Pulse

Yonatan, a young accountant, is convinced that the seven-week-old fetus his wife Mira is carrying is dead-it has no pulse yet, the doctor tells him. Added to this, Yonatan has to deal with his and Mira`s move from their Tel Aviv apartment to a moshav in the center of Israel. But unexpected visitors and his father`s sudden illness disrupt his plans.

Pulse traces two remarkable days in the lives of Yonatan Berger and his aunt, Yehudit, who has come to visit her sick brother. They find themselves traveling both the real and psychological distance from the bourgeois comfort of Tel Aviv to deprived neighborhoods, from Jenin in the West Bank to Kasol, India, where Yehudit`s estranged son disappeared after his traumatic military service in the occupied territories. The difficulty both Yonatan and Yehudit find in communicating with their loved ones, and with one another, is conveyed by a present-absent narrator who is the third-hidden-protagonist of the book. Through his voice, Iczkovits skillfully describes characters who are torn, struggling to adapt to the norms of Israeli life; and thus he exposes the degradation of these norms and the violence that pervades them. Not only does the fetus have no heartbeat: we see that the pulse of Israeli society as a whole has veered off course.