The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Past Continuous, by Yaakov Shabtai, translated by Dalya Bilu
reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

Untitled document

Yaakov Shabtai. Past Continuous. Trans. Dalya Bilu. Overlook, 2003. 389 pp. Paper: $16.95.

Zikhron Devarim (Remembrance of Things) was first published in 1977, four years before Yaakov Shabtai died at age forty-seven. Past Continuous, its English translation, was published in 1983. A new edition of that translation reclaims for English readers one of the supreme achievements in Israeli fiction. The novel, Shabtai’s first, begins by announcing: “Goldman’s father died on the first of April, whereas Goldman himself committed suicide on the first of January.” Set in Tel Aviv, Past Continuous focuses on the nine months between April Fool’s Day and New Year’s Day, which are bracketed by the death of a father and his son. It concentrates on the activities and affiliations of Goldman, Caesar, and Israel, three friends in their forties whose names are suggestive of the three varieties of Jewish experience—ghetto, assimilationist, and Zionist. After revealing the novel’s most dramatic event, Goldman’s suicide, in his first sentence, Shabtai implicates his reader in a network of shifting relationships among hundreds of characters, disdaining mere plot but generating a dense, dynamic colloid of human lives. Past Continuous is constructed according to the principle of association: one name leads to another, and the reader’s attention often hops in midsentence, sentences whose verbs lack allegiance to any single tense. A compulsive philanderer, Caesar believes that life is “fluid and formless and aimless, and everything was possible in it to an infinite degree, and it could be played backward and forward like a roll of film.” The style that Shabtai forges for a mutable world, in which Goldman’s sister Naomi can fall out the door of a moving car and pass away forever, is one fluid, restless paragraph for the entire length of the novel. It could and should be played backward and forward. However, though her translation from Hebrew is otherwise supple and fluent, Dalya Bilu chose to divide the quick, dense mass of Shabtai’s original into discrete paragraphs and to introduce punctuation not present in Zikhron Devarim. The novel becomes more accessible, though at the cost of compromising Shabtai’s Heraclitean vision. Even so, Past Continuous is not an easy book to get into, though it is nearly impossible to get out of. Moving testimony to the fleetingness of all we encounter, it has earned an enduring place in contemporary Hebrew fiction.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Past Continuous, by Yaakov Shabtai, translated by Dalya Bilu reviewed by Steven G. Kellman Untitled document Yaakov Shabtai. Past Continuous. Trans. Dalya Bilu. Overlook, 2003. 389 pp. Paper: $16.95. Zikhron Devarim (Remembrance of Things) was first published in 1977, four years before Yaakov Shabtai died at age forty-seven. Past Continuous, its English translation, was published in 1983. A new edition of that translation reclaims for English readers one of the supreme achievements in Israeli fiction. The novel, Shabtai’s first, begins by announcing: “Goldman’s father died on the first of April, whereas Goldman himself committed suicide on the first of January.” Set in Tel Aviv, Past Continuous focuses on the nine months between April Fool’s Day and New Year’s Day, which are bracketed by the death of a father and his son. It concentrates on the activities and affiliations of Goldman, Caesar, and Israel, three friends in their forties whose names are suggestive of the three varieties of Jewish experience—ghetto, assimilationist, and Zionist. After revealing the novel’s most dramatic event, Goldman’s suicide, in his first sentence, Shabtai implicates his reader in a network of shifting relationships among hundreds of characters, disdaining mere plot but generating a dense, dynamic colloid of human lives. Past Continuous is constructed according to the principle of association: one name leads to another, and the reader’s attention often hops in midsentence, sentences whose verbs lack allegiance to any single tense. A compulsive philanderer, Caesar believes that life is “fluid and formless and aimless, and everything was possible in it to an infinite degree, and it could be played backward and forward like a roll of film.” The style that Shabtai forges for a mutable world, in which Goldman’s sister Naomi can fall out the door of a moving car and pass away forever, is one fluid, restless paragraph for the entire length of the novel. It could and should be played backward and forward. However, though her translation from Hebrew is otherwise supple and fluent, Dalya Bilu chose to divide the quick, dense mass of Shabtai’s original into discrete paragraphs and to introduce punctuation not present in Zikhron Devarim. The novel becomes more accessible, though at the cost of compromising Shabtai’s Heraclitean vision. Even so, Past Continuous is not an easy book to get into, though it is nearly impossible to get out of. Moving testimony to the fleetingness of all we encounter, it has earned an enduring place in contemporary Hebrew fiction.

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