"The Observers": A misanthropic grandmother, a troubled granddaughter, and a murder mystery
In the last book Edna Mazya completed before her death, the Israeli theater is in turmoil, and its people do not seem particularly nice. A modest and kind souvenir from the desk of a beloved creator.
Edna Mazya, "The Observers", Keter, 271 pages.
Everything begins with a peek at the neighbors' house across the way. At first with a small theater binocular and later with a larger, more sophisticated one. The peepers, who call themselves "The Observers"—a grumpy grandmother and her teenage granddaughter suffering from a social disorder—tell the curious they are engaged in birdwatching, but in their sights are birds of a different kind. For example, an eccentric married couple from the theater world: an actress and a director. In the apartment next door lives the actress's personal assistant, an aging bachelor named Theodore Berger, who is half a dubious type and half "pure as oligarchs' vodka". It was in him that the grandmother's obsession began: "When you live alone, the persona falls off, the manners fall off, the muscles give up, gravity wakes up, age pounces on you until you surrender and unite comfortably with your specific existential misery. I learn a lot from this."
James Stewart did it before in Hitchcock's "Rear Window". So what is the grandmother's excuse? "There was always an anthropological curiosity about life in me. There is no pornographic dimension in my hobby. I reassured myself that as long as it remains between me and myself, it is like oil in the ground that has not been discovered." Edna Mazya, who finished the book before her death (Maayan Rogel performed the final restoration), is incredibly skilled in this. This is not a "great" book, but it has a beautiful simplicity and emotional honesty that echo Mazya's popular work.
The grandmother is Professor (emeritus) Ruth Lapidot, former director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine. She neglected her personal life for her career; she is prickly on the outside and stinging on the inside. Lapidot believes people should talk as little as possible and has always gotten along better with the dead than with the living. She cannot stand fools, which puts her before a problem when she finds herself surrounded by idiots, including those tasked with solving the murder mystery that she and her granddaughter stumbled into against their will.
Like in the Hitchcock film, it takes time for them to decipher what they are actually seeing: are these events part of a play, or reality itself? Lapidot's extreme lack of sentimentality leaks into the way theater people are presented. One might have expected Mazya, a successful playwright, to show a hint of affection for this environment. Instead, the book is full of mockery and resentment toward the scheming actors and the soulless management. It reads more like a document of hatred than a love letter to the theater. This raises a gloomy wonder: if Mazya remained with such a heavy load of bitterness, what were all her efforts for? Where is the magic of the theater?
The characters are mostly caricatures. The only one who evokes sympathy is a prop master named Cookie, a low-level worker who protests against the institution. Even the recruitment of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" does not elevate the text. The murder plot, where the grandmother and granddaughter act as amateur detectives, is thin and unbelievable, and its solution is far-fetched. The emotional honesty pulses only in the relationship between Lapidot and her granddaughter Yahli. They get closer and move away, building mutual trust in agony, which sheds light on Lapidot's only son, who succeeds in his work but fails in his fatherhood. This is the heart of the novel. Despite some excessive culinary details, it is a modest and kind souvenir from a beloved creator whose absence is felt painfully.
