Asaf Roth creates an Israeli Oedipus, and mentions how painful life was here even before October 7

In Assaf Roth’s second book, the author sketches the character of a modern tragic hero, an Israeli Oedipus, who does not kill his father, but sacrifices his brother on the altar of bereavement.

The protagonist of the book ‘Condolences to my mother’, Benjamin (Benji), goes to study in Paris right after the end of the “thirty” of his brother Robbie, who was killed during his regular military service. His escape to France is a journey of detachment and alienation from home, from the country, from rigid models of masculinity and Israeliness. From the European capital, where Benji tries to wake up and disappear into the French, he writes to the mother he left in Israel, the mother from whose terror he is trying to break away.

The brothers Benjamin and Reuven, Benji and Ruby, are products of contemporary Israel. Their parents, of Moroccan descent, were brave in the country and loyal to it: middle class in a satellite city of Tel Aviv, a white Toyota, visits to family and friends, paying taxes and paying by sacrificing the sons.

Reuven, the eldest son, goes through the course of Israeli manhood, passing its tests. He is brown, like a native saber whose growth is accompanied by the sun. As in a tribal initiation ceremony, he climbs a tall tree and jumps from it, to the cheers of the father and the protests of the mother. Remains in the regular army, marries a good woman and starts planning a family. He has his regular falafel, “the best in the country”, where he is known and his dish is prepared in his honor. Seven years after his birth, Binyamin ben Zakkonum was born. Everything is supposedly normal.

Only the white, gentle Benji with the golden curls, only he is not adjusted. gay
“After I told you I was gay, Robbie didn’t invite me in for a conversation. It was beyond his power, and I didn’t scold him for it. Somehow, this status of the big brother still had an attraction, and Robbie held onto it as if there was no doubt at all that he was entitled to it” (p. 87).

It is the father who understands that the son must stay away in order to survive

The book is a long letter in which the son reckons with his mother, whose presence within him ranges between attraction and repulsion, between concern and violence, in an ongoing symbiotic relationship:
“I would snuggle up to you, and ask to sit on your lap… I would curl up in your lap, and you would wrap me around, and we didn’t have to answer him at all. Until one time I got tangled up in your dress, and maybe I pulled some string, or chain, or ends of hair that escaped from my gathered hair, and I hurt Go, and you shouted and breathed at me: “Benji, really, you’re not a baby anymore. You’re heavy to me, how long will you climb on me like this?” and you looked at the other guests apologetically, but you still continued to embrace me, as if your face and arms belonged to each other. Different bodies. I remember how the stinging insult burned my skin, and how I promised myself at that moment that I would never come to you again. And yet I stayed in the embrace” (p. 37).

The relationship of the son to his mother is stretched between the essence of life and the essence of death, between Eros and Tantus. The erotica threatens to marry the son, who rummages through the mother’s underwear and steals the album of her youth in which her soft femininity is described with her golden hair. On the other side, he depicts her pursed lips with the cheeks falling around, which gives her a canine appearance, holding a knife with clenched hands and consuming violence over chopping vegetables.

The son’s reckoning with the mother is stark: for preferring the eldest son, for banishing him from her lap, and most of all for not accepting his sexuality, his flawed masculinity, his gentleness, the things that largely make him who he is. “More than once and twice I have seen you shed tears over the fact that I am gay. Tears of mourning over the image of the son you had, and that I will never be – a son who faded away and was lost. I am left as a condolence award” (p. 36).

It is precisely the father who contains, accepts, flows with the other sexuality and with moving away to France. He travels with his son to Paris, and teaches him to manage in it: “Dad drew with his pedantic precision the various metro lines – each one in the appropriate color, with a fine pen, and with sharp lines” (p. 52). The father outlines the way, as if he understands that the son must distance himself from the family and Israeli tyranny in order to survive.

The son’s account with the mother is poignant: “More than once and twice I have seen you shed tears over the fact that I am gay. Tears of grief over the image of the son you had, a son who faded away and was lost. I am left as a condolence award.”

In France, the son looks for his mother’s Moroccan Frenchness, the one with the speckled glasses and the French-spiced language. “Dialana” a Moroccan guy tells him, “ours”, as if Benji could really go back to being Moroccan or French.

The wandering Jew returns from his permanent home to exile

Assaf Roth represents a new generation of writers of Eastern origin, one who grew up in an upper middle class, accepts being Israeli as a matter of course, does not carry with him the burden of migrations and ropes of immigration and does not apologize. He is here like everyone else, bringing the story of his Israeli family.

Just like Naama Dei in her book ‘Vapateum Boker’, you will not find here the pain of immigration and assimilation in the “Ers-Poetika” style. To a large extent, these writers tell the story of the upper middle class in the Mizrahi that Prof. Nissim Mizrahi studies, a class that feels a sense of belonging to Israel and is committed to it.

The story that Roth tells is the story of the restless wandering Jew, who comes to Israel with the desire to build a permanent home, but the price is too heavy. The story of the migration from Israel back to the foreignness of the diaspora, to the foreign language that tries to resemble the local one, but always betrays the foreignness of the Israeli, the Jew. The mother who ties her son to the knot, the father who sends and runs him out. A normal Israeli family.

The book was written before October 7. It is strange to read books that were written the day before, because to us in the terrible present it seems that the whole world has turned upside down on us, that we are living a terrible reality the likes of which we did not know. The book confronts a painful truth: all the elements were here before, even before the Hamas attack. The prices of life here, binding the boys and bereavement, running away and staying.