The Loves of Judith: A Novel

The Loves of Judith: A Novel

A woman with three loves and a son with three fathers: a universal story of passion and personal destiny by the award-winning author of A Pigeon and a Boy.   When the mysterious Judith arrives in a small agricultural village in Palestine in the 1930s, she attracts attention of three men: Moshe, a widowed farmer; Globerman, a wealthy cattle dealer; and Jacob, who loses his wife—the most beautiful woman in the village—because of his obsession with Judith, who insists on living in a cowshed rather than settling down with any of her admirers. When she gives birth to Zayde, all three suitors consider him their son, and Zayde, who tragically loses Judith, imbibes their triple wisdom and their distinct versions of his origins. As Zayde pieces together the beguiling story of the singular woman who was his mother, Meir Shalev weaves a magical novel of the joys and secrets of village life, of an unconventional family, and the unexpected fruits of love. “Told in a euphonic voice and employing the magic conventions of a fairy tale, this is a heartwarming narrative agleam with moments of plangent sadness, rueful humor, and compassionate insight.” — Publishers Weekly One of Israel's most celebrated novelists, MEIR SHALEV was born in 1948 on Nahalal, Israel's first moshav. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and his honors include the National Jewish Book Award and Israel's Brenner Prize for A Pigeon and a Boy. He died in 2023. 1   On warm days, a soft smell of milk rises from the walls of my house. The walls are plastered and whitewashed, tiles cover the ground, but from the pores of the walls and the cracks of the floor, the smell rises to me, persists, steals in like the sweat of an ancient love.   Once my house was a cowshed. The house of a horse and a she-ass and a few milk cows. It had a wide wooden door, with an iron bolt across it, concrete troughs, yokes for cattle, jugs, cans, and milking stations.   And a woman lived in the cowshed, she worked and slept in it, dreamed and wept. And on a bed of sacks she gave birth to her son.   Doves walked back and forth on the ridge of the roof, in the remote corners the swallows were fussing over their nests of mud, and the fluttering of their wings was so pleasant I feel it even now, softening the expression on my face, smoothing the wrinkles of age and anger as it rises in my memory.   In the morning, the sun illuminated squares of windows on the walls and gilded the dust particles dancing in the air. Dew gathered on the lids of the jugs and field mice scurried over the bundles of straw like small gray lightning bolts.   The she-ass, my mother told me, because she wanted to preserve the memories in me, was wild and very wise, and even in her sleep she would kick, and when you wanted to ride on her back, Zayde, she would gallop to the door, bow down, and pass under the bar of the bolt, and if you didn’t jump off her back in time, Zayde meyn kind, the iron bar hit your chest and brought you down. The she- ass also knew how to steal barley from the horse and how to laugh out loud and how to rap on the door of the house with her hoof to get some candy.   And a mighty eucalyptus tree rose up in the yard, its boughs wide, fragrant, and always rustling. No one knew who had planted it or what wind had borne its seed. Bigger and older than all its brothers in the nearby eucalyptus forest, it stood in its place and waited long before the village was founded. I often climbed it because crows nested in its crest and even then I was observing their ways.   By now my mother is dead and the tree has been cut down and the cowshed has become a house and the crows have taken off and new ones have come, returning to their dust and hatching out of their eggs. And nevertheless, those crows and those stories and that cowshed and that eucalyptus—they’re the anchors, the eternal pictures of my life.   The tree was about sixty feet high, the crows’ nest was close to its crest, and in the thicket of its lower branches you could see the remnants of the “Tarzan hut” of children who climbed up and nested in it before I was born.   In the old aerial photos taken by the British air force and in the stories of the villagers it is clearly visible, but today all that’s left of it is an immense stump, with the date it was cut down seared in it like the date of death on a tombstone: December 10, 1950. Moshe Rabinovitch, the man whose yard I grew up in and whose cowshed I live in, the man who gave me his name and bequeathed me his farm, came back from burying my mother, sharpened his big axe, and put the tree to death.    2   For three days Rabinovitch chopped down the tree. Over and over again the axe swung up, and over and over again it came down. Around and around the man chopped, moaned and swung, groaned and struck.   A short man, Rabinovitch, taciturn and broad, with thick, short hands. Even today, in old age, the villagers call him “Rabinovitch the O