Australian Wedding

I bought this book on the internet after reading positive reviews about it in the press. It’s a new book out by Nava Semel.
Probably I was expecting something like Bill Bryson’s “Down Under” but in Hebrew. I was disappointed. Semel’s book is about her travels in and around Byron Bay in northern NSW, in her son’s footsteps or should I say, on the scent of his shikse girlfriend, Lucy. (albeit ambiguously)
As my son pointed out the photo of Lucy on the cover bears an uncanny resemblance to Bar Rafaeli. But try as she may Semel doesn’t manage to conceal Jewish mother’s distain. Something in Semel’s attitude to Lucy and the alternative lifestyle, new age community around Byron Bay reveals a certain mixture of bemused condescending observation of the community’s naive, anarchistic, sauvage noblesse independence and a certain anthropological wonder, as if that other more famous and studied Lucy and her prehistoric family of australopithecines had come to life before Semel’s very eyes. Semel’s point of view is fundamentally tzfoni, Israeli bourgeoisie, and though in the book she wrestles hard with her conscience, rationalising her bereavement for her wayward son’s betrayal of the collective ethic against her profound protective desire for his personal happiness, the author does not succeed in settling her conflict nor give us any new perspective.
In Down Under, Bryson travels around by foot, rail, air and car, stays in hotels, rubs shoulders with the populace, drinks middies and eats with them, lampoons them and laughs along with them. Though it’s just a humble travel book the writer charms the reader with a mixture of humour and information, so that from the safety of your favourite armchair you, the reader, can suspend your disbelief and feel that you too are on a voyage of discovery, even if its through the writer’s eyes. You’re reading about the trip you’d have loved to have done yourself.
Unfortunately reading Australian Wedding, besides discovering pieces of Shlomo Artzi’s biography, if anything, I had the sense of confronting the politically correct version of Israeli ethnocentrism and egocentricity and c’est tout. Its all about me, me, me with some patronisingly polite references to aborigines and local left leaning politics, probably stuff Semel read about rather than came face to face with. You can feign European manners but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It still comes out as obstinacy. I got the feeling that her voyage to Australia was an excuse to write about herself and her opacified Zionism rather than a voyage of discovery to a new world and a fresh point of view. There is as much text about Semel’s family, herself and her forefathers as there is about Byron Bay.
Reading the book I started toying with a hypothesis that in order to captivate the reader a writer has to go out on a limb and immerse himself/herself totally in the object of his observation, relinquishing his own conventions and parameters for a time at least. Otherwise the book will be lifeless. This assumes that the writer’s identity is either so weak it offers no resistance or else is it is secure enough to let go and plunge in, and consequently either empathise with or disapprove of his subject. But on reading Australian Wedding I’m reminded of the wicked genius of a Hamishia Hakamerit skit lampooning the Israeli need for consensus, at any price.

Australian Wedding is written from deep within the North Tel Aviv consensus. Its almost as if Nava Semel never took a step out.