Fields of Exile. Nora Gold
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Praise for Nora Gold’s “Marrow”:
“Bravo!”
— Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature
Advance Praise for Fields of Exile:
“An engrossing read.… A revealing and searing portrayal of moral courage and commitment amidst hypocrisy and betrayal … seen through a cross-cultural looking-glass.”
— Irwin Cotler, Emeritus Professor of Law, McGill University
“Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile is a gripping tale. It is also a novel of ideas in the tradition of George Eliot, Doris Lessing, and Marge Piercy, but one that is filled with real characters, a literary sensibility, and a powerful example of the near-fatal consequences of anti-Israel aggression. The heroine Judith’s vulnerability, dreaminess, erotic imagination, and knowledge of Jewish traditions in both kitchen and yeshiva drew me close and kept me there, and I could not put this book down. I wanted to scream to her, though: ‘Danger Ahead! Proceed with Caution,’ but she could not hear me. I hope and pray that this novel’s readers do.”
— Phyllis Chesler, author of
The New Antisemitism and An American Bride in Kabul
“Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile is a fine novel: poignant, passionate, compelling, and funny, an adventure of the heart and mind. I don’t think anybody has nailed the way anti-Israel feeling gives the license for antisemitism as well as Gold has here, and you won’t find a more unflinching examination of the terrible ironies inherent in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or a more compelling portrait of the personal toll exacted from those who face these ironies with courage. This is an emotionally fraught, distinguished novel, often as humorous as it is harrowing.”
— Steve Stern, author of
The Frozen Rabbi and The Book of Mischief
“In Fields of Exile, Nora Gold succeeds fully in making her characters debate social and political themes as an expression of their personal complex contradictions. They are luminously alive. This novel is about men and women who are trying to understand and define their relations to each other, as well as their place in society. Wonderful reading.”
— Naïm Kattan, author of
Farewell Babylon and Reality and Theatre
“Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile restores one’s faith in the possibilities of the novel. It is truly a novel of ideas, a brave book that ventures into territory from which non-fiction has shied away and even obscured the truth. With a lyrical flair Nora Gold has delivered a novel that casts a light onto the ivory tower in ways that should unsettle the faculty lounge.”
— Thane Rosenbaum, author of
The Golems of Gotham and Second Hand Smoke
“‘My heart is in the East and I am in the far, far West.’ Seldom has anyone expressed so well as Nora Gold the yearning for Zion that remains within every fibre of one who has been torn away from a life of fulfillment in Israel and condemned unwillingly to return to the anti-Zionism/antisemitism of exile. A brave book that courageously takes on the ambivalences of Jewish life in the Diaspora — ambivalences that mirror those of the protagonist, torn between two very different lovers.
— Alice Shalvi, Israel Prize laureate
“The yearning for true peace and human compassion blooms in these fields of exile. Judith, the protagonist, much like Nora Gold, the author, searches relentlessly for ways to fix the flaws of our world. This is a novel written with an open heart and a loving hand, and with the hope that literature can somehow make amends. After crossing many fields of exile we, like Judith, shall finally find our way home.”
— Nava Semel, author of
And the Rat Laughed and Paper Bride
“A novel about a difficult subject — antisemitism in the university — written with passion and fervor.”
— Ann Birstein, author of
Summer Situations and The Rabbi on Forty-Seventh Street
FIELDS OF EXILE
a novel
Nora Gold
Dedication
For David, my best friend and true love
Exile
How difficult the word how many memories
of hatred and slavery
and because of it we have shed so many tears
exile
and yet, I’ll rejoice in the fields of exile …
— Leah Goldberg
— 1 —
She is sitting on the edge of her father’s bed, holding his hand. She thinks he’s dead, but she isn’t sure. He seems strangely still and lifeless; he can’t be dead, though, because he’s her father.
His hand is still warm and dry, as it always was. Like when he took her hand at the age of three, to lead her for the first time safely across the street. And when he touched her on the cheek, in a kind of wordless blessing, the day she left home for Israel.
Her father was not happy about her going to live there. Neither he nor her mother could understand why she would give up a safe and comfortable home to go “halfway across the world, and to a war zone, yet.” But they didn’t stand in her way. Now, though, ten years later, her father brought this up again. Just yesterday he said, “I know you want to return to Israel, Judith. And that’s fine, if that’s where you’ve chosen to make your life. But first you have to go back to school. You need a Master’s degree so you can stand on your own two feet.”
“Never mind, Daddy,” she said. “I’m fine.” Which is what she always said whenever he raised this topic.
But this time he didn’t accept her answer with his usual resigned silence. She was older now, he said: thirty-two, not twenty-two like when she first went to Israel, and here she was, still alone — gantz aleyn, he added in his native Yiddish. By which he meant she was unmarried, and with no prospect of marrying any time soon. She did have a boyfriend, and even one her father liked, but this wasn’t somebody she could imagine ever having as a husband. Firstly, because she planned to return to Israel, and as soon as possible, and he would never follow her there. And secondly, because he was conservative and right-wing, a tax lawyer who had little in common with her socialist ideals or her passionate temperament. But they had known each other since high school — they went out in grade eleven, and then again during her final year in university, for those last few months before she left for Israel. When nine months ago she came back to Toronto, Bobby seemed to always be around. They started going to movies together, and dinners, and in no time at all they fell back in step with each other and became a couple again. She was lost, disoriented, and depressed being back here, and he was comforting and dependable with his weekly Saturday night dates and daily phone calls and invitations. He also felt familiar, and maybe even familial, because he saw her much as her father did. As a wonderful, talented person who had wasted herself and her Bachelor of Social Work by moving to Israel for ten years, living hand-to-mouth in Jerusalem for the last nine of these, and before that working on a kibbutz where she did various odd jobs. Some of them very odd, like simultaneously sucking turkey sperm up one side of a two-pronged straw and turkey ovum up the other, to try and artificially unite them for fertilization. An unpleasant job because sometimes she sucked too hard and the foamy foul mixture came up into her mouth. They were right, Bobby and her father, that since her two social work jobs in Jerusalem were both only short-term contract positions, she hadn’t developed her career very far while in Israel. But still she doesn’t consider those years to be wasted time. She’d