Yaakov Shabtai - a brilliant tour de force, a Joycean panorama of the lives of three men, their families, their lovers, and their friends in the quintessentially modern city of Tel Aviv. It is as much a novel about Tel Aviv-its landscape, its idiosyncratic atmosphere, and its history-as it is about the human condition

Yaakov Shabtai, Past Continuous, Trans. by Dalya Bilu. Overlook TP, 2002.


Past Continuous is a brilliant tour de force, a Joycean panorama of the lives of three men, their families, their lovers, and their friends in the quintessentially modern city of Tel Aviv. It is as much a novel about Tel Aviv-its landscape, its idiosyncratic atmosphere, and its history-as it is about the human condition.

A reissue of one of the classic works of twentieth-century Jewish fiction; Past Continuous depicts the crises in the lives of three Israeli men - Goldman, Israel, and Caesar - as they attempt to focus their lives and extract meaning from chaos. The reader is drawn into a mass of family tangles and social exhaustion -- wives and ex-wives, passing mistresses and crushing marriages, desperate intrigues and disappointments, the loss of children, friends, ideals. Past Continuous is a brilliant tour de force, a Joycean panorama of the lives of three men, their families, their lovers, and their friends in the quintessentially modern city of Tel Aviv. As much a novel about Tel Aviv - its landscape, its idiosyncratic atmosphere, and its history - as it is about the human condition.


Written in a single paragraph Shabtai’s only completed novel is an involved chronicle of Israeli life in the mid-1970s. Endless sentences lay out the entanglements of a group of friends and relatives gathered together in the streets and parlors of Tel Aviv after the death of a protagonist’s father. Socialism and religiosity are debated, sex is had, the folkways of European Jewry are mourned as irrelevant, but it’s Shabtai’s stunning control of the casually inflected long sentence, with its nested clauses and conversational asides, that marks this novel as a breakthrough for Hebrew literature.  -Joshua Cohen


''PAST CONTINUOUS,'' the late Yaakov Shabtai's first (and only completed) novel, marks a new plateau in contemporary Hebrew fiction. It is a long, complex, ambitious work of literature, part elegy, part etiology, with a music all its own. Along with A. B. Yehoshua's recent family study, ''A Late Divorce,'' and Amos Oz's nonfiction work, ''In the Land of Israel,'' it offers some hard looks at the moral and psychological interior of Israel over the last several decades - and some revelations.

Shabtai died at the age of 47 in 1981, the victim of a series of heart attacks. A moderately successful playwright who wrote original plays and adapted the classics, he had written only a handful of short stories before embarking on ''Past Continuous.'' Little in his previous work, in other words, prepared the reader for the novelistic talent he was to reveal. And little perhaps in his life as well - he lived simply in a modest apartment in Tel Aviv, and when you spoke to him, as I did on several occasions, you encountered a youthful spirit, an eye for mirth and a taste for literature. His bookshelves bulged with European works, mostly dramas, and he spoke directly about the books and writers he liked and did not like, without rancor, envy, injury, or pomposity.

''Past Continuous'' is the work of a mature artist, not a first novelist, and it is neither an easy read nor what one would call entertaining. Instead, it is an exacting, difficult story, to be read slowly, in 20- to 30-page chunks, in many sittings; a story that is not dependent on traditional plot movement or chronological time, or on chapter or scene pauses (the decision, in an otherwise readable English translation, to paragraph the unparagraphed Hebrew original, only interferes with Shabtai's strenuous, modernist intentions).

The narrative hangs together and moves by means of association - mainly of characters, but also of time and place. The result for the reader is a thick but compelling literary labyrinth of connected families (and stories), where one character is followed for several pages, then another - related in some way - whose story leads into yet an additional related life, and lo and behold you've turned several corners and are confronting the original character again. What at first is disconcerting and discontinuous, slowly, surely, becomes one fabric, one story, seamless and satisfying. For what we are witnessing, finally, is a society all of whose members are intimately related. The revelations come mostly in the narrating (rather than in the dramatizing), and the apparent digressions are often the scenic material. How surprising, and bold (and occasionally problematic) that the trained dramatist should abandon his own genre almost entirely in the making of this, his first novel, for the sake of his narrative voice.

The basic action of Shabtai's tale is given in the very first sentence of this large book, where we learn of the death of Goldman's father on April 1, and Goldman's suicide nine months later, as both deaths are reflected upon by Goldman's friends Caesar and Israel. Almost immediately, we are drawn into the friends' lives (including the histories of their parents in the Diaspora), a never-ending morass of family chaos and social exhaustion - wives and ex-wives, revolving mistresses and crushing marriages, desperate intrigues, divorces, disappointments, lost children, friends, ideals, and then back again into the lives of Goldman's father and Goldman - all the time moving between the living past and the dead present as though, in fact, there were barely a distinction. The now of these characters' lives is perpetually intertwined with, and dislocated by, the presence of the past, the character of time embodied as much in the technique as in the theme.

In the course of this impressionistic and relentless narrative (no break even for extended dialogue in nearly 400 pages), we are given a portrait of contemporary Israeli society that is, to my mind, the most prodigious (and probably realistic) yet in Hebrew fiction. No kibbutz utopias here, no Jerusalem mystique, no Zionist uplift, no sabra heroics - in other words, no magical society. Instead, it is a portrait - with Balzacian breadth - of a family and a people in trouble, lives lived at the end of a lofty dream gone haywire, paradise exploding. And yet, throughout the wild and random damage, where suicide and desperation are the norm, we hear the author's love for what has been lost, the old Tel Aviv as much as the old Zionist ideals for a new society. Here, in an elegy for the childhood of their city and state, the wounded characters find refuge from the personal and social assault on their adult lives.

This theme of quiet mourning provides a subtle relief to character and reader alike. For if Shabtai errs in ''Past Continuous,'' it is in the excess of his energy and ambition; at times he is the servant of his material, not its master. One wonders - is this the result of an overextended reliance on difficult technique in a first book? Or are the difficulties those entailed in trying to write fiction about a tiny society in the midst of a convulsive crisis while one is living through it? For it is true that, in Israel, the writer is connected with the society - as citizen, family member, spiritual heir and at times spokesman - in ways difficult for us to imagine. As literature, ''Past Continuous'' is an achievement of high order, though it is not for every reader and requires patience from even the best. - Alan Lelchuk

So many secret disappointments and betrayed visions accumulate over the years and bear down upon the consciousness of people who may not even know the source of their dismay. In the culture of Israel, this burden is perhaps the very idea of Israel itself, as if people—at least, some people—were haunted by a vision of what Israel was supposed to be but, in the nature of things, never could become.

This weight of feeling clouds, yet ultimately defines, Past Continuous, an Israeli novel of great distinction which was first published in 1977 and has now been put into fluent English. (But with one “concession” to American readers: the occasional paragraphing of what in the Hebrew text is an unbroken flow of language.) I cannot recall, these past several years, having encountered a new work of fiction that has engaged me as strongly as Past Continuous, both for its brilliant formal inventiveness and for its relentless truth-seeking scrutiny of the moral life. While a difficult book requiring sharp attentiveness on the part of the reader, it still satisfies traditional expectations that a novel should lure one into an imaginary “world.”
Until this book Yaakov Shabtai had been an Israeli literary figure of middle stature. A tremendous breakthrough, which can be compared to that of Faulkner when he moved from his early novels to The Sound and the Fury, occurred in Shabtai’s middle age, the kind of breakthrough that becomes possible when a writer gains possession of his own culture, uncovering its deepest sentiments and secrets. Shabtai died of heart disease in 1981 at the age of forty-seven, leaving behind another unfinished novel that has been published in Hebrew, but not yet translated into English.

The opening pages of Past Continuous plunge us into a bewildering mixture of fact, memory, reflection. A voice speaks, and it is of an omniscient narrator who seems in complete control. Nothing can be heard or seen except through its mediation. Neither colloquial nor very eloquent, it is self-assured, exhaustive. It records; it quietly corrects both itself and the book’s characters; and, although rarely, it keens over their fate. Above all, this voice tries to get things exactly right, as if some higher power had assigned it the obligation of making final judgment.

The opening sentence—“Goldman’s father died on the first of April, whereas Goldman himself committed suicide on the first of January”—sets the bounds of time and the tone for all to follow. The present in Past Continuous consists of the months between the deaths of father and son, with the speaker, whose identity we don’t yet know but whose authority we accept, leading us back, through his own associations of event and impression, to events in the past. As the relatives and friends of Goldman’s father, Ephraim, gather after the funeral, there begins an unraveling of shared memories. The local detail is very dense, matted into synoptic vignettes of the characters’ lives. There are dozens of … - Irving Howe

SHABTAI, YAAKOV (1934–1981), Israeli writer. Despite his untimely demise, Shabtai had established himself as a master of several genres: sketches, plays, poems, stories, and novels. Even though only one of his novels was completed, with another not finally edited, it is in the field of the Hebrew novel that Shabtai made his most significant contribution to Israeli literature. He combined a bleak, realistic outlook with a humor unusual on the Israeli literary landscape, bringing a touch of Yiddish irony and fluency to the archetypically local scene. From the outset, in his first volume of short stories, Ha-Dod Peretz Mamri (1972), he imprinted this scene with an elegiac tone, mourning the loss of a vanishing world embodied in the death of the narrator's grandmother. It is not just an individual who is passing, but a generation, and, with that generation, a way of life and an earlier, now departed civilization.

His most remarkable and permanent work is the completed novel, Zikhron Devarim (1977; Past Continuous, 1985). It is primarily a portrait of three individuals, three middle-aged Israeli men whose lives in Tel Aviv over a nine-month period, are presented in the context of two events in the "life" of one of them. The two events which frame the narrative are the death of Goldman's father, which sets the scene, with the tragic and hilarious funeral, and then Goldman's own demise, precisely nine months later. This time frame, as noted by one of the other characters, Caesar, precisely fits the period of gestation. And it remains as an ironic comment that the time required for the creation of a life is signaled here by two points of life's closure. The innovation, for the Hebrew novel, lies in the manner of its telling. The whole is presented as a single paragraph. Although the narrative is broken up into separate sentences, there is no separation into chapters. Its is a single sequence, as it were, to be read in one breath, clearly an impossible demand made upon the reader by a work of 280 pages. The English translation dispenses with this typological requirement.

This work is a roman fleuve, although in this particular rendering of the genre, all is compressed in one volume. Here the consciousness of the three heroes, presented through the objective, omniscient eye of a third person narrator, is passed from one to the other over the period described. But there is a seemingly seamless shift in place, time, and person that allows the reorientation of the narrative. Although we are presented with an ongoing narrative, that sequence also comprises flashbacks and memories, as well as projections forward. Thus there is a comprehensive portrait here of the human frame, albeit offered through a specific lens. The three characters also constitute a microcosm of attitudes, as well as a society in miniature. Goldman, through his father's and his own death, acts as an anchor. Clearly, he cannot comment on the latter event, so Caesar, who cannot believe that good things can come to an end, acts as a necessary foil. The third character, Yisrael, the youngest of the three, is a rather undefined figure, living in the shadow of the other two, and taking his posture from them. Caesar charges around, blustering, protesting, womanizing, gourmandizing. Goldman experiments with philosophies and interpretations of life. Yisrael, quietly and rather ill-naturedly, observes from the sidelines.

Here, there is no single hero. But there is a force that shapes their lives, as well as the pulse of the society that encases it. That force is the movement of time. In the second novel, which was later edited by the author's widow together with the critic Dan Miron and published posthumously under the title Sof Davar (1984; Past Perfect, 1987), a different stance and literary technique are adopted. The single paragraph technique is abandoned, and instead we have a narrative in four parts with a single hero. But each section adopts a different standpoint, culminating in the finale which explicitly surrenders any presumption of naturalism. An omniscient narrator comments on the central character, Meir, who is on the way to death, and beyond ("sof davar," a quotation from Ecclesiastes, means "the end of the matter").

The prominent element in Shabtai's work is the tragic sense of life, and its impending end. However, this is presented with a vibrant and original brio. Shabtai's plays include: The Life of Caligula (1975); The Chosen (1976); Don Juan and His Friend Shipel (1978); The Spotted Tiger (1985); Crowned Head and Other Plays (1995); and Eating (1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

H. Herzig, Ha-Shem ha-Perati (1994); D. Miron: Pinkas Patu'aḥ (1979); L. Yudkin, 1948 and After: Aspects of Israeli Fiction (1984); idem, Beyond Sequence: Current Israeli Fiction and its Context (1992).

[Leon I. Yudkin (2^nd ed.)] - www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0018_0_18123.html