Shimoni's Lover

by Jenifer Levin

In post-war Israel, the Kol family strive to regain the ability to love as they struggle with devastation and loss, and with finding the meaning to their hates, fears, and passions

Genres: Novels

378 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Jenifer Levin is known for her novels Water Dancer (nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award), Snow, Shimoni’s Lover, The Sea of Light (nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in Fiction), and her short story collection Love and Death, & Other Disasters. Her essays and short fiction are widely anthologized. She has also contributed feature articles to the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, among others. One of the first openly gay authors to be published in the mainstream press, The Washington Post named her part of the “lesbian literati”.

Levin graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in Comparative Literature, subsequently studying Medical Anthropology and South Asian history. She traveled widely in Europe and Southeast Asia, lived and worked in Israel, and studied Tibetan Buddhism for 10 years. A former competitive swimmer, she has coached women’s running and weight-training and completed several marathons.

Levin has two sons whom she adopted as toddlers from Cambodia. Her essays about Cambodia—a country devastated by war, poverty, and genocide—before and after the intervention of the United Nations, and her experiences adopting and raising special needs children, have appeared in several anthologies.

She and her family live in New York City.

Reviews

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was originally published in print media in 1987 and has been re-issued in 2013 as an ebook via Untreed Reads which gave me an opportunity to download and re-read it. I first read it in the mid-nineties after several visits to Israel. At that time I was studying ancient religious history of Israel and went back five times during a relatively peaceful time in Israel's existence. I saw nothing of the lives depicted in this book, however, except perhaps for echoes during my visits to various kibbutzim which have changed dramatically since the time of this book's story. It's rich with slices of family and kibbutz life from a bygone era in the 1970's.

Israel is often painted in our American media and imaginations as a monolithic entity; a place of pilgrimage; a place of ethical travesty; a Western government in an Eastern world; an occupying force; a State to embrace or deny: good! bad! beautiful! ugly! Few views on Israel are less than passionate.

But this book is not about a single entity called Israel. It is about individuals and their internal dealings. It is about secular Jews, Israeli born who did not create Israel but who feel ambiguous, nonintellectual loyalty as much to the state, as to their family and people. They were born and raised on a kibbutz and are dealing with their ancestral legacy of war. Their focus is survival, of individuals and of their people: "To kill instead of being killed is to save your people from extinction." All that killing and being killed gives rise to an unnamed ghost, PTSD, which haunts all relationships and invades intimacy at its core.

When the book opens, Shimoni the heroic eldest brother of four Kol sons has died in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Shimoni's family is dealing with the loss of their iconic heroic son, piled on top of so many other losses.

I only know the book's place in time from the book description. Via the wonders of ebook technology, I actually searched "Yom Kippur" and did not find it. Within the narration and internal dialogue of the characters, the war is referred only as "the war" and isn't it true that it takes us time to look backwards and name our major historic events?

The title, Shimoni's Lover, refers to more than just the mysterious Miriam Sagrossa. Another kind of lover--Lucero--Shimoni's comerade in arms, survived the war in body but not in spirit. Says Lucero of his wartime relationship with Shimoni: "Do you know that after awhile we breathed together? As one man? Our bodies were synchronized, there in hell. We became one. Like lovers." But Shimoni's Lover refers to more than just those two people who were closest to Shimoni immediately before his death. I believe the Lover also represents family, kibbutz and ultimately a People; the expression of heroic but also selfish love that sacrifices its life, for better and worse.

Often mentioned, are the rifts between Jews in Israel. Nadav, who is the most emotionally open of the Kol brothers says to Michael, the youngest. who aspires to be the next hero: "Do you ever think that maybe, just maybe, there will someday be a stop to all the wars? And that then, maybe--well, what do I know really?--but maybe then we'll have to sit down with each other, all the Jews, the religious, the socialists, the Moroccans and Americans and Europeans who came here to be a part of a Jewish state, and we'll finally have to make peace among ourselves? So, who will there be to help us make such a peace then? Who, when we're all trained not for peace but for war?"

Not only do those rifts exist between Jews, they exist within the very heritage of the Kol family, half-descended from Moroccan Jews-- giving one son, Rafi, a look that makes him easily mistaken for Arab. Rafi's physical appearance, his body and the fact that he is gay and intensely averse to being a soldier, make him feel like an outsider among his own people; an exile among returned exiles, who dreams of his escape to America.

I have mentioned the four sons of the Kol family but not the women who are interlinked with Kol family through love and marriage; such as Miriam, Shimoni's surviving unmarried lover, who is completely sick of losing men to war, hates the men for their deaths. And Jolie, an American Jew who marries Rafi to find a place in Israel, while Rafi marries Jolie to find a place in America. There is just too much intense, complex dysfunctional beauty in character studies and evolving relationships to unpack in this review!

My only issues with the book are the occasional interludes of vagueness that do not connect the narrative or make it more cohesive. I got a little stuck in the middle, but the gems of reflection were worthy of continuing toward the end. After the climactic dramatic event, the concluding family scenes feel a bit ponderous but the final chapter is a satisfying ending which is also a beginning.

At the time of the Yom Kippur War, Israel was a very young state and even now remains malleable, in flux, unfinished. L'dor vador (from generation to generation) Israel's character and outcomes will change, just as do all countries and cultures. This book is an important, well-drawn document of historical fiction, a remembrance of things past.