The Drive

by Yair Assulin, Jessica Cohen (Translator)

הנסיעה שמתוארת בנסיעה היא כזו שכולנו מכירים וחלקנו אף נוטים לזלזל בה – נסיעה של חייל בשירות חובה אל הקב"ן. אלא שעד מהרה מתברר שזוהי גם נסיעה אל גבולות הנפש, אל מעמקיה של החברה הישראלית, ואולי אף אל האמת והגאולה. וכיוון שגיבור הספר הוא בן למשפחה דתית-לאומית, ש"השתמטות" מבחינתו היא רעיון בלתי נסבל – ומי שמלווה אותו לתחנה לבריאות הנפש הוא אביו המסור, שעצם המילים "בריאות הנפש" מעידות בעיניו על כישלון שאולי אין ממנו תקומה – הנסיעה הופכת למסע שנטען בעוד ועוד משמעויות, נסחף לסערות רגש מטלטלות, נקרע בין כמיהות רומנטיות ודתיות לבין דילמות משפחתיות ופוליטיות, ונע בין יאוש ופחד מוות ליופי עוצר נשימה.
הפרוזה של יאיר אסולין בשלה וחכמה להפליא: מצד אחד היא צלולה, ריאליסטית, חדה כתער, ומצד שני מעוררת השראה. הוא מצליח להכניס את הקורא הישר אל תוך עולמו של הגיבור, לדבר ממש מתוך פיו וליבו, לנטוע בקורא את התחושה שמדובר ביומן פרטי של חייל דתי המצוי במצוקה גדולה, ורק כשהקורא מגיע קצר נשימה אל סוף הספר הוא מבין שהטלטלה האישית שמתוארת בו, "העדות" שכביכול נמסרת בו, היא יצירה ספרותית מעמיקה, משוכללת ומרשימה.

Genres: Fiction, Israel, Middle East

135 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I have the greatest admiration for those who honorably serve in the military, I can absolutely understand how difficult—even impossible—it is for those who march to the beat of a different drummer and must subjugate ego to a regulated conformity.

The unnamed narrator of The Drive sums it up this way: “Military discipline was first of all…erasing yourself, your name, your moods, your emotions, your ability to feel things, your capacity to choose between love and hate, between faith and heresy, between truth and lies.”

Forced to put in his mandatory three-year service with the Israeli army, this young soldier reaches a breaking point—knowing he needs to serve if he expects any future life (work, marriage) but mentally unable to do so. The Drive refers to a drive he takes with his loving father to the MHO – Mental Health Organization – who will decide his future.

The difficulty I have in writing this review is that I viewed the narrator as narcissistic, childish and unpleasant—and I’m not entirely sure if the author intended him to be. If so, then he succeeded well. But from time to time, I suspected that Yair Assulin wanted us to sympathize with him. A reader can do both, of course, but in this instance, I found it a challenging task.

This narrator, right from the start, describes himself as a “picky eater” and appears to have parents who dote on him. Right from the start, we discover that “mommy” is making calls to the commander after he calls home, sobbing and miserable. Then we get this sentence: “Two soldiers told me there’d been a terrorist attack and he’d gone to a meeting called by the brigade commander. I have to honestly admit that I couldn’t have cared…”

Wowza! There is a lot of whining how he is “really unhappy here and can’t be here.” But he is not on the frontlines and—when he is asked to do mundane tasks like pick up trash—indicates that this kind of stuff is way beneath him. His insistence on taking sick time to go home translates to other soldiers being forced to give up their own leave.

So here’s my problem: at some point, I felt that Yair Assulin had to show his hand. What is this book about? Is it about the way that the army sucks the soul out of those who resist regimentation and the erasure of individuality? Or is it the opposite: a story of a young narcissist who selfishly refuses to go beyond the “I” to embrace the “we” (not unlike young people today who won’t wear masks even though it will save lives)? This is a well-written book but I think it does itself a disservice by not defining itself better.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I’ll be honest, I’m not finding it easy to review Yair Assulin’s short novella about a young conscript struggling with the burden of his National Service assignment. It’s certainly well written. It drips with authenticity, and does a very good job of conveying the unique sense of dread and mundane monotony that many draftees undoubtedly experience during their army time. There’s nothing quite like the blues of the night before returning to base. The book follows the unnamed soldier on a pre-dawn car trip with his father from home to a large central army base for his evaluation at the IDF’s mental health clinic. This is the culmination of a torturous series of events where the protagonist becomes increasingly at odds with his fellow soldiers and his commanders of various ranks, and just about everybody in his life for that matter. He’s at the end of his rope.

The journey is interspersed with numerous flashbacks of the recent past that has brought him to this point. We see his difficulty in conveying his feelings to the people in his life - his family, his girlfriend, and closest friends; and his inability as an intelligent eighteen year old to adapt to the major change in life that society expects of him as his duty to ‘the homeland’. He’s grown up knowing that this - military service - is exactly what would happen to him in that space in time between high school and the rest of his life.

So why so difficult to review? Because no matter how much I want to sympathise with him, and all my instincts would normally extend a lot of sympathy towards his exact predicament, that of an unwilling conscript; I just had a really hard time with him himself. He’s just not all that sympathetic. He has a quite unlikeable superiority complex, has disturbing fantasies of wanting to see his mother or his girlfriend worrying about his service, and is really quite whiny and petulant, generally, about his lot. In actual fact, compared to the many various alternatives, his posting in a small intelligence unit is really not all that bad. He is not really in harm’s way, has a pretty cushy job, and gets to go home on most weekends. [Contrastingly, most IDF combat soldiers typically get to go home maybe one weekend in three, or two if they’re lucky.]

As with my own experience, many conscripts can struggle with accepting the authority that will control almost every facet of their life for a period of usually three years. His experience really didn’t seem all that bad to me. But then I had to think back. Think back to boot camp and then combat training. Think back to all the rules and the bullshit and the lack of freedom that comes especially in the earlier phases of the service. And think back to all those kids - and that’s what they are, kids - who really just can’t handle the conformity of wearing a uniform, following orders, and respecting rank. To say nothing of carrying a weapon.

I’d been anticipating some sort of salvation, but again there was nothing. Again I’d have to get up the next morning with the same people, again I’d have to sit in that rotten war room, laminating and cutting, over and over again.

Yes. That’s the army. A lot of repetitive monotony. A lot of the time it sucks. But it’s not Passchendaele or Omaha Beach he’s suffering through. There’s no chance of him facing physical danger.

In one of his lowest moments, following a fruitless discussion with his commander - instigated by his mother’s urgent phone calls - this particular C.O. that he really despises sends another soldier (yet another one of the ‘hated’) to remove his weapon. It comes as a nadir of utter humiliation.

I don’t know what else she told him. I only know that after a while a soldier turned up, a guy I hated and who hated me, and he said that Eli had woken him up and told him to take away my weapon so I wouldn’t put a bullet through my head.

Army suicide happens, and our boy has certainly had those tendencies, fixating on throwing himself under a passing vehicle. Home on leave, he’s already verbally assaulted his best friend for his understandable refusal to break his hand in a car door - so as to get a lengthy medical exemption.

There’s an unfortunate cultural stigma in Israel (or certainly used to be) for those discharged from service on mental health grounds, and the boy doesn’t want out. He just wants another base, another job. Can’t they just understand what he needs?

At the end of the drive, he arrives at the central base, for the 8am meeting with the Mental Health Officer. A gut-wrenchingly convincing assessment of Kafkaesque proportions ensues. The MHO and the soldier circle each other repetitiously, until -

“What did you say?” he asked with restrained anger.
“I said my blood will be on your hands. I said I can’t go back there. I just can’t. Why does it have to be so complicated?”

The outcome of that meeting may surprise some readers, and others not. But something didn’t quite ring true, despite all the promise that the author led us here with. I don’t know.

I’m glad that the author brings this somewhat taboo subject matter to wider attention, but disappointed that it wasn’t with a more sympathetic character. Yair Assulin’s scene-setting though is pitch perfect, from the paltry bookshelf in the C.O.’s office, to the lonely ice cream on a deserted base wall, and the excruciating denouement at the MHO... So I’ll certainly look forward to reading more of his fiction in translation

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Drive is the kind of story you want to slowly savor and simultaneously devour. The writing is beautiful. The story is raw and haunting.

I loved the mental health aspect. The struggle was palpable and visceral. It’s the kind of book you want to pick apart and analyze and re-read.

I recommend this one to anyone who appreciates great fiction.

I received an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

[Siv30 · Rating 3 out of 5]

בעיניי מדובר בנובלה יותר מאשר רומן פרוזאי.
בגוף ראשון, במהלך נסיעה לקב"ן מספר הדובר את קורותיו בצבא שהובילו אותו עד הלום.

מסע העליה הרגל והווידוי של הדובר נמסרים לקורא בפשטות ולעיתים אף לוקים במונוטוניות חדגונית, אך יש בהם מהפכניות ואף חתרניות רעיונית בשל היותו של הדובר בן החברה הציונית דתית, שהתחנך ואף ניתן לאמר עבר אינדוקטרינציה של הבן והחיים האידיאלים: של ארץ ישראל השלמה, שירות בצבא ואת המדינה, נישואים עבודה. יצויין כי כל המסע והסיפור אינו מלווה בהשמצות של צה"ל או לחילופין השמצות הנוגעות לפעילות בשטחים דבר מרענן בנוף הספרים הישראלים המתייחסים לסוגיית הצבא.

בחברה שבה הרעיון של פטור מהצבא ועוד פטור מהסיבות הנפשיות מהווה רעיון עיוועווים הראוי להוקעה והקאה, הנסיעה לקב"ן מהווה נקודת מבחן והכרעה. לא רק לדובר אלא גם לאביו ואימו, לחבריו ולחברה בה גדל. לא בכדי מנסה אביו לפתור את הבעיה בדרכים לא דרכים תוך שהוא מנסה להשפיע על בנו להסתגל ולקבל את הדין. לא בכדי הדובר מסתיר מחבריו את התוצאות של אותה הנסיעה.

יש בנובלה הזו איזון מעניין בין הפרט לאופן שבו הפרט נתפס בחברה. והאכזבה שלי שבגללה נתתי לספר רק 3 כוכבים ולא 4, הוא סיום הספר שהיה מאוד מאכזב בעיניי.

[Yaara · Rating 2 out of 5]

חשבתי שזה יהיה סיפור על חייל שסובל מפוסט טראומה אבל... זה סיפור על ג'ובניק דתי נרקסיסט מפונק שאוהב לצטט פסוקים מהתנ"ך ולא יכול לסבול יותר, שימו לב "לניילן ולגזור ולאסוף בדלי סיגריות בגשם". וזה עוד זכה בפרס ספיר לספרות ביכורים. כנראה בזכות הפסוקים. נו שוין - לפחות הוא קצר.

[Erika Dreifus]

In the tradition of the short novel set within a brief time span—in this case, a drive to a psychiatric appointment and the visit that follows—we meet a young Israeli soldier who is seeking relief from the emotional suffering he's experiencing in his post. I'm not certain that, by the end, the novel is quite as "anti-militarist" as the publisher has made it out to be, but that's a more complicated topic that I can take on here. There's some helpful background provided in this Los Angeles Review of Books interview: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a.... Another translation by the essential Jessica Cohen.

[Michael Rieman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to preface my comments by acknowledging that I have not served in the American military forces, though as a young man during the Vietnam War I was a 1A and might have been drafted except for my status as a teacher. Indeed, the whole process at the induction center seemed harsh and arbitrary. That having been said, I still found Assulin's short novel to be little more than a complaint without sufficient justification to make me more sympathetic to the young man's obviously unhappy experience.
Like many young men his age, the narrator is self-involved. He wants to face the world on his own terms, without really having to consider either the needs of others or the demands of his society too closely. He has supportive, loving parents and family, good friends like Dror, and a girlfriend who seems very sensitive to his moods. He seems not to have considered that Israeli society does expect military service from its young people, or that he might try to work out the best form of that service for which he could apply. We know that he was transferred to a unit at an unspecified base, and that he hated being there, though his work seemed largely to be preparing and laminating various maps for other officers and soldiers. He goes into great detail about his feeling of "suffocating" there, and his attempts to receive sick leave which allows him to go home for a few days. His tearful manner has turned off the others on the base, who mock him as a "shirker." This just feeds his desperate desire to leave the base. His mother and father attempt to help him in different ways; his mother by contacting military personnel on his behalf, and his father by trying to make him understand that most others have endured military service before going on to lead productive lives. In fact, most Israelis do expect that one has served in the military, and a failure to do so may have negative social and professional consequences. This reasoning makes little impact on his psychological state, however. He considers committing suicide by jumping in front of passing cars outside the base, but in the end cannot bring himself to do this. A request to his friend Dror to slam a car door shut on his hand or his foot, thus rendering him disabled is rejected by his friend.
"The Drive" itself describes a road trip by the narrator and his father to seek help at an army mental health facility which will hopefully solve his problems. His hopes sppesr o be dashed when the officer who interviews him informs the narrator that he does not have the authority to make a transfer, though he can suggest modifications of the narrator's responsibility. The only other option is a discharge from the army altogether, but that isn't what the young man wants either.
A sympathetic assistant at the facility offers to grant him a furlough which would require weekly visits for renewal, and this seems at first to be an appealing course of action. However, the novel ends more ambivalently as the narrator returns to the office, possibly to accept a discharge with all the possible consequences of that action.
Though the book has been considered a searing indictment of the military system, I could not help the feeling that it was little more than the complaint of a person who could not find his way within a system that did not cater to his personal needs. Indeed military life is not for everyone, and adjustment to it may be very difficult for those who have lived relatively sheltered lives, as had this narrator. He had, however, been transferred to an Intelligence unit in which he might have found an acceptable place. Yes, some of the officers were no doubt flawed men with an inflated sense of importance, but that could be true of any institution of society including the workplace.
Stylistically, the total focus on the narrator's state of mind and point of view reduces every other character to simply either an obstacle to the narrator or a sadly disappointing person. The "confessional" quality of the text allows the reader to form an opinion of this narrator, but it may not be the one he wants the reader to come away with.

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I joined a combat unit and did basic training for combat until they discovered I had asthma and transferred me to Intelligence, and that’s where everything went wrong, and I don’t really know how to explain what went wrong or how, but I just know that I can’t tolerate the situation there... My soul can’t tolerate it... It’s an interesting thing the way the soul edits our memories for us...”

The Drive is a short novel by the Sapir Prize and Israeli Ministry of Culture Prize winning author Yair Assulin. It tells the story of the anguish and suffocating military life of a young Israeli enlistee who has found his life to come to an impasse of boredom and meaninglessness in the machine of the military. This is more of a philosophically-driven plot that takes us on the crushing Yossarian-like journey that our protagonist is facing as he is both engaged with the military and enjoying his service to his country, but also lost in the cogs of its operation. The main question arises about whether or not the support of his parents and girlfriend are enough to push him through his service, and if a hail-Mary pass by looking for a diagnosis at the Military’s Mental Health Offices are enough to have him reassigned or completely discharged.

This book raises a lot of interesting questions about where the passions for love of country and enlistment cross over into the realities of the bureaucratic machine. I have had several friends in the US military – specifically those serving in the Navy and the Coast Guard – that have expressed this deep soul-crushing crisis while stuck on a boat in the middle of nowhere for months at a time. While I will never truly understand this experience, Assulin has written a meditation on the process of a breakdown with empathy and grace. Add the strict nationalism and required duty that must accompany being an Israeli soldier, and the dynamics are truly debilitating. A beautiful debut, and the second masterful and beautiful English translation I have read from Jessica Cohen.

[Caren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Israeli writer Yair Assulin was wise to portray his character's despair concisely in this powerful novel. A lengthier narrative would have lessened the intensity of the young soldier's mental breakdown as he desperately requests the military officials, ultimately the Mental Health Officers, to be transferred to another base. As military service is obligatory for all 18 year old Israelis, with few exemptions provided, Assulin's portrait of an unsympathetic, uncompromising, and often indifferent authority contradicts the illusion created about "patriotic" army service. The unnamed soldier teeters on the brink of a mental breakdown, fearful of the stigma that will follow him if he is relieved of his duty, yet so desperate he considers suicide.

To understand the depth of this young man's despair, one must understand that obligatory army service is looked at for future employment and educational opportunities and serves as the foundation of the patriotic citizen's responsibility in his/her future. For this reason, I suppose that Assulin's novel would have been considered controversial, a voice that expresses what probably is more prevalent than is openly acknowledged. The political implications of and reasons for the plea are not referred to by Assulin, as the soldier is not involved in combat or involved with the Palestinian population. Rather the soldier's desperation lies in the struggle to remain an individual when his every action is controlled by the authority.

Written in the first person, the narrative is supported by strong writing that allows the reader to identify intimately with the emotional distress of the character. His loss of self is further portrayed by the absence of a name by which to identify him, in contrast to even the most minor of characters. His father's love supports him throughout their "DRIVE" to the Mental Health evaluation and allows him to laugh when he finally says to his son, "You really are a bit of a narcissist."

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brutally honest account of a young man’s state of mind, struggle with, and terror of serving in the army and of death.
“ …even though I could see the actor’s moving and talking, and even though I understood what they were saying, none of it managed to break through to me, to that death sitting inside me like a stinking lump of s- - - , reeking like a rotting carcass— the death that must have positioned itself in me when I stood on the side of the road night after night, waiting for headlights to appear in the distance so I could jump…”.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the basic blocks of Israeli life is military service. Refusing to serve or being released for a mental illness are stigmas that make it far more difficult to find a job, or even someone to marry. What this means to one young soldier is explored in the short novel “The Drive” by Yair Assulin (New Vessel).
http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic...

[Yonit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very readable but felt more like a short story to me. I see why it took 9 years for this book to appear in English translation as it is quite specific to life in Israel and their army system.

[Steven Ridgely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great story.

[Leslie (updates on SG) · Rating 2 out of 5]

The prose is good, but the story didn't provide me additional insights into the military culture or mental health. One star off for the ending, which didn't work for me.

[Gaby Chapman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young Israeli recruit can't bear it.

[Joe Huennekens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Filled with real pain, but a deeply unpleasant reading experience

[Alicia York · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF it

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ending felt very much-needed, like feeling getting your lucky break. Very moving moment with his reciting quietly his prayers as a final silent call for help.