Title: The Gavriel Tirosh Affair
By Yitzhak Shalev
Translated by Hillel Halkin
With a foreword by Ruth Wisse and historical context by Yiftach Ofek
The Toby Press, an imprint of Koren Publishers Jerusalem
252 pages
There is a barbershop on Ben-Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. The unnamed narrator of Yitzhak Shalev’s novel passes it one day in the 1960s and catches the scent of an aftershave lotion he has not smelled in twenty years. It stops him cold. He steps inside, half expecting to find Gavriel Tirosh sitting in the barber’s chair. The man there is someone else. The narrator hurries out. But the scent follows him, and for the rest of the afternoon he wanders the divided city, tracing the borders of his own memory.
That opening captures something essential about The Gavriel Tirosh Affair, published by The Toby Press, an imprint of Koren Publishers Jerusalem (korenpub.com). It is a novel about the presence of an absence. Gavriel Tirosh appears for less than a year in the lives of five Jerusalem high school students in the late 1930s. He teaches them history. He trains them for combat. He vanishes. Decades later, they are still trying to make sense of what he meant and what he cost them.
Shalev, who lived from 1919 to 1992, published this novel in 1964. His son is Meir Shalev, the author of The Blue Mountain and other well-known works. The elder Shalev was a poet and man of letters, and this is his only novel. Ruth Wisse, who wrote the foreword and spent years getting the book translated, calls it the novel she would have wanted to discover in high school. The novel is set in high school, and it speaks to the students living those years as much as to the adults looking back on them. Hillel Halkin, who has translated Yehoshua, Oz, and Hareven, handled the English. The result reads like it was written in English from the start.
The story is set during the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, a period of Arab attacks on the Jewish population that historians also call the “Bloody Events.” The Jewish leadership’s official policy was havlaga, restraint. The Haganah would defend settlements when attacked, but would not pursue perpetrators or retaliate. Some Jews rejected this approach and formed breakaway groups, including the Irgun. They believed that restraint signaled weakness, that it encouraged further violence, and that the British would only respect strength.
Into this world comes Gavriel Tirosh, a twenty-eight-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany, hired to teach history at an elite Jerusalem high school. He arrives with a tan that surprises the students, green eyes that captivate them, and an aftershave lotion that the narrator, years later, can still smell. He teaches them the Crusades. He makes them write research papers. He takes them on a class trip to the Galilee. On a steep trail to the ruins of Montfort, he outruns them all without trying. That is when they begin to understand that their new teacher is not like the others.
Tirosh forms a small group: Aharon, Dan, Yair, Aya, and the narrator. He trains them in marksmanship, fieldcraft, and tactics. He teaches them to move through the night without fear. He sends them on missions that blur the line between education and combat. His methods are unorthodox. His aims are ambiguous. His sister was murdered in Germany. He has no patience for Jewish accommodation or Jewish passivity. He believes the Jews of Palestine are making the same mistake as the Jews of Europe, and he is determined to break the pattern. Before leaving his kibbutz to become a teacher, he told a friend: “Enough of forging iron! It’s time to forge souls!”
The novel never makes clear what Tirosh’s relationship is to the underground organizations. He seems to operate independently. He recruits his students without asking permission from anyone. He answers to no one. Near the end of the school year, during an operation in the Arab village of Shuafat, Aya is killed. Tirosh disappears. The students finish the year without him. They join the underground. They fight in the War of Independence. They build families. They grow middle-aged. They never see Tirosh again.
Shalev writes in the first person, and the narrator’s voice carries the weight of hindsight. He is looking back from 1964, sixteen years after the establishment of the State of Israel. The country exists. The war was won. But something has been lost. The narrator walks past the ruins along the armistice line that divides Jerusalem and sees in them a reflection of the ruins inside himself. He realizes that he and his surviving friends “were all blurry facsimiles of Gavriel.” He and his friend Yair, the only two survivors of Tirosh’s group, meet occasionally in cafés. Aharon died commanding a unit that destroyed a British railway line, blown to pieces attaching the explosive charge himself. Dan was killed during the War of Independence when his infantry company approached an Arab village they thought was deserted. They are overweight. They have grown cynical. They lead lives of trivial pleasures that Tirosh would have regarded with disdain. The narrator imagines encountering Tirosh again and winces at the thought of his dismissive stare.
The novel describes the narrator’s obsessive searching. He goes to the train station to watch passengers arrive. He walks the aisles of theaters and cinemas, scanning faces. He catches the scent of Tirosh’s aftershave lotion and breaks into a run, only to discover it is someone else. Years pass. He names his son Gavriel. The searching never stops.
This elegiac tone runs through the entire novel. It is not a story of triumph. It is a story of bereavement. Wisse notes in her foreword that the novel “partially joins the literature of bereavement, filled as it is from start to finish with mourning for the absent teacher and other departed people and expectations.” Tirosh succeeds in changing his students. He prepares them for a fight they had to win. But he also leaves them with something unfinished, a wound that does not heal.
The novel raises questions it does not answer. Was Tirosh right to do what he did? Was the price worth paying? Did the Jews of the Yishuv need men like him, or did they need to resist the temptation to become like him? Shalev lets the tension sit. The book was controversial when it appeared. It gave voice to the Irgun and Lehi at a time when Israel’s Labor establishment controlled the national narrative. Menachem Begin, former leader of the Irgun, would not become prime minister until 1977. Shalev was writing against the grain.
But the novel is not ideological. It is personal. The narrator does not defend Tirosh or condemn him. He simply cannot let him go. Tirosh appears for a few months and shapes the rest of his life. That is the mystery at the heart of the book. How does one person exert such power? What makes a teacher unforgettable? What does it mean to be changed by someone and then abandoned by them?
There are passages in the novel that linger. The description of the narrator wandering through divided Jerusalem, searching for traces of a past that no longer exists. The account of Aya’s death, told with restraint that makes it more devastating. Shalev does not overwrite. He trusts the reader to feel what he does not say.
Halkin’s translation preserves the spare quality of the prose. He makes small changes where necessary to help American readers understand references to the Yishuv and the underground movements, but he avoids footnotes, which he finds cumbersome. The result is a text that reads smoothly without feeling dumbed down. Yiftach Ofek’s historical introduction provides context for readers unfamiliar with the period. Wisse’s foreword explains how the book came to be translated and why it matters.
The Gavriel Tirosh Affair was published sixty years ago. It arrives in English at a moment when Israel is again divided over questions of force and restraint, when debates over how to respond to violence feel as urgent as they did in the 1930s. The novel does not offer answers. It offers a story about people who made choices under impossible circumstances and spent the rest of their lives wondering if they chose right.
Wisse notes that before the category of young adult fiction existed, The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night “were among the teen books of our generation.” This novel belongs in that company. It is set in high school, about high school students facing choices that will define their lives. It speaks to the students living those years now as much as to adults looking back on them.
The narrator ends where he began, walking through Jerusalem, following the trail of a memory. He never finds Tirosh. He never stops looking. That is the legacy Tirosh leaves: not certainty, but the inability to forget.