In the midst of gift giving, traveling, and the general chaos of the holidays, I always take time to catch up on my reading. This week’s selection, Sondra Silverston’s translation of Zeruya Shalev’s Pain, provides a unique view of the “out with the old, in with the new” attitude of the new year. A decade after suffering horrific injuries in a terrorist attack, Jerusalem school principal Iris has a surprising encounter with the first love who broke her heart years before; he is now an appropriately titled “pain specialist” at a local clinic. Should she shed her failing marriage and rekindle their relationship?
Recent reviews have noted how Pain offers an intriguing take on the Madame Bovary formula of the bored, unfulfilled wife. While reading, I was struck by a careful, textured perspective on its subject. In one sense, pain refers to the mental anguish of middle age, as Iris attempts to reclaim her youthful identity amid increasing alienation from her husband and children. Yet it also registers as physical suffering and political turmoil. Shalev makes it clear that Pain takes place in a city where bombings are part of everyday life, and where inclusion initiatives at Iris’s school are charged with urgency.
In the novel’s early pages, many of Iris’s concerns seem at once banal and understandable. She and her husband, Mickey, sleep in separate rooms, and work such long hours that their house is little more than a place to “rest a tired body.” She’s always been closer to her wild child son, Omer, and cannot relate to her daughter, Alma, who lives in Tel Aviv. Iris is also among the most respected school administrators in Jerusalem, well known for working miracles with the most difficult students. Yet this account of a hardworking woman staring down the barrel of a midlife crisis has dark undertones. Even as she contends with long-term health consequences, she remains haunted by former boyfriend Eitan, who abandoned her after she helped him recover from a parent’s death.
This memory of lost love, what might have been a minor plot point in another novel, becomes the connective tissue between Iris’s past and uncertain future. When I began reading Pain, all I knew was that its protagonist had survived a terrorist attack, and I wasn’t sure what to expect: Would it be a politicized account about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or a medical mystery about her illness? This domestic drama, subtly interweaving the bombing’s aftermath with familial tension, was a pleasant surprise. Its most sinister moments arise from the manipulative power charismatic men hold over the women in their lives. Though she insists that the “pain he caused her belongs to her former life,” Iris finds herself back in Eitan’s orbit with troubling results. He’s left a trail of divorces and angry children in his wake and grows increasingly resentful of her reluctance to give up her husband and family. Meanwhile, her daughter Alma has fallen under the spell of her own Svengali, a cultish figure named Boaz who controls her sexually and financially.
How do story arcs about emotionally abusive men and bombings belong together? In Silverston and Shalev’s capable hands, they are a perfect fit. Were it not for her ongoing medical treatment, Iris would never have been reunited with Eitan, and she may not have become so estranged from her young daughter in a haze of pain pills and physical therapy. By attempting to bring her daughter back into the fold, she is forced to come to terms with her former self: “Love has many faces, sometimes it’s cut off from life like a kite without a string. You know it’s gliding in the sky, but you have to let it go because you don’t want other things that are more important to you to fall.” Extramarital affairs are well-trodden literary territory, but I was impressed by how Pain made the old new.
Zeruya Shalev, Pain, trans. Sondra Silverston (New York: Other Press, 2019)
Photo Credit: Kranich17 via Pixabay.
