As a feminist, was Ayelet Gundar-Goshen wrong to write a novel about a girl who lies about sexual assault? Keren David met the new star of Israeli literature
March 21, 2019 10:32
ByKeren David, Keren David
When Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was writing her latest book Liar, she had sleepless nights. In an era where women victims of sexual harassment are speaking up and being taken seriously, was it right to be writing a book in which the protagonist is a teenage girl, Nofar, who falsely accuses a Z-list celebrity of sexually assaulting her?
The question was particularly acute as she had just become a mother for the first time. As she looked at her her baby daughter “I knew that some day she will be sexually harassed. As a mother I can’t protect her. Although the Me Too movement means that maybe there is a chance that she will live completely differently.”
She persisted, telling herself that it would be perverse to change her story, that male authors would never be told that their characters are representative of all men. And readers of Liar may find as I did that their sympathies are, at the very least, evenly divided. Yes, Nofar the teenage girl is wrong to lie about what the celebrity did — but as, minutes beforehand, he had launched a cruel verbal attack on her, it feels rather satisfying when he is arrested.
In fact, as well as exploring the psychology of lying, the novel examines the question of what constitutes an assault. Why is a physical attack a criminal act, I wondered, while reading it — and yet words which wound and destroy, are not? Gundar-Goshen agrees. “He crushes her with his words, and this is something which he would not be held accountable for. It’s something that often men do to women. She is traumatised, and it is an assault in a way. ” She’s glad to hear that I felt sympathy towards the hapless Nofar. “I didn’t want the reader to hate her. Sometimes good people can do terrible, terrible things.”
Gundar-Goshen based the story on a true life case, an Israeli woman who falsely accused an African refugee of rape. A friend of hers was defending the man. Gundar-Goshen was interested in his accuser. “At first everyone hugged her as a victim. But then she was publicly denounced. She was no longer an innocent lamb, she was the big bad wolf, she became the monster.” As a psychologist, Gondar-Goshen wanted to imagine why someone might weave such a story and what effect it would have on her. “To call her a monster is to draw a line between ‘us’ and ‘her’. She is not human, it dehumanises her. It’s too easy to condemn her, it’s much more interesting to ask, are there any moments when I too could tell such a lie? The truth is that we all bend the truth somehow.”
In the book, lying Nofar blossoms under the sympathetic gaze of a nation, and forms her first relationship although that, too is based on and threatened by untruths. But eventually the truth — or some truth — seeps out.
Gunder-Goshen started her professional writing career at 18, as a reporter for the IDF, and continued as a journalist for Yediot Ahronot. But she gave up her job because “I felt if I ever want to write fiction I have to quit the newspaper. “
She was exhausted by writing endless headlines about Netanyahu. “It’s a terrible sexist metaphor but I guess a woman who sleeps with customers all day can’t go home and make love to her husband.”
She took a masters’ degree in Psychology and in 2012 her first novel was published. One Night, Markovitch, set on the eve of World War Two, is about false marriages between a group of Jewish women desperate to escape Europe, and Jewish men from British mandate Palestine. It won Israel’s Sapir prize for debut novels and was translated into 13 languages, as was her second book Waking Lions, in 2014.
Waking Lions is also about lies — in this case told by an Israeli doctor. Eytan Green kills a man, an Eritrean migrant, in a hit and run accident on a desert road. “Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s omniscient narrator involves us in a web of lies, guilt, evasion, seduction and moral equivocation …This might have turned into an American-style minor thriller with predictable twists. Instead, it is a work of great subtlety which wrenches at the heart of both the family and the state, and makes for compulsive reading,” said the Spectator ‘s reviewer.
Subtlety and ambivalence abound once again in Liar, qualities sadly lacking in Israel’s politics. She’s been an outspoken critic of Netanyahu. Can the coming election change anything?
“I wish,” she says, “I wish. The idea of waking up in an Israel which is not governed by Netanyahu and the extreme right is really a dream. I just hope it will come true.”
How does she explain Netanyahu’s popularity among Israeli voters? “I think he’s the biggest storyteller. More than Amoz Oz, more than David Grossman. He’s the biggest storyteller…not in modern Israeli literature but in modern Israeli politics. He tells very clear and vivd stories in which the forces of good are fighting the forces of evil.
“In real life the stories are more complicated than that.”
Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is published on March 28 by Pushkin Press