6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Father and sons . . ., June 15, 2008
Half-way through this novel I almost gave up on it. It was hard to meet on its own terms, its plot turns a bit melodramatic, its tone almost operatic. An Israeli scholar, married with five young sons, becomes enamored of a charismatic rabbi, and after a four-month affair leaves his family. Taking place as it does within the context of religious beliefs that condemn what he has done, this turn of events creates a tidal wave of ramifications that grow and converge years later at a fiftieth birthday dinner, where long buried secrets and resentments are finally voiced. Father and sons are then left to mend a lifetime of disappointments and grievances.
The book represents on one level a kind of microcosm of points of view among Israelis about Israel - from a zealot founder of a settlement on the West Bank, to an ultra-Orthodox young couple, to reformed and secular Jews. On another level, it is a fierce domestic drama, rich with guilt, recriminations, petty cruelties, and other sorrows. Finally it is an extended meditation on the conflict between truth to oneself and what is owed to others. To what extent, the author wants us to ask, is being true to one's nature merely self-indulgent hedonism? The answer does not come easily, and when they get to the last page, readers of this novel will find the question not completely answered. There is more to the story to be told, and we are left with any number of clues about what lies in store for all of the characters we have come to know.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love story on surprising levels, like a carpet with many layers and threads., March 5, 2008
It takes place in Israel, and breaches daring new ground. The struggle between the lure and pull of Jewish sources and love of another soul are tangible and delicately depicted. Yes, one can have a love affair with study and meaning. The struggle of someone at the critical age of 50, and the meeting with his adults sons, who are people struggling to define themselves in light of their father's choices. The meeting between the father and his adults sons rings true with painful accuracy, the anger, the expections and the disappointments and surprises. Some amazing story telling takes place, because the characters each tell a story of the human condition, which is heart wrenching and real, and thus they get to know each other, and we do too. So the author is setting the scene, and we are invited to a table heaving with home made delicacies which we have been a participant in their creation,but the characters themselves do the story telling. We, as readers, learn about the power of storytelling as a tool for breaking down the isolation between human beings, generations, sexual preferences, and those with different beliefs and abilities. I loved the exposee of a woman with special needs being more developed in love than those who are "typical." Highly recommended. Bravo!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Everything that was expected of me that was no longer me", January 8, 2008
This unusual love story juxtaposes secular Israeli life with fundamental Judaism and in the process shows how relationships are born, live, and eventually die.In this beautifully realized novel one man is forced to feel his way through the perils and pitfalls of marriage and love when overnight his whole world is suddenly turned inside out.
In 1996, Joseph Licht, an accomplished academic, is giving long and careful consideration to planning a menu for his reunion, each item chosen for the effect it will have on his guests' emotions as much as on their palates. Twenty years ago he left his wife, Rebecca; their five sons, his father, Manfred, and the farm where he grew up, in affect abandoning his life of thirty years when he fell in love with Rabbi Yoel Rosenzwieg, a dynamic young teacher-scholar hailed by all as a Torah genius.
Joseph first meets Yoel at a lecture in Jerusalem and almost immediately this young and impressionable man becomes captivated by the Rabbi's low-simmering peacefulness. A surprisingly large man who looks more suited to a life of physical, outdoor labor than to the scholarly and spiritual pursuits that undoubtedly required endless hours of sedentary study, it only takes an instant for Joseph to realize that his life will be forever shaped by his encounter with this physically dynamic man.
They both have an inkling of what will happen between them, though neither of them can truly imagine the expereince. Even Joseph is shocked at the tingle and swell of arousal, his first inklings of a basic and complex instinct he never thought he had. Meeting for secretive trysts at an unoccupied apartment owned by Joel's in-laws, the affair becomes so heated that it frightens Joseph to feel so out of control and he steadily becomes Yoel's life force, filling whatever space he occupies with a pulsing energy that is spiritual and intellectual all at once.
Secretly Joseph rejoices at this new and rare friendship with a man whose company he can feel completely at ease with and yet challenges him intellectually, who is free to speak his mind about the joys and rigors of Orthodox Judaism in the same breath as the glories of Western Culture. This is a true friendship and a near perfect pairing of minds and interests, coupled with the sexual attraction and lust that is like a "fire raging within."
There is however, a darker side to this relationship: Haunted by centuries of rabbinical commentaries and moral tales, the weight of centuries of leaning and tradition are rolled heavily to the side, even as Joseph and Yoel know that their affair represents "Sodom and Gomorrah revisited" and the curse of Leviticus: "an ultimate unleashing of God's unremitting fury upon mankind."
When Joseph abruptly leaves his wife and children, in the days that follow he slides from nervous hopefulness to quiet panic, experiencing a churning dread in his stomach. But when Yoel suddenly commits suicide, Joseph not only grieves his loss but also wonders if he could have prevented it. Plummeting, changing and whirling, his life shattered, Joseph remains decimated by loniless and fear, terrified by a choice gone wrong, and strangled by silence and unmeasured time.
At the center of Light Fell is Joseph's troubled and complicated relationship with his five children who grow older harboring various animosities for their father.Joseph certainly has loved his boys in return, in different measures and hopes, and now at fifty he dreams of healing the wounds of the past through this reunion dinner. His sons, however, show a mixture of determination and unwillness, the anxiety about the reunion weekend with their father crowding their waking thoughts, and their reaction to their father's long ago affair a mixture of shock and solemnity.
Two other characters play a pivotal role in this tale: Joseph's current lover Pepe, a man of crude appetities and unsavory business practices, maddening and disarmingly charming at the same time who encourages Joseph to hold the reunion dinner; and Rebecca, Joseph's ex-wife who views her ex-husband as the coward, who had escaped his responsibility and run away as she had stayed to uphold the family.
Author Evan Fallenberg movies back and forth in time, showing us the setbacks and compromises that shaped Joseph's life after the affair with Yoel ended so precipitously. He also presents different points of view, telling Rebecca's story, then returning to Delia's and then onto the three eldest sons, Daniel Ethan and Noam. Finally at dinner how each party copes with this uncomfortable reunion is complicated by the inevitable incriminations, even as Joseph tries to explain his actions.
It is here that Fallenberg sets up his complicated dynamics of the secular verses the fundamental, and that Yoel and Joseph's love affair meant so many different things for different people. For his sons it once came to represent a perversion and a lusting, a destructable force, even as they fancifully cling to their father's supposition that they can return to the simpler times; for Pepe it is a titillating string of tales, full of youth and vigor, hot sex and adventure; and for Rebecca it is her immature husband's escape from reality and responsibility. Certainly for Joseph the affair after all these years remains the personification of true love, "two souls only, bound at every point of their being." Mike Leonard January 08.
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