Eitan Dror-Friar, “You Will Not Love”, Library for the People, Am Oved, 224 pages
Michael (or Mickey or Michaeli) has Tourette’s syndrome. It started in early childhood – the tics, the spasms, the popping eye, the sudden barking sounds – it is not clear how and why, maybe because of an unpleasant incident with a dog, maybe without any connection. The pediatrician said it was a common occurrence. He was wrong. Anyway, the syndrome here even at age 40 and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. If that’s not enough to differentiate Michael from other people and burden him with difficulties, he suffers from another “spoilage”, as defined by one of the neighbors, and is also attracted to men. If men are attracted back to him, that’s another question.
Michael learns quickly, with no choice, how to conduct himself in the minefield of the dating world. “In recent years, I used to inform, and I have already watched the embarrassment, the panic, the attempt to evade me. In most cases the guy gave up, would kill his grandmother while having a conversation a few minutes after I told him about the distortions. A girl would not cancel a date, I think. Women face disabilities, it does not deter them. It seems to me easier to be crippled than a male. If you’re straight, of course. “
Michael is a former karate champion. When he was sent to class for the first time, as a child, he fell in love with the guide. He learned to defend himself physically – a life skill that often saved him, and is responsible for some of the fierce situations in the story, including rescuing a beloved bitch from her captors – and developed his body to fend off and balance the initial, frequent mockery of the environment in the face of syndrome.
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Michael writes his story as an ongoing letter to his older brother David (his uncle), his fickle anchor, who eventually got up and moved / fled to Australia, although it is possible that the ocean separated them even when they lived in the same house. “We both grew up on the destruction of their world,” says Michael, and “theirs” refers to his parents. The no less fickle Yiftach, the first man to receive Michael as he is, lazy to leave the house, boasting an unusual nose with a “trombone resonator box,” calling his lover “Bobo” and teaching him what Bob Marley ice cream is, will add reasons to Michael’s abandonment anxiety.
Eitan Dror-Friar, after a children’s book and two collections of stories, the first of which (“Fingers on the Hill”) won him the Sapphire Prize for his first book, designs in his first and most beautiful novel A World of Men, with one female character adorning and illuminating this world in Hollywood light. / Lizzie / Lilbet, the Dutch mother of Michael and David (doubt “Anne Frank’s aunt”, as Michael the boy tells the class without being laughed at, because on Holocaust Day it is forbidden to laugh, doubt “a distant aunt of the Brady family”), who is a kind of beauty queen, If not Miss World, local; Marilyn Monroe who is aware of her natural assets and does not hesitate to use them when needed and when not needed, and in one word: inhale (“inhale, do you remember there was such a word? All those words that disappear, do they come back sometime?”).
But Elizabeth, who “still dances waltz in Juliana’s royal court” and loves the old song “How High is the Moon” (“Somewhere there is music / it’s where you are”), is an unforgettable character not only because of her beauty. She conducts the choir of men with a high hand, with firm charisma and a dramatic / melodramatic / operatic sense that produces sparks of cruelty, alienation and also infinite grace and almost divine compassion, in a kind of harmonious contrasting unity. The men on their part are rags (Father Molly), wandering souls (the Brazilian neighbor Morris, whose sexual orientation is called Michael, who knew him from childhood, “our common disaster”, and recognizes in him “the short stature of our sick in the face of the world”) and, as mentioned, those fleeing uncomfortable places , Voluntarily and also involuntarily, but they are all wonderfully written and each of them can hold an entire book of his own. The dog characters are no less developed and exciting than those of the two-legged, which is an achievement in itself.
Dror-Friar paints at least 50 shades of solitude at every turn. “With a cigarette, as long as it burns,” Michael muses, “you are not really alone. You should smoke once an hour, disperse the moments of grace.” “I feel sorry for them and I feel sorry for me too,” he laments his parents who pinned hope (like him) on one girl who fell in love with him, the boy who used to “throw himself on the wall” and that in a note at the Western Wall asked for an electric train God. Speaking of the guy who fell in love with him (“I was never anyone’s obvious”) he explains: “Branch, if he doesn’t get enough sunlight, he will fold and twist and do whatever it takes to get more light. I lived there in the dark, and like most of my sons Man I did not do what it took to get light.
Yiftach did it for me, sent me to look for a bright place, and I still did not understand what darkness he was talking about. “And about the Brazilian neighbor, his guitar teacher, Michael says: “I was in the center. So he protected me from my loneliness, and then his loneliness bothered me, and I knew a packet of waffles would not help.”
“Sweet is conciliatory,” says one of the characters. , And a real beauty that radiates from the pages all the way.