The beaches of Tel Aviv are some of the most spectacular of any major world city. Sarit Yishai-Levi uses these beaches as a backdrop for her newest novel, The Woman Beyond the Sea, translated from Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann. And as the title implies, the water also serves as a boundary, specifically between three generations of mothers and daughters.
The story begins when a young woman named Eliya has just split from her husband, Ari, an aspiring Israeli novelist who moved to Paris without her. It’s just after the Yom Kippur War in the early-to-mid 1970s. Eliya’s parents, Lily and Shaul, back in Tel Aviv, have never approved of Ari so the divorce doesn’t come as a surprise to them. When Eliya returns from her ill-fated trip to Paris, she finds solace in the beaches of Tel Aviv.
The Sheraton Beach was my beach. The beach of my childhood, youth, and adolescence, the beach that was like home. Packed with people in the summer, it was desolate now, not a soul on the sand. I stood at the waterline, the soft, gentle waves lapping at my feet. Stretching out my arms, I raised my head, inhaled deeply, and closed my eyes, praying to the sea to rescue me like it always had, to heal me as it had helped me in the past. Wearing my black dress, despite the bitter cold, I walked into the water.
This particular trip to the beach is fortuitous because Eliya meets a surfer named Eldad who is fighting his own demons from the Yom Kippur War. He can tell that Eliya is troubled and refers her to his psychotherapist, Amir Kaminsky. It’s during her sessions with Dr. Kaminsky that Eliya starts to delve into her fraught relationship with her mother, Lily.
Lily, for most of the book, is the character who suffers the greatest losses. She loses her first child to meningitis when he’s just a year old, but long before that she was abandoned as a newborn by her mother on Christmas Eve and left in front of a Catholic convent to be raised by nuns. Lily knows nothing about her birth family apart from a note claiming that her mother is Jewish. After Lily starts traveling to Jaffa as a young woman to consult with an Arab bishara or fortune-teller, she asks about her past. The bishara sees a woman beyond the sea who has a black heart.
Lily was assailed by thoughts about the great sea and the woman who lived beyond it, the woman whose heart was black because of her sin. She had no doubt that this was the woman who’d left her at the convent on Christmas Eve. She could feel it in her bones. But what was she doing on the other side of the sea? She had to know who the woman was. She had to find out why she was beyond the sea.
But Lily never looks at the sea herself. She always faces away from it, toward the graveyard where her deceased son is buried. She has never been close with Eliya, because she’s so worried about losing yet another family member and cannot bear more pain. So she keeps Eliya at a distance. Lily and Eliya clash even more when Eliya introduces her parents to Eldad, the surfer she met at the beach, as her new boyfriend. Lily doesn’t think Eldad is good enough for Eliya because he doesn’t have a proper job; he’s still working on his PTSD from the Yom Kippur War. Shaul is more forgiving because his parents never accepted his marriage to Lily, a woman without a past.
Shaul’s Sephardic parents came to Tel Aviv from a tight Jewish, Ladino-speaking community in Monastir, Yugoslavia which is now called Bitola in today’s Macedonia. Shaul’s mother never wanted to leave her parents in Monastir, but as a young wife she followed her husband to Tel Aviv so that he could be closer to his brother. She grew to love the city.
Sometimes I thought the people in Tel Aviv lived on the beach and not in houses. Every hour of the day, from morning till late at night, people were on the beach. They had winds from the desert, the khamsin, much worse than today, and me with a baby in my belly sweating like a horse and heavy as a bear, and to cool down a little from the heat, we went to the sea, and I would go into the sea, and only in the water could I breathe.
But still the great unknown in the story is the identity of Lily’s mother, the woman beyond the sea. Eliya ends up helping her mother to search for her birth mother and find the true story behind Lily’s abandonment.
There are not many contemporary Israeli authors translated into English, but Yishai-Levi has seen great success in her first novel, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, and seems to have another winner here. The Woman Beyond the Sea isn’t just a story of family separation and the repair of fraught relationships, but it also celebrates a multicultural Tel Aviv with different races and religions.