Characters: Retrospective, by A.B. Yehoshua

Of the three Israeli novelists with worldwide reputations -- David Grossman, Amos Oz, and A.B. Yehoshua -- Yehoshua is my favorite. His characters are psychologically complex and his plots engrossing, but that’s not the only reason I look forward to each of his novels. It seems to me that his Israeli characters are first human beings, and only after that Jewish and Israeli. The special situation of Israelis (and Jews) is not absent from his novels, but it is not their main subject. He grapples often with the question of how Israeli Jews relate to other cultures, other religions, other lives -- pagan Africans in Friendly Fire, Spanish Catholics in his latest book, Retrospective. When Israel was founded, some hoped that with their own land, Jews could become people like all the others and not a special case. It has not worked out that way, but Yehoshua writes as if it has.

Retrospective tells the story of Yair Moses, an elderly Israeli film director who has been invited to a retrospective of his films in Santiago de Compostela. With him is Ruth, the star of all of his films and his occasional mistress. The occasion, however, seems a little strange from the start. The only films to be shown are the director’s earliest, long forgotten efforts. They are dubbed into Spanish, so he cannot understand the dialogue he no longer remembers. Moreover, on the wall of his hotel room is a painting that echoes a scene he excised from the screenplay of one of these films: a lactating young woman nourishing an old man with milk from her breasts. (The painting exists; it is based on the legend of Caritas Romana, the story of a woman whose father was condemned to starve and is saved by his daughter’s milk. Though Yehoshua does not mention it, a similar scene appears on the last page of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath).

The screenwriter for those first four films was Ruth’s lover. He broke with both Ruth and Yair over their refusal to film this scene as he wrote it. As the two watch these four old films, and later visit the scenes where they were shot, it becomes clear that Yair has never been able to see Ruth as the woman she was then and has become. Instead, for him she is first and foremost a character. In fact, he often refers to her as “the character,” and in real life treats her as a child. He has never acknowledged, or even sensed, the truth of her experiences, her childhood as a poor immigrant and her resentment of his more privileged background, her relationship with the scriptwriter and even with the other actors in his films.

Retrospective is not the Hebrew title, which is Hesed Sefaradi (Spanish charity, or caritas), but it clearly refers not only to the film program, but to the act of revisiting and evaluating the past. The film sites have undergone metamorphoses. One was a village on the earlier border between Israel and Jordan. The cameraman incorporated the Jordanian part of the village by using a telephoto lens. But now that village is under Israeli control, though paradoxically the railway track central to the film is off limits and they need the services of a Palestinian helper to visit it. Another film showed an imaginary secret military installation in the desert. Now they find a real super-secret installation there, and their Bedouin guide is instantly detained by soldiers while the two Israelis are allowed to leave.

Ruth’s uneasy existence as both a character and a real woman reminded me of two other fictions about women (real ones in these cases) whose lives were distorted by their second role as characters in famous books. The first was the film Dreamchild, about the real Alice Liddell, model for Alice in Wonderland. In her old age she was invited to get an honorary degree from Columbia University, and traveled to New York to receive it. There she was besieged by eager crowds who wanted to see the Alice she never really was. In dream sequences she remembers both the picnic with Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) that inspired the famous book, and nightmarish sequences from the book itself. In the end, she forgives Dodgson for the way his book distorted her life, and also repents for her own coldness toward him. 

Shortly after seeing that film, I read Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar, about the woman who served as the model for the beloved in Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. Now an old woman, she has come to Weimar to ask Goethe’s help for one of her children. Since Werther was the most celebrated cult novel of its time, news that Lotte is in Weimar spreads fast and the hotel is surrounded by fanatic groupies. When Lotte finally meets the aged Goethe, she finds that he is obsessed with his status as Europe’s most famous writer, and scarcely resembles the young man she knew. He has, in short, become a character himself.

Alice and Lotte are fictional characters based on real women, but Ruth, of course, is entirely fictional. In some ways this allows Yehoshua to delve more deeply into the tensions between creator, model, and finished work, since the writer of Dreamchild (Dennis Potter), and Thomas Mann never show us the illusions of Dodgson or Goethe. When Yair learns what was behnd the mysteries of this strange retrospective, and (after making a mock confession to a sort of Benedictine guru) undertakes a bizarre repentance, the boundaries between reality and fiction-within-a-fiction dissolve even more.

The novel is not entirely successful. Watching imaginary films with their director can become a bit tiresome, and Yehoshua perhaps tells us more about those movies than we really wanted to know. The ending is enigmatic and I did not find it entirely successful. Still, I read the book eagerly and haven’t stopped thinking about it.

And it would make a great movie.