Snapshots (review)

Louis Kahn's much-cited comment that "architecture is a reaching out for the truth" could very well serve as the epigram for Michal Govrin's novel, Snapshots. Published in Israel in 2002 under the title, Hevzekim—flashes—the novel was awarded the AKUM Prize for Literature. Barbara Harshav's eminently literary and elegant translation was brought out by Riverhead Books in 2007. Structured as a journal, richly layered with poetic language, photos, and sketches, Snapshots is a meditation on history, home, war, built and natural space, and the eternal return of loss.

As in Govrin's 1995 novel, The Name, a ritual of time frames the plot. In the previous book, it is the counting of the 50 days of the Omer. In Snapshots, it is the year of mourning, the year of kaddish for Ilana Tsuriel's father. Tsuriel is a world-renowned architect who left Israel and Zionism behind as a young woman. She accepts a UNESCO commission to design a peace monument in Jerusalem and calls the project the Settlement of Huts and Mount Sabbatical. The Talmud's discussion of the impermanence of built space (the huts erected on the holiday of Sukkot) and the relinquishment of property rights during the seven-year Sabbatical cycle (when traditionally land is left fallow), become for her construction models of peace. Traditional Jewish sources show her a way back to the land and to the father she once rejected.

Personal stories also abound in this book, which wrestles with imposing notions of history and home. Alain, Ilana's husband, is a historian of the Holocaust. His life's work, one long kaddish to the unnamed dead, is an antiphonal response to her post-nationalist vision. Sayyid, Ilana's lover, is a Palestinian theater director from Ramallah and Amsterdam with whom she is creating the performance segment of her peace monument. And flowing through Ilana's dramas: the archetypal paternity quest. She addresses her recently deceased father as she works, spends time with her children, travels, even as she makes love. She is talking back to, working through, his Zionism. She remembers how he would overlay ancient texts on contemporary landscapes, showing off the thread of time.

Space—an architect's domain—is applied brilliantly by Govrin, through Tsuriel, not only to a particular location and edifice, but to the notion of land in general and possession in particular. Her anachronistic gender splitting, whereby a lack of possessiveness, a kind of surrendering, is seen as feminine, whereas territoriality is conceived of as masculine, is redeemed when she extends this conception of proprietorship to the body as well. Ilana has numerous lovers and does not express a commonplace possessiveness or jealousy when she recognizes that Sayyid is also bedding others.

Over the year of mourning, Ilana becomes uneasy with her rejection of her father's ideals and his belief in the need for a Jewish homeland. She is haunted by her abandonment of him in his old age. Agreeing to return to work and build in Jerusalem may very well be her guilt offering. And she does it her way by working closely with Sayyid and his theater troop, with an office of Jerusalem architects staffed by Jews and Arabs.

In order to complete the project, and against her husband's wishes, Ilana travels to Jerusalem with her two young sons. It is 1991 and Iraq has invaded Kuwait; war is on the horizon. Once she is there, the mounting political tensions cause UNESCO to put the peace project on hold. Sayyid's decision to withdraw his theater troop's participation is the death knell for their romantic relationship, even as they desperately seek each other out sexually.

Nightly, Israel comes under missile attack from Iraq. Ilana and her eldest son fasten gas masks over their faces. Her youngest crawls into a gas-resistant tent. The neighbors in her low income building become one family. She emerges chastened by this ordeal by fire. And despite, or because of, the existential threat, Ilana experiences Israel, almost against her will, in her...