By Maria Bregman
There is a moment of sublime, tragicomic misdirection at the heart of Eshkol Nevo’s novel Honeymoons. A wealthy American Jew, grieving his late wife, donates a small fortune to build a mikvah – a ritual purification bath – in a quiet Israeli town. The donation is an act of memory, a link in a sacred chain. The problem? The town’s mayor, a man whose ambitions are more carnal than canonical, erects it in a neighbourhood populated almost exclusively by Soviet immigrants who haven’t the faintest idea what it is. They see a pristine, taxpayer-funded swimming pool. And so, a space intended for spiritual cleansing becomes a theatre for the gloriously profane: for boozy parties, for illicit trysts, for the messy, unholy business of being alive.
This central metaphor is the key to unlocking Nevo’s project. His novel, which arrives garlanded with praise for its wit and warmth, is doing far more than recounting a series of love stories in the vein of a sunnier Woody Allen. It is, I believe, staging a quiet but profound rebellion. Honeymoons is a declaration that for a new generation of Israelis, the grand, foundational narratives of the nation – of state-building, of religious destiny, of political struggle – have begun to ring hollow. When the big answers fail, Nevo suggests, all that is left is the small, chaotic, and desperately urgent question of who you are going to love.
To grasp the seismic nature of this shift, one must place Nevo in his literary context. I remember reading Amos Oz’s masterpiece, A Tale of Love and Darkness, as an undergraduate, feeling the almost suffocating weight of history in every sentence. For Oz, and for his great contemporaries like A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, the personal was always, inexorably, political. Their characters were microcosms of the state, their private agonies tangled up in the eschatological drama of Zionism. They carried the kibbutz, the wars, the intractable sorrows of the Promised Land on their shoulders. Theirs was a literature of consequence. This is heavy stuff.
Nevo, the grandson of a prime minister, is writing from within that same legacy, but his response is to shrug it off with a wry smile. His characters are not carrying the nation; they are struggling to carry their own shopping. They are ‘lost souls’, as the book describes them, adrift not only in emigration but in their own homes, feeling they ‘live… not there’. The existential void they seek to fill has a uniquely Israeli shape, but their solution is universal. The national project gives way to the romantic prospect. Politics is replaced by passion.
A City of Unrighteousness
Consider the mayor, Avraham Danino, leader of the so-called ‘City of Righteousness’. As he awaits the bus of new Russian arrivals, his civic duty melts away into a florid, deeply undignified fantasy about a tragic, busty immigrant named Marina-Olga-Irina. He knows, in that small, shrivelled part of the soul reserved for self-awareness in politicians, that this is beneath him. A mayor should dream of ‘science-based industries, new investments and large-scale construction’, yet all he can conjure is the imagined pressure of her hand in his. The political leader is not a visionary; he’s just a lonely man hoping to get lucky.
This is not simple satire. It is a diagnosis. The official language of the state, of progress and purpose, has become a thin veneer over the throbbing, untameable desires of the individual. The same is true of religion. Nevo’s characters try to find solace in faith, but find the signal is weak. One man reflects that for years he clung to ‘“the Lord’s ways are inscrutable” and “everything is for the best” as if to a life raft, but in the last few weeks this grip had loosened’. The mikvah stands empty of its divine purpose, a monument to a faith that no longer provides adequate answers.
What fills this vacuum? A cacophony of human longing. Nevo’s ‘encyclopedia of love’ is defiantly unromantic. It is love as a clumsy, life-saving force. It’s the love of an old man for a young woman, of a grandmother for her grandson, of a filmmaker for his art, of a lost man for the birds of Costa Rica. It is carnal, inconvenient, sometimes destructive, and always brutally honest. It is, to borrow from the world of civic engineering, less a grand architectural blueprint for life and more like an emergency repair kit. It’s the duct tape you use to patch the soul when the official structures have failed.
Some will argue, of course, that this is simply the human condition writ large. They will say that a search for love in the face of existential dread is the stuff of Chekhov, not just of a small town near Tel Aviv, and that the novel’s charm lies in its universality.
It’s a plausible reading, but a lazy one.
To de-contextualise Nevo’s work is to strip it of its specific, potent power. The void his characters are trying to fill is not a generic modern ennui; it is a void left by the slow erosion of one of the twentieth century’s most potent national myths. The questions they ask – Where is home? What do we owe our ancestors? Where do we find meaning when God goes quiet? – reverberate with the distinct echo of Israeli history. They just happen to find the answers not in the Torah or the Knesset, but, as the novel puts it, ‘somewhere in the vicinity of love’.
Perhaps I am reading too much into a comedy that delights in poking a stick at sacred cows and celebrating the messy glory of sex. But the laughter in Honeymoons feels like the laughter of relief. It is the giddy freedom that comes from finally putting down a heavy burden. The burden of being a symbol, of living up to an ideology, of performing a historical role. Nevo’s characters are the first generation to be granted the permission to be, simply, themselves. Flawed, selfish, yearning, and ridiculous.
The novel’s final triumph is to consecrate this mess. The mikvah, built to impose a top-down, ancient form of purity, is ultimately sanctified by the imperfect lives that swarm within it. It was meant for God, but it is claimed by people. It turns out the holy water wasn’t holy enough, but the bootleg vodka, shared in secret between strangers learning to love each other, just might be. It is a tender, hilarious, and profoundly moving admission of defeat. And in that defeat, a new kind of victory is found.
