The Bed You Make
Eitan Russo, a strong and introverted man, returns to his childhood home in an old agricultural village after years of estrangement. Two brothers from a neighboring Arab village, Baseel and Majd, help him set up a horse farm together with his girl friend Alona. It is summer 1991, and the day starts with Eitan trying to break in Barb, a beautiful wild stallion that Baseel and Majd have given him as a gift. From the outset it is clear that something terrible will happen in the course of the day, and the plot is built as a high-tension, passion-filled drama, with present events dictated by what happened decades before. For despite his attempt to avoid his destiny, Eitan repeats errors made by his father, Bezalel Russo.
As the story of the past interweaves with the present, dark repressed secrets gradually emerge. Back then in the early 1940s, Bezalel Russo and his wife Ahuva, a loving couple, came and settled in the village, had two sons and made their living growing avocados. But one day, an Arab man disappeared in the avocado grove under mysterious circumstances, and the Russos’ life was wrecked. Bezalel left home and died of heart failure a year later. Ahuva was left a widow, and the younger son emigrated to Australia. Eitan, the firstborn, has never spoken of what happened in his childhood and it is only now, forty years after the trauma, that he confronts his past.
With sweeping intensity, Ayelet Shamir binds together the two distant periods with their enthralling characters and carries the reader on to the dramatic denouement.
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“A fine, subtle and precise Faulknerian novel … In my eyes, it is a powerful, heart-rending story about the terrible power of the past … I read it in excitement and suspense. ”
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“ In addition to all the words of praise that have already been said, and are yet to be said, I wish to point out the rare and inspired quality of Ayelet Shamir’s narrative prose, which creates a rich visual and emotional world. ”
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“ Ayelet Shamir’s novel is very unusual in the landscape of Hebrew literature in recent years … It reaches a rare profundity of plot, of emotion and of ideology that exposes the hidden layers of Israeli existence … The Bed You Make arouses admiration and achieves a forgotten literary goal: to look around and within, in order to distinguish and to diagnose; to ponder ourselves, our ancient sins and how they have evolved. ”