Judas - Amos Oz

( Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange )
(Finalist - Man Booker International Award 2017 )

I think I came across the word "Traitor" for the first time, while I was reading Enid Blyton's "The Rat-a-Tat mystery", as a kid. I didn't know the meaning of the term and referred my father's dictionary to look it up. Since then I've come across the term many more times than I would've cared for - especially its Sinhala equivalent. While I don't pretend to be so broad minded as to dismiss the term to be  of an absurd meaning, I do concede that its  application is valid only within a context, and hence relative. We are but mostly small men at most times, and in such a world as we live in,  a man could be labelled a traitor or a tag of treason could be removed, posthumously. This book is about two traitors, so called. A exposition into the historical character of Judas Iscariot, who is said to have betrayed Jesus Christ, and the fictitious Shealtiel Abravanel, whose idea of Zionism didn't include waging a war for a separate nation for the Jews. It is safe to believe that this book is one that is close to the author's heart, as he himself has been labelled thus, due to his stance on the security and political concerns of his nation

So how does the book flow?
Enter, Shmuel, University drop out, dumped by his girl friend, asthmatic and alone in his world for all practical purposes, who finds himself the ideal job for a period of semi-hibernation, as he tries to reevaluate his life. Meet Atalia, attractive widow of 40 something, Shealtiel's daughter in law, from his late son's marriage - mysterious and  scornful of Shmuel - at times, at least. Shmuel's job is to be a companion to talk to Gershom Wald, Atalia's father in law. Put these people in one house, close the doors, maybe the windows too and  keep all visitors out. Once in the house, we have several tangents of conversation on the Jew's attitude towards Jesus Christ, the split opinions about nationhood between Gershom, and Shmuel with his socialist leanings, Shmuel's infatuation on Atalia which she mostly scorns, and the private worlds of these three people, to which a few windows are opened, once in a while.

.

While the main theme focuses on the possibility that if there was no Judas, there wouldn't have been Christianity and his devotion may have made him the first and possibly only true Christian, it also conceded that he has earned the wrath of millions,  since history has judged him harshly. This position is explored at depth - either through conversations between Wald and Shmuel, or a few peeps into Shmuel's former masters' thesis subject - how to Jews considered Jesus Christ.

“How ironic it is, Shmuel wrote in his notebook, that the first and last Christian, the only Christian who did not abandon Jesus for a moment and did not deny him ... the only one whose heart was truly broken by Jesus’s death, is the one who has been considered, by hundreds of millions of people on five continents and over thousands of years, the archetypal, the most heinous and most despicable, Jew. As the incarnation of treachery, the incarnation of Judaism, the incarnation of the connection between Judaism and betrayal.”

In parallel Amos presents the views of Shealtiel's, through the words of Wald, and his daughter, about how Zionism could've been possible without  nationalism, which has started a war - a war that he never wanted but which made his daughter a widow, and stopped what might have been  a  promising career as a professor in Mathematics, for his son in law.

"He was firm in his view that Zionism could not be achieved through confrontation with Arabs, whereas I had understood by the end of the forties that it could not be achieved without some such confrontation."

These conversations make for a read that makes one evaluate one's own beliefs. The arguments that he presents for and against Israel, are so naturally etched into the fabric of the novel, that it doesn't come out convoluted. For  three months or so,Shmuel lives in a kind of a self willed prison, by some  people who have paid dearly for the beliefs that they held, or against the beliefs they held, since the times that they lived in gave them hard choices - maybe, no choices. Shmuel, himself at a juncture in life, undecided, lost, yearns, loves, loses, but gets a chance for a fresh start at the end of the period of hibernation. And the way that Amos Oz, has made the reader an invisible resident of that gloomy house with its  wall of willows, the residents living out the rest of their lives, for what else are they to do. It is as near a modern masterpiece as it gets, and I have no hesitation in stacking this with two other great novels I read very recently - Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, and Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders.

 Amos lost out to David Grossman, in 2018 as the latter won the Booker International award. I rate "Judas", above "The Horse...", for the overall completion and the width of the novel of the former, against one man's admission of defeat, however bitterly the author had manage to  capture it all in ( as presented in the latter.)