Orchard, the: A Novella     by Benjamin Tammuz, Translated by R Flantz Original title: ha-Pardes Original language: Hebrew Country: Israel   Published by Persea Books Pub. Date: June 1984 Format: Paperback ISBN: 0914278436 List Price: $6.00 Not available for ordering Published by Copper Beech Press: Providence, Rhode Island Pub. Date: 1984 Format: 88 pages Not available for ordering Published by Copper Beech Press Pub. Date: 1984 Format: 88 pages Not available for ordering

This novel by the versatile writer, sculptor and art critic Tammuz, who emigrated with his parents from Russia to Palestine at a young age and started publishing stories in the early 1950s, is probably the most famous of his prose works. It recounts, in nineteen short chapters, the development and fate of an orchard near Jaffa, through the eyes of the narrator, a Jewish agronomist expert in the care of citrus trees. Crucially, the orchard is owned by two step brothers, one born of a Muslim mother (Obadiah) one of a Jewish mother (Daniel) but both with the same Jewish father.

Although the orchard is treated as a real place in the tale — there is experimentation in planting techniques, a swarm of deadly locusts blows over one year from the East with the hamsim wind, wars in Europe have effects on fruit sales, and so forth — it is also a symbol through which cycles of ’resurrection and destruction’ in the land of Israel are explored, from the time of the Ottoman Empire to the war with Egypt in 1956. Specifically it shows the changing relation between Arab and Jew, presented as integrated and untroubled in the early years and murderous as the century proceeds.

According to the original Turkish owner of the orchard, a generation prior to Daniel and Obadiah, Arab and Jew had no fear of each other, lived in peace side by side, the country was polyglot, and Arab and Jew ate each other’s food. But external events (property purchase, Arab massacres of Jews in the riots of 1929 and 1936) drive a wedge between Jew and Arab until the situation is such that Daniel’s (or is it Obadiah’s?...) son is born obsessed by weapons, with a secret arsenal of guns stashed away by the time he is ten, quick on revenge, and with no time for education or talk, since ’whoever wants life had better not talk of peace’.

With its solemn biblical cadences and tight focus on essential elements, this novel has an awesome tone to it (and Daniel and Obadiah hark back to the Biblical Isaac and Ishmael, sons of Abraham and [Jewish] Sarah, Abraham and the Egyptian woman Hagar respectively). This tone is reinforced by the mysterious character Luna, a woman dreamed of by Daniel before he even set foot in the orchard who is described as spell-bindingly beautiful, and who appears never to age... She is a magical presence in the orchard, appearing at several places at once between the trees and magnetising desires both adulterous and incestuous, fatally bringing Muslim and Jew into conflict.

Tammuz, who was briefly an advocate of ’Canaanism’ in the 1950s, a short-lived movement which believed that the Jew of Israel should identify not with Europe — the Diaspora was seen as an irrelevance — but with the Levant, understood as a geographical, political, linguistic and cultural unit, clearly views this conflict as tragic (see also his sober story, The Swimming Contest, also about Arab-Jewish relations, in the Oxford Book of Hebrew Short Stories anthology, reviewed here).

Benjamin Tammuz’s The Orchard has the compact power of tragic drama, neatly reworking the classic tragic structure of enemy brothers — Obadiah inscrutable and resentful, Daniel eaten up by guilt and attempting to assuage it by showering gifts on his brother — to show just how deadly conflict can be when it inserts itself within ’family’ bonds (Arab and Jew as brothers).

Not only does Tammuz show how far hatred can go, but, again in keeping with the pure tragic line of this novel, what a catalogue of ills ensues when ’natural’ bonds of solidarity are dissolved: bonds which should be sublimated erupt violently (some of the grimmest wounds are inflicted via Luna, the ’object’ through which, silently, both brothers express their possession of the land), and the orchard, ’too thick and too dark’ becomes the scene of incest and violation. As fundamental social limits are broken down (through murder and incest), so another tragic theme emerges, the threat of dissolution of differences: by the end of the novel one cannot know for certain whether Luna is indeed Jew or Arab, hence whether her son, the Israeli patriot, is one or the other....

This is a tense tale, written at a time when the sense of threat and of imminent conflagration was strong (the book was first published in 1971). But is also has a visionary aura to it, full of ambiguity and contradiction (the orchard reaches its peak yield at Daniel’s death, just as it reaches its first full yield during the Arab attacks on Jews in 1929), making it a challenging read.

’But Daniel, whose neck muscles were strong — stronger, it appeared, than one would have guessed by appearances — pulled himself backwards a step or two, swung up his right leg, and kicked Obadiah in the chest, knocking him to the ground. Before Obadiah had time to recover and get up, Daniel tore the tie from around his neck and threw it away. Now the two brothers were tightly locked together, each trying to raise the other up in the air and throw him heavily back down onto the ground. They resembled two men in a primitive dance, wild and savage, a dance in appearance only, but in truth the last embrace before death.’ p54-5