What is it that, with you or without you, just keeps on going? With a tireless drive, oblivious to joy or wreck, to which one can’t but submit? Shabtai would surely answer: life, with its catalogue of deaths too, or perhaps just time. This force ever pushing onwards is Shabtai’s theme in his remarkable first novel, which in Hebrew bears the title of Zichron Devarim, ’Recollection of things’, with more than a wink at Marcel Proust’s epic on time lost, remembered, written and regained.

Past Continuous takes an unforgettable sweep through 1970s Tel Aviv, following the lives of three friends in their forties — Caesar, Goldman and Israel — first in their attempt to attend a funeral (the funeral of Goldman’s father: they turn up at the wrong cemetery), and secondly as they mix with friends and relatives at the house of the bereaved. Here the linear progression of the novel diverges to a myriad of criss-crossing stories, as we encounter the friends’ sisters, aunts, great-uncles, mothers, lovers, fathers, cousins and their various histories, contentments, bitternesses or madnesses. The book ends nine months later, with Goldman’s suicide and the birth of an unwanted child from Israel’s lover Ella; life rubs up against death — one of the novel’s major themes

In between the beginning and end, where we all live, is Shabtai’s racing prose, driven by an extraordinary rhythmic energy, taking in a vast network of life stories as they press into the present. The Jews of the generation of Goldman’s parents come from the complicated polyglot worlds of Jewish Europe, and additionally experience the transplantation to Palestine. Each character is bearer of their own unique life events, and these are never solely individual and psychological: for example Manfred, who as a Zionist pioneer became a communist and as a communist rejected Zionism and returned to France in the 1930s, and then as a disillusioned communist devoted himself to the study of Christian demonology; or Uncle Lazar, whose childhood was spent in a luckless village which changed hands from Poland to Russia to Germany. Lazar’s emigration to Tel Aviv was followed by a profound and poisonous rift between himself and his brother over the right classificatory system for their respective stamp collections — by country or by subject? Shabtai shows here his keen sense of the small matters which can, hilariously to outsiders, carry immense weight in our lives.

Meanwhile Grandma Clara throws her Yiddish-Polish-Russian curses at the ’heat and the people and the taste of the water and the rabbi and the prices and the shape of the houses and the howling of the jackals...’. Past Continuous has a full inventory of mesmerising and complex tales, trajectories and characters.

These are, according to Shabtai, the ingredients of Tel Aviv in the 1970s. But the land of Israel is changing, it is no longer the land of the pioneers, and the new Israel grates against the old: in the background are rocketing property prices (overshadowing the old socialist ideals), there is nepotism and corruption in the Labour Party, ongoing struggles over land, peace and the Palestinians, and the rise of the political Right under Menachem Begin, who took power the year the novel was published, 1977.

Faced with these changes, the generation of the pioneers engages in passionate argument. Caesar, Goldman and Israel, however, educated, bohemian middle-class Sabras*, internalise these rifts and crises in the form of a sense of alienation and rootlessness, so that a huge question mark hangs over ’Life’ and its value(s). All three men are unfulfilled and on edge: Israel prevaricates over just about everything (where to live, what to do, whom to love), Caesar bounces restlessly between at least three lovers, always stretched somewhere between regret at the absence of permanence and a desire for detachment, and Goldman the one-time lawyer moves disconsolately between Taoism, dieting, cosmology and his Bullworker[tm] exercise machine. Life is, as Caesar puts it, a ’swinging suicide’.

An extraordinary, unique book, to be relished, as Shabtai (who died young) would have it, with a kind of exhausted jubilation.

’...and Besh approached the table, still shouting... announced that life was so idiotic and false and perverted that on the one hand it mesmerized him and fascinated him to such an extent that he would never abandon it, on the other hand he would never abandon it because he wanted to annoy it by his presence, and on the third hand he would like to tear it to pieces and set it on fire, and then he said that he would sell the present and the future and the world to come and eternity for one plate of the fish soup that his mother used to make, and that she was without a doubt one of the wonders of the world and like his brother in Australia she had also regarded herself as a German, but unlike his brother she had been so convinced and so consistent in this belief that she had held to it until the Nazis finished her off and maybe even now — in the form of smoke or something, because according to the law of the conservation of matter nothing in nature was ever lost — she still believed in her Germany and she was sure that it was all some terrible mistake, and he burst out laughing again...’ p143-4