Peacenik MK’s son writes sinewy Shin Bet novel, to international acclaim
Yishai Sarid’s noir novel is one of 10 contenders for the prestigious Impac Dublin Award, to be announced Wednesday
Mitch Ginsburg is the former Times of Israel military correspondent.
Yishai Sarid, a partner in a law firm and a novelist, a father of three and a son to Yossi, the most adroitly acerbic MK to have served in Israel’s parliament — a man who during his three decades in public office often saved his sharpest darts for the Shin Bet security service — is the author of a dark and poignant novella told in the first person by a Shin Bet interrogator and case officer who has the heart of a poet and the hands of a killer.
In Hebrew and English the book is called “Limassol.” In France, where it won the country’s highest literary award for translated crime fiction, the 2011 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the publisher gave it the more lyrical “Le Poète de Gaza.” In Ireland it is shortlisted for the prestigious Impac Dublin award, one of the most cosmopolitan and lucrative literary honors in the world, the winner of which will be declared, on Wednesday (June 13) by the mayor of the city. Several Impac winners have gone on to win Nobel prizes in literature.
“The book was submitted without my knowledge by a librarian from Bremen, Germany,” Sarid said, noting that any book that appears in English is eligible for consideration so long as it is recommended by a major international library system.
Ten books were short-listed this year. Eight of them were originally written in English, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist “A Visit from the Good Squad” by Jennifer Egan and the searing Vietnam War novel “Matterhorn,” written, after decades of tribulation, by Karl Marlantes, who served as a Marines officer during the war.
Sarid’s novel is unique. It is a taut thriller, to be sure, the plot resting on the backdrop of what might be called desert noir, where instead of fog and oil-black puddles, the sun burns the fields a brittle yellow that “no rain will save” and the glinting white heat smothers the characters’ thoughts before they are born. There are bursts of humor and strokes of lyricism throughout.
But what sets this book apart is that in looking deep into the work of a Shin Bet agent, it manages, within the space of 187 Hebrew pages and the confines of a plot, to offer a spare and unflinching look at the two poles of Israeli society – the Shin Bet and the bohemian arts scene — and a deep, thoroughly gripping perspective on fathers and sons and the lingering effects of absent love.
The book, translated into English by Barbara Harshaw but read for the purposes of this article in Hebrew, is stretched taut between the low-ceilinged interrogation rooms of the Shin Bet in Jerusalem and the outdoor cafes of Tel Aviv. Unlike the Mossad thrillers released each year, European rivers do not freeze outside the window, and foreign women, beautiful and troubled, are not made whole by their agent lovers.
Instead, the book revolves around a Shin Bet agent who came into the service with a master’s degree and a blue-skied peace sticker on the rear window of his car. A man who upon entry into the service told his brilliant, religious boss, Haim, who wears a black yarmulke and “looks like a sweaty postal worker,” that he was enrolled in a creative writing class, which, Haim later reveals, “sounded worse than if you’d said you were shooting heroin.” And yet, Haim assured him, we need “people like you, who love this land without brutality.”
Over the years, under Haim’s watchful eye, the bumper sticker comes off and his studied, soulful approach to interrogation, the kind that could pry information from a suspect with the mutual relief of a popped cork, gives way to what he admits is the butcher’s approach. And it is in that manner — with a suicide bomber on the prowl and his wife picking at the frayed threads of their marriage — that he kills a man in mid-interrogation.
Haim calls him into the office. He is not concerned about the death. Perhaps there will be a few questions from journalists, a bit of talk from Knesset members – the kind of thing that will blow over in a matter of days. He is worried about the “spiritual wellbeing” of the interrogator. He strokes his arm, “the way no man has” since he was a child, and tells him to go home to his wife, to soften up on the inside in order to get strong again, and then to take a break from interrogation.
Haim sends him to Tel Aviv, to an author. At 23 she was crowned the great up and coming female author of her generation but by the time he meets her she is 40 and her book can only be found in the library. She is beautiful, in a powerful, commanding way. (Quite unusually for the genre, the men in this book appreciate women: our hero is cowed by the intelligence of this author’s eyes and when he and a Palestinian man look at a beautiful waitress in a café, whose skin glows, it is with the kind of “wonder that we take with us to the grave.”) Her son is a junkie, living in a shack near the beach, hiding from gangsters. Her husband is dead. Her dear friend, Hani, a Palestinian poet who lived in Tel Aviv during the pre-Intifada days, is dying and in pain in Gaza.
And the Shin Bet agent, presenting himself as a businessman in need of assistance with his novel, has the keys to these problems. While pretending to learn the tricks of the novelist’s trade, he nonchalantly jingles the keys before her eyes. They are hers for the taking. But in return she must help him. This is the soul-crushing work that is at the heart of his job — inducing people of sound mind to betray their loves, their ideals and their allegiances.
Though this work is often done for a good cause, perhaps even the best of causes — to save lives — it exacts a price from those who perform it.
Sarid, who served as a major in the IDF’s Military Intelligence branch, was never in the Shin Bet. But he does seem to have a deep understanding of the way it is viewed from the outside and the way those within perceive the ungrateful masses.
The agent, after being hounded by a state attorney about the death during interrogation, tells her, under the light of a gray sunrise and a fluorescent lamp, that “you don’t want to hear anything. You want them locked up nice and tight in the cages, these monkey people, so they won’t be able to run away, their mouths filled with rags, so they won’t be able to scream.” And this, he says while looking at her framed family portrait of children in ski clothes, all so that “they won’t come devour those cute legs of yours and your children and that sweet husband.”
Even the Mossad, “the neighbors on the hilltop,” are dismissive. They are tanned, dressed in silk, enjoying the sea view from the window, their headquarters always carrying “the scent of duty free.” When they speak to the narrator it is with condescension. He not only does society’s dirty work but theirs, too. Haim sums up the difference between the two organizations: “With them there are always satellites and costumes and European scenery. You could kill one hundred terrorists in the Kasbah and no one would notice… People pay money to see a matador kill a poor bull; they write books about it, dress him up with flowers, but no one buys a ticket to a slaughterhouse.”
Finally, at the very heart of the book, is the matter of masculine love, for fathers and sons and occasionally for women. Sarid, 47, who like the protagonist likely grew up with an absent father, has the plot hinge on the agent’s allegiance to the father figure in the Shin Bet and the Gazan poet. To reveal more of the dynamic would be to cut too deeply into the plot. But perhaps it suffices to say that when the agent is forced to see a psychologist, and he tells him about a recurring dream in which his throat is slit near a fountain on the Temple Mount, the man “smiles for the first time, is unable to stop the smile, as though he’d encountered the elephant man of psychology. ‘That is where the binding of Isaac took place, exactly there,’ he whispered in wonder, and he leaned back contentedly as though he’d just finished having sex.”
