causes,
García Hernández points to the writ-
ings of Angela Davis. Abolition, she
writes, “involves re-imagining in-
stitutions, ideas, and strategies, and
creating new institutions, ideas, and
strategies that will render prisons obso-
lete.” The same holds true for “deten-
tion centers,” “processing facilities,”
and any other euphemism that might
take their place.
In August, as I concluded my inter-
view with Enrique about his time in the
La Palma Detention Center, I remem-
bered the advice of a social worker
from the Florence Immigrant and Ref-
ugee Rights Project who had advisedme to always close conversations by
gesturing toward moments of hope and
joy. I asked Enrique about the day he
was released from prison, about the
moment he found out he would finally
be reunited with his family. He thought
first of their safety, he said, deciding
to quarantine at a hotel while he made
arrangements with his wife to surprise
their daughters. “It’s a blessing to be
with them again,” he told me, “but italso feels strange.” As he waits for his
asylum case to be decided, he still fears
that he might somehow end up back
in detention, that it all might happen
again. He keeps in touch with other
men in La Palma, and he recalls the
way word spread each time a fellow de-
tainee was about to be released. “Don’t
forget about us,” Enrique always told
them as they prepared to leave. “Re-
member what’s happening in here.” QResidents of Ganei Tikvah, near Tel Aviv, Israel, 1982National^ Libraryof^ Israel