The Presidential Blog

In advance of novelist Evan Fallenberg’s November 11 lecture at Hampshire –  click here for more information — I recently read his novel Light Fell (2008). Fallenberg is American by birth and now lives and writes in Israel. Like me, he grew up in Cleveland, so I also look forward to swapping hometown stories.

As for Light Fell, the novel’s main character is one Joseph Licht. (Okay. Since “Licht” means “light” in German, it’s a little heavy-handed, but let’s let that pass.) To celebrate his fiftieth birthday Licht has invited all his adult children to a grandly elegant festive meal he has planned in the Tel Aviv apartment.  This will be a more than usually fraught occasion, since he has seen relatively little of his children since he left his wife and divorced her many years earlier.

There is a back story, of course, as we discover from the many flashbacks that bring us understanding of how Joseph and his family have reached this point. Central, from Joseph’s perspective, is his own “coming out” as a gay man, his realization that he could not continue in his marriage with Rebecca, loving as it had or seemed to have been, and be true to himself.

The language of self-realization is mine, not Joseph’s or Fallenberg’s. It may seem to suggest a selfishness, even a narcissism. If so, it is not Licht’s alone but one inherent in the individualist sensibility everywhere and always — the dominant sensibility in the modern world. As the novel shows in the lives of the individuals who populate Joseph’s story, everyone must make his or her own choices between one set of social norms or another. Some have personal desires that are not so easily accommodated within prevailing norms. And if sometimes the choice to strike out on one’s own seems cruel to those one leaves behind, sometimes the choice to adhere to norms is a means of expressing one’s individuality, however imperfectly. And sometimes the choice to conform is the cruelest one of all.

At the heart of the novel is an ecstatic love affair between the still-married Joseph and Yoel Rosenzweig, a brilliant young rabbi, also married. (They inhabit a world where “married” means, in the case of two men, to women; this is not twenty-first century Massachusetts.) I mean the word “ecstatic” in its most fundamental sense: as their eyes meet for the first time, they are each rapt, transported to a different plane.

While Licht at first may have had a more scholarly interest in meeting with Rosenzweig, almost at once an intense personal bond is established. Before long, their friendship deepens to include physical intimacy. This is a love, and love-making, that is ecstatic, transcendent, taboo-breaking. It does not follow any ready-made script. It does not conform to any pre-imagined scenario. The language Fallenberg employs is highly unusual. If it is reminiscent of anything, it would be the Biblical Song of Songs or medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetry celebrating beloveds, usually young men, poetry that is represented in Light Fell by excerpts from remarkable writers from al-Andalus.

Licht and Rosenzweig read some of these texts together. I can think of other lovers who come together over books, and in the tradition I know best, ruin comes to them all (Abelard and Eloise, Paolo and Francesca).

One might think that this might not be so in the modern world, but Fallenberg’s two lovers exist in worlds that are differentially modern. The plans were for both to leave their wives and build a life together, but the dream is shattered when only Licht can fulfill his end of the bargain. Indeed, he carries on even when he knows that Rosenzweig will not be joining him, for the rabbi has died.

Licht makes his way into life as a gay man. I use the term to denote a pattern, even a script. He lives in Tel Aviv. He meets the man with whom he will share his life, Pepe – wealthy, exuberant, highly-sexed. (So one gathers; he is “off-stage” except in flashbacks.) The life Licht shares with him is clearly different from any life he might have lived with Rosenzweig.

Or rather, from the life we imagine he might have led. It is, of course, a notorious fallacy to play the game of “what if” from within what is already fiction.

It is only much later that Licht learns more details about Rosenzweig’s death. It turns out not only that Rosenzweig committed suicide, but rather that the instrument of death … Well, I shall not play the spoiler. Let me only say, however, that Fallenberg is not shy about investing certain objects with symbolic, even allegorical power.

One of the remarkable aspects of this novel is the degree to which Fallenberg, or as I should more strictly say, the narrator, shares sympathy. Rebecca, Licht’s ex-wife, is someone whose pain Licht feels and honor. Consequently, we feel and honor it as well. It is she who is the care-taker of Licht’s father, yet she is no unbelievable saint either.

Licht’s children each have different stories, different paths back into different places in Licht’s life.

I have to register my own prejudice, though, and say that I have least sympathy for the charismatic rabbi, Rosenzweig, who not only fails to break free from the shackles of tradition but hubristically thinks that his sin is so enormous that he must kill himself.

I do not doubt there are such people. Alas, there are all too many suicides, still today, and not just among learned rabbis. I should not hate the sinner, but rather the sin. And, at the risk of reductiveness, the sin is homophobia masquerading as religious faith. But I am angry nonetheless.

The book, however, is a definite keeper. If you read it, I think you will enjoy it.