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The Blue Mountain: A Novel

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Told with tenderness, humor, and just the right touch of fantasy, Shalev has fashioned a wonderful novel. The characters are vivid and imaginative. The descriptions of nature are enchanting. The story itself is a metaphor for the way in which the Zionist dream has played itself out among successive generations. Don't miss it!

The Eastern European emigrants to Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century assured that what would become known as the 'Second Aliyah' would bear a Yiddish accent, a socialist ethic, and a hard-nosed disdain for the religious Zionism of some fellow travelers. Meir Shalev provides us an angle on their experience that makes it difficult to reduce their exploits to those of secular saints and impossible not to love them for their deeply human foibles.

In Blue Mountain, Shalev has given us a great read, portraying the intersecting loves and hates of his semi-fictional village with an unflinching eye and a deeply sympathetic voice. Halkin's English translation comes off the page as anything but a translation, and so places this moving novel into the hands of a public many times broader than the original.

The narrator poses as the grandson of one of the original pioneers, bequeathed by his parents' early death into the legacy and kindness of two such oldsters. One is his grandfather, the other the village's hilariously didactic schoolteacher. Growing up as they grow old, 'Baruch's' narrative voice conveys to us his guardians' memory of the Second Aliyah even as we look in on that scene with considerably less innocence about the consequences of Jewish immigration to Palestine than his fictional villagers could have imagined.

With reason, Shalev's style is compared to Gabriel García Márquez' 'magical realism', though the flights of fancy in Blue Mountain are fewer than those in García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. They also owe more to the no-nonsense raw edges of the pioneers' gritty socialist experiment than to the porousness of metaphysical boundaries. Transplanted to their unpromising environs by events as much as by choices, these Jews from Russia and the East had little time for the cultural adjustments and incremental synchronization that easier times allow. They drained the swamps and hauled orchards out of dry land by means of certainties that, if they seem quaintly humorous in hindsight, get no apology from those who felt compelled by the tenuousness of survival to exercise them.

That is not to say they lacked affection for the Arab inhabitants of the land they cultivated, for these appear from time to time on the margins of village life as respectable passers-by. Rather, they simply had no time, nor could pausing to reflect upon the pogrom-punctuated Russia they had left behind accomplish much but distract them from the new thing to which they had put their hands.

Time, such as it was, existed in order to invent a better way to milk the cows, apply folk genetics to the citrus, and cultivate the large loyalties and enmities that flourish in small towns. Shalev narrates those times.

He speaks through Baruch, who should have been a farmer but instead earned millions by turning the family farm into a cemetery for the Second Aliyah's finite number of dead, those who arrived pale from New York and were buried for thousands, as well as those buried fresh and for free from the village's old folks home.

Shalev is a widely-read Israeli author of essays, novels, and children's books. To some, he is best-known for his compelling newspaper columns that, not surprisingly, argue that grace and sanity like those with which Baruch narrates the history of the Blue Mountain, ought to be cultivated in the hot zone of the Palestinian-Arab conflict. (See 'In the end, it is the violin that wins', [...])

'Uncle Baruch' finishes his tale only when a new generation, sprung from the union of Uri, the village's randiest returned exile, and Nehama, the daughter of the alarmable village cantor, returns to grow up on the land that their forebears had turned to green and to call him 'Uncle'. Perhaps Shalev would tell us that it is by such affectionately-termed traditioners that the story passes from one generation to its successor, so that it remains tell-able and well-told to those who will never drain swamps or walk with as much certainty as the Second Aliyah's 'Movement' found it necessary to do. Or perhaps he simply enjoyed telling the tale.

Blue Mountain is wonderful! A bit tough going at the beginning, but by mid-way you'll be glad you made the effort. Meir Shalev may turn out to be the best Israeli writer of his generation. His writing still lacks the depth and focus of an Allende or Hesse, but he's learning fast, and the richness and complexity of this tale are hard to match. After reading it on a friend's recommendation, I ended up giving four copies as gifts. A most enthusiastic "10!"

It helps to have some background knowledge of the history of the settlement of Jews in Israel in modern times to understand the nuances of The Blue Mountain. Much of the book is a critique of the pioneering ethos that settled the country.

The novel is set in a cooperative farming village in the Jezreel Valley, and there is no aspect of the pioneering venture that does not escape Shalev's scorn. For example, the motif of the swamps that were drained to create farmland in the Valley surfaces again and again. Toward the end of the novel, newspapers claim that there were never any real swamps in the Jezreel Valley; so one of Shalev's old pioneers recreates one and even hires "farmhands" from a nearby city to dress as old pioneers and drain it. Examples like this abound in The Blue Mountain.

Shalev is fond of discarding linear narrative in his novels. They loop around, going back over events and adding and changing our knowledge of events. It is less effective in this novel than in A Boy and a Pigeon, and Esau. Here Shalev gets bogged down in the process, and it hurts the flow of the novel.

That said, this novel is superb reading. Even in translation Shalev's deep knowledge and love of nature comes shining through. If the land of Israel is the real character of this novel, than Shalev does it justice.

This is the most popular book in Israel for many a year. It's like a combination of "Little Woman", "Little House on the Prairie" and "Exodus" that was written by some of the guys from "Mad Magazine". It is truly a work of art and the trans-lation by Hillel Halkin is spot on. This is not just about Kibutzim but also about those pioneers from Russia who hoped to build a 'new society' in Israel.

Like many of my ancestors who came to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the people in Shalev's village had brought a piece of the Shtetl with them. People wanted to lead their lives based on the rhythm of the seasons and to live by the 'sweat of their brow' and to eat only what they grew. But they also had the notion to build a utopian society based on 'everyone according to their needs'. All would work for the 'common good' but like in the Soviet Union, 'some got more goods than others no matter how common they were'.

The Kibutzniks found out that human nature abhors equality. No matter what the society, people look out for their own (nepotism) and try to destroy those who they consider a danger to themselves (stalinism). Not everyone who wants to work hard, likes to see their labor wasted by a 'dreamer' who sits around all day 'thinking great thoughts'. The loss of many of the second and third generation to the cities, shows that you can't remake people into something they don't want to be.

Zeb Kantrowitz

I read this in Hebrew and loved it. It is a great story that is well told in a non-conventional manner. I haven't read this in English but have read other translations by Halkin and he does a good job.

This is a lovely book, a pleasure to read and enjoy. Shalev is perhaps the finest of the current generation of Israeli authors, a natural storyteller with a deep knowledge of and love for Israel's language, land and people. I am trying to read everything of his that appears in English, and urge others to do the same.

The novel is a fictionalized series of vignettes based on early to mid-20th century pioneer life in Israel. Characters are of Eastern Europeans who migrated to Israel and came to found a farming village. The stories have the flavor of folktales with the characters represent personae of specific types rather than deeply drawn persons. The books incorporates historical events as they reflect in daily life of everymen or women in an agrarian Israeli Jewish society pre-independence.The Blue Mountain: A Novel

It may have been written a few years ago, but this book appears to be right up there in terms of how people who built up a new country behaved. I felt as if I was living right there with the early settlers.
Amazon lived up to its reputation of being the place to find items unobtainable elsewhere.

The Blue Mountain is a wonderful story full of characters that completely absorb you from beginning to end. Full of twists and surprises, this is a book you will think about long after its finished.