Reinforcement of Jewish and Israeli Stereotypes in The Lover by Rebecca Sacks

“We walk backwards into a future we cannot see, eyes on the past,” (p. 6) says Allison, the main character of the novel The Lover by Rebecca Bee Sacks. This is just one of the Talmudic ideas Allison, a Canadian woman who comes to Tel Aviv University to study Talmud, is interested in. But this might be Sacks’s voice telling the readers that the starting point of this story is its end—it is constructed toward a moral, and for me, as an Israeli reader, this moral is problematic, to say the least.

The story opens with pregnant Allison finding a wooden box under a bed while reorganizing the room for her baby. Unable to leave the box shut, she is revisiting the relationship she had with Eyal, an Israeli soldier eight years younger than her. At first glance, their relationship seems ideal—on weekdays she pined for him and wrote love letters while he was away on military duty, and on weekends they sexily reunited.

When a war breaks between Israel and Gaza (presumably Operation Protective Edge in 2014) and Eyal is sent to fight in the Strip, Allison is initiated into the Israeli experience and completes the metamorphoses into a “real” Israeli. But what does it mean to be an Israeli?

First of all, Israelis are warm, as the stereotype goes. “Warmth. I had never before experienced such warmth as I did in Israel… Even today, after all these years living here, I am struck by this difference when I go back to Canada to visit my parents. How cold it is there. Not just the weather, but the heart” (p. 45). Apparently, everyone is welcoming and loving in Israel, but this feeling of belonging comes with an ethical price. Allison has to tolerate Israeli racism, such as the one expressed by her Hebrew classmate, “’ My boyfriend says they only understand koakh.” Allison interprets, “The word she used could mean ‘strength’ or ‘power,’ but in this context, it clearly meant ‘force.’ The Arabs only understand force.” (p. 165). And not just racism, she will also have to tolerate Israeli indoctrination (“a frayed yellow Judenstern patch morphing into the angular blue star of the Israeli flag”), and Israeli axioms (“boys want war”).

She understands the dangers of the “manipulative quality of the narrative” and feels discomfort to hear her boyfriend’s mom say, “We need to bomb them, bomb Gaza to dust” (p. 134), but she accepts it for the sake of the nice warm feeling she gains. This exchange seems to be at risk when Allison meets Aisha—a student at Tel Aviv University and a Palestinian from Nazareth. Allison becomes close to Aisha by pretending she has the political views of her sister. By becoming friends with Aisha and visiting her in her family house in Nazareth, so Allison learns about the Palestinian narrative.

As an Israeli, I felt offended by the character of Allison. She fantasizes about a new guy while her boyfriend is in Gaza, condescends over her sister, and, worst of all, lies to Aisha about who she is without ever explaining or apologizing. But I was also uncomfortable with the way the Palestinians were represented. They, just like Israelis, hold various opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As a former student at Tel Aviv University myself, I can confidently say that Aisha seems very radical for a student there. What bothered me the most was Aisha’s accusing Israel of harvesting organs from “martyrs.” No further details. The narrator says she checked, and it was true. I also checked and found a controversial story at best and blood libel at worst that was published in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet in 2009. In placing a story in a realistic world, in Tel Aviv in 2014, the reader would presume the historical events are facts. Therefore, the insertion of this controversial story as if fact-checked is disturbing since it misrepresents the realistic world in which the plot takes place.

Furthermore, at this point in the novel, Allison has to make a choice. What is she going to do with the horrific information she just heard and the facts of the Palestinian narrative—which is troubling as it is without the harvesting organs anecdote. Is she going to renounce her new Israeli identity and join her sister on the progressive left? Is she going to disregard the Palestinian narrative and continue her love affair with a “Zionist” soldier? I must spoil this for the sake of my argument—well, Allison chooses the lovely Israeli warmth over what she perceives as the truth.

I disagree with the narrative of having to choose between two narratives, and I think literature should strive to bridge between points of view, but more than that—what does it say about this character, Allison, who is contrived in this novel as the representation of The Israeli? What could it say other than that Israelis are liars and racists? What is this story but recycling of Jewish stereotypes and reestablishing Israeli stereotypes?

The only complex character I found in this novel, and the one who seemed a true person rather than a literary construct making a point, is Eyal. The boyfriend came back from the war feeling guilt and regret, but no one wants to listen. He regains his moral values when he chooses to break up with Allison when he finds out how she treats Aisha.

Sacks’s debut novel City of a Thousand Gates was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction in 2022, and The Lover is not written unskillfully. Despite the novel’s engaging plot and enriching references to the Odyssey and the Talmud, I finished reading it feeling Israeliness was appropriated here for a pro-Palestinian agenda, to use the progressive jargon. Reading it today, a year after it was published, during which a new war broke in Gaze and still going on, I can’t help feeling that this book falls into the same depressing discourse of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by creating a world in which one must choose sides, a world in which Allison and Aisha cannot be friends because they don’t have the same political views. If we cannot imagine friendships and conciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, if we would not read about that, then how will it ever be made true?

• Sacks, Rebecca. The Lover: A Novel. Harper Collins, 2023.