Elinor, the protagonist and narrator of Gail Hareven’s newly translated novel, Lies: First Person, leads a quiet life in Jerusalem, keeping the memory of her unhappy childhood and neglectful parents at a safe distance. Her tranquility is shattered when of a male relative who brutally abused her sister resurfaces. Much of what makes the novel compelling, writes Adam Kirsch, is that the abuser, Aaron Gotthilf, is also a controversial writer:
If this story were being told by an American novelist, it might remain on the level of a psychological case study. But Hareven guides Lies, First Person onto the plane of allegory, by giving it a specifically Jewish symbolic dimension. Aaron Gotthilf, it turns out, is not just a villain in Elinor’s eyes. He is a figure of loathing in the broader Jewish community because of a book he wrote—the very book he was working on during that summer in the family hotel.
This book, Hitler, First Person, was a literary attempt to fathom the secret of Hitler’s evil by entering into his imaginative life—by using him as a narrator. Such an attempt brought down on Gotthilf a firestorm of criticism, and one Holocaust survivor even tried to throw acid in his face. When Elinor herself reads the book, she is left speechless with horror: the evil that Aaron tried to conjure in print seems all too consonant with the evil he did in real life.
More about: Arts & Culture, Forgiveness, Holocaust, Israeli literature, Jewish literature, Literature