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Books: Where They Feel They Belong
Sarah Fulford
Welcome to Heavenly Heights
by Risa Miller
St. Martin's Press
256 pp.; $23.95
Risa Miller draws her characters in such a way that any reader can understand why they choose to live in a settlement, even as they ignore the storm clouds gathering around them
If there's one thing you expect from a book about West Bank settlers, it�s a political opinion. Everybody else has one. Pick up a paper in any city from Boston to Barcelona and you�ll read that settlers are a deluded gang of fundamentalist cowboys and Israel�s main obstacle to peace. But "Welcome to Heavenly Heights," Risa Miller�s first novel, about the inhabitants of a newly constructed West Bank apartment building, is deliberately apolitical. It�s also shrewd, accomplished and sometimes wrenching.
Miller grew up in Baltimore, spent several years in Israel and now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. She neither condemns the settlers in her novel, nor does she venerate them, and her non-judgmental portrait comes across as a challenge. It�s as if she were saying to her American readers: You may imagine settlers as gun-slinging pioneers but look, they�re a lot less foreign than you think. Many of her characters are drawn to Heavenly Heights for reasons readers will understand: Because it�s the only place they feel they belong.
Take the Baltimore couple whose journey Miller chronicles most intimately. It�s 2000, just before the outbreak of the intifada. They�re Orthodox: Tova, who teaches English to Russian Jewish immigrants, wears long sleeves and a wig. When her husband, Mike, tells her he wants to make aliyah because he�s tired of America, with its "gross materialism" and "onward and upward" ethos, she says yes -- not just because of a spiritual calling, but because she likes the idea of escape. For her, Israel means leaving behind "the tension of being a subculture [very Jewish] of a subculture [Jewish.]" It�s Tova�s longing to be among people like herself that ultimately seals the deal.
So why not move into an apartment on a leafy Jerusalem street around the corner from the synagogue of their dreams? Miller explains: "They looked at commuting neighborhoods, a little to the north -- settlements if you need to be technical -- and ended up buying in Heavenly Heights, where a double apartment... costs a fraction of the same apartment in town." In other words, government subsidies and a mortgage underwritten by an anonymous benefactor turn Tova and Mike, middle-class Americans with kids, into Israeli settlers.
Then, a few months before their departure, they�re told that one of the water pipes of their future apartment building, laid by Palestinian workers, has exploded. It�s not enough to stop the couple from making aliyah but it�s a bad omen, and the first of several small, symbolic catastrophes that occur throughout the novel. In Israel, Tova and Mike take their kids rafting and hear the sound of Katyusha rockets overhead. Later, a perfectly ordinary day is interrupted with the news that not far from the settlement two reserve soldiers have been killed by a group of Palestinians.
Miller conveys anxiety through the skillful use of sparse language, imagery and subtext. Rarely do her characters talk about the precariousness of their situation and yet all around them tension simmers. Even insignificant irritants -- a bicycle believed to be lost, dirt on the corridor floors, heavy rain -- feel ominous, as if everything, including the elements, is conspiring to kick Jews out of the West Bank. Fatigue is another problem. While ritual observance organizes the framework of their lives, Miller�s characters seem too exhausted for much of a spiritual life. Overcoming the unexpected hurdles of their new circumstances is about all they can handle.
At times, their adjustment can be comic (there are several jokey references to the Israeli mop, which is described as a "stick with a windshield wiper end"), and at others tragic (in a particularly tender scene a rabbi feels the pitying gaze of Arab day laborers as he brings a wheelchair to his MS-stricken wife).
Mostly, though, the Judaism of these settlers is bogged down in the mundane: the caffeine deprivation of a fast day, the etiquette rules of small talk at the mikvah, the epic battle of finding parking at a Lag Ba�omer celebration. When the residents of Heavenly Heights bus into Hebron to experience a Shabbat in the sacred and embattled city, Tova discovers she�s forgotten to pack towels. Getting new ones before sundown is a logistical nightmare (she can hardly borrow them from a local Palestinian family or even swing into a department store). She and Mike start to bicker, each blaming the other for the oversight. The unstated accusation is that everything would be so much easier back in Baltimore.
"Welcome to Heavenly Heights," which won the PEN Discovery Award in manuscript form, does more than just provide a fascinating window into the personal lives of West Bank settlers. Miller�s subtle, highly impressionistic style of storytelling tugs lightly on the heartstrings at first, then grows in intensity. By the end of the book, when violence erupts in Heavenly Heights and Tova and Mike�s future there is in jeopardy, Miller has you firmly in her grip: You�ve fallen in love with her fragile little world of seekers, dreamers and those just trying to fit in -- and like them, you just hope for the best.
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