Meir Shalev, one of the greatest and most widely read among Israeli writers, died Tuesday, April 11, at the age of 74, in Alonei Abba (Galilee), of pancreatic cancer. Endowed, in his life as in his work, with a solid sense of humor, he confided to a relative, at the very end of his life, that having been born in the very year of the creation of the State of Israel , in 1948, it seemed natural to him to disappear before him – although, added this lifelong opponent to the right, he did not know who, of him or of his country, was sicker.
This ultimate anecdote captures the spirit of the character well. Cousin of the author Zeruya Shalev, translated into more than twenty languages, he belonged to the same and brilliant generation as Amos Oz (1939-2018), AB Yehoshua (1936-2022) or David Grossman. After studying psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he resided, and after completing his military service in an elite corps, the Golani Infantry Brigade – he took part in the battles of the Six-Day War in 1967 and was wounded in uniform – he first became a journalist, an activity he would never quite give up – his weekly column in the daily Yediot Aharonot had become legendary. But he was keen to separate literature from his political commitment – when it comes to the conflict with the Palestinians, he was a supporter of the two-state solution – which made him an opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu, who nevertheless paid homage to him by learning his death.
His production of fiction draws on various sources, in particular the South American novel and its magical realism. His literate parents had nourished his childhood with books by Mark Twain or Charles Dickens, the echo of which is heard in his sarcastic style. His literary imagination remained imbued with the memory of the first Jewish agricultural settlements in Ottoman and then Mandatory Palestine, in the Jezreel Valley or in northern Israel. Nostalgic memory when it came to evoking his childhood in the village (moshav) by Nahalal, with its concentric architecture, or his Russian grandparents and his grandmother (in the guise of the formidable Tonia, in My Russian grandmother and her American vacuum cleanerGallimard, 2013).
Critical memory, far from any idealization, in A gun, a cow, a tree and a woman (Gallimard, 2017), which narrated the saga of the Tavori, a family of brutal and smart Galilean farmers, knowing each shoot and each bird, the antithesis of the stereotypes of Jewish emigrants arriving from Russian or German cities in ironed jackets and varnished shoes. The Tavori are bearers of cross-generational hatred – a theme that has run through Meir Shalev’s work since Let the earth remember (Albin Michel, 1990), his first novel, which sold 75,000 copies in the first year of its publication in Israel, in 1988. This one already told the epic of the Russian pioneers clearing the Galilee, at the beginning of the XXe century.
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