View from 'The Hilltop' is Middle East absurdity

A Novel

By Assaf Gavron

Translated from the Hebrew by Steven Cohen.

Scribner. 448 pp. $26

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Reviewed by

David L. Ulin

A sprawling novel that revolves around a small Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the focus of

The Hilltop

is less satirical than absurdist, offering a middle vision between the ridiculous and the sublime.

"In the beginning were the fields," Assaf Gavron starts things off, and the biblical rhythms are no accident. For Othniel Assis and his fellow settler Hilik Yisraeli, their community is no less than a birthright, a connection to geography, to history, that stands outside government or politics.

It doesn't hurt that one department in Israel's bureaucracy doesn't know what the next is doing.

Here, Gavron sets up the essential push-and-pull of the novel: The settlers may have laid claim illegally to their enclosure, but it is almost impossible to get them out. To make that explicit, he introduces characters on every side of the situation, including Othniel and Hilik and their families, a section commander of the Israeli Defense Forces, and the residents of the neighboring Palestinian village of Kharmish.

Gavron describes all this with a measured matter-of-factness, complicating the tensions with familiarity. In this world, Arabs are not a distant other, but are rather uneasy neighbors who share many of the same hopes and dreams as the Jews.

When the IDF decides to build a security fence that will encroach on both the settlement and the village's olive fields, Jews and Palestinians alike protest the move. "The incident climaxed in a bizarre act of solidarity," Gavron writes in the voice of a Washington Post reporter whom he places at the scene.

The olive groves figure in a key subplot: a proposed partnership between one of the settlers, a former investment banker named Roni, and the Palestinian, Musa, who owns the groves. Roni has a scheme to sell Musa's olive oil to boutiques in Tel Aviv, but when he goes to close the deal, he is outsmarted.

For Gavron, that highlights the way nothing (or no one) is isolated anymore. Investment bankers may become Israeli settlers; Palestinian villagers have lawyers in the family.

This is not to say that Gavron overlooks the politics, just that he puts them in their place. Politics, after all, begins with people's hopes and fears. And yet the pleasure of The Hilltop is that it doesn't offer easy outcomes - the only option is to persevere.

The Hilltop is not without its flaws, especially a pair of extended digressions about Roni and his brother Gabi, who end up at the settlement to escape their pasts. These stories are interesting but take us out of the main narrative. More important is the human drama and, yes, the human comedy.