By Lisa Katz
The English title of Israeli author Savyon Liebrecht’s latest work, The Bridesman, translated by Gilah Kahn-Hoffman, is a clever rendering of the Hebrew term shoshbeen, denoting the close friend or relative of either sex who accompanies bride and groom (one each) to the wedding canopy. The book, set within an Iranian Jewish family in Israel at the end of the 20th century, revolves around the relationship of two young people. It ends in a startling reveal of abuse, paradoxically conducted in the name of family values.
Like the widely translated novels of David Grossman and Amos Oz, The Bridesman sketches a particular Israeli community and its moral quandaries at a particular time. The story is narrated by the titular best man, Micha, now a 39-year-old former Israeli. The child of separated parents and newly separated from his own wife, he is a successful ghostwriter in Los Angeles. In the first half of the book, he recounts the history of his warm childhood relations in Israel with the 18-year-old orphan Adella, taken in by his unpleasantly close and manipulative extended family when he is nine. At that young age, he indeed served as best man at her wedding, while the term echoes with other possible meanings. In the second half of this short book, he travels to Israel at her invitation to meet after nearly a quarter of a century.
Adella had been taken in by Micha’s family to become the wife of his disabled uncle Moshe, twenty years older than she. The disability is never explained beyond a general physical weakness and slow speech; a caretaker is also needed for the aging father with whom he lives. Adella is considered an exploitable girl because she lacks family. She is described as physically unattractive, with poor eyesight and a slight limp. She has proved herself to be industrious at boarding school and excels at cooking, sewing, and cleaning. Later she will expand these qualities into clothing design and small business management, genuine successes still within the purview of a stereotyped view of women. She will give birth to a child, and become the mistress of her fate. She is not a victim.
The nerdy boy Micha is attracted to the intriguing teenager and she to him. He notices Adella’s close attention to her surroundings, her attempts to create beauty and what may be termed an aesthetic life. When he narrates what he learns from her, the text grows interesting, in Hebrew and in Kahn-Hoffmann’s English. For example, at her wedding:
I could still hear the sound of the gentle rustling and feel the sensation of the Muga silk, which according to Adella’s handwritten entry in the notebook is considered the most precious silk in the world, golden in color, with lifespan of fifty years, produced only in the Brahmputra Valley, from the fibers of the cocoon of the Muga silkworm larva. The length of each fiber is one kilometer or 3,281 feet and it weighs ninety grams or about three ounces and maybe at this very minute—I smiled to myself as I raced along beside my mother and felt my fingertips tingling with the memory of the texture—maybe at this exact moment Adella was bending over the table and sewing the collar of her wedding dress with the tiny bit of leftover silk which she had found by chance in the bargain bin at the fabric store, a little golden scrap born in the Brahmaputra Valley… (52)
At fifteen, Micha moves to the United States with his mother. At a reunion more than two decades later, he meets the new Adella, who has sharpened her looks and shortened her name to Adel. She has morphed into a successful sweater designer with stores in luxury hotels in Israel and Munich. Adel/Adella’s manipulative nature, the dark side of her ability to make silk purses of sow’s ears, now becomes clear. The consequences are made known to Micha and the book ends abruptly.
The Iranian/Persian/Israeli flavor of the family is expressed in descriptions of food, Farsi phrases, specific religious observances, and in its insistence on togetherness. Many such Jewish communities in Israel still practice customs they had in former homelands — in Moslem or Arab or European or Western hemisphere countries. These ties loosen over time, but it seems to me, an American Israeli, that interest in ethnicity — where were your parents born? your grandparents? — is very much alive. Israeli Jewish society is not monolithic and The Bridesman mirrors this.
Liebrecht herself was born in Munich to Polish Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Israel in 1950. Two previous novels and three books of her short stories are available in English, rendered by an array of veteran translators from Hebrew including Jeffrey M. Green, Marsha Pomerantz, and Sondra Silverston.
Liebrecht’s work, as it does here, often focuses on the painful flash points in life, when individual need clashes with tradition or political reality, and with another person’s needs. The title story in her best-known collection, Apples from the Desert (Feminist Press, 2000), translated by Barbara Harshav and made into a popular Israeli film a decade ago,is about a teenage girl from an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem. She runs off to live with a man on a secular kibbutz; her traditional mother is horrified yet quickly learns the advantages of her daughter’s choices. In “A Room on the Roof,” in the same collection, a Jewish woman faces the fraught reality of Israeli-Palestinian relations straight on, during a home renovation. Green’s lyrical translation of this story provides instructive reading especially now, during the October 7th Gaza War. Liebrecht provides a nuanced depiction of how both Palestinians and Israeli Jews are aware of the mutual exploitation that may underlie even their most ordinary interactions, and despite good will. Such relations, obviously personal and political, are perhaps not unlike those inside the fictional family in The Bridesman.
Liebrecht’s latest novel appears at the same time as a new Israeli film with a related plot. Ayelet Menahemi’s Seven Blessings deals with the consequences to a young girl given away to a childless relative to raise. Like The Bridesman, the story takes place in a similarly claustrophobic family in Israel, but in this case a Moroccan Jewish one. Both milieus place importance on the family bond, and reproduction: the continuance of the family line. In these Israeli stories, inequality in human relationships may mean that one side reaches a desired goal by making a calculated deal that would not be acceptable or would even be abhorrent to a different person.
In Seven Blessings, the terribly painful experience of the child removed from her mother is only directly confronted in the tumultuous gatherings after her wedding, when the harm done, despite good intentions, is finally recognized and acknowledged. In The Bridesman, Adella clearly understands that what seems an unattractive marriage to an older, disabled man can be used to her advantage; she develops herself without neglecting the caretaking responsibility to her husband. However, in her relations with Micha, she crosses a moral red line, in an action I will not reveal here. In Liebrecht’s novel, not only are there no consequences to her actions, they seem to have no effect on those involved. Thus the novel loses an opportunity to explore what it set out to tell.
Liebrecht, Savyon. The Bridesman. Translated from Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffman. Europa Editions, 2023.
Lisa Katz is a translator from Hebrew, most recently, of So Many Things Are Yours, a bilingual selection of poems by Admiel Kosman (Zephyr Press 2023). She has lived in Jerusalem since 1983.