Pigeons have to be trained (Sara)

Hello Robbie and all you readers out there,

Before I start, I want to issue a formal invitation to our silent readers: do let us know what you thought about the book! Fill up our virtual pigeon loft with your missives!

And now back to the questions at hand:

I am still struggling with the image of the homing pigeon as in some way representing the larger Jewish story. I like your reading of the homing pigeon as being ahistorical, connected to physical or even racial memory. In this reading, we long for the Land of Israel because it’s in our blood, not because of persecution or even ideology.

That said, pigeons also have to be trained—and we are certainly trained in the Diaspora to long for Israel! And as various characters say several times, you have to love your home, or else you won’t go back…how many Israelis leave Israel? Or Diaspora Jews who cannot feel at home in Israel? I find the easy metaphor of Jewish soul as homing pigeon to be a bit simplistic, or maybe outdated.

Perhaps this is a key to understanding the strange “Where are they now?” section that you mentioned and that Helopait also mentioned in a talkback. While the main story is told within the frame of myth in Shalev’s lyrical language, the new first person narrator of the epilogue minimizes, even discredits Yair and his story by telling us what really happened. Although I was confused as to the narrator’s identity, I was moved by the very last paragraphs of the novel, where the old kibbutznik says that “even the pigeons don’t visit anymore.” We no longer live in a time where people feel this homing instinct; we no longer live in the mythical time of homiyah.

In the formal structure of the narrative, the pigeons also play a somewhat implausible historical part. I remember the scenes where the Boy and Girl both travel around the countryside in the early wartime days, leaving pigeons in secure locations to be sent as messengers. Was that part historically accurate: were pigeons really used as messengers during wartime? It seems that even at the time, the pigeons were seen as anachronistic, archaic, laughed at by the soldiers—although the Boy’s final dramatic action does prove their ultimate utility.

And onto some things not about pigeons…

I wanted to bring up one of the most fascinating and elusive characters in the novel, the Girl/Raya/Yair’s mother. We see her through the eyes of the men who love her, for the most part—Yair narrates her story to her, occasionally calling out in direct address. The love story with the Boy is mostly told through his eyes, although the scene where she talks to the pigeon who brings the Boy’s final missive is breathtaking.

What struck me most when I reread the novel a second time is how much we see of her longing and desperation in the first few chapters of the book, long before we learn of her tragically shortened love. Indeed, it seems that her whole adult life was spent mourning her soulmate, and that she was never truly able to connect with Yaakov/“Yordad,” despite his obvious devotion. How else are we to read the scene of frustration, early on, where she gorges herself on figs on Yom Kippur and then shatters the buses’ windows? It seems that by building his house, Yair is trying to prevent himself from feeling as desperate as he saw his mother to be.

How do you see the character of Raya functioning in the novel? Did she compel your imagination, as she did mine? What was she thinking about, all those years? And where did she get the money to give Yair?

Looking forward to your thoughts, Robbie, and to yours, dear readers!

kol tuv

Sara

On Pigeons and Longing: First Thoughts (Sara)

Dear Robbie:

Greetings from Boston! I wish I were sending this missive by pigeonagram, rather than over the internet. (Can pigeons make transatlantic voyages?) I’m excited to begin this conversation about Meir Shalev’s captivating novel, A Pigeon and a Boy.

[Warning: spoilers below!]

Home and its Hebrew homophone, homiyah or longing, are the main themes of this looping double narrative. Our first-person narrator, Yair, tells of his longing for stability and connection through his acquisition and renovation of a home of his own, away from his emotionally distant wife. Just like the pigeons sent by the Girl and Boy in the interlocking narrative, Yair wants a home where he will feel comfortable and thus want to return. In delectable prose, Shalev narrates the efforts to find a dwelling where the trees give the right sorts of fruit and the work of steadfast contractors can make a house strong.

Accompanying this is the tale of two pigeon handlers who fall in love during the days preceding Israeli Independence: the pigeons that pass the tokens of their doomed romance hide the key to Yair’s complicated family history. Just as the Boy manages to train homing pigeons to root in two places, so does Yair wrestle with the impulses to have multiple homes: to stay with his wife Liora, to make his home with his childhood companion Tirtzah—and perhaps all in an effort to claim fully his distant mother’s love.

Reading this book made me miss Jerusalem, my home for the past four years. The story opens with a landscape I know well: the Monastery of the Cross, the German Colony train tracks in Jerusalem. And even though I am now living in Boston, the idea that my Jewish soul is longing for Jerusalem—nefesh yehudi homiyah, as in our anthem—sticks with me, makes me feel guilty almost for not being to see my other home on the horizon. By fixing one of the novel’s narratives at the dawn of Statehood, Shalev imbues it with a singular sense of destiny and gravitas: the love stories are foundational myths. What does it mean, for those of us who live in the Diaspora, to have a home in which we do not live? Are we pigeons floundering without direction?

These grand questions were tempered a bit by some concerns that the novel raised around identity stereotypes. I felt that the native-born Israeli characters seem to have a sense of dignity lacking in the immigrants. The kind Dr. Laufer’s feminine plurals are ridiculed, Liora’s American panache and wealth make her materialistic and cold. I wanted to see myself in the novel, but I had trouble feeling represented (although the mention of Liora’s speaking English with Yordad was a nice humanizing touch).

Moreover, I found the descriptions of appearances to be somewhat simplistic: a reversal of the “tall/blonde” versus “short/dark” stereotypes. Nearly all the “dark” characters are sympathetic—Yair, Meshullam, Tirtzah, the Boy—while the “light” ones tend to be cold or distant—Liora, Benjamin, Raya. The one exception might be Yordad, and in general, I found the scenes with him to be some of the most moving in the book. I won’t forget the scene where he tells the intercom nurse that he’s been slowly dying for years, ever since Raya left him.

As a feminist, I also noted in myself a bit of discomfort with the gender roles of the novel. Yair narrates the story in direct address to his mother, perhaps as a tribute to her love and inscrutability. Indeed, his family relationships seem a bit cliched: longing for the love of his beautiful distant blonde mother, he replicates her unavailability in Liora’s cold clutches. Furthermore, Liora struck me as a singularly unpleasant character; the tragedy of her two miscarriages may have been intended to humanize her, but I read them through Yair’s frustrated eyes as an excuse to end intimacy. Yair’s female double, Tirtzah, has all the warmth that Liora lacks, and while their coupling is erotic, Yair never seems to treat her as a true partner or soulmate.

Which brings me to a main question: why did Yair bring Liora to his house, alienating Tirtzah and returning to old patterns? Was it an Oedipal attempt to woo back his mother’s double, or an inability to truly move forward with his new life? I saw his need to reunite with Liora as a true character failing—I’d love to hear how you read that scene.

Just as a pigeon meanders (although not a homing pigeon!), so do my observations, it seems…I’ll leave you with one question about Shalev’s tone: what do you make of Yair’s magical-realism encounter with the pigeon, toward the novel’s end? Why does he kill that poor pigeon? To follow his mother’s injunction against having pigeons in the house? To eradicate his past?

Eagerly awaiting your thoughts—

L’hitra’ot,

Sara

Building not Yearning – First Thoughts (Robbie)

Dear Sara

Greetings from Israel! I’m carefully wrapping this letter around the leg of a pigeon. But just in case, I’ll also send it through digital wings as well…

I, like you, found myself fixating on the symbolism of the homing pigeon. The girl (the future mother of Yair, as it turns out) points out that in Hebrew, calling the birds “Postal Pigeons” simply doesn’t have the in-built magic of a Homing Pigeon. In particular if we apply the Hebrew homiya – which itself means yearning. Though I fought with myself throughout, I could not stop myself from searching for the national component to Shalev’s analogy. It’s an approach that runs contrary to all we know about emotional engagement with art, but I just couldn’t help it!

As someone who now lives in Israel after having left the UK some 14 years ago, I find myself less concerned with the yearning and more with the building of the home. Indeed this is where Yair’s heart lies. He falls into being an ornithologists’ guide, but he fully commits to buying and building a home. On the personal level Yair’s home is a place of security, authenticity, and identity, as well as a tool of courtship with Tirtza. But on the national level Shalev raises even more striking issues.

Are the Jewish people to be likened to a homing pigeon? Is the Jewish People’s return to Israel the result of an indescribable indecipherable urge with which we were born? While evocative, it is also a history-denying image. Neither politics nor persecution brought us here, only an instinctual compass.

In this sense, I guess Yair’s brutal killing of the pigeon at the end of the book was less shocking. It was another attack on history and mythology. Now we have a home, perhaps we have no patience for anything that reminds us of our highly contingent past?

Having said that, I’m not sure I like many of Yair’s choices. He’s a fascinating central character with whom I empathise, but also occasionally despise. His inadequate response to Liora’s miscarriages, and his shocking betrayal of Tirtza at the end of the novel find me wishing I’d spent less time inside his head. He is a brave choice of protagonist.

As for the black-and-white characters, for myself I found myself enjoying the heroic Mizrachi-looking characters. Israelis of Jewish Arabic origin tend to be the lesser caste. Here they thrived in all their non-European passion and down-home wisdom.

Finally, I am still left breathless with admiration at Shalev’s ability to pour so much love and pain into such a concentration of events and dialogue. In one short memorable chapter he takes us on a dizzying journey from the heights of infatuation, marriage, disenchantment and ringing loss. Yair and Liora’s entire relationship is squeezed agonizingly into that one chapter – it’s a masterpiece of emotion and concision.

And finally an unanswerable question back to you: Why on earth did Shalev add on that ‘Where are they now?’ epilogue chapter? What is this, the end of Animal House?

Looking forward to hearing your responses and – most importantly – the responses and thoughts of everybody else who would like to join this conversation!

I wonder:

• Do others also see the homing pigeon as in some way symbolic of their relationship to Israel?
• What other aspects touched people?
• Did the historical passages enlighten or weigh them down?
• Are there other novels that have so exalted masturbation??

L’hishtameya

Robbie