Yair Assulin

Well, I’ll be honest, I’m not finding it easy to review Yair Assulin’s short novella about a young conscript struggling with the burden of his National Service assignment. It’s certainly well written. It drips with authenticity, and does a very good job of conveying the unique sense of dread and mundane monotony that many draftees undoubtedly experience during their army time. There’s nothing quite like the blues of the night before returning to base. The book follows the unnamed soldier on a pre-dawn car trip with his father from home to a large central army base for his evaluation at the IDF’s mental health clinic. This is the culmination of a torturous series of events where the protagonist becomes increasingly at odds with his fellow soldiers and his commanders of various ranks, and just about everybody in his life for that matter. He’s at the end of his rope.

The journey is interspersed with numerous flashbacks of the recent past that has brought him to this point. We see his difficulty in conveying his feelings to the people in his life - his family, his girlfriend, and closest friends; and his inability as an intelligent eighteen year old to adapt to the major change in life that society expects of him as his duty to ‘the homeland’. He’s grown up knowing that this - military service - is exactly what would happen to him in that space in time between high school and the rest of his life.

So why so difficult to review? Because no matter how much I want to sympathise with him, and all my instincts would normally extend a lot of sympathy towards his exact predicament, that of an unwilling conscript; I just had a really hard time with him himself. He’s just not all that sympathetic. He has a quite unlikeable superiority complex, has disturbing fantasies of wanting to see his mother or his girlfriend worrying about his service, and is really quite whiny and petulant, generally, about his lot. In actual fact, compared to the many various alternatives, his posting in a small intelligence unit is really not all that bad. He is not really in harm’s way, has a pretty cushy job, and gets to go home on most weekends. [Contrastingly, most IDF combat soldiers typically get to go home maybe one weekend in three, or two if they’re lucky.]

As with my own experience, many conscripts can struggle with accepting the authority that will control almost every facet of their life for a period of usually three years. His experience really didn’t seem all that bad to me. But then I had to think back. Think back to boot camp and then combat training. Think back to all the rules and the bullshit and the lack of freedom that comes especially in the earlier phases of the service. And think back to all those kids - and that’s what they are, kids - who really just can’t handle the conformity of wearing a uniform, following orders, and respecting rank. To say nothing of carrying a weapon.

I’d been anticipating some sort of salvation, but again there was nothing. Again I’d have to get up the next morning with the same people, again I’d have to sit in that rotten war room, laminating and cutting, over and over again.

Yes. That’s the army. A lot of repetitive monotony. A lot of the time it sucks. But it’s not Passchendaele or Omaha Beach he’s suffering through. There’s no chance of him facing physical danger.

In one of his lowest moments, following a fruitless discussion with his commander - instigated by his mother’s urgent phone calls - this particular C.O. that he really despises sends another soldier (yet another one of the ‘hated’) to remove his weapon. It comes as a nadir of utter humiliation.

I don’t know what else she told him. I only know that after a while a soldier turned up, a guy I hated and who hated me, and he said that Eli had woken him up and told him to take away my weapon so I wouldn’t put a bullet through my head.

Army suicide happens, and our boy has certainly had those tendencies, fixating on throwing himself under a passing vehicle. Home on leave, he’s already verbally assaulted his best friend for his understandable refusal to break his hand in a car door - so as to get a lengthy medical exemption.

There’s an unfortunate cultural stigma in Israel (or certainly used to be) for those discharged from service on mental health grounds, and the boy doesn’t want out. He just wants another base, another job. Can’t they just understand what he needs?

At the end of the drive, he arrives at the central base, for the 8am meeting with the Mental Health Officer. A gut-wrenchingly convincing assessment of Kafkaesque proportions ensues. The MHO and the soldier circle each other repetitiously, until -

“What did you say?” he asked with restrained anger.
“I said my blood will be on your hands. I said I can’t go back there. I just can’t. Why does it have to be so complicated?”

The outcome of that meeting may surprise some readers, and others not. But something didn’t quite ring true, despite all the promise that the author led us here with. I don’t know.

I’m glad that the author brings this somewhat taboo subject matter to wider attention, but disappointed that it wasn’t with a more sympathetic character. Yair Assulin’s scene-setting though is pitch perfect, from the paltry bookshelf in the C.O.’s office, to the lonely ice cream on a deserted base wall, and the excruciating denouement at the MHO... So I’ll certainly look forward to reading more of his fiction in translation… (altro)