THE CHOCOLATE DEAL ('Iskat ha-shokolad)

Novella by Haim Gouri, 1964

The dramatic backbone of Haim Gouri's poetically written and viscerally expressionistic novella The Chocolate Deal (1968; 'Iskat ha-shokolad, 1964) focuses on the rived souls of two Holocaust survivors wandering aimlessly through postapocalyptic Europe and their attempt to come to terms with their experiences and in the process establish normality. It is about the scarred psyche of the victims as they grapple with the sudden descent upon them of normality and the attendant battle to rebuild their identity and find a way, as Aharon Appelfeld once put it, beyond despair. Instead of foregrounding the Nazi horrors, Gouri deliberately sidesteps entering the concentrationary experience, preferring instead to pin the nucleus narrative to the period immediately following the Shoah and show the immutable terror within the floating clove of emptiness gnawing inside every survivor. As if holding a sieve, Gouri picks through the ruins and ruptures of the past that have been bequeathed to him as someone who was not in Europe during the atrocities, trying to transform this cracked marquetry into an architectural unified story that ropes the reader into empathic identification with the wounded. Drenched in symbolic allusiveness and repeatedly blurring the line between realities, leaping from character to character and from time to time, these oscillations leave the reader blinking and groping in desperate attempts to follow. For instance, at the start of the book it is unclear who the two protagonists are or who at times is the narrator, and revelatory details are proffered in shards and driblets. Since Gouri's aim is in presenting emblematic personas that represent contrasting types and not veritable, fully fleshed characters, as well as adumbrating the lingering aftermath of the survivor universe, the plot's drama is conveyed not through a penetrating strobe light but through a hazy obscure lens that stultifies any clear decoding of the personage of the story.

Set in an unidentified postwar German city, the story is told through the eyes of the two central characters, Mordi (Mordechai) Neuberg and Rubi (Reuben) Krauss, whose interior monologues serve as the piston engine of the narrative. In many ways this aesthetic device underscores the unstaunched psychological nature and structure of the tale and the author's penchant in working along the lower levels of consciousness in depicting his heroes' torrent of agony. In essence, the two childhood friends who had survived the inferno and who meet unexpectedly in a train station are the recto and verso of the survival experience. To be sure, their characters function as an all-purpose metaphor for the disparate ways one can deal with the past and live in an amoral world. In other words the two men parabolically embody some dimension of survival larger than just the personal.

One critic shrewdly observed that at the outset the main protagonists live as if in a spiritual wasteland, sapped of vigor and riddled with psychic lesions. Denuded of family, they spend copious hours futilely looking through the missing persons section of the newspapers for remaining relatives. And although the reader is not told how Rubi managed to stay alive during the Holocaust, we discover that Mordi, a talented journalist in France who, prior to the war, was conducting research on troubadour poetry for a doctoral dissertation, was housed in a monastery by his university teacher. Hiding in the cellar and cared for by a righteous monk, he is savaged with guilt after learning that his mentor was tortured and interrogated for his act of kindness.

The conniving Rubi, whose dreams of prosperity are smashed when he discovers that his wealthy relatives have perished in the hands of the Nazi beast, is hell-bent on reconstructing his shattered existence and becoming rich, figuring that the only way to arise from the ashes is through fraudulence and revenge on the perpetrators. To that end he confects a black market scheme that exploits the excess leftover of military chocolate unloaded on the local market by the stationed American forces. In his pursuit he plans on manipulating a Dr. Hoffman into medically confirming the rumors that the consumption of chocolate affects male sexual potency and then selling the surplus for a high price after the rumors are debunked. Rubi, the mathematical wunderkind, demands the doctor's cooperation since he knows about his lack of moral rectitude during the German barbarity. Rubi's moral indifference is further illustrated when he takes up with a German woman, unmoved that she once was a Gestapo devotee and now moonlights as a prostitute.

In contradistinction Mordi is introspective and passive, constantly enrobed and swathed by the past from which he cannot escape. The conscience-stricken young man is obsessed with the knowledge that he alone survived and finds it increasingly difficult to live in this vicious and cruel world, while at the same time dealing with the existential alienation that like a ring gradually stretches out and envelops his fragile existence. During the course of the book the pensive and morbid Mordi comes to represent the survivor who is unable to forget the unspeakable tragedies, wholly burdened by the painful memories that are slowly eating away at his energy and willingness to live. Tellingly, the hypersensitive hero mysteriously dies when Rubi momentarily abandons him for Gerti, his German mistress, underscoring the symbiotic relationship of dependence and need that has flowered between the two boyhood friends. On a deeper level one could argue that Rubi's proposed swindle to trade on German shame and guiltiness is the author tipping his self-reflexive hat, subtly hinting at the divisive issue of German reparation. Gouri is remarkably able to limn this terrain without moralizing or judging his principals' actions, sagaciously understanding that in the aftermath of the Shoah the response of the survivors was multiplex and variegated rather than monolithic. What Gouri seems to suggest is that there are twin roads that the survivors can travail. The first is to maintain and preserve one's ethical integrity in continuously brooding over the terrible loss—a path that ultimately results in the destruction of the soul. The other is to forge ahead, to discard the mental anguish of the past that perennially overhangs the victims and embrace the present, pathetic and ravaged as it may be.

—Dvir Abramovich