Posted on April 8, 2009 by Steve Pollak
I've heard wonderful things about Meir Shalev but I have not (yet) had time to read his novel, "A Pigeon and a Boy."
So, it was with some delight that I found a bit of his work posted recently on Words Without Borders, a wonderful resource for finding new literature in translation.
Shalev's piece, "The First Love," was translated by Stuart Schoffman. Here's a taste:
The Israeli-Arab conflict, I realized, isn't only about land or holy places. It's a dispute over something more difficult: love. Specifically, a father's love. And to make things even more complicated, this is not love that is expressed in the gift of a coat of many colors, or by a better blessing, but rather in the very worst act to be found in the book of Genesis—the binding of Isaac. It is written in the Bible: "Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love," and offer him as a burnt offering. It's a bit hard for the descendants of Ishmael to see the name Isaac attached to the words "your favorite son, whom you love."
Ishmael and Isaac themselves, by the way, were not rivals. Certainly not like Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. The real rivalry in the family was between the two mothers, Sarah and her maidservant Hagar. The fact that two separate religions would someday spring from Ishmael and Isaac was as yet unknown. But when God said "your favored one, whom you love" about Isaac—Ishmael and his mother having been banished from Abraham's house—the emotional basis for the problem that afflicts us to this day was set in place.
Head over to the Words Without Borders site to read the whole piece. It's worth it.