The Wolf Hunt by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Pushkin Press, £16.99
Reviewed by Jenni Frazer

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is an Israeli novelist and psychologist whose speciality, I think, is displacement — more specifically the understanding of what it is like to be in another’s shoes, and the choices that emanate from that.

Her first novel, which found great success internationally, was the magic realist-flavoured One Night, Markovitch, inspired by the sham marriages in the late 1930s between Jewish men from mandate-era Palestine and Jewish women from Europe on the eve of the Holocaust. Waking Lions, her second, pivoted on the frenzied scrabbling for justification after a hit-and-run accident.

Now, in her fourth novel, The Wolf Hunt, she examines a different kind of displacement: of Israelis who leave their country for America, and of a teenager with a limited understanding of the parameters of freedom.

The Shusters, on the face of it, have little to trouble them. Husband Mikhail has a senior position in a Silicon Valley tech company that is on the verge of getting a prestigious government contract. Lilach, our narrator, is a largely stay-at-home mother who volunteers at a Californian old-age home, when not smothering their teenage son, Adam, in love and false encouragement.

For, as Gundar-Goshen carefully peels back her plot like an onion, we learn that Lilach is the epitome of unreliable narrators, and that every protagonist is a liar.

In her opening paragraph, Gundar-Goshen hits the reader: 16-year-old Adam may have murdered his schoolmate, Jamal. “That’s not true,” she assures us. But the more we learn about Adam’s dodgy behaviour, the more we wonder: how well did she really know her son, and of what he was capable?

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Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's book (Photo: Bookcover)

Each of the characters has a difficult back story, from Mikhail’s adoption by kibbutznik parents, to Lilach’s problematic relationship with her lawyer mother back in Israel.

And then there is Uri. Uri Ziv, a heart-of-stone individual who runs self-defence classes for a group of teenagers, including Lilach’s son, Adam, and who also, it emerges, served — 20 years earlier — in the same top-secret admired army unit as Mikhail Shuster. Mikhail, who never talks about his army service, calls Uri “akhi” — “my brother”—  a term only used among the closest of Israeli army buddies.

And once Uri comes on the scene, then the reader knows it is only a matter of time before betrayal becomes a central theme of the book, too.

Betrayal is explored in many forms: be it of Israeli society, the Israeli “bubble” in expat California; the young Jewish teens trying to fit in to American society; of antisemitism; and even the young American-born Israelis in California, wondering whether there is a place for them in the Israeli army.

Gundar-Goshen’s central question is “how well do you know the people closest to you”, and on this reading, the answer is that Lilach hasn’t got the faintest idea about her husband, her son, and most of all the somewhat creepy Uri.

I loved the novel, except for the conclusion, because I felt that Gundar-Goshen wrapped up the plot all too rapidly and expediently. I didn’t believe in the solution. But I was left wondering whether the Shusters, having thought they had solved their difficulties with Israel by hot-footing it to California, might yet return to rebuild their lives in Tel Aviv.

Either way, I am pretty sure that Lilach and Mikhail would be out on the streets, demonstrating against the government on Saturday nights: another form of displacement, once again.