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Two She-Bears
Cover of Two She-Bears
Two She-Bears
A Novel
One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists—the acclaimed author of A Pigeon and a Boy—gives us a story of village love and vengeance in the early days of British Palestine that is still being played out two generations later.
“In the year 1930 three farmers committed suicide here . . . but contrary to the chronicles of our committee and the conclusions of the British policeman, the people of the moshava knew that only two of the suicides had actually taken their own lives, whereas the third suicide had been murdered.” This is the contention of Ruta Tavori, a high school teacher and independent thinker in this small farming community who is writing seventy years later about that murder, about two charismatic men she loves and is trying to forgive—her grandfather and her husband—and about her son, whom she mourns and misses.
In a story rich with the grit, humor, and near-magical evocation of Israeli rural life for which Meir Shalev is beloved by readers, Ruta weaves a tale of friendship between men, and of love and betrayal, which carries us from British Palestine to present-day Israel, where forgiveness, atonement, and understanding can finally happen.
One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists—the acclaimed author of A Pigeon and a Boy—gives us a story of village love and vengeance in the early days of British Palestine that is still being played out two generations later.
“In the year 1930 three farmers committed suicide here . . . but contrary to the chronicles of our committee and the conclusions of the British policeman, the people of the moshava knew that only two of the suicides had actually taken their own lives, whereas the third suicide had been murdered.” This is the contention of Ruta Tavori, a high school teacher and independent thinker in this small farming community who is writing seventy years later about that murder, about two charismatic men she loves and is trying to forgive—her grandfather and her husband—and about her son, whom she mourns and misses.
In a story rich with the grit, humor, and near-magical evocation of Israeli rural life for which Meir Shalev is beloved by readers, Ruta weaves a tale of friendship between men, and of love and betrayal, which carries us from British Palestine to present-day Israel, where forgiveness, atonement, and understanding can finally happen.
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Excerpts-
  • From the book ONE
    The Telephone Call

    The cell phone rang. The tall, beefy guy peered at the screen and said to the woman across the table: “Gotta take this. Be right back.”

    He went outside, trying to suck in his potbelly. He wasn’t accustomed to it, and it kept surprising him: images in the mirror, pressure on his belt, the reaction of his partner as he moved atop her body.

    “Hello?”

    The familiar voice replied, “I counted nine rings. You made me wait.”

    “Sorry. I was in a restaurant and came outside.”

    “We have a problem.”

    “I hear you.”

    “I will explain it to you intelligently and carefully, and you will attempt to respond the same way.”

    “Okay.”

    “You remember the nature walk we took?”

    “This morning?”

    “What did I just say? Intelligently and carefully. No times, no dates, no hours.”

    “Sorry.”

    “It was a nice walk.”

    Silence.

    “You didn’t hear what I said? It was a nice walk.”

    “I heard you.”

    “You didn’t respond.”

    “You wanted intelligent and careful. Whaddya want?”

    “What kind of language is that? Say: ‘What sort of response?’ ”

    “Okay.”

    “ ‘Okay’ is not enough. Say what I said.”

    The young man contracted his belly and released it at once. “What sort of response?”

    “You could have said whether you agree or disagree with what I said.”

    “About what?”

    “About our nature walk.”

    “I agree. It was a very nice nature walk.”

    “You should have answered immediately. Twice you made me wait. First the ringing and now the response.”

    “Sorry.”

    “Don’t you ever make me wait.”

    “Okay.”

    “Do you remember where we relaxed at the end of the walk?”

    “Sure do. In the wadi under the big carob tree.”

    “What did I say? Intelligently and carefully. No times, no places, no names.”

    “I didn’t say names.”

    “You said ‘carob,’ no?”

    The young man gently made a fist with his right hand and studied it. It was wrapped in a white bandage, and only his fingertips protruded. His eyes, small and close together, shut for a moment and opened, as from pain that recurs when its origin is recalled.

    I visualize him in my mind. He stands outside the restaurant, considers his boots, lifts his left leg a little, rubs the shiny square boot tip on the right leg of his pants.

    And I hear his interlocutor continue: “If you had only said ‘carob’—-that’s one thing. Only ‘big’—-not so terrible. But ‘the big carob,’ noun and adjective and the definite article—-this is serving it up on a plate. Bon appétit, please eat. Not just any tree: a carob. Not just any carob, a big carob. And just not any big carob: the big carob in the wadi. This is a wording that limits the possibilities. This is why language was invented, so things will be clear. But for us, clear is very bad. Do you understand?”

    “Yes. I’m sorry.”

    “Enough apologizing. Just pay attention.”

    “Okay.”

    “Good. Now the point. The point is we forgot something there.”

    “The gas gizmo you made us tea...
About the Author-
  • One of Israel's most celebrated novelists, MEIR SHALEV was born in 1948 on Nahalal, Israel's first moshav. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and his honors include the National Jewish Book Award and Israel's Brenner Prize for A Pigeon and a Boy. He died in 2023.
    STUART SCHOFFMAN worked as a journalist at Time and as a screenwriter in Hollywood before moving to Israel in 1988.  He has written about Jewish and Israeli culture and politics for many publications, including The Jerusalem Report and the Jewish Review of Books.  His translations from Hebrew include Beginnings by Meir Shalev, Lion's Honey by David Grossman, and three novels by A.B. Yehoshua: Friendly Fire, The Retrospective, and The Extra.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    July 18, 2016
    A versatile writer of fiction, memoir, biblical studies, and children’s stories, Shalev (A Pigeon and a Boy) delivers a stunning, Faulknerian novel about a family deeply rooted to the land. The setting is a moshava, or Jewish settlement, originally established in British Palestine by the Baron de Rothschild, whose community is marked by a rugged clannishness: “A different kind of people live here and every stone has its side of darkness and side of light.” Referring to a biblical episode in which two she-bears emerge from the woods and kill 42 children, the title presages the acts of violent retribution to come. Heavy though it is, the book is leavened by a humane, comedic, and romantic spirit. A graduate student researching the moshava’s history of gender politics gets more than she bargained for when she interviews Ruta Tavori, whose family has been at the center of the moshava’s most notorious episodes. Ruta is an obliging subject, sharing the “terrible stories about the terrible things that were done by the terrible men I love” in her irreverent, tender, clear-sighted, and occasionally incensed voice. (Along with the interviews, the novel is comprised of Ruta’s own written accounts of the Tavoris.) Her tale begins with Grandpa Ze’ev, the one-eyed patriarch of the clan, who in 1930 moves to the moshava with a “rifle, a cow, a tree, and a woman,” all a man needed to start a life. A murderous domestic drama develops, the details of which Ruta divulges alongside an episode from her own life: the death of her six-year-old son. Exquisitely paced and effortlessly shifting in tone from jaunty to suspenseful to tragic, this morally complex novel leaves no stone unturned in excavating one family’s past.

  • Kirkus

    July 1, 2016
    A novel about love, desire, loss, and revenge in a small Israeli settlement.There's a story Ruta Tavori likes to tell about her family: soon after her grandfather Ze'ev, a young man, came from Galilee to start a new life in a newly settled moshava, his brother arrived in a wagon, bringing for him all the things one needs to start a life: a basalt stone to build a house, "a rifle, a cow, a tree, and a woman." "This is important," Ruta says. "You have no idea how many times I heard that story, and always in that order." The woman at the end of that list became Ze'ev's wife. The violence that soon takes place between them has far-reaching effects on their immediate family and the surrounding community for generations to come. For Ruta has had a tragedy of her own, and she soon tells it: 12 years ago, her 6-year-old son, on a hike with her husband, was bitten by a snake and died. Ruta tells these stories, which are connected, though it isn't clear yet how, in overlapping, intertwining chapters that move back and forth in time. She is a chatty, sometimes-sarcastic narrator, and she comments on the role of the storyteller as she goes along. As she says to the historian who has come to interview her, "we of all people know that over time only what is written becomes true, and what is spoken doesn't." Shalev (My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner, 2011, etc.), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and Israel's Brenner Prize, has concocted a layered, circuitous narrative, ample with emotion. The problem is the sculpting and the pacing of that emotion. The book seems to sag beneath its weight. So many fine details are included (inane chatter between Ruta and her historian, for example) that they begin to crowd out the larger--much larger--story. That means that the denouement feels rushed and the emotional resolution unearned. Shalev may be a force to be reckoned with, but his latest work still leaves something wanting. This knotty, labyrinthine tale fails to add up to more than its parts.

    COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Library Journal

    Starred review from August 1, 2016

    The tragic death of a beloved six-year-old son is the pivotal event of award-winning Israeli author Shalev's new novel, which, like his best-selling The Loves of Judith, opens in a 1930s farming community in what was then called British Palestine and ends in present-day Israel. Narrator Ruta Tavori, a strong, smart, and independent-minded woman who works as a secular teacher of the Hebrew Bible at a local high school, tells the story of her family to a researcher collecting local history. Ruta's husband, Eitan, was devastated by Neta's death as he feels personally responsible; they were on a "guys only" hiking trip in the desert when Neta suffered a deadly snakebite. This tragedy transforms Eitan into a mute who labors hard for 12 years and estranges himself from everyone. It takes another dramatic event to compel Eitan to return to Ruta and the reality of their life without Neta. VERDICT Shalev, an amazing storyteller, gives us a beautiful novel of life, love, and loss as Ruta's world becomes our own. An excellent choice for discussion groups and a delight to discover. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.]--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

    Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Booklist

    Starred review from August 1, 2016
    When Eitan and Netafather and sonset out into the hills near their mosheva in British Palestine, Eitan dismisses his wife, Ruta: Hikes for guys . . . . Girls not allowed. But when the last of these male-only ventures leaves Neta dead with a snake bite, Eitan retreats into stony silence, leaving no family voice except Ruta's. Shalev and his readers rely even more on this self-identified wild woman when she discovers a death-dealing creature worse than a viper: her inquiries reveal that her grandmother's secret loveridentified as a suicide by investigatorsactually died at the hands of her murderously jealous Grandpa Ze'ev, who threatened her grandmother so menacingly that she struck him, taking out an eye. It is indeed Ruta's two female eyes that penetrate the masculine mysteries surrounding Eitan's later vengeance and that recognize the last horrific evidence of Ze'ev's own distorted sense of justice. Seamlessly translated from the original Hebrew, this tale of love and bloodshed resonates with the primal passions of the biblical texts it invokes, while opening provocative new perspectives on modern questions about Israeli politics and gender identity. Darker than Shalev's earlier A Pigeon and a Boy (2007), but just as likely to attract acclaim.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

  • Library Journal

    November 1, 2017

    Shalev depicts Israeli rural life and history from the time of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922 to the present. (LJ 8/16)

    SEE ALSO: Shalev's My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner (2011), A Pigeon and a Boy (2007), Four Meals (2002), The Loves of Judith (1999), The Blue Mountain (1991)

    Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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