436
PARTISAN REVIEW
who "prefers not to." Did you seen any kind of inspiration there for
the opening of the novel?
AO:
I certainly never thought of it before, but now that you mention
it, there might have been a certain amount of inspiration . These
things do not work consciously. I won't swear an oath there was; I
won't swear an oath that there wasn't, either.
ASG:
How have women critics in Israel treated you? That is, how
have they reacted to the treatment of women in your stories?
AO:
Women critics usually took to the extreme: either "How dare
you?" or else "How could you know?"
ASG:
I wondered, for example, that in
A Peifect Peace
you have the
irrational, shrewish Hava and the very childlike, simple-minded
Rimona. There doesn't seem to be any normal woman .
AO-:-£ersonally I'm not a great believer in normalcy. And if you
look, you'll hardly find a normal man in this novel, either. But I am
not making any statement about women in general. No, Hava is
Hava, and Rimona is Rimona. In some other novels I have different
types of women .
ASG:
There are so many unhappy marriages in your novels, so
many bitter women.
AO:
How about the epilogue to
A Perfect Peace,
where this trio lives
kind of contentedly? That's a good marriage. Who says marriage
takes two? Why not three , or six, or eleven?
ASG:
Well, let's just say that in several of your stories there's a situa–
tion where you find-as, say, in
My Michael-a
rather meek, good–
natured , rational man with an irrational wife who's impatient with
his traditional virtues; a mismatch of personality types between the
idealistic husband - unassuming and . . .
AO:
...
boring sometimes, pedestrian-with a dreamy , capricious
woman.
ASG:
I wondered why Michael put up with Hannah so long.
AO:
I guess there is more between the two of them than appears on
the surface. She opted for the kind of security and stability which he
could offer her, whereas he probably chose what I'd describe as a
colorful option in his otherwise fairly gray life. So it may not be as
totally unhappy as it seems on the surface . Or, to put it in different
words, self-indulgence may be a legitimate part of the game; ex–
pressing complaints and anger may be one of the components of be–
ing sated and content. Anyway, these are generalizations. In the
early days of Zionism, in the then-Palestine there was something
about the sexes' relation which strikes me as wrong. They pretended
