36 The New York Review
to a stranger in the one way she knows
how, I have yet to see it.
In a literary culture awash with men of
Ashkenazi origin, Matalon’s stature as
a best-selling author whose works be-
came mandatory high school reading
in the last three years of her life was so
atypical that Israeli critics were quick
to classify her writing as “Mizrahi” or
“feminist”—labels she bristled at. She
once told an interviewer on television,
“You said I object to ‘Mizrahi writing.’
That’s like saying I object to spring.”
She went on, “I insist on not knowing
what Mizrahi writing is.” Is it any work
written by a Mizrahi author? Or a work
written by any author about Mizrahi
characters? Or are there some implied
attributes of what such writing should
look or sound like? (Vapidly conde-
scending categories such as “women’s
writing” or “urban music” prompt sim-
ilar questions.)
One label she did not object to, how-
ever, was “Levantine writer,” a term
she adopted from Jacqueline Kaha-
noff, a lucid essayist whose work influ-
enced her immensely. Kahanoff, like
Matalon’s parents, was born in Cairo
to a French-speaking Jewish family.
She immigrated to Israel in 1954 after
spending a decade in the United States,
and never grew fully comfortable in
Hebrew. She wrote her books in En-
glish; they were then translated into
Hebrew, and the originals were never
published. Matalon considered this
tragic—she called Kahanoff a “writer
without an origin”—and much of her
own work can be read as a silent dia-
logue with Kahanoff, who died in 1979.
Matalon’s first novel, The One Facing
Us, features a writer named Jacqueline
Kahanoff who had been friendly with
the narrator’s uncle during their child-
hood in Cairo. It also reproduces an
essay by Kahanoff from The Sun Rises
in the East (1978), a collection of essays
describing her “Levantine generation”:
In later life our paths sometimes
crossed, and we could speak in
our own voices: Greeks, Moslems,
Syrians, Copts, and Jews, Arab na-
tionalists, Zionists, Stalinists, and
Trotskyites, Turkish princesses in
exile, priests, and rebels. We talked
of our youth, when our souls were
so divided within ourselves that
we feared we would never recover.
Yes, we had mastered words, a lan-
guage in which to frame thoughts
that were nearly our own. Perhaps
too late to make any difference, we
discovered how close we had been
to one another in our youth. Our
choices had commanded other
choices, and from those, in the
adult world, there was no retreat.Thoughts that were nearly our own. With
one qualifier—that crushing “nearly”—
Kahanoff manages to conjure the
quivering existence of the immigrant.
Levantine writing, for Kahanoff (and
by extension for Matalon) meant a form
that was constantly shifting and multi-
plying, one in which, as Virginia Woolf
put it in To the Lighthouse, “nothing
was simply one thing.” Matalon argued
that this was what set Kahanoff apart
from her compatriot Edward Said.
“Where Said finds annihilation, humil-
iation, and bitterness,” Matalon said in
an interview published posthumously
in the Hebrew-language Granta,
Kahanoff finds a great life force,
mutual fertilization among differ-
ent ethnic groups, and the possi-
bility of forming an identity that
isn’t just lacking, damaged, and
battered, but the opposite: rich,
pliant, changing.Matalon liked toying with the struc-
ture of her works, perhaps as tribute
to this chimeric definition. Often this
meant introducing some kind of exter-
nal formal constraint. In 2012 she pub-
lished, in Hebrew, Undue Influence, a
lively epistolary novel depicting a ro-
mance between a female ghostwriter
from Tel Aviv and a male musicologist
from Jerusalem, which she cowrote
with Ariel Hirschfeld, a literary critic
who was also her life partner. Matalon
wrote the woman’s part of the corre-
spondence, Hirschfeld the man’s. They
apparently decided that they would not
share their letters in advance with each
other and that nothing could be re-
vised. (A cushy premise for them; less
so for the reader.)
By contrast, The One Facing Us is
arranged like a family album: nearly
every chapter begins with an old pho-
tograph of the narrator’s relatives; at
times a photo is labeled “missing” and
instead we get a description of what it
purports to show. This is followed by
a close reading of the photograph with
an eye toward the unintended detail,
like the two men off to the side of a
wedding party in 1954, pointing at the
rug on which the newlyweds are posing.
Walter Benjamin, in his 1931 essay “A
Short History of Photography,” called
such incongruities the “tiny spark of
accident,” arguing that they made
the viewer feel present in the image-
making. (It is also an apt description
for fiction that feels alive.)
Interwoven with these photographic
readings is the story of Esther, the
young narrator, who is summoned to
Cameroon by her dapper Egyptian
uncle to spend several months in his
villa in Douala, out of some vague de-
sire that she fall in love with his son.
This is odd, as Esther is barely sev-
enteen. Again there is a blurring of
first- and third- person narration. And
again the events described seem almost
tangential to the portraiture of Esther’s
family. Under a black-and-white photo
of a seated man, there is this passage:Father sits in a room, the time and
place unknown: it could be any time
within a twenty-year period, any of
twenty different places or circum-
stances.... This photograph is not
of “Father” but of “the father,” the
universal archetype, the immutable
image of “father,” divorced from
time, place, circumstance. His
slim signature of a moustache, his
Omar Sharif smile, his shiny shoes
vanquish the fleeting capricious-
ness of the moment.... The socks
look tight; they seem to hug his an-
kles. A yellowish sheen on the left
ankle troubles me; it might indicate
the socks’ silkiness, their superior
quality, or that the fabric is wear-
ing thinner with each washing.The more Esther lingers on the image,
the more she begins to doubt it. Is her
father wearing fine silk, or are his socks
threadbare? Does she even know him?
The One Facing Us is a searching,
at times exasperating book that is ul-timately about the failure of biography
and the unknowability of other people.
I say “exasperating” because Esther’s
stay in Douala at times falls into the
most obvious contraptions, its language
weighed down by cliché and lack of
specificity. When she realizes that the
man she is attracted to is sleeping with
another man, she is said to cry “tears
of laughter”; a jungle is described as a
“thick, deep stretch of green.” These
sections are filled with the conven-
tional signaling of emotion without the
real thing.
They are also surprisingly tone-deaf
in their portrayal of the local people
Esther meets: men with “bloodshot
eyes,” a “magnificent brown chest,” a
nose “broad and squat.” It is unclear if
we are meant to read Esther as impli-
cated in her uncle’s exploitative view ofhis Cameroonian “help” or if, as seems
likelier, her view of the locals is meant
to be perceived as somehow more nu-
anced, given that she scolds her aunt
for being racist and develops a relation-
ship with one of the servants.
Put all this aside (if you can) and you
will find early glimpses of the skillful
character sketches that Matalon came
to trust more in her later work: brief
and assured sentences about hardened
women, slightly askew, doing their ut-
most with the scraps they are given,
like the woman who, upon meeting
her son’s new girlfriend, a doctoral
student who has decided “not to bring
children into this disastrous world of
ours,” deadpans, “Do you know of a
better one?” Or the two middle-aged
sisters who dawdle at real estate agents’
display windows, gawking at the large
mansions with swimming pools but
“worried about the upkeep and the
cleaning.” Or the dissociated new
mother who unwillingly puts her baby
to her breast and, cradling the back of
his head, whispers, “Eggshell.”The thwarted life of women is also the
conceit around which Matalon framed
her last completed novel, And the Bride
Closed the Door. (An unfinished work,
Snow, appeared in Hebrew last year,
two years after her death.) At 128
pages, And the Bride Closed the Door
reads like a novella or a comedic set-
piece, complete with brief asides that
could pass for stage directions: “Nadia
hurried over to him (her thighs got a
little tangled up in the dress’s satin
slip).” The language is straightforward,
breezy, conversational. And Jessica
Cohen’s translation makes it highly
accessible, though something of Ma-
talon’s poetic pacing in Hebrew—analmost forensic treatment of slang and
phonetic class signifiers—is sadly lost
in most of her translated work. But it is
weightier than it seems.
The novel begins when a young bride
named Margie locks herself in her
room on her wedding day and refuses
to come out. We never see her; we only
hear about her from others as Matti, the
groom, and her parents attempt to ca-
jole her. Margie is the blank canvas on
which their own anxieties are blotted.
(Her mother: “What are we supposed
to tell people? Five hundred people in
that wedding hall four hours from now
with the food and the band and every-
thing!” Matti, whispering through the
door: “Could you maybe explain to me
what that fight was about?”)
Margie’s reasoning remains a mys-
tery. We learn only that the previous
evening, she and Matti had watched a
television film about the Israeli poet
Leah Goldberg, and Matti had com-
mented that had he known Goldberg
he would have tried to save her from
her difficult life. (“Goldenberg, Gold-
berger, Goldberg, Goldenberger—
those names of theirs will be the death
of us,” a cousin of Margie’s says. It be-
comes clear that her family is Mizrahi;
of Matti’s family we know less, though
it is implied that they are Ashkenazi.)
After watching the film, Margie, who is
said to write poems herself, withdrew.
Matalon leans a little too much into
whimsy. At one point, the family phones
a service called Regretful Brides that
specializes in cases like Margie’s. The
senile grandmother (who else?) turns
out to be the only one with clarity. But
another development that seems at first
a little labored gains heft: Matti’s father
calls in a favor from a friend, who sends
a truck driver from the Palestinian Au-
thority’s electric company to extricate
Margie from her room with a ladder.
“Why Arabs? Don’t we have our own
rescue forces?” a neighbor asks. How
will they recognize the truck, someone
else inquires: “Does it have that flag
of theirs?” As unlikely as the setup
seems, it’s not hard for an Israeli to
imagine: the called-in favor, the hushed
cooperation between the Israeli and
Palestinian utility companies, a kind
of frenetic mobilization that has to do
with the near-sacred status of weddings
in Israeli society. All of it coheres.
Confettied throughout the novel are
Matalon’s well-chosen details: the rela-
tives who gradually start to shed their
wedding clothes, looking “not unlike a
family gathered for a cookout on a traf-
fic island on Independence Day.” (That
traffic island vivifies the image.) Or the
grandmother’s closed-in balcony, filled
with the broken lampshades and debris
left behind by the previous tenant, who
she is convinced will be back for them
one day.
And then there is Margie. A question
mark. An absence. Because the title
of the work revolves around a missing
figure, and because the novel is con-
strained to a single location, unfolding
in surrealist fashion, parallels to Beck-
ett are unavoidable, as Margie serves
as a kind of latter-day Godot—with
an important distinction. “Margie de-
mands something that masculinity has
taken for granted,” Matalon said after
the novel’s release. “The right to hole
up in a room, to be the master of time
and silence.” For years, men have had
the luxury of getting lost, she added.
“Why don’t we have the right to be lost,
too?” QRonit Matalon, 2015Patrice^ Normand/Leextra/BridgemanImages