Do you remember when Blacks and Jews in America found common ground in the struggle against racial discrimination? To be honest, I don’t—I’m a bit too young for that. From what I’ve read though, it was a time of optimism and hope about the future. How did Martin Luther King, Jr., put it? “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Morality, it should be said, is a relative concept. And of course, the Rev. King was speaking a very long time ago…
Present-day Silicon Valley is the setting for The Wolf Hunt, the fourth novel by the Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Lilach Shuster, the central character, lives a contented life. A long-time transplant to the United States, “Leela”—as she is known by Americans discomfited by Hebrew’s guttural kaf— is married to Mikhael, a C-suite executive in a high-tech firm. Adam, their sixteen-year-old son, seems as well-adjusted as any teenager straddling two very different worlds can be; his default setting is monosyllabic introversion, but he does get his homework done and walks the dog.
So far so good? Not quite. Lilach works for a local drop-in facility for the elderly, organizing cultural activities for the clientele. Her colleagues like her, her work is valued. But once upon a time, in a country far away from here, she was someone else altogether. “If my doctoral supervisor could see it, he would definitely ask whether this was the glamorous job I’d move to America for,” Leela muses to herself. Life isn’t perfect, but it is ok. Until it is not.
Things start to fall apart after a racially motivated attack on the local Reform synagogue; a machete-wielding African American bursts into the Rosh HaShanah service, killing a congregant. The Shusters, like many Israeli expats, have an arms-length relationship with the local Jewish community. Despite this, they understand that an attack on one Jew, for being a Jew, is potentially an attack on all Jews. That aside, the social identity of the perp adds another layer of interpretation. This is America, after all. Race matters here, serving as synecdoche for all kinds of things, relevant and not.
The visceral shock of the moment translates into numbness; then, after a pause, a frantic scrabble for interpretation if not necessarily contextualization. The Shusters have guests visiting from Israel, in-laws with their teenage sons. In Lilach’s eyes, Adam’s diffidence stands out against his cousins’ unforced self-confidence. “This wouldn’t have happened in Israel,” one opines. Is this the confidence of a teenager or the confidence of an Israeli interpreting the world from a very specific place? It is hard to say. He is right though, in a sense. One doesn’t get this specific form of violence in Israel, I’d argue—even if many Israel Jews frame “nationalist” crimes as the local equivalent of antisemitism.
No surprise that collective responses to trauma tend to congregate towards the mean. The social instinct nudges us in line behind the loudest voices in the room—saying for us the things we want to say, and sometime things we aren’t quite sure we want to say out loud. The consequence of this, though, is that valid pockets of dissent or uncertainty are overwritten and ultimately lost. In the context of the Shuster family, it feels natural that they articulate their vulnerabilities through the perceived innocence of their son. Leela and Mikhael encourage Adam to join a local self-defense group, run by a fellow expat for the children of other Israeli transplants. Should Adam ever find himself under threat, the not-quite-spoken presumption is that he will learn something about how affronts to the self are dealt with in another place.
The racialized tension of the first few chapters of The Wolf Hunt is, however, but the backdrop to the pivot of the book. This does not manifest gradually; Lilach sets out the line of engagement in the very first paragraph. “My boy is named Adam Shuster. His eyes are the color of the sea in Tel Aviv. They say he killed Jamal. But that’s not true.”
Jamal is Adam’s classmate, an African American boy and, as we learn, from a markedly unprivileged background. At a class party, Jamal has a seizure, collapses, and dies. Racial presumptions massage the initial consensus. Drugs, probably. Sad—but perhaps not a surprise? But then, whispers begin to circulate. Might it be that the Shuster boy had something to do with Jamal’s death…
A psychologist by training, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s fiction output—four novels including Waking Lions and The Liar (English translations published in 2015 and 2019, respectively)—is rich evidence of her prescience in first identifying then concatenating (Israeli) social dilemmas into personal morality plays. Specifically, she is pretty good at sifting out the contradictions that are all-too-often concealed by blanket definitions of the collective self that we call mainstream Israel. Expatriate Israeli life is depicted with a vivid realness, capturing the in-betweenness of a self-valorizing diaspora who nonetheless are never fully at ease with themselves or where they are. It’s no accident, I think, that Gundar-Goshen chose to set the racial attack in a Reform synagogue. Reform is the largest denomination of Judaism in the United States. For secular diaspora Israelis, though, I suspect that Reform Judaism sits somewhere between an unthreatening religious curiosity and the proverbial second shul that the shipwrecked Jew builds on a desert island—the synagogue he’ll never set foot in. It is a light but effective touch: not a defining statement in itself, but a useful descriptive piece within the larger mosaic.
In portraying a mother gradually torn apart by doubt and uncertainty, Gundar-Goshen’s depiction of Lilach is a master class in character development. At first, Lilach seems circumscribed by a not-quite-articulated ambivalence—about herself, and about the surrounding circumstances of the moment. She has her doubts about the utility of the self-defense club. It isn’t that she celebrates what she reads as her son’s timidity, but she can appreciate this for what it is. Perhaps, she muses, Mikhael’s unequivocal push for their son’s physical development is linked to a deeper competitive drive of his own? But then, the options are limited and the fear is still there. In any case, after initial resistance Adam takes to the club, and to the enigmatic Uri who runs it. There are whispers, Adam reports, that Uri used to be in the Mossad. The boy has found a role model.
Curious despite herself, Lilach surreptitiously checks out the self-defense club. On a wall, the collective’s raison d’être is declaimed for all to see, that well-rehearsed line from the Talmud. “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” Very Old Testament, as we Christians like to say. When Lilach shares her reservations with another mother, she is reproved sharply. “You and Mikhael are not active in the community, so maybe you don’t understand the full extent of what we are facing.” The population of this community seems fungible, but at the same time not. Are the “we” American Jews or Israelis? And do they respond to threats and fears in the same way?
Amidst this anxiety, the center seems to hold. Or, to put it differently, Uri seems able to hold the center together. After Jamal’s death at the school party, Uri arrives on the scene in moments, comforting and supporting his young charges, his very presence binding them to his sense of commitment and responsibility. For this, Lilach is grateful; but her questions about Uri still linger. In time Mikhael finds out a bit more. Back in Israel, Uri had served in an elite combat unit and, it was said that, had the potential to rise all the way to the top. Like many of the new diaspora, Uri had left his homeland to seek his fortune in a bigger pond, one of many Israel high-tech professionals seeking to conquer new territory. But somewhere along the way, he had taken a wrong turn and had become a middle-aged man bulldozing expat kids into becoming self-reliant fighting machines. Something seems out of place. All that said, Mikhael takes to him eagerly too. And despite herself, Lilach finds herself falling in thrall to his magnetism…
The key question of Adam’s guilt—or not—runs through The Wolf Hunt. But this isn’t quite the central conceit of the book. Gundar-Goshen, I think, is just as interested in the damage done to Lilach’s sense of self when the external world intrudes, uninvited. Front and center here is her identity as a mother. As the case against Adam develops in nudges and whispers, she begins to interrogate herself. Does she really know who her son is? Or has her parenting been one huge charade, orchestrated for an unseen but omnipresent audience? “As your kids get older…you begin to choose activities that don’t require talking…something to hide the fact that you no longer know how to speak to your children,” she muses. “We took pictures of ourselves doing things. If anyone asked, ‘Where were you when your son was growing up?’ I could show them. I had an alibi.”
Adam doesn’t have an alibi. If anything, the evidence amassing against him, albeit largely circumstantial, begins to look damning. Doubt transmogrifying into fear, Lilach cannot find a convincing narrative that would help her defend him from the accusations. Adam becomes taciturn and wary, daring his mother to accuse him of the unspoken. Mikhael, usually dependable, is inattentive. Work is on his mind. His company is on the verge of closing an important deal, and his mind is in many different places at once. That we still have no real sense of what “work” constitutes for Mikhael, more than half way into the text, seems plausible.
The deeper Lilach digs for answers, the more violent the resistance to certainty she encounters. She seeks out Jamal’s mother, consumed by an unsettling mix of empathy and pre-emptive defensiveness. Their encounter makes for uncomfortable reading, the reader knowing that Jamal’s mother—separated by class and race from the other parents in the school—knows nothing of the whispering chorus of accusations against Adam that are building to a crescendo. But during the meeting, Lilach stumbles across information that might give her the context, perhaps even the justification, for Adam’s alleged act. Or does it? Lilach’s journey seems to be about finding the perfect victim, the one who in all circumstances cannot be held responsible for his actions. That said, she can’t bring herself to demonize Jamal, because…because all sorts of things, key amongst them middle-class guilt. But she can’t allow herself either to believe that Adam might have murdered Jamal. She can’t.
For this reader, it felt that the enthralling psychological tension that Gundar-Goshen painstakingly crafts does not quite stand up all the way through her book. One must be fair, though. The Wolf Hunt is engaging and provocative, not least because it faces down complacent transpositions of Israeli certainty into a foreign landscape. (Relocation, the title of the book in its original Hebrew, is a loan word with a vast hinterland attached to it.) Gundar-Goshen is a good storyteller, and a good chronicler of the contradictions that torment the human condition. But she doesn’t quite succeed in integrating these two tropes into a single work—a disappointment of sorts that I had with her two preceding novels, Waking Lions and The Liar.
All that said, Lilach’s unspoken ambivalence, by the end of The Wolf Hunt, does manifest as viscerally real. And unresolved. And there is that issue with relative notions of morality. We don’t have Rev. King—not him, not another like him—with us today. Still, one can’t but wonder how long his moral arc is; and whether it will lead us to justice, or to vengeance.
The Wolf Hunt, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, tr. Sondra Silverston
2023, Pushkin Press, pp. 278