The notion of a South American homeland that was briefly considered by early Zionists in the 19th century is the fascinating seed for Eshkol Nevo’s Neuland – an immensely powerful exploration of love, grief, ‘what ifs?’ and the forces that bind and break families and nations.
Nevo is a leading light of the younger generation of Israeli authors, and his book is as steeped in the country’s history as his own family (he is the grandson of Levi Eshkol, prime minister during the 1967 Six Day War).
At the novel’s core is a slow-burning love story between two lost souls who find each other thousands of miles from their home. Dori has left his wife and young son in Israel to search for his father Menny, a former war hero who went travelling in South America after the death of his wife and subsequently vanished.
Dori is joined in his search by Inbar, a restless young woman who makes a brief journey from Israel to Berlin, where her mother lives, and then quite spontaneously makes a decision at the airport to buy a ticket to Peru, where she soon joins Dori on his quest. The dark shadow that lies across her every waking moment is the suicide of her younger brother when he was 19.
Each chapter is told from the point of view of one character. In the accounts of Inbar and Dori, we learn of her desire for love and of his yearning for a deeper fulfilment, and see how they inch closer together as they follow the trail leading towards Dori’s missing father.
But there are other voices too: in Israel, Inbar’s grandmother Lily remembers the fateful choices she made while fleeing for her life from Poland in 1939. Less successfully, there is Dori’s hired detective, Alfredo, unfortunately depicted as little more than a cardboard cut-out of the hard-living, hard-loving Latin male stereotype.
Otherwise, this is a deeply affecting story, juxtaposing the lives that have been led and their possible futures with the chimera of ‘the road not taken’: not, for the most part, as a source of regret but as a way to learn and start afresh.
Dori’s quest is eventually revealed to be a peculiar version of Heart Of Darkness. The Captain Kurtz at the end of this journey proves to be a Menny reborn as a guru of peace, determined to restore Zionism to the original ideals of Theodor Herzl, who in his utopian novel Altneuland (The Old New Land) dreamt of a society that was open to all humanity. Its motto was simple: ‘Man, you are my brother.’
The reality has inevitably turned out to be very different from the dream – as is borne out by the events of the 2006 war with Lebanon, during which Neuland is set. Menny (and, one senses, Nevo himself) describes it as ‘an unnecessary war that won’t change a thing’. In contrast, Nevo and his characters are steadfast in their pursuit of truth and new beginnings.
While Israel is a country beset by challenges from within and beyond its borders, Menny, Dori and Inbar embody hope and a refusal to succumb to fatalistic resignation: in short, the future is not yet written.