Rachel Revisited

MY MICHAEL by AMOS OZ

287 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

"One winter's day at nine o'clock in the morning, I slipped coming downstairs. A young stranger caught me by the elbow. His hand was strong and full of restraint. I saw short fingers with flat nails. Pale fingers with soft black down on the knuckles." Thus Hannah, a pretty young student at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, met a geologist-to-be named Michael Gonen. This novel by the popular Israeli writer Amos Oz is Hannah's first-person account of her ten-year marriage to Michael. The sentences fall like the drip drip drip of the rain on Hannah's Jerusalem, and what the voice within her keeps repeating is "me, me, me."

Hannah moves through her marriage and her life with the scornful arrogance of an unpublished poet who has not gone to the trouble of actually writing a poem. Her habitual comment on her husband's remarks is, "That's trite." She takes no pleasure in his success, feels remote from her young son and declares herself as bored with her own hard-working contemporaries as she is with the older generation's memories.

She has long and complex erotic dreams. Mostly she dreams of two Arab boys, twins she grew up with in a village outside Jerusalem. In the games they played, "I was a princess, and they were my bodyguard, I was a conqueror and they my officers, I was an explorer, and they my native bearers." Now the Arabs are the enemy, and Hannah dreams of them as lovers and kidnapers, "dark and lithe, a pair of strong gray wolves," from whom she wishes to be rescued. At journal's end, the long-suffering Michael is helping a glamorous blonde finish her thesis. Hannah takes this as the end of her love, and the reader can only wonder what took so long.

Yet My Michael was a smashing success in austere, beleaguered Israel. Why? Author Amos Oz, 32, a leading dove among Israelis and a hero of the discontented young leftist groups, sees the novel as a kind of allegory: "It hit an open nerve in the heart of Israelis. They saw in it a life without perspective. A nation in turmoil that dreams of relations with the Arabs."

There may be a germ of truth here. The passion that animated the early founders of Zion has cooled. The new passionate people are the Arab fedayeen, and in some small dark recess of the national psyche, the Israelis are jealous. In particular, the not-so-young married women who are the book's most fervent admirers have found in Hannah a vicarious release from the unromantic demands of industrialized nation building.

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