Esau, by Meir Shalev, tranlated by Barbara Harshav is an exceptional novel, and one that breathes with illumination, fantasy, Biblical characters, parables, and poetic prose.

The story revolves around the Levy family, a Jewish family of bread makers in Israel. It spans decades from pre-World War I through the 1970s. It is modeled after the Biblical story of Esau and Jacob. Esau is the narrator, and appears to be speaking to a female. Esau’s brother (in the novel) is his twin, Jacob, and their father is Abraham who is married to Sarah, and Sarah is a Jewish convert. Both of the brothers love a woman named Leah.

Jacob more or less “steals” Leah from Esau, and marries her. He continues on the family tradition of bread making, and is the town baker. He and Leah have children, while Esau follows a different course by moving to America. Yet, he still considers himself a bread-maker, a baker, of sorts.

He becomes a writer, and a baker, in a metaphorical sense. “Like my father and brother, I also make my living from bread, but I don’t bake it anymore. I write about it.” Esau feeds off of the jealousy he feels for Jacob, off of his sexual/romantic interests, and off of the death of his mother, whose funeral he didn’t attend. His writing is his bread, and he kneads it and watches the pages rise and fall, jumping back and forth in time through his childhood, and further back detailing how his parents met, and then forward again into the present.

Bread becomes the metaphor for Esau’s writing, and continues to be so, until the end of the book. Shalev kneads and manipulates a tale of both fantasy and reality, within the confines of continual uprisings in Israel. Esau is a novel of stories within stories, as parables and tales exist within the whole. The prose can seem disjointed if the reader isn’t cognizant about what is occurring. Shalev has a purpose and writes that way intentionally. That doesn’t mean to imply that the book is less interesting or less intense due to Shalev’s form of writing.

On the contrary, I found Esau to be a fascinating and intriguing novel. Shalev manages the almost impossible, in blending Biblical stories and verse, along with hints and allusions to fables and myths that include animals and symbolism. He presses and molds the “bread”, with vivid word-images that flow through time and place, and carry us to other worlds. The story is filled both with fantasy and realistic events and moments, through use of metaphors and stunningly beautiful prose the spiritual, logical and emotional events are astonishingly detailed.

Anyone who has written an essay, a paper for a class, a novella or book, should be able to relate to Esau’s character. Most writers skip back and forth within their work, changing this, reformatting that, adding and deleting text, enhancing or exaggerating prose, creating vivid details, etc. One word can take on more than one connotation, and the writer is often crossing out and editing the content of a word or sentence for clarity. This is what Esau (the book’s narrator) has done, in trying to create his own book about his family and life.

I enjoyed Shalev’s use of blending fantasy and reality, time and place, Biblical characters and stories, into the modern world. Shalev is masterful in that aspect, and has been in his past novels, using the same format. That is Meir Shalev’s brilliance in his novel Esau. He has projected a writer into the book, as only a writer can (by effectively writing in the manner that only a writer does write). His emphasis and use of fables, tales, Biblical characters and references, myths and metaphors has produced a masterpiece of a novel. The aromas of life unfold before our eyes.

I do not own this novel, but have personally read it. I am so glad my local library had a copy.
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Jew Wishes…Peace to you all.
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