By Michal Zechariah.
Maayan Eitan, Love (Penguin Press, March 2022)
When I was in high school, I had a boyfriend who was more sexually experienced than me. He said he used to date an older girl from a kibbutz—kibbutzim were communes known for their promiscuity—who taught him everything about sex. He talked about the things they did often. After we finally did it, though, he started crying. “What’s wrong?” I asked. I was alarmed. Entangled in his duvet, my boyfriend confessed that this was his first time. There was no girl in a kibbutz. The stories he had been coaxing me with for weeks were all fictions, spun in his imagination, and based on porn. Did my boyfriend love me, or was he only eager to try out the things he had seen on his computer monitor behind closed doors? Was I seduced by the honest desire his stories evinced or by their pornographic fictitiousness, so obviously false in hindsight? In Love, a radiant debut by Israeli author Maayan Eitan, these possibilities are all inseparable from one another. Love cannot be protected in a world already rife with sexual exploitation.
Love is a phantasmatic prose poem about the life of a teenage prostitute (she uses the pseudonym Libby at work, but that is not her real name). Originally published in Hebrew and translated into English by the author, the slim volume is split into two parts. The first part is titled “Words Are Whores” and is loosely structured around the narrator’s experiences as a sex worker—the hired men that drive her from one apartment to the next throughout the night, her exchanges with the other girls she meets in their cars, her fascination with Assaf, the elusive pimp that hired her, and her grotesque encounters with clients. The second part, “Love,” begins with a romantic relationship later in the narrator’s life but soon becomes unmoored from its starting point, floating in time among her days as a sex worker, her memory lapses, and an unspoken trauma in her childhood. She initially lives with a partner she claims to love and finds a job at a gallery. But these attempts at normalcy fail when she inevitably gravitates toward her old life. Speaking retrospectively, she tells her partner:
This is how I imagine I’ll show up again at your door: instead of two suitcases, I’ll have a backpack this time. In the backpack there would be a book, in the book it would say, we are free women, said Anna to Molly. Perhaps Molly to Anna. I decided to become a free woman too, I had too much money and I got sick of returning to your bed every night, so free from the chains of this world I called Assaf again and told him, Hey, Assaf, it’s Libby.
Eitan’s protagonist cannot imagine a wholehearted reunion with her partner. Her fantasy of returning to him already contains the seed that led to her departure—her desire to be a free woman. The book that instigates this desire is Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, where the protagonists Molly and Anna identify themselves as “free women” because they are unmarried. Freedom, for them, means freedom from men. Love’s narrator also comes to see her romantic relationship as a form of bondage, where her financial welfare becomes inseparable from sharing her partner’s bed. Returning to that bed every night feels as undesirable to her as her nightly routine as a sex worker. But she ends up in the same position as Molly, who admits that it is hard for women to define themselves outside of their relationships with men: Eitan’s protagonist can only alternate between her attachments to her unnamed partner and the pimp Assaf—she never becomes independent from them.
Love’s narrator continuously unwrites the facts of her own account. She creates alternatives to every event and repeatedly confesses to lying. To say that she is unreliable would be an understatement. All the while, she maintains coherence through the distinctiveness of her voice and entangles the reader in an increasing emotional intimacy. When telling her partner how a girl she knew as a sex worker once urged her to “run away from there,” she says:
It seems like I should have listened to her, but I stayed inside, this was what I imagined Assaf wanted me to do. Perhaps I didn’t imagine. Perhaps, in the end, I met him. I think I fell in love with him, I think, in the end, that I fell in love with him. Or perhaps it was someone else. Who opened the door for me and wrapped his arms around me and pressed me to his chest. Who waited for me on a bench next to my building when I was delayed and asked, is everything all right? Everything’s fine. Do you remember that I told you what we did? I lied. I made it all up for you. So that you love me.
In this brief passage, Assaf transforms from an absent but commanding figure whom the protagonist must obey to a love interest, to the main character in the protagonist’s fantasy about loving care. At the end of this sequence, the narrator faces her present partner again and reassures him that the entire story has been a lie—she was never a sex worker. The book’s intense anti-realism and refusal to commit to a single set of facts respond to the horror of its central insight: that love, the thing that people yearn for the most, is already implicated in the violence of sexual exploitation. In the narrator’s experience, sex work and heterosexual monogamy have more in common than we may like to admit. Faced with love’s false promises of care and safety, lying is the only way that she can distance herself from her attachments to men.
Eitan is a controlled author who is acutely aware of the possibilities of fiction. Before the Hebrew version of Love came out in the spring of 2020, she regularly published short stories in Hebrew literary magazines and popular media. She was a graduate student at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on Hebrew literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba. When her book arrived after six years of work it became an immediate “literary sensation,” as declared by the blurb on the English edition dust jacket. The Israeli literary community celebrated Eitan’s ingenuity, and the attention she received seemed unprecedented for a debut writer of innovative literary fiction. Leading publications such as Haaretz and the Hebrew edition of Granta covered the book, and prominent critics, editors, and authors—including Tehila Hakimi and Dan Miron—praised her prose. But alongside the general enthusiasm about Eitan’s literary talent, others raised concerns about her book’s noncommittal relation to facts. Ayellet Ben Ner, co-founder of Argaman, an organization advocating for sex workers’ rights, confronted Eitan on social media and demanded to know whether or not she had been a sex worker herself. If not, what right did she have to write about sex workers’ lives? Was she not appropriating their voices for her own purposes?
Eitan replied that it was none of Ben Ner’s business. In an interview to Haaretz shortly after the confrontation, she argued back: “Miranda July has said that women authors are denied the liberty to write fiction, and anything we write is perceived as autobiographical . . . I should have the liberty to write even when discussing my characters’ deepest pains, which are not disconnected from reality. The demand for autobiography is irrelevant to literature as far as I’m concerned. It’s an essentially patriarchal question.” Eitan is a powerful interpreter of her own writing, and her public interviews offer accounts of her book that are as persuasive as the book itself. For her, the freedom to write fiction is not only a freedom to lie. It’s a freedom to tell the kinds of truth that only fiction can discover. With its fundamentally undetermined relation to facts, Love manipulates readers’ expectations from fiction—a followable plot, a character arc—to express the radical incoherence of experience in the face of sexual violence. The violation of the body sunders narratives that make sense of the pursuit of love and renders everyday language inadequate for describing it. When the narrator is committed to a psychiatric institution, she defies the therapists’ attempts to analyze her: “I laughed loudly when they asked if I felt any pain, where did it feel painful. What else could I do?” The character’s pain, as Eitan says in her interview, is “not disconnected from reality.” It is the pain of yearning for love, but only being able to experience it as exploitation. But straightforward propositions such as this are insufficient for conveying the quality of this pain. If it can be conveyed by words at all, they need to be the circular, evasive, and variegated words offered by Love itself.
Although Eitan is the book’s translator as well as its author, you wouldn’t know it from the copyright page. Nowhere is she credited for the translation. In a social media post about self-translation, Eitan acknowledges the commercial reasons for this choice. Despite translators’ increasing visibility in the literary industry, the English-speaking book market is still heavily biased in favor of original English titles. Only 3% of the books published in the United States are translations. By translating their own work, authors can perform a miracle—they can create a second yet original copy of their book.
Eitan’s translation preserves the rhythms of the Hebrew original as well as its lyrical seductiveness, even as it occasionally stumbles over grammar or idiom. And then there are instances in which different languages cannot replicate each other. Love’s opening scene provides an example of this limitation. In that passage, the narrator goes through a catalog of possible local life stories:
You didn’t have any friends
You had a terrific laugh. You had long legs, big tits, a flat belly. No, you were fat. You came from ruined homes, well-off families, your parents were madly in love with each other. Your father was an accountant, a kibbutz member, homeless, a linguistics professor at a university. He loved you like his youngest daughter. You were an only child. You were born to a large family, after years of treatments, you were adopted . . . You were born in Saint Petersburg. No no: your parents came from America, you were born in the suburbs, you replied to them in Hebrew when they talked to you in a jumble of foreign languages. You spoke Russian until you were seven then you forgot it, the snow too. You knew no other language but Hebrew. You refused to answer your grandparents when they spoke Amharic to you. You pretended not to understand them.
The English pronoun you obscures the number and gender of the narrator’s audience, which the Hebrew makes explicit: plural, feminine. Here, the ungendered and unnumbered second person in English diminishes the effect of the Hebrew text. Only the plural nouns and the proliferation of possibilities give the impression that the narrator is addressing multiple people.
The second person feminine plural is important for the interpretive possibilities it allows: Is the narrator speaking to the other sex workers she meets every night, pointing to the prevalence of her situation across all demographics? If so, why does she sometimes stop the cumulative torrent in order to correct herself, choosing between alternatives rather than adding them to the string of possibilities? Could the plural you refer to the narrator herself, in the same way that Dante on the brink of hell speaks about his life as nostra vita? In this case, the protagonist may be an Everywoman of sorts, standing in for all sex workers, or all women. Whether Eitan intends her protagonist to address fellow sex workers, herself as a representative for women at large, or even the readers, the implied audience of this passage shows that Love is not only telling a personal story. This is not the psychological account of how one woman’s sexual trauma caused her to lose faith in love. Although Love gradually spirals toward greater intimacy, the image of multiple women at the beginning of the book frames its dark conception of love as a wide-ranging, transcultural problem. Sexual violence cannot be excluded from love, even if we are not always faced with its worst iterations. If Eitan’s protagonist is trapped in a world where love is contaminated with violence, then we must be trapped in it with her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michal Zechariah is a literary scholar working on ethics and emotions in early modern British literature. She teaches at the University of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Psyche, and various Hebrew literary publications.
