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The Family of Woman
Beile Gr�nbaum
Four Mothers by Shifra Horn (translated from the Hebrew from Dalya Bilu), St. Martin's, 276pp.; $23.95.
(October 11, 1999) What happens when magic realism meets up with a clan all of whose men either take off or die
Horn opens captivatingly: Amal, our narrator, who has just given birth to a boy, recalls that her own birth took place to the sound of mortars in Jerusalem during the War of Independence. Amal was born into a family of women whom, for five successive generations, misfortune has left bereft of husbands. It is a fate she herself does not escape: The day Amal gives birth her husband leaves her. Despite the circumstances, the women receive the baby boy with a sigh of relief; the chain of women is broken and the curse that has haunted the family is over.
Against this background, Amal sets off to learn about the fathers in the family. The narration shifts from first-person to an omniscient voice that brings us back in time through four generations of mothers: Mazal, the great-great-grandmother, an orphan married at age 13 to a man toward whom her only desire is to squeeze the sticky content from his pimples; Sara, who has a special gift of healing people with rose water so powerful that it makes the droppings of Jerusalem�s horses smell like roses (Sara grows up to become so beautiful that pilgrims to the city would make a detour to "feast their eyes on the great wonder"); Pnina-Mazal who, apart from the 15 human languages she acquired during a boat trip, understands the language of the animals and the dumb; Geula, Amal�s mother, a red-haired communist who is eager to blow up the offices of both the British Mandate and the Jewish Agency.
"Four Mothers" exposes the vulnerability of women in a universe characterized by a never-ending succession of evil deeds committed by men: rape, war and familial neglect. In their fight against their destiny of tragedies, the mothers survive only by means of magic and wonders.
When it was published in Hebrew, in 1996, "Four Mothers" was on the bestseller list for nearly a year, and Horn, a former journalist, won acclaim as a writer of magic realism. The book does have some elements of that genre: a dose of fantastic events, and characters with symbolic names, like the narrator who breaks the family curse (Amal is Arabic for "hope" and Hebrew for "work," a name given by her Jewish but anti-Zionist mother, Geula, whose name, in turn, means "redemption"). But, instead of having magic add exotic spice to an otherwise realistic plot, Horn allows reality in "Four Mothers" to be overwhelmed by fantastic events that tend to grow in scope as the story unfolds. This is a shame, because in between the heavy-handed fantasy, Horn does attain moments of mysticism with her more subtle descriptions, such as the way the hair of her female characters refuses to sink below water level when they visit the mikvah before their respective weddings. Or, when Geula as a child is caught in the night near the henhouse with a fox. The reader is puzzled: Which is fox and which is Geula? Both creatures have green eyes, red hair anda wild spirit, and thusthe fox becomes a beguil-ing metaphor for Geula�s character.
We are told that the story takes place in Jerusalem, but aside from the use of names of various locations, Horn, herself a Jeru-salemite, offers little sense of the city�s texture. Neither does she take advantage of the rich history of the periods her book spans. Only momentarily does Horn let history steal into the plot by letting a husband get drafted: the conflict is World War I, but it is so vaguely described that it could be any war at any time.
The book�s most serious flaw, however, is its use of flat adjectives that only add a clich�d feel and leave the characters with little substance other than the superficial traits the author ascribes to them: beautiful, wild, evil, intelligent. Unidimensional characters have their qualities exaggerated to the point that they lose their credibility -- with the women those qualities are usually positive, but the men are characterized by a strong dose of malice.
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