The Liberating Bride (2001)Footnote * figures as the most discursive of A. B. Yehoshua's novels. It follows the comings and goings of Yochanan Rivlin, an aging Middle East scholar, as he tries to discover the untold cause of his son's failed marriage and struggles to breathe life into his own moribund study of the causes of internal violence in contemporary Algiers. The novel abounds in the minutiae of everyday life and the often inane nature of human conversation. Its progression is intermittently impeded by eruptions of social comedy and political parody. It dwells on the myriad routines of marital, familial, and social transactions and gives ample scope to arcane academic disputations. But this seemingly sprawling narrative surface generates a carefully crafted deep structure by means of which the novel conducts a wide-ranging exploration of personal and political conundrums. As in many of his previous novels, Yehoshua's practice of constructing analogies between family situations and national issues enables him to engage psychological motivations, moral considerations, and ideological determinants that affect both the private and the public spheres of life.

The central analogy in The Liberating Bride is between the complex relationships within the Rivlin family and the similarly complex relations between Jews and Arabs within Israel and in the territories it occupies. At the latter level, which is the focus of this essay, The Liberating Bride joins “Facing the Forests” (1963), The Lover (1977), and Mr. Mani (1990) as a work in which Yehoshua takes a periodic measure of relations and prospects for accommodation between these communities. In The Liberating Bride, this effort involves an extensive interrogation of the relevance of postcolonial theories about the nature of national identity to the reality of the relations between Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians living beyond the Green Line. This aspect of the novel is most evident in the manner in which its protagonist, Yochanan Rivlin, resists the repudiation of essentialist notions of national identity that has become the staple stance of postcolonial theorists and critics.

The concept of hybridity is a mainstay of the argument against national and cultural essentialism.Footnote ¹ This argument draws much of its authority from the work of Homi Bhabha, part of whose project is to undermine the binary opposition between colonizer and colonized and to emphasize, instead, mutualities and negotiations across the colonial divide.Footnote ² Such negotiations, he believes, will redefine the concepts of homogenous national cultures, or organic ethnic communities, and will result in hybrid forms of human solidarity that transcend cultural boundaries.Footnote ³ The character Rivlin, by contrast, is preoccupied with the intransigence of cultural boundaries and the consequent collapse of human solidarity. His research aims to determine the causes of the civic breakdown of Algerian society, which, after Algeria gained independence from the French, descended into an exceptionally vicious cycle of internecine violence. But the question that haunts and frustrates Rivlin extends beyond the confines of the Algerian conflict. His larger concern is, as he says, “what is happening to Arab identity, of which the Algerians are a part.”Footnote ⁴

In this assertion of an essential ethnic identity, Rivlin is, of course, close to Yehoshua, who has been consistently concerned with the essence of Jewish and Israeli identity. But while in his previous works Yehoshua sought to discern, define, and perhaps transform what he regards as pathological deformations in the Jewish psyche, in The Liberating Bride, he directs a comparable narrative effort toward the Arab psyche. The assumption guiding this thematic departure is that, like Jews, all Arabs share an ancient cultural root that persists in shaping their inner world and determining their relations to the outside world. Rivlin's intellectual point of departure is his quest for the sources of violence between two Algerian communities that inhabit the same land, but his experiences shift the focus of this inquiry away from the distant North African conflict to the tensions afflicting his own part of the Middle East.

Contemplating the difficulties of writing sympathetically about the Algerian struggle for independence in the 1940s and 1950s while “witnessing their terrible murders today; the insane terror that is raging there,” Rivlin experiences an unsettling shock of recognition. “Suddenly,” he says, I despaired of “all the Arabs” (37, 35; emphasis added). Later, while visiting with the family of his Arab assistant, Samaher, he concludes that even though the Arabs with whom he is interacting are not the same as the Algerians he is studying, they have an “‘ancient common root,’ which is sometimes hard and cruel and sometimes generous and caring” (188, 194). And when his hosts inquire about when he will write about the Arabs of Palestine, Rivlin explains that “even when he writes about distant Arabs in distant times, he looks for connections with those that are near, because, after all, you are all from the same root, from the same desert” (192, 199). Rivlin's essentialist assumptions are challenged by Dr. Miller, a junior member of the Middle East Studies faculty and one of the new breed of postcolonial theorists. In the spirit of Edward Said, Miller rejects the entire field of Oriental studies and dismisses Rivlin's premise of an essential national identity as an artificial, oppressive, totalizing construct that obstructs mobility, creates boundaries, and blocks the natural flow of human coalescence, integration, and cooperation. Drawing on the work of Bhabha, he offers an alternative vision of dynamic intercultural contacts that create a “hybrid, androgynous experience” that “demolishes the old, static, essentialist categories” (493, 508).

Rivlin is initially dispirited by Miller's critique. But later, drawing on the experiences that are recounted in the novel, he is able to formulate a skeptical counterargument to the antifoundational perspective of the postcolonial approach and an affirmation of the discipline of Orientalism (mizraḥanut), which is based on what he describes as “the long-standing faith in the ability of Western reason to study and understand the history and the actions of the Arabs with the customary tools of scientific inquiry” (498, 513). This, he argues toward the end of the novel, is particularly important to Israeli Orientalists because,

As it traces the evolution of Rivlin's thinking on Arab identity from initial uncertainty to a greater sense of clarity, The Liberating Bride interrogates the postulations of postcolonial theory by testing them against the reality of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. What this examination demonstrates is that, irrespective of prevailing theoretical disclaimers, national identity remains a powerful cultural force that must be acknowledged and contended with, especially in situations of social instability, conflict, and disruptive change.Footnote ⁵ These are precisely the situations created by the continuing Israeli occupation of an increasingly restive Arab population. And a central thematic concern in The Liberating Bride is what is perceived as an ominous Palestinian impulse toward hybridization with the Israelis that has been induced by the subordinate Palestinian position in this clash of national wills.

During a visit to a Palestinian village, Rivlin is surrounded by a group of young Arabs who are skeptical about the “peace process” that followed the Oslo Accords. The Arabs want to know, “What's the story with the Jews? Because if peace turns out to be an illusion, why do we need to separate?” (219, 228). It gradually becomes clear that this desire to merge, which is reiterated at various junctures in the novel, is an expression of a deeper national aspiration that transcends the arbitrary demarcation of the Green Line and binds both Palestinians and Israeli Arabs in a common cause: they appear possessed by a primal desire to return and inhabit the land that they lost. This desire, which is portrayed as a constitutive component of both the Israeli Arab and the Palestinian psyche, manifests itself in the ideological insistence on the hybridizing right of return.

Contrary to the benign presumptions of postcolonialist theorists, The Liberating Bride presents an increasingly apprehensive view of the dynamics of social hybridization as they apply to the Israeli–Arab situation. An incident with the hybrid creature that appears toward the end of the novel is emblematic of this concern. The incident is introduced with an epigraph from Kafka's parable “A Crossbreed.” It says, “I have a curious animal, half kitten, half lamb. It is a legacy from my father. But it only developed in my time” (506, 520).Footnote ⁶ This epigraph is followed by a story that Netur Kontar, a Druze officer in the Israeli army, tells his friend Marwan, a Christian Arab dentist, about a strange creature that his father, the legendary hunter Abu Netur, had recently encountered. This “hybrid creature,” is “part giant cat, part lamb … Its size and form were clearly that of a large lamb, but its head and claws, and especially its expression, were definitely that of a cat. And its eyes were a mixture of the two animals. Wild, darting eyes, round and green, glowing with fear and cunning” (506, 520). A deliberate replication of Kafka's crossbreed, which, “[f]rom the cat takes its head and claws; from the lamb its size and shape; from both its eyes, which are wild and darting,”Footnote ⁷ this creature shows no fear of Abu Netur. It approaches him gingerly, sniffs his garments, and rubs its head against him. But when it senses the old hunter's intent to capture it, the creature strikes with its claws, leaps away, and vanishes into the thicket, leaving a long gash in Abu Netur's forehead.

Determined to capture the creature, the veteran hunter lays a trap and lies in wait. The creature appears again, and again allows Abu Netur to caress it, exposing its underbelly to show that, as is typically the case with hybrids, “it is completely sexless.” But when Abu Netur tries to drop his net over it, “the creature jumped away, and before running toward the Jezreel Valley, it clawed the face of the old man who was trying to deprive it of its freedom and almost ripped out one of his eyes” (507, 522). Marwan is skeptical about the story, but Netur is convinced of its veracity and persuades his friend to help him hunt the strange animal because, as he explains, “he wants to know and understand what kind of new creatures are emerging in this land” (508, 523). This emblematic depiction of hybridity emphasizes its sterility, its deceptive affability, its capacity for violence, and, as it turns out later, its potential for causing catastrophe. The signifying function of this incident is further informed by the epigraphic gesture to Kafka's parable and, through it, to the lessons of the Jewish historical experience with hybridization.

The outcome of the Jews' diasporic efforts to graft themselves onto various branches of other national identities refutes Bhabha's conviction that such an incorporation will categorically replace the concepts of homogenous national cultures and organic ethnic communities with hybrid forms of human solidarity that transcend cultural boundaries. The Jewish experience in Europe shows that the dynamics of national or ethnic hybridization are not universally beneficial and may often serve to exacerbate national pathologies and generate catastrophic consequences. Long before the Jewish effort to integrate into European society unleashed the most murderous pathologies within that society, Kafka contemplated the internal consequences of this effort in “A Crossbreed.” His half-kitten, half-lamb hybrid incorporates the inherently contradictory mind-sets of both animals,Footnote ⁸ and, as a result, is alienated from both of its constitutive domains: “It flees from cats and makes to attack lambs.”Footnote ⁹ Doomed to perpetual exclusion and isolation, the creature shares the narrator's suicidal inclinations. “Perhaps,” the narrator muses,

Yehoshua devoted his 1990 novel Mr. Mani to an extended exploration of the causes of what he regards as a self-destructive drive that is pathologically embedded in the collective Jewish psyche and constitutes a persistent impediment to a healthy Jewish national life. In The Liberating Bride, he turns his attention to the roots of what he sees as a similarly destructive pathology deeply rooted in the Palestinian psyche. He locates the external political manifestation of this pathology in the voices within both the Israeli Arab and Palestinian communities that are calling for a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by merging the two communities into a single, hybrid state. Like almost every Israeli, and probably most Palestinians, Yehoshua understands that the call for a state that would abolish the Jewish Law of Return and legitimate the Palestinian right of return is driven by a desire for a demographic restoration of Arab hegemony over the entire land and the reduction of its Jewish population to subordinate minority status once again. His concern is not with the actualization of this desire, which is presented in the novel as a delusional dream, but with the potential for violence involved in living in close proximity to a community that continues to be driven by this dream. In The Liberating Bride, he seeks to dispel this delusional aspiration by exposing its pathological roots.

Rivlin's experiences in the novel redirect his attention from his original concern with the connection between aspects of a collective Arab psyche and the causes of internal violence in Algiers to the correlative potential for violence inherent in the desire for a hybrid Jewish–Arab state. What he sees and hears stands in distinct opposition to Bhabha's contention that, rather than causing conflict and contestation, hybridization brings forth new forms of amalgamation in which two or more cultures merge into a new mode.Footnote ¹¹ Bhabha derives this notion from Mikhail Bakhtin's discussion of organic hybridization of languages, and transforms it into a process of cultural negotiation that leads to social integration. The Liberating Bride points to the problematics of extrapolating social principles from linguistic models and of imposing such abstract theoretical constructs on the realities of complex social and political situations. However, Bakhtin's original thinking on hybridization is actually useful for understanding the manner in which the novel proceeds to expose and explore the roots and nature of a social pathology.

Bakhtin's notion of hybridization pertains to the mixing within a single utterance of two different linguistic consciousnesses that may be widely separated by time, by social differentiation, or by some other factor. He distinguishes between two forms of hybridization, which are often in conflict with each other. One is unintentional, organic hybridization, which takes place within the social discourse. The other is intentional, artistic hybridization, which is characteristic of literary discourse, especially the novel. Organic hybridization involves an unconscious dynamic that mixes various languages coexisting within the boundaries of a single dialect or a single national language. Such unconscious hybrids have been profoundly productive historically, but are largely invisible and unfelt. Bakhtin mentions them almost in passing in order to differentiate and better define intentional, novelistic hybridization, which is his primary interest.Footnote ¹²

Unlike organic language hybrids, an intentional language hybrid is the conscious creation of an artist constructing a literary fiction. And, unlike organic hybrids, in which the separate languages are merged, intentional hybridization is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another in order to set different points of view against each other in a dialogical structure. Typically, this involves two individualized sociolinguistic consciousnesses that come together and contend with each other within the boundaries of a single utterance. One of these is the consciousness and the will of the author who is doing the representing. The other is the consciousness and the will of the character who is being represented. This double-voicedness enables the perception and illumination of one linguistic consciousness by another linguistic consciousness. And for Bakhtin, the crucial effect of such intentional hybridization comes at the moment when, within a single discourse, one voice is able to unmask the other. This is the point at which authoritative discourse is undone.Footnote ¹³

In The Liberating Bride, this double-voiced capability of novelistic art is most clearly evident in the representation of the exorcism scene from S. Ansky's iconic Jewish play The Dybbuk, as it is produced and performed by some of the Arab participants in a festival of Arab and Jewish poetry held in Ramallah. Rivlin and his wife are invited to the poetry festival by Rashad, a cousin of Rivlin's Arab assistant, Samaher. Rashad is preoccupied with the fate of his sister, Rauda, who is prohibited from returning to her family village in Israel because she is married to a Palestinian from across the Green Line. He befriends Rivlin in the hope that the professor will use his connections to obtain permission for Rauda and her children to return to Israel. Extending his invitation, Rashad explains to Rivlin that the festival will be a celebration of poetry from both sides, and “is open to anyone who loves co-existence” (369, 384). “There will be no politics and no jokes,” he says, “only poems and gentle speech. Poems of friendship and poems of love” (387, 404).

The ironic strain that informs much of the novel's signifying structure is particularly evident in the events of the festival; these events signal that simmering beneath the amicable surface of civility is a rigid Palestinian nationalism, steeped in hatred for Jews and rooted in the yearning for a dominant Arab presence throughout the entire land. Some of the Arabic poems that are recited are blatantly antisemitic. Others are passionately anti-Israel. And when an angelic Lebanese nun, who came to Ramallah in order to contribute to the “festival's spirit of love,” (430, 446)Footnote ¹⁴ attempts to perform her celebrated “Song of Paradise,” she is drowned out by a chorus of Palestinian “veterans who, remembering the demonstrations and confrontations of their youth, rise to their feet and try to bend the nun's sacred singing into a stark nationalistic anthem” (433, 449). It is little wonder that Rivlin sees, in all of this, “a warning; a warning about the abyss that is waiting for all of us here” (433, 449).

Alert to this danger, Yehoshua seeks to mitigate it by attempting to discern the psychological motivations that underlie such extreme expressions of political and ideological aspirations. This effort is manifest in his intentionally hybridized, double-voiced representation of the exorcism scene from The Dybbuk, a play that involves an extreme instance of hybridization in which one individual consciousness grafts itself onto another and subsumes it completely. The exorcism scene is translated into Arabic by Samaher and directed by Rashad. Both also participate in the performance, along with Rashad's sister, Rauda, and two of her young sons, who serve as a kind of chorus. Samaher plays Rabbi Azriel; Rauda plays the young bride, Leah; and Rashad plays the spirit of her dead lover (the dybbuk) who has possessed her. Rashad appears wearing a shroud and carrying a staff topped with the face of a large doll-bride with features strikingly similar to those of Samaher. Rauda remains standing behind a thin lace curtain. When Samaher recites Rabbi Azriel's lines, Rashad, as the dybbuk, responds in Hebrew, and, from behind the curtain, Rauda echoes his words in Arabic, so that the scene, in which the dybbuk resists the rabbi's increasingly forceful efforts to expel it from the body it has occupied, proceeds in both languages simultaneously.

Applying Bhabha's paradigm of colonial discourse to this pivotal scene, Dorit Yerushalmi concludes that the Ramallah Dybbuk is an example of the occupied subject's cultural praxis (I am condensing Yerushalmi's argument but retaining her language). The occupied subject, who is in the midst of his national struggle, appropriates a theatrical event that has been a cornerstone in the Zionist-Jewish cultural memory. The purpose of doing this is to impose the “other's” story of longing on the Israeli Jewish spectator's attention and, in so doing, to restructure and complete the national narrative of this spectator. Rauda and her sons both symbolize and claim the right of return, and Israeli readers of The Liberating Bride cannot avoid seeing, through the exorcism in the Ramallah Dybbuk, the occupation and expulsion of which they are a part and which is the constitutive experience of Palestinian nationalism.Footnote ¹⁵ Given the context of the forum in which it is performed, this is an obviously defensible reading of the Dybbuk scene—although one may question how many Israeli readers of The Liberating Bride, in the year 2001, were still not fully aware of this perspective and its place in the Palestinian national narrative. But the full context of the novel's signifying structure makes it clear that Yehoshua's thematic intentions are more ambitious than the reiteration of a familiar political position. Moreover, the remarkable casting and staging that he creates for his fictional Dybbuk scene signal strongly that this is a scene that speaks with more than one voice. And if we shift the critical paradigm from Bhabha to Bakhtin, we can discern in the same discourse the voice of the author, unmasking the voice of his characters and challenging the authority of their narrative.

The contending view that emerges from this intentionally hybridized text is that the trope of a demon lover inhabiting the body of his living bride and clinging to it at all costs is a metaphoric representation of a pathology that has afflicted the Palestinian psyche. It is a manifestation of an obsessive adherence to the fantasy of reconstituting a life in a land that they once possessed but to which they cannot return. From this perspective, Rauda and her children represent the dangers of the delusional clinging to the Palestinian right of return. As the voice of the dybbuk makes clear, underlying and motivating the ideological refusal to accept the imperatives of a changed reality is a profound psychological cause: a deep fear of the unknown—an inability to relinquish a national narrative of comforting but ultimately debilitating delusions in order to construct a life designed to accommodate the new realities rather than to validate old myths. When Rabbi Azriel commands the dybbuk to leave Leah's body, saying, “You have crossed over to another world and there you must stay until the resurrection of the dead. Therefore I command you to leave the body of this maiden and return to your place of rest” (422, 439), the dybbuk's adamant refusal is not an expression of principled conviction but rather of paralyzing fear. Rashad, as the dybbuk, says,

And Rauda reiterates in Arabic, “La astati'u ‘l-huruj” (422, 439).

It is difficult to read this defiant but deeply fearful refusal as the voice of the Israeli occupier. It is, rather, the voice of the weaker entity, which, in its fear of making an existential change, is resisting a superior force and vowing to cling to its position irrespective of the dire consequences. Even when the rabbi promises to protect it from the demons if it leaves Leah's body and to deliver it into their hands if it does not, the dybbuk remains adamant:

The exorcism scene is a constitutive component of a broader signifying structure that, by means of Yehoshua's characteristic practice of constructing analogies between family situations and national issues, thematizes the debilitating effects of obsessive striving to restore an unattainable past. The analogical correlative to Rivlin's effort to better understand the Arab psyche is his ongoing effort to liberate his son, Ofer, from a life that has been immobilized by his fixation on the dream of return to the imagined Eden of his marriage to his ex-wife, Galya, who has long moved on and is now bearing the child of her new husband. And the analogical correlative to Ofer's futile fixation on regaining the lost paradise of his past marriage is the Palestinian fixation on regaining the imagined paradise that was lost to them in the land that is now Israel. Both are regarded as delusional obsessions that impede and distort the lives of those who submit to them. The precise nature and destructive consequences of the fixation that, as is intimated in the exorcism scene, inhabits both Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, is most clearly evident in Rashad's compulsive devotion to the right of return, which, like a dybbuk, inhabits his soul and compels him to disastrous action.

After he fails in his efforts to obtain legal permission for Rauda and her children to return to Israel, Rashad decides to smuggle them across the border on his own. But this effort, too, fails. He is stopped by Israeli border guards who permit only Rauda and her small children to cross; Rashad is thus forced to leave the two older boys behind. And when the eldest, Rasheed, tries to steal across the border by himself, he is mistakenly shot by the Druze officer and Arab dentist who were out hunting for the crossbreed creature. Rashad blames himself for this catastrophe, and, as he reconstructs the events that led to it, it becomes clear that the catastrophe is a direct result of his obsessive devotion to the right of return. When the people of his village attempt to comfort Rashad and persuade him that he is not to blame for the tragedy because “[i]t is all a matter of an ancient fate that only God understands and only God will remedy in the end,” Rashad, speaking of himself in the second person, admonishes them in his heart,

When Rashad reaches Rauda's house and announces his intention to smuggle her and her children across the border, “Everyone is a little scared and confused and only you are joyous and confident, as if the Right of Return had already mated with you” (511, 526; emphasis added). But the confidence instilled by the right of return turns out to be false and a cause of calamitous consequences. Rashad's agonized reaction to the ensuing tragedy indicates the danger inherent in convictions that disregard the reality to which they are applied.

Rashad's anguish is not caused by the realization that he made a horrible mistake but rather by the sense that he did not have the courage to act on his own convictions. He believes that the catastrophe that befell his nephew was caused by his own willingness to compromise on the right of return. When he is stopped by the Israeli border guards and allowed to cross with Rauda and the smaller children on the condition that he leave the two older boys behind, Rashad agrees to a compromise that, in retrospect, he regards as the true cause of the calamity that followed. “Oh, Rashad, reckless Rashad,” he grieves, “why did you succumb to the compromise that drove the boy into the hands of the hunters who broke the law on the mountain?” (510, 526). And he continues,

While recognizing and reflecting the depth of conviction and power of emotion involved in the Arab claim of the right of return, The Liberating Bride regards the Arab dream of reclaiming the entire Land of Israel as a debilitating, yet extremely dangerous, delusion. Its extensive exploration of this dream's manifestations culminates in a double-voiced expression of both fear and hope. It is fear of the great violence that might erupt from the clash between the intrinsic dedication of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs to the right of return and the equally intrinsic rejection of this right by the Israeli Jews. And it is hope for what may result from a greater Jewish awareness of this deep-seated Arab aspiration, and from an increased Arab awareness of the futility of basing a national life on a delusional aspiration, which has brought catastrophe upon them time and again. Subtle indicators of this latter prospect are embedded throughout the final movements of the novel. When, for example, Rivlin attempts to commiserate with Rasheed's aunt, Afifa, saying, “I'm so very sorry about Rasheed … believe me, I loved him very much,” Afifa responds angrily,

A similar sense of disillusionment is ultimately expressed by Rashad himself when, sitting at the bedside of the comatose boy and recounting the events of that fateful night, he finally confronts the connection between the obsessive dream of return to the lost land and the debilitating catastrophe that struck Rasheed. “Because now,” he says, “during the nights and the days that you spend by the bed of the vegetable that refuses to blossom, you keep asking why did the catastrophe happen on that black night, and how The Right, that appeared to have become your friend, stabbed you in the back” (512, 528; emphasis added).

In the novel's final movement, the hopeful prospects intimated by Rashad's loss of confidence in the validity of his dream of return to a lost land are amplified by the manner in which Ofer comes to relinquish his analogously obsessive dream of return to a lost love. For about a year, Ofer had been happily married to Galya, the daughter of Yehuda Hendel, a prosperous Jerusalem hotel owner. When Ofer stumbles on a scene of incest between Yehuda and his other daughter, Tehilla, he feels compelled, as he says, “to tell my wife, my life companion, my true soul mate, about the shocking thing I had seen” (257, 267). But when he does so, he is horrified by her totally unexpected response. Galya's loyalty to the image and honor of her family is stronger than her loyalty to Ofer and to the truth. She refuses to acknowledge the possibility that what Ofer saw actually occurred. Insisting it was a disgusting delusion, she demands that he apologize and never mention it again. And when Ofer refuses to deny what he saw, she terminates their relationship and makes him promise never to reveal the reason for the breakup. Five years after their divorce and total estrangement, irrespective of the fact that Galya has remarried and is about to have another man's child, Ofer still clings to the delusion that, despite this radical change in circumstances, he can still return to the original bliss of his marriage. In a sly indication of the signifying connection between this situation and that of the dybbuk in the Ramallah production, Yehoshua has Rivlin refer to Ofer as “his eldest son, whose soul refuses to part from the wife who left him” (448, 464).

Ofer, who lives alone in Paris, believes that if he continues to maintain his silence, Galya will eventually relent and permit his return to what he calls her “Garden of Eden” (241, 251). Literally, this is a reference to the Hendel hotel where his wedding took place and which became emblematic of his connection to Galya and her family. Figuratively, the Garden of Eden trope, which recurs throughout the novel,Footnote ¹⁶ is emblematic of a fantasy of an idyllic past existence that was unjustly lost but will, one day, be restored. As Hagit Halperin has noted, there is a sustained analogy between Ofer's debilitating delusion of regaining the Eden of his lost love and the equally self-damaging Arab fixation on the dream of return to their lost land.Footnote ¹⁷ It is also important to note that there is a snake lurking in the recesses of this Edenic garden. The basement of the idealized Hendel hotel is the site of the incestuous relationship between Yehuda and Tehilla.

As in Yehoshua's earlier novel, Mr. Mani (1990), incestuous relations are a mark of a character's moral turpitude. Within the signifying structure of The Liberating Bride, incest also marks an unsettling instance of hybridity challenging the notion that all forms of human coalescence are morally and socially beneficent and that obliterating boundaries and demolishing essentialist categories will invariably yield positive results. The cautionary connotations of this incestuous relationship are amplified by the fact that, as revealed by Fuad, the Israeli Arab headwaiter of the hotel and the keeper of many of its secrets, the affair between father and daughter was initiated by Tehilla as a means of exerting power over her father, taking control of the hotel, and completely altering its character (534, 547–8). Tehilla was named, with apparent, and ultimately ironic, hope, after the supremely virtuous protagonist of Agnon's novella of the same name. But her true nature and sinister intent are signaled by the repeated references to her as the adonit,Footnote ¹⁸ an archaic and virtually obsolete term for “lady,” a term familiar today almost solely for its place in the title of another short work by Agnon, Ha'adonit veharokhel (The Lady and the Peddler). In this story, the seemingly genial adonit, who is never seen eating, turns out to be a vampire who takes in lodgers, becomes intimate with them, and then feasts on their blood.Footnote ¹⁹ Commenting on Tehilla's success in taking over the hotel, Fuad, who knows her better than anyone, observes that this is “a success that will kill us all. … She has all the talent and intelligence her father had, but none of the compassion” (325, 339). And, as is often the case in Yehoshua's work, the story of The Liberating Bride turns on compassion.

The agent of transformative compassion is Fuad, the Israeli Arab who embodies the aspiration to full incorporation within the Jewish nation. In the course of the novel, he undergoes a transformation that constitutes what the novel proposes as a viable existential response to the realization that this is a futile and essentially degrading objective. Fuad's long and loyal subservience is motivated by what he understood to be Yehuda Hendel's promise that he will eventually become a full and equal partner in the hotel.Footnote ²⁰ He stays in place despite his awareness of Yehuda's incestuous relationship with Tehilla, and he hides this knowledge from Galya, whom he loves and who, from early childhood, has regarded him as her friend and protector. When faced with the choice between saving Galya's marriage by confirming what Ofer saw, or protecting his prospects of partnership by continuing to withhold the truth from her, “he decides in favor of the desired partnership without realizing that it was the real delusion” (536, 549; emphasis added). The degrading force of this delusion is also evident in the manner in which Fuad withholds his sympathy and compassion from Ofer, whom he encounters one night near the hotel, weeping over the loss of Galya and being eager to talk about it. In his determination not to lose favor with any member of the family he serves and whose enterprise he seeks to join, Fuad refuses to extend solace and, despite the compassion he feels for him, dismisses Ofer with a cold admonition:

But then Fuad goes home and, out of sorrow and compassion for Ofer, writes a poetic lament in which he gives voice to the empathy his subservient position prevents him from expressing to others (345, 360). When Rivlin learns of this and asks to see the poem, Fuad claims that it is lost, just as, later, at the Ramallah poetry festival, he will claim that his poetic ability has been lost because his symbiotic connection to the Jews has caused him to lose his authentic Arab voice.

After hearing the readings of the Palestinian poets, Fuad explains to Rivlin, “I realized that my Arabic has lost all its flavor, all its spices and hot sauces. Perhaps because I have become so closely connected to you Jews, my natural spring has dried up and my Arabic comes out of a rusty faucet” (427, 443). To which Rivlin offers a caustic corrective: “Fuad, with sudden despair, … Your Arabic wasn't impoverished because of the Jews, but because you gave up your freedom and became a slave of the hotel. … You look out only for yourself, and care only about getting ahead. But where do you think you'll get to, Fuad? Without inner freedom you'll never get anywhere. And, in the end, the only laments you'll write will be about yourself” (427–28, 444). This is another iteration of the novel's preoccupation with the stunting consequences of lives shaped by the delusional pursuit of an unattainable object of desire. The centrality of the Hendel hotel in the lives of both Ofer and Fuad imbues this trope with a metaphorical force that fuses the personal and political dimensions of this preoccupation.

In the case of Fuad, the political dimension is first foregrounded during his participation in the Ramallah poetry festival, to which he, like Rivlin, is invited by Rashad. Fuad accepts the invitation in the hope of restoring his flagging sense of Arab identity and “finding poetic inspiration among his compatriots from across the border” (410, 427). However, also like Rivlin, Fuad is profoundly disillusioned by what actually transpires there. He realizes, as he later tells Galya, that Rashad invited him to the festival

This realization of the violence and destruction that may be unleashed by the force of the Arab desire to merge with, and thus submerge, the Jews of Israel is very disturbing to Fuad. Equally distressing is the realization that Yehuda, whose name bears an unmistakable national connotation, never intended to live up to his promise of partnership. With Tehilla now in control of the hotel, Fuad will never be made a full and equal partner. These realizations lead Fuad to the conclusion that his aspiration to true partnership in the hotel is hopeless and that he would be better off resigning, “collecting his compensation and going back to the olives and figs of his wife's orchards. Because, he says, what's the point of remaining loyal to the deceased in order to protect a family from the truth that is still causing someone great suffering” (539, 552). That someone is, of course, Ofer, who is still suffering the consequences of Galya's refusal to abandon her fantasy of an idyllic family life and to confront the unsettling truth, which Fuad knew and Ofer discovered.

Fuad also recognizes the similarity between Ofer and Rashad who, “like Ofer, is a person who keeps trying to breathe life into a dead love” (539, 552). And, when this realization elicits in him a surge of empathic compassion for the hapless Rashad, Fuad experiences a similar rush of compassion for Ofer, just as he did on the night he found him weeping for his lost love. “But now he [Fuad] is wiser,” Galya tells Ofer when they finally meet:

Fuad's new perspective contains two elements that inform much of Yehoshua's fiction: an unflinching commitment to truth and a steadfast belief in the redemptive qualities of empathy and compassion. These capacities constitute the foundation for the new partnership that Fuad is proposing and that Galya finds herself accepting.

The power of truth and the force of compassion impel Galya away from the strictures of denial and delusion in the hope of protecting the next generation from their dire consequences. These forces also alter the course of Fuad's life in a direction that suggests Yehoshua's perception of what could constitute a viable basis for a partnership between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews: not the hybridizing impulse to merge and subsume, but rather an intimate and respectful recognition of the essential otherness of each partner. This is subtly articulated in the narrator's rendition of Galya's confession to Ofer. We are told that, through her long association with Fuad, Galya came to see in him “a double shadow of intimacy and otherness” (533, 546). Similarly, Yehuda regarded Fuad as “an employee who combines the qualities of total otherness and great closeness” (534, 547). In rendering his resignation from the hotel, Fuad acknowledges the error of his effort to suppress his otherness in order to pursue what turned out to be an impossible prospect of attaining an equal role in running the facility. For, in the course of this prolonged and consistently frustrating effort, he lost many facets of his original Arab identity and much of his authentic Arab voice.

Fuad's resignation from the hotel and return to his family's orchards marks a determination to recover his true self. This is a critical step toward establishing the new partnership he proposes to Galya, for this partnership requires, first and foremost, relinquishing debilitating delusions and acknowledging the existential imperatives of unchangeable realities. It requires recognizing, as Fuad observes in another context, that “what was lost will not return and there is no point in agonizing about it” (389, 406). Galya seeks to confer the same understanding on Ofer. Confronted with the truth and moved by compassion, she relinquishes her attachment to a delusional vision of an idyllic past and arranges to meet Ofer in the hope of releasing him from the constraints of his own delusional attachment. But she also makes it clear that acknowledging the truth of what Ofer saw does not make her accessible to him again because their circumstances have changed and an altered reality requires an altered response to it. Ofer resists mightily, clinging to his dream of rejoining his life with Galya's. But she is adamant in insisting that reality has severed the connection between them. Not only is she married to another and about to have his child, but also Galya now realizes that their love had been doomed from the moment Ofer discovered the truth about Yehuda and Tehilla, and that only his forced separation from her made his continuing devotion possible. “If we would have stayed together,” she tells him, “your love for me would have died. Because you are a person who cannot accept the cruel complexity of the world and fights against it all the time. Your hatred, and perhaps even envy, of my father would have driven you crazy and poisoned both of us. … No, don't be sorry that we parted. There really is nothing left of our love” (541, 554–55).

Galya is the Liberating Bride. She manages to free Ofer from the delusion that had so stunted and obstructed his life. The specific nature of her success on the personal level signifies the direction the novel signals on the political level. As Ofer prepares to board the plane back to Paris, Rivlin presses him, once again, for the cause of his breakup with Galya. When Ofer maintains his silence, Rivlin accuses him of continuing to believe that he and Galya will be reunited and that, consequently, his life will be more stuck than ever. Previously, Ofer would have regarded such criticism from his father as an intolerable intrusion into his private life and would have responded with aggrieved resentment. But now, with newly acquired calm and confidence, Ofer answers that he is no longer stuck. And he explains, “Because even if I am still attached to her in my thoughts and perhaps also in my heart, morally, I have freed myself of her. And this, dad, should be enough for you!” (547, 560).

The alteration that Galya manages to effect in Ofer's mind constitutes a call for a similarly liberating transformation in the Arab mind. The prospect of a conscious relinquishment of the moral commitment to a delusional desire is the hope with which The Liberating Bride seeks to counter its acute awareness of the depth of the emotional ties that connect Palestinians and Israeli Arabs to their lost land and its growing dread of the violence that may be unleashed by their deeply ingrained dream of repossessing this land. It is a prospect that is given considerable thematic weight by its position and its force in the concluding movement of the novel. But the viability of this hopeful prospect is called into question by countervailing forces that are so vividly represented in many of The Liberating Bride's preceding moments.