Study for Obedience

and A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

When I mentioned that Study for Obedience, by Sarah Bernstein was one of the books I couldn’t get into in my last post, a friend whose book creds I count on said it had been one of her favorite books last year. So I gave it another try.

I just needed to slow down, I found out. This is a book with (very) long, wandering sentences you need to pay attention to. It’s full of mystery. You need to let yourself be drawn in by the voice.

The narrator, an unnamed middle-aged woman, comes to an unnamed town in the remote north of an unnamed country to care for her wealthy older brother whose wife and family have left him.

The story begins, “It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets,” followed by a litany of village disasters. “I knew they were right to hold me responsible,” the narrator says.

A few pages later, she says, “Where to begin. I can it is true shed light on my actions only, and even then it is a weak and intermittent one.” This is followed by another kind of litany, this one naming the demands of her needy siblings whom she’s obediently attended over the course of her life. “In this process, I would become reduced, diminished, ultimately I would become clarified, even cease to exist. I would be good. I would be all that had ever been asked of me.”

She starts a third and final time. “There was the house, standing at the end of a long dirt track road and in a stand of trees, on a hill above a small sparsely inhabited town.”

And we’re off!

Well, sort of. The truth is, Study for Obedience meanders throughout, its narrator crab-walking her way to something like the truth about her time in the town. Another thing you have to slow down for. Not to mention that you’re constantly wondering how to think about what she’s telling you. The more you read, the more you realize that that her obsession with selflessness has skewed the way she sees everything.

Very little happens. There are few scenes, virtually no dialogue. The brother leaves, the narrator, left alone, takes long walks in the countryside, open to nature in a way she’s never been before. She avoids the town. The people there speak an ancient language she doesn’t understand and when, finally, she must go there for supplies, the clerk in the store makes no effort to communicate. The tension is acute.

This book is a lesson in the power of silence.

The narrator mentions the “ancient religion” of her people. She mentions the Holocaust. She mentions her family’s history in the town and tells us that the people of the town had been among those who persecuted them. Yet she is convinced she is complicit in the town’s downfall, that she must atone for this if she is to be accepted.

She tries and fails at this. She is blamed for a ewe caught in barbed wire, a herd of crazed cattle. When she enters a café and looks at a baby, the baby’s mother screams. She weaves dolls and wreathes from grasses and places them on the doorstep of townspeople at night, then one day witnesses a group of townspeople burying them.

Except for the fact that cars and cell phones and the internet are in the story, this could be a medieval fable. Which, sadly, makes sense because fear and hatred of The Other is nothing new. You’d think we’d be doing better by now. But we’re so not.

Coincidentally, the next thing I read was A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, by Nathan Thrall. The books could not be more different. One all voice and mystery; the other, a detailed account of a tragedy that brings you to the same place. Why?

Five-year-old Milad Salama sets off on a school trip to Kids Land one morning, excited, his backpack full of treats his father Abed Salama had bought him the evening before—a bottle of Israeli orange drink Tapuzina, a tube of Pringles, and a chocolate Kinder Egg. It’s raining hard, windy. The bus must travel on a road hazardous even in good weather because Palestinians are not allowed to travel on the safer road. Just before the bus reaches a checkpoint it must go through, a huge out-of-control truck crosses the median and slams into it. The bus flips over and bursts into flame.

Israeli emergency services are minutes away but they don’t come. Travelers stop and help get the children out of the bus, loading some of the less injured into their own cars. Some of the remaining children have burned to death; others desperately need care but must wait until Palestinian ambulances arrive. Then wait again for the ambulances to be let through the checkpoint before they can be taken to Israeli hospitals. Most parents don’t have the blue pass required to enter and must wait for word from those who do.

Over the course of the book, we learn how Abed Salama’s life brought him to the moment of the accident and follow him as he searches for his son. We meet various people—both Palestinians and Israelis— connected to the accident one way or the other: parents, doctors, and rescue workers, as well as politicians and bureaucrats, some of whom were complicit in causing the accident and its aftermath.

 For example, the separation wall and the Israeli permit system forced the bus carrying the kindergarten class “…to take a long, dangerous detour to the edge of Ramallah rather than driving to the playgrounds of Pisgat Ze’ev, a stone’s throw away.”

This is just one of many details that brought me to a deeper and more troubling understanding of the fraught relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. While Study for Obedience left me with a sense of the spiritual oppression events of the past (and, unfortunately, the present) so many Jewish people suffer. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama left me with pictures: the wall snaking through the West Bank, maps and color-coded passes, gated Israeli settlements on land where for generations Palestinian families made their living.

In 1992, after having his brutal beating by police set off days of rioting in L.A. Rodney King said, “People, I just want to say, can’t we all get along?”

Someone painted the quote on a wall not far from my neighborhood. It survived for years after the riots, fading over time. It’s gone now but I still see it in my mind’s eye when I pass the spot.

Some people laughed when King said it, I remember.

As if the very idea was absurd. Not to mention the reality.

I don’t know. Maybe it is. Some believe that at any given moment in time the world is peopled by souls spiritually unfolding over time, from those just beginning, their lives defined by the need for food and shelter, to those nearing the light—with stopping off points whose lessons involve power, greed, materialism and self-absorption. That would certainly explain the problem.

Even so, couldn’t we try harder than we do—as individual people, as nations?

A first step might be to see and then acknowledge that our own pain at being oppressed and brutalized is a mirror image of the oppression and brutalization others suffer at our hands.

At which point, wouldn’t sensible person conclude, What’s the point?

Over the past months I’ve read the news coming out of Gaza, been moved to tears by the images of people suffering—on both sides. Israelis grieving their loved ones; Palestinians grieving their loved ones. Grief they have in common; centuries of grieving, actually.

Why can’t we get along? is an unanswerable question, I know.

But I can keep trying to figure out how to think about it.  

In this, both Study for Obedience and A Day in the life of Abed Salama were a help to me.