First published in 1929, and groundbreaking for its supple Hebrew style, David Fogel’s Married Life has as its protagonist Rudolf Gurdweill, a would-be writer who attends regular gatherings at a café with a circle of Jewish friends. At one such meeting he notices, and then approaches, the statuesque and evidently Gentile Baroness Thea von Tokow; they agree to marry before the evening is over. Dara Horn describes what happens next:

The baroness turns out to be . . . a dyed-in-the-wool sadist, a sexual predator who sleeps with a different man every week of their marriage, bites Gurdweill during their rare sexual unions, shreds Gurdweill’s manuscripts, and treats Gurdweill as her slave, ordering him to do her bidding, hitting him when he doesn’t instantly comply with her whims, and threatening to strangle him in his sleep. (Nor, we learn, is she particularly unique; her brother cheerfully tells Gurdweill about his hobby of strangling family pets.)

But Gurdweill, . . . is well beyond your average melancholy poet. He is a masochist, one who repeatedly burned himself and stuck himself with needles as a child without knowing why. As an adult, he relentlessly rationalizes Thea’s abuse in order to remain with her, because it is exactly her cruelty that makes him feel worthy, the crumbs of her attention becoming his great prize. (One often wishes that Gurdweill would look up Freud in the Viennese phonebook, but that would require exactly the agency that Gurdweill lacks.) It’s a match made in hell, and the reader’s hell is witnessing Gurdweill’s endless arguments with himself about why it’s all perfectly fine. . . .

If this were a contemporary American novel, it would be a story about a psychopath. But Fogel makes it painfully clear that the dynamic between Gurdweill and the baroness is not exceptional. Instead, it is mirrored in every experience this novel’s Jewish characters have. When Gurdweill and his friends visit an unfamiliar café, they are seated beside the “Aryan Nature Lovers Meeting, Neubau Branch” and overhear the group’s anti-Semitic speeches—but they find the atmosphere perversely appealing. . . . When they ride the city’s tram, a drunk harasses them with anti-Semitic slurs—but they barely respond, leaving Gurdweill feeling “ashamed, as if he had been the cause of the quarrel.” . . .

Vienna, we slowly realize, isn’t the backdrop for Gurdweill’s marriage. Gurdweill’s marriage is the backdrop for Vienna, for Austria, for Europe itself, full of Jews who will abase themselves without limit for any crumb of social acceptance, and full of non-Jews who gleefully know it.

Even if the agreement with Hamas to secure the release of some, and possibly all, of the remaining hostages—and the bodies of those no longer alive—is a prudent decision for Israel, it comes at a very high price: potentially leaving Hamas in control of Gaza and the release of vast numbers of Palestinian prisoners, many with blood on their hands. Nadav Shragai reminds us of the history of such agreements:

We cannot forget that the terrorists released in the Jibril deal during the summer of 1985 became the backbone of the first intifada, resulting in the murder of 165 Israelis. Approximately half of the terrorists released following the Oslo Accords joined Palestinian terror groups, with many participating in the second intifada that claimed 1,178 Israeli lives. Those freed in [exchange for Gilad Shalit in 2011] constructed Gaza, the world’s largest terror city, and brought about the October 7 massacre. We must ask ourselves: where will those released in the 2025 hostage deal lead us?

Taking these painful concessions into account Michael Oren argues that they might nonetheless be necessary:

From day one—October 7, 2023—Israel’s twin goals in Gaza were fundamentally irreconcilable. Israel could not, as its leaders pledged, simultaneously destroy Hamas and secure all of the hostages’ release. The terrorists who regarded the hostages as the key to their survival would hardly give them up for less than an Israeli commitment to end—and therefore lose—the war. Israelis, for their part, were torn between those who felt that they could not send their children to the army so long as hostages remained in captivity and those who held that, if Hamas wins, Israel will not have an army at all.

While 33 hostages will be released in the first stage, dozens—alive and dead—will remain in Gaza, prolonging their families’ suffering. The relatives of those killed by the Palestinian terrorists now going free will also be shattered. So, too, will the Israelis who still see soldiers dying in Gaza almost daily while Hamas rocket fire continues. What were all of Israel’s sacrifices for, they will ask. . . .

Perhaps this outcome was unavoidable from the beginning. Perhaps the deal is the only way of reconciling Israel’s mutually exclusive goals of annihilating Hamas and repatriating the hostages. Perhaps, despite Israel’s subsequent military triumph, this is the price for the failures of October 7.