A few minutes later his breathing stopped" (The Lover 23). She still had not searched the upper floor, but the emotion of her search, the suffering of the men on those awful wards, was too much, and so she "left the building." Dafi describes that when a math teacher is killed in the war, students were suffering over the loss, but, "it's impossible to be only sorry, but we really were stunned and shocked because we remembered him living and standing beside the blackboard not so long ago, writing out the exercises with endless patience...[and though many students went to sleep because of how boring he was] in the middle of all this drowsiness, in the cloud of chalk dust flying around the blackboard, the formulas used to penetrate. And now he was himself a flying cloud..." (The Lover 24). Soon, not only the math teacher was forgotten, "we forgot the math as well, because for two months we studied the Bible instead of math."

So the irony in this circle of violence-related suffering, is that the math teacher is taken away through the draft and is killed by war's ugliness, and what he taught the students is then replaced in student's minds by rigorous religious instruction, which, if religion were really truly a powerful force in society, would have prevented the war that took the math teacher in the first place.

Sometimes the suffering described in The Lover is ironically juxtaposed with someone who seems to wish to benefit financially from that suffering. Adam has repaired a car, an expensive repair, for a man who has come to collect the money from his grandmother's will - but she has not yet expired. The story the customer tells about how his grandmother is on her deathbed "sounds more and more like a hallucination" (The Lover 102) to Adam. The story is that grandma raised this man, and recently she fell into a coma; because he is reportedly the only heir, he has flown in from Paris to Israel to claim whatever...

But he can't pay the bill for the car repair because he spent most of his money on the plane ticket.
When the customer ("Gabriel Arditi") returns the following day, Adam speaks; "Has your grandmother passed away?' I smiled." No, but the airline bought the return ticket for half price, and now he thinks he can get the car out of the garage. All this goes on while a grandmother reportedly suffers on her death bed. Is this how a war-torn society looks at mortality?

Meanwhile there is another non-violent kind of suffering in this novel, that of young Dafi who comes home early from the beach and discovers her mother in the midst of an apparent sexual act with a mysterious man that has been coming to the house.

Suddenly...what a fool I am, I was sure she's been murdered, I don't know why the idea of murder suddenly came into my head...and I started to wail, thumping the door fiercely - 'Mommy! Mommy!'" Then her mother appears, "barefoot, wearing a thin dressing gown, her hair in a bit of a mess...there was something odd about her..." (The Lover 114). Soon, Dafi overhears her mother whispering to the man, "...she doesn't suspect anything." "I shuddered, I thought I was going to faint...my eyes were full of tears (116) I've never felt so lonely in my life." The suffering that a young girl would go through, knowing her mother is doing something risque with a man who is not her father, and that the trust between mother and daughter has vanished in the stench of a room with strange body odors and over-flowing ash trays, is a powerful kind of confusion and suffering. This form of youthful suffering could be avoided, if the mother were not engaged in an extra-marital affair in her own house.

Works Cited

Oz, Amos. A Perfect Peace. Orlando, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

Yehoshua, Abraham B. The Lover. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.