by Sarah Terez Rosenblum
A writer builds the house and leaves the rooms sparsely furnished; the reader hauls in their belongings, makes themselves at home. Bee Sacks’ profound and unsettling novel The Lover invites this collaboration.
The story of an affair between a Canadian Jew and an Israeli soldier, The Lover is an empathetic exploration of the politics of love in Israel-Palestine. Through lush, brazenly tender prose, Sacks aligns the reader with Allison, who initially grapples with the power disparities in her adopted country before calcifying into certainty: She will embrace the realities of maintaining an ethnic democracy because of the warmth and acceptance she has found. Yet Sacks’ politics run counter to those of their protagonist. The author’s fierce belief that Jewish liberation is entwined with Palestinian liberation appears between words on the page.
When I reached out to Sacks, I shared that my relationship to Israel had always been ambivalent, yet on October 7th I was unnerved to find Hamas’ attack felt personal. The distance between fear and hatred is a hairsbreadth, and I had been teetering, but Sacks’ book lifted me lightly and set me on my feet.
We discussed unconventional form choices, queer love as resistance, and the power of fiction to educate through empathy. Our conversation contains spoilers.
Kaitlyn Greenridge in her New York Times Opinion piece “Who Gets to Write What” discusses the negative feedback she received in workshop when her intended villain, a Trump-loving racist was perceived as cartoonish. She writes:
“As much as this character had begun as an indictment of all the hypocrisies of my childhood, she was not going to come out on the page that way, not without a lot of work. I was struck by an awful realization. I would have to love this monster into existence. The voice of this character had been full of scorn and condescension. I rewrote it with those elements in place, but covered with the treacly, grasping attempts at affection of a broken and desperately lonely woman.”
This quote came to mind for me after I finished your book. I want to make it clear that my intention in bringing up this quote is not to align a Zionist character with a monster. Although I am not a Zionist, I do not believe Zionists are by definition monsters, but this quote feels relevant to the creation of Allison, a character who differs from the author, yet whom the author took pains to depict with empathy and depth. Can you talk about what led you to choose Allison as your point of view character?
The first time I tried to tell the story that would become The Lover, I attempted it as nonfiction. This was nearly a decade ago, around 2015. I wrote a draft of what I suppose you would call a memoir. The problem: it never felt true. Even when I relayed the facts, I could feel I was not telling the truth. I wanted to tell the story of how I’d be changed by loving in a violent place, but something held me back. There were places I was unwilling to go when it came to depicting Zionism. So I put away the memoir manuscript, and turned my attention to my first novel, City of a Thousand Gates. I think sometimes, you need to write one book to unclog another. When I returned to memoir in 2021, I decided to try it as fiction. I knew this meant I could pressurize the narrative by having the lover deployed to Gaza—mine was not—but I was not certain what the move to fiction would mean for the main character. Rather than me choosing Allison, I found she emerged as increasingly separate from me in each successive draft. Her name kept changing, further and further from my own. Rebecca, Rachel, then finally, Allison. The more I allowed Allie to stray from me as a person, the closer I came to telling the truth I’d failed to get to in nonfiction. Another way of saying this: I chose to magnify a few qualities in myself (my mutability, my desire to be loved, my attraction to power) and allowed these traits to completely shape Allie and her choices. Something that had been holding me back in the memoir, I realized, was that I depicted each event with one eye on how it reflected me as a person. I did not want to seem bigoted or problematic; I wanted to assure the reader (and myself) that I was a good, liberal subject. In fiction, I let go of this self-protectiveness, and fully embraced the project of depicting a woman who grows to accept the realities of living in an ethnic democracy.
As I mentioned, I was awed by your ability to first connect the reader to Allison, and then hold the reader accountable as Allison’s fallibility becomes apparent. How did you want the reader to relate to Allison?
The reading experience you have described is, honestly, my precise fantasy for how this book might be read, especially by readers who identify as liberal, Jewish, or both. I hoped that initially, readers would feel at ease in Allison’s narration. They would recognize her and her values. I wanted this recognition to slowly become more and more unsettling, until the reader found that they were in a place much more frightening than they had anticipated. Discomfort is so important. If we are brave enough to sit in our discomfort, we can learn what we are afraid to know about ourselves. What is it that keeps us from embracing love, embracing liberation?
This book is not a critique. It is a heartfelt question: What is the cost of Zionism for Jews? This cost may not be commensurate with what it has cost Palestinians, but it is deeply significant and rarely discussed. Parents sacrifice their children for Israel. Jews from Arab lands have sacrificed their roots. To oppress another people is a tremendous psychic weight that must be constantly justified—nationalism reinforced by trauma. Allison sees all of this. I wanted to make her a character who had insight and understanding. She sees all of this, and then she looks away. I wanted to leave the reader holding the tab—left with a discomfort that I hope will lead to self-reflection.
Many people in my life identify as Zionist. I love them; I fear I have failed them, because I have not found the right words to help them—help us, collectively—see past our own, very real trauma enough to feel that the trauma of Palestinians is just as real. Just as real. Since October 7, many people I care about have expressed, in so many words, that they do not consider the people of Gaza to be human beings. When I advocate for a ceasefire online, they write to me personally to tell me how wrong I am, how self-hating I must be. I know that they are speaking not from a place of hate—as counterintuitive as it sounds—but rather from a place of love, trying to protect the people they love. It never ceases to terrify me: how so many acts of violence understand themselves as acts of love. What I wish I could convey, what I wish they could hear, is that the state will never love them. The state will never love us. The state loves only power. We must find a way to love each other—to see the divine in every single human being, to recognize that our liberation as Jews is entwined with Palestinian liberation, to demand a ceasefire now. That is the only way forward.
As Allison becomes radicalized, her relationship with her lesbian sister and her sister’s nonbinary partner fragments. This trajectory seemed to highlight Allison’s discomfort with more complex human realities, with grey areas. Is Allison, in part, an examination of the pull to binaries, the difficulty of holding complicated, contradictory truths?
Allison’s attitude toward queerness is quite similar to the one that I held in my twenties, which was that everyone is probably queer in the sense that there is nothing absolute about sexuality, but living as a queer person makes you marginal (therefore less safe), and why would she ever want to do that? Allison is an amazing character to work with because of all she makes apparent. She sees everything I do; she understands everything I do; the only difference between us is her heightened desire to be loved by power. Her straightness is more than anything a relationship toward power, having very little to do with sexuality. After all, you can be a queer person in a straight or straight-passing relationship! Because while it is true that queer love is a blessing, that queer sex is transcendent and hot af, and that queer partnership is the most embodied I have ever felt, the truth is that my queerness is so much less about whom I fuck than it is about my resistance to power, my love for queer community, and my fight for a world in which trans kids, BIPOC queers, and trans women everywhere are not fucking murdered.
What is the power in choosing a POV character with whom you as the writer do not precisely agree?
It’s more dangerous, more fun, more frightening, more challenging, more consequential, more everything. I highly recommend it.
One of the experiences you shared with Allison is an initially tentative friendship with a Palestinian family. In Allison’s case, this friendship allows the reader to experience Allison’s internal conflict, her sense of herself as a voyeur and a fraud, and ultimately her choice to reject these potential friends and embrace her newfound identity. I valued the dissonant experience of empathizing with Allison as well as with the family whom she betrays. Can you talk about how you wanted that friendship to function in terms of plot and character?
Palestinians exist. It is weird how many books set in Israel-Palestine, especially those by North American Jews such as myself, have no Palestinian characters. Imagine being told not only that you have no history and no future, but that you don’t exist at all. I was completely unwilling to traffic in that kind of narrative lie. I wanted to have Allison encounter Palestinians on campus, as she absolutely would at Tel Aviv University, and to react to these Palestinian students. I wanted to depict the limits of her seeing—how so often, her interactions with Palestinians were fantasies about what kind of person those interactions made her. And I wanted to give the Palestinian characters the opportunity to resist her, resist her way of seeing and narrating them. Also, maybe I mean, resist me, resist my narration. This is a book that questions what Israel has cost us as Jews, yes, but it would be obscene not to create a space in that narrative for a Palestinian woman—in this case, Aisha’s grandmother—to tell the story of what Israel cost her.
At first you situate the story within Allison’s POV and using her interiority, toggle between past and present. When I arrived at Allison’s lover’s POV within the past, I had a sort of knee-jerk reaction, a sense that you had broken some rule of point of view and past and present. Once I became accustomed to the fact that you would be consistently moving into her lover’s POV it didn’t bother me, and I was inspired by your audacity. What are your thoughts about establishing and then deviating from the norms of a text?
I’m so happy if my audacity inspired in any way. I do think a lot about establishing a kind of contract with the reader. Ideally, I would have done so in the first three chapters of the novel: made an offer, made the terms clear, stuck to those terms. So did I cheat a little by introducing the POV shift in chapter four, all the way on page 42? Yes. The ol’ bait and switch. However, once I established the rules of the POV switch—that her lover’s sections would be written in present tense, close third person, and set off with a little swirly graphic in the space break—I stuck to the rules. I figured if the writing was good enough, I could win back the reader’s trust.
Your prose—whether you’re evoking setting or the draw between Allison and her lover— is sensuous and immersive. What’s your relationship to setting?
I pay a lot of attention to the physical world of any story I’m reading, writing, or living. I’m answering these questions from Wichita, where I am the “emerging writer in residence” at Wichita State University. Of course, I am rereading Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. (When in the Great Plains…) I can’t get over how Cather allows the land to communicate to the narrator, how the fields and light and dirt reveal to him something about himself. It’s making me want to write…
And how about sex scenes? Do you think about them in any way distinct from other scenes?
Sex is, to me, just another act of communication. We are communicating with a partner (or partners!), yes, but maybe more significantly, we are communicating with ourselves. I cherish sex, in life and in writing, because it is a place where language collapses.
You’ve said “it is inconceivable to me that love ends.” How does this fuel your work as a writer?
Ahh. What a great question. I think you’ve found the place I write from: the desire to know love, to know God. I think I write towards a wholeness that is always just out of reach.
Bee Sacks is the author of two novels: The Lover and City of a Thousand Gates, which was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction. A former journalist, they worked at Vanity Fair for several years before moving to Israel-Palestine to study sacred Jewish texts. They now live in Los Angeles.
Sarah Terez Rosenblum’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as The Hopkins Review and The Pinch (both forthcoming 2024), The Normal School, and Prairie Schooner among others. Sarah’s novel, Herself When She’s Missing, was called “poetic and heartrending” by Booklist.