I bent down, sifting through the dirt until my fingers landed upon a smooth stone. It felt heavy for its size, weighing down my hand and coating it with dust. Stone in tow, I walked back to the group. Their bodies were small, overshadowed by towering hills.

“Rimon,” the tour guide said in Hebrew. The group listened closely, peering at the pomegranate in his hand. It was overripe, bursting with blood-colored seeds. The guide’s voice trailed off, the faint rhythm of faraway bombs detonating to the north in Syria distracted me. I turned the stone over in my hand again before pocketing it: my small token of a tired land. 

Days later, I went through my souvenirs one by one. A salt crystal from the Dead Sea, a leaf from Jerusalem, a sliver of concrete from a crumbling apartment complex in Tel Aviv. The heavy rock from the Golan, once Syria, now Israel, covered in dust.

Three years later, I lingered after hours at my college Jewish center. Its small library, usually full of bright chatter, was silent. I walked along the rows of books, trailing my fingers on Hebrew and English volumes and wiping the dust on my jeans. Landing upon a worn collection by celebrated Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, I removed it and sat down. I flew through one poem, then another.  

My trip to Israel had been a blur. Moving through Amichai’s verse for the first time, I was struck by the intensity of my recollections. Israel’s rolling hills, which I had observed in my adolescence, became illustrated in my mind by Amichai’s poem “God Full of Mercy.” Amichai writes, “I, who plucked flowers in the hills / And looked down into all the valleys, / I, who brought corpses down from the hills.” The hills brimming in his poems with flowers and optimism, also once produced corpses. As I moved through the lines, I felt both hollow and whole.

That morning in the Golan, I remember that my grandmother stood solemnly, wearing a thin jacket and donning wide brown sunglasses which contrasted her Ashkenazi complexion. She read a poem off a laminated sheet, probably the type handed to every tourist. Tears streamed down her face, mixing with  beige foundation. 

I forget the poem’s title, and its words. I like to think it could easily have been Amichai’s poem, “Jews in the Land of Israel,” in which he writes, “We forget where we came from / Our Jewish names from the Exile give us away.” Amichai was born into the rising Third Reich in Germany as Ludwig Pfeuffer, dying in Israel with his adopted name, which roughly translates to “Praise, my people live.” I thought of my own name: Jacob, an anglicization of Ya’acov, a hint of ancient roots. For two thousand years my ancestors had lived outside of the land of Israel; they too lost themselves in exile and history. Their names and rituals became reminders of their origin. 

In “Temporary Poem of My Time,” Amichai calls out the stones of Israel, describing the land as a place of endless battle, of constantly thrown rocks which predate and outlast us. Naturally, I thought of my stone from the Golan.  “Is there in this land / A stone that was never thrown / And never built and never overturned … And never screamed from a wall and never discarded by the builders / And never closed on top of a grave and never lay under lovers.” Where had my stone been? I sat and thought about it. I imagined it being trampled by young Israeli soldiers, clad in green and imprinted with passion, boots kicking up dust. Or had it once been laid upon by young lovers under a knowing sky, or shoveled over a forgotten grave?

Amichai returns to the motif of youth to note the common humanity of Israel’s diverse, and often sparring, inhabitants. In “An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion,” Amichai writes of his search for his “little boy,” noting an Arab Shepherd searching for his goat on the opposite hill. The two join briefly in their “temporary failure.” Both cry out for their charges, their voices “meet above.” 

The verses moved me to the Golan, its tall hills which carry the echoes of bombs while smothering cries in different languages to the same Divine presence, lingering “above.” In a land divided by violence, Amichai provides a moment of poetic respite, stripping different peoples down to a common search in the same Eastern landscape. Poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch notes in Tablet that Amichai wrote in a world reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust, meditating not on “God’s power” but instead on, “His absence, or indifference, or simple debility.” Amichai provokes my own quiet anger at Divine futility in his writing with his mentions of mourning and suffering children, caught in the “wheels” of the “machine.”

That day in the Golan I had seen smiling children; we had whirred by them on a 4×4. Some had flaxen hair, all had toothy grins, brightened with naïveté. They played by a stream adjacent to their farm, jumping off idle military equipment stored on the bank. Battleground, turned playground. Children damned before birth, and if born, taken too early by war. Amichai hovers on the sobering nature of conflict; he wonders, perhaps in anguish, if “behind all this some great happiness is hiding.” 

In “Memorial Day for the War Dead,” Amichai speaks to youthful innocence: “Children with a grief not their own march slowly / like stepping over broken glass.” Here, the children lack a nationality: they could be Israelis, “broken glass” bringing forth collective memories of Kristallnacht or Intifadas, or Palestinians, wandering among the ruins of a house destroyed by conflict out of their control. Before I discovered Amichai, a rosy Israel had filled the blurred memories of my youth. That day in the library, Amichai did not seek to change my mind about Israel’s beauty and its singular importance to “Am Yisrael,” the Jewish people. In highlighting the child’s innocence broken by conflict, Amichai replaced my boyhood understanding of a complicated land with a mature one. 

In “Memorial Day for the War Dead,” Amichai also mocks the land of milk and honey mentioned annually at my family’s Passover seder. He laments, “Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread, / in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.” The precious land promised to the Jews in Exodus is here soaked with childrens’ pain, in front of an aging and decaying G-d. Yes, the land of Israel is sweet. It had stung my grandmother to tears and filled me with pride in a wandering people, restored. So too may tanks once again thunder across the soil where I found the stone in my youth, another effort to settle grievances formed before my birth. 

Amichai rounds out the poem, “An Arab Shepherd Is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion,” by associating children with the birth of new faith, noting that, “Searching for a goat or for a child has always been / The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.” Armed with Amichai’s tender verse, I wonder what my next visit to the Golan or other places in Israel will be like. Though my experiences may fall short of the poetic or prophetic, perhaps I will find new beliefs in my budding adulthood, or lose old ones anchored to my youth. 

A year after I wrote this story, I learned enough Hebrew to translate one of Amichai’s poems on my own. Check it out.

Works Cited

https://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/yehuda_amichai_2004_9.pdf

The emotions and experiences of youth are profound, and long-lasting. The politicians and leaders whose actions, conflict and writings affect the lives of millions were once children too, absorbing the conversations of their elders and catching details which adults often miss in their haste or preoccupation with other matters. As Sari Nusseibeh puts it, poignantly, in Once Upon a Country, “My brother Zaki, a precocious ten-year-old, watched the debates with large, round, curious eyes, absorbing every word as if his brain were a complex calculating machine” (73). Clearly, Nusseibeh himself — despite his occasional disclaimer that he oft preferred other distractions to the heated political salons of his Palestinian family — clearly gathered a vast amount of information as a child among the Arab intellectual élite of Jerusalem. So too, in Amos Oz’s Tale of Love and Darkness, the author recounts his childhood in Jerusalem on the Jewish side of the divided city, delicately weaving together political events with intimate personal moments. In this short essay, I will demonstrate how the childhood perspective of both young protagonists is a salient method which sheds light on the domestic underbelly of Jerusalem politics, and how the “othering” of the opposite side is rooted in separation since birth.

Nusseibeh’s childhood perspective shows the intimate side of his father’s involved Arab political life. His first political recollections were “of screams,” after the new war broke out in 1956 (73). These “screams” are left ambiguous, suggesting a child’s ignorant and innocent fear. As a child, Nusseibeh described politics as the “gravitational center” of his family life (73). Privy to conversations which historians and scholars can only dream about, his narrative of his father’s political activity evokes an image of the young author — more cognizant of his surroundings than the adults realize, with “curious eyes” like his brother — scurrying underfoot. He relates the “interminable discussions” in his living room about King Abdullah (Jordan), Ben-Gurion, Eisenhower, Nasser and others (73). These conversations were less than abstract, though, as these political leaders figured as personal characters in Nusseibeh’s childhood. Later in the text, Nusseibeh casually mentions King Hussein dropping by the house for lunch, and a later falling-out between his father and the Jordanian sovereign (89-91). The living room was filled with “dense smoke” and lengthy evening debates (73). His mother, a Palestinian refugee from the coastal plain, talked politics infused with a literary air, filling the young narrator’s brain with images of a “magical dreamland,” lush with oranges, the Mediterranean Sea, all imbued with “idyllic innocence” (73). Out of his own bedroom window — arguably the most intimate of spaces — the narrator could peer out into a “shoot-to-kill zone,” separating the Jews in “enemy territory” from Arabs like himself (74). With such views out of his childhood window, little exposition is required to emphasize how interwoven personal life and the perils of politics were for Nusseibeh and other Jerusalemites.

Nusseibeh addresses the simultaneous proximity and division with neighboring Jews in the text’s prologue, directly addressing Amos Oz’s narrative: “I was raised no more than a hundred feet away from where Oz lived out his childhood, just on the other side of the fortified ‘No Man’s Land,’” (16). Oz, as a child, sat in his parents’ “small, dark apartment,” coming up with military strategies to defend the Jewish people, knowing little of the “ancient cobbled lanes” of the Arab quarters of the Old City which had long been inhabited and preserved by Nusseibeh’s ancestors (16). Only a hundred feet away, the intimate spaces of Oz’s home provided sanctuary for entirely opposing beliefs; a boyhood with the opposite experience of Nusseibeh’s.

After the 1947 announcement of the partition plan for Israel and the plan for a Jewish state, Oz relates the domestic side of a profound political change. Far from the dry narratives related in historical textbooks, Oz’s childhood recollections of the late November merrymaking suggest the raw passion and emotion which remain a powerful part of Israeli national memory. A child of course, his elders instructed him to sleep until the vote ended near midnight, after which he awoke and — in what felt like a “frightening dream,” a neighbor or stranger picked up the young narrator, so he “wouldn’t be trampled underfoot,” after which he was passed from hand to hand until he landed on his father’s shoulders (Ch. 44). Oz feeds the reader a stream of consciousness of the festive night: his parents shout, his mother strokes his head and back (Ch. 44). Within the personal narrative, Oz interweaves the personal and political realms. His mother’s hand is a symbol, working “perhaps to soothe us or perhaps not, perhaps out of the depths she was also trying to share with him [father] and me in our shout and with the whole street, the whole neighborhood, the whole city, and the whole country” (Ch. 44). If the original Hebrew is a direct translation of “out of the depths,” this brief reference (ממעמקים) to Psalm 130 calls to mind the soulful song of ascents and Jewish hope for Israel’s Divine redemption. His mother’s hand, thus, calls to mind an entire narrative of national and religious memory. Amid this political redemption, the touch of his mother connects Oz’s personal life to religious politics.

Later that evening, back in the confines of his childhood bedroom, the political and personal continue to connect through Oz’s youthful eyes. His father had told him on the street, “… look, my boy, take a very good look, son, take it all in, because you won’t forget this night to your dying day and you’ll tell your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren about this night when we’re long gone” (Ch. 44). After the political rejoicing, Oz recounts crawling back into bed past his bedtime and dressed in his street clothing — his childhood innocence peeks through: his parents’ rules are just as important to include as the political narrative at hand. Oz’s father sat down beside him in bed and told him a painful story of anti-Semitic assaults he experienced in Eastern Europe. His father, caressing his son, told him that “from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew” (Ch. 44). The bedroom here becomes main stage for a powerful infusion of classical Zionist values. The moment becomes increasingly personal, as the narrator sleepily touches his father’s face, feeling the only tears his father would ever shed in front of him. For many children, seeing a parent reduced to tears is one of the most powerful marks of an emotional moment. In the Nusseibeh writing, too, the narrator’s sister was reduced to tears by Anne Frank’s Holocaust narrative, as is his Palestinian mother who “suffered at the hands of the Zionists: “Without a word, my mother gently wiped Saedah’s tears away, and furtively wiped away her own” (72-73). The reader, allowed into these private childhood moments in the narrators’ memories, sees family emotions on both sides of No Man’s Land.

Separated since birth, each child protagonist sees the other side as alien. The ultra-orthodox provide a good focal point for the divide. Nusseibeh, peering out from the few vantage points he has over the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, sees the highly observant Haredi Jerusalemites as otherworldly. Intrigued, he describes men with “long wizard’s beards,” black coats and “curly side locks” (75). The men are “bearded creatures,” appearing eerily in the distance before disappearing behind another corner, entering and exiting his reality silently and at a distance, like “in a dream” (75). Meanwhile, on Oz’s side of No Man’s Land, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood has a Hebrew name — Mea She’arim — but is just a passing thought at the beginning of a paragraph which focuses mainly on the foreign side of Jerusalem, the stomping ground of Nusseibeh and his ancestors (Ch. 40). Oz describes an “opposite Jerusalem,” consisting of “menacing yet fascinating” Abyssinian, Arab, pilgrim, Ottoman, missionary, and other groups. Oz recalls an unknown world, filled with bells and “winged enchantments” (Ch. 40). To a childhood Oz, Nusseibeh’s side of Jerusalem is alien and hostile, “a veiled city, concealing dangerous secrets, heavy with crosses, turrets, mosques, and mysteries … through whose streets ministers of alien cults shrouded in black cloaks and priestly garb flitted like dark shadows, monks and nuns, kadis and muezzins …” (Ch. 40). As children, living before the Internet shed light on the going-ons in forbidden territories, neighboring communities provided as much intrigue and mystery to the protagonists as scripture or the content of their latest pleasure novel. It is only evident that such antagonism and alienation plays into adult politics, years later. After all, though in Chapter 44 Oz describes the melancholy, foreboding silence which must have filled Arab homes on the night of the partition announcement, such insight is the product of years of mature introspection and reflection. As a child, the Arab quarters and “veiled city” of non-Jewish Jerusalem remained a foreign world into which few, if any, entered.

In both works, the recollections of a childhood in a war-torn Jerusalem provide unique insight into the city’s history and its residents. The protagonists’ reflections on childhoods brimming with conflict and politics provided me a chance to sympathize with the intimate, hidden angles of Jerusalem history. Both child narrators, halfway through the twentieth century, also observe the stirrings of impending history outside of Jerusalem’s insulating mountains, albeit from opposite sides. Oz notes that “over the hills and far away, a new breed of heroic Jews was springing up, a tanned, tough, silent, practical breed of men, totally unlike the Jews of the Diaspora” (Ch. 1). He is referencing the suntanned, passionate new arrivals to the coastal plain, incidentally the birthplace of Nusseibeh’s refugee mother. The modern reader knows that the “tough” and “practical” men on the coastal plan, organizing collective farms and military organizations, would eventually continue to push Jewish infrastructure into the hills. Nusseibeh, a descendant of a 1,300-year-old Jerusalemite dynasty, may be alluding to this future, sensing it even as a child. In the years preceding the 1967 takeover of Jordanian Jerusalem by Israel, he describes faraway political “convulsions” as mere words in the newspaper or on BBC radio (79). Nusseibeh compares his childhood home’s nightly political salons to that of a Russian novel, where unassuming characters approach issues as the stuff of evening discussion — unaware that the “far-off cataclysm[s]” will eventually bring their entire world “crashing down” (79).

Works Cited

Nusseibeh, Sari. Once Upon a Country. Farrar, Giroux and Strauss, 2007.

Oz, Amos. A Tale of Love and Darkness. Translated by Nicholas de Lange, Harcourt Publishing

Company, 2004.*

*I used chapter references since the page numbers are not standardized due to the e-book format.

In the third chapter of A.B. Yehoshua’s 1989 novel Mr. Mani, the reader meets the enigmatic and intellectual Yosef Mani. He calls himself a homo politicus, who “drifts” among the identities of 1917 Jerusalem, developing his politics and acquiring languages as though they were a “batch of keys to a house with many doors” (172). In fact, a deep reading of this chapter shows that the singular speaker – Ivor Horowitz, a British Jew investigating Yosef for anti-British activity – also displays fundamental signs of being a homo politicus. Jerusalem, with its tangle of competing cultural and religious groups, engenders such persons. In this paper, I will argue through a close reading of the text that both Ivor and Yosef capitalize on their cultural, linguistic, and national affiliations to serve their own interests as homo politicus – a partial byproduct of the Western nationalist psyche rising in the Jerusalem at the time.

First, a close look at Horowitz’s comments to his British colleague display his nature as a homo politicus: he makes a conscious political decision to evade his inherited identity as a Jew in favor of serving Great Britain. It starts early in the text – with Horowitz’s repeated explanation of his name’s spelling: “Horowitz, Colonel, with two ‘o’s’” (150). Horowitz’s need to clarify this alienates him, as Colonel Woodhouse appears to not immediately understand his Jewish name. Almost in response to this awkward start, Horowitz’s ensuing description of fellow Jews demonstrates a subtle grammatical effort to set himself apart. He tells the Colonel, “We never thought we’d encounter such a stormy winter in Jerusalem, which our [emphasis added] British imaginations had pictured” (150). This use of the third person continues in Horowitz’s discussion of the Western Wall, which Horowitz calls “that big white wall they [emphasis added] stand in front of, which is supposedly a remnant of their Temple” (151). Horowitz also does not fail to mention his characteristically British law studies at Oxford and later military service. Horowitz’s political goal here, as prosecutor, is to establish a congenial relationship with the Colonel who will judge Yosef Mani’s alleged treason. So, he uses powerful references to his British identity to try and win the elder Brit’s favor.

The focus of the conversation, however, is on Yosef Mani’s nimble ability to navigate the complex cultural and political world of Jerusalem, eventually using what he learned to serve his Zionist political aims. Yosef’s local affinities and Zionist roots are displayed in the same paragraph on page 178, suggesting an intentional connection by Yehoshua. In a single day, he spends his mornings in the Arab coffeehouse, teaches Arabic grammar in the afternoons, visits his Sephardic synagogue for midday prayer and ends the evening at the Zionist Club (178). His local roots are further made evident in the prosecutor’s description of Yosef’s physical movement throughout Jerusalem, the city where his “father and grandfather” are interred (187). Yosef moves between innumerable holy sites and ancient city gates with an insider’s ease, flitting from the “Mohammedan coffeehouse” to the meetings of Jewish dignitaries who have come to witness the “redemption of Zion” (Yehoshua 187). The author thus quietly describes Yosef’s political birth as a Zionist, albeit from an angle usually unexplored; as Klein notes in his piece on Arab Jews, historical research has “barely touched on Arab-Jewish identity” (20). The British used Yosef’s linguistic abilities to announce their political proclamations to locals in Palestine, work which clearly irked him. Horowitz’s narrative language conveys several examples of Yosef’s annoyance at the British presence in Palestine. Horowitz describes the British armed forces as the “British juggernaut thundering across the Holy Land” and Allenby’s army as creeping slowly into the “mountains of Judea” (183-184). In both statements, religious Jewish terms are used to describe the land. Yosef goes on to subvert the British cause by clandestinely preaching to local Arabs, in pursuit of his homo politicus goal of instructing them to form an identity, which may serve his own political needs.

The reader is told that at night, Yosef “shut[s] his eyes and pictures himself orating to the Arab villagers … his heart bled for the Arabs …” (187). He speaks to the villagers in the local Arabic which even the British could not master, despite years of study at Oxford (Yehoshua 181,189). Addressing the group, he informs them of Balfour’s declaration, supplicating them to get “an identity, and be quick!” (Yehoshua 189). Detailing the declaration, he notes that the land will be divided in half – with one section “for us,” i.e., the Jews, and another for them (Yehoshua 189). He notes that the Englishman and Turk, while present then, would eventually depart – calling upon the Arabs to “sleep not” regarding their own interests. Clearly, as a Jew who attends daily prayer, avoids kindling fire on the Sabbath and has immersed himself in the Jerusalem meetings of passionate early Zionists, Yosef is conveying that the rapidly organizing Jews will overtake Arab claims to the same land. The fact that the Zionists meet at nighttime, forgoing sleep in their efforts to establish their national presence, only strengthens his call to his Arab brethren to “sleep not.” Far from acting this way to empower the Arab cause, Yosef symbolizes a homo politicus who knows that when competing groups establish their interests at the outset, it can reduce conflict. Yehoshua, writing some seventy years after these 1917 scenes, knows that the powerful Jewish organizing power in the land of Israel would eventually lead to bloodshed and conflict with local non-Jewish Arabs, whose practical national aspirations materialize decades too late.

Yosef toes the lines of a delicate political situation, navigating new nationalist predicaments. According to Klein, Ya’akov Yehoshua (the father of Mr. Mani’s author) described the residential courtyards of the Jews and Muslims of Jerusalem as “common,” before the British influence (21). Arab Jewish and Muslim relations were familial and friendly, bound by locale and language. The younger Yehoshua, our author, grew up in a Jerusalem where Jewish mothers poured their hearts out to Muslim women, and vice versa (21). Klein sums up these nostalgic recollections of a Jerusalem where local ties reigned supreme: “Nationalism suddenly intruded on their lives and those of their Muslim neighbors and imposed its hatreds and wars on them. The construction of the national “I” involved the rejection of prior identities, including that of being Arab Jews” (21). Yosef – a homo politicus at heart – appears to the reader as an early thinker on this issue, and he seeks to use his local and linguistic affinities to spread common knowledge about the national aims of Britain and European Zionism and the danger they pose to the peaceful, intercultural lifestyle which he likely views as integral to his Jerusalemite identity.

Works Cited

Yehoshua, A.B. Mr. Mani. 1989. Translated by Hillel Halkin, Doubleday, 1992.

Klein, “Arab Jews” (Class text, Prof. Behar)

Usually, the objective of fiery romantic passion is to spend as much time as possible with one’s lover. In Lope de Vega’s 17th century play ​The Knight from Olmedo​, lovers Don Alonso and Doña Inés repeatedly describe each other within the context of their blazing passion. At one point, Don Alonso even exclaims about his feverish feelings toward his beloved: “My love does not grow cool. It burns!” (2.15). Given their burning passion, it would be expected that the two would strive to marry at once, or at least shun any opportunity to be without the other. Puzzlingly, a pattern emerges throughout the play which points to a more complicated reality: the pair, despite consistently voicing their love and passion for each other, are surprisingly inactive in their pursuit of marriage, or any physical union. Over time, the play comes to serve partly as a meditation on how people undermine their outspoken desires. Though evidently in love with each other, Don Alonso and Doña Inés deceive themselves about their relationship and chronically sabotage their success as a couple by imposing unnecessary obstacles to their own union.

Nothing proves so detrimental to objective reasoning as a fall into the depths of passion, and Don Alonso and Doña Inés evidently experience such a fall. The two are entangled in a deep love for one another, beginning with Don Alonso’s falling for Doña Inés at a festival at first sight and evolving onwards. The deep romantic passion experienced by both parties in the relationship helps to explain the pair’s later irrationality and deceptive actions. Regarding her unwanted suitor Don Rodrigo, Doña Inés says “His looks and flattering words turn me / To ice” (1.183-184). This is the direct opposite of the heated, passionate feelings she exhibits towards Don Alonso, including when she refers to her heart as “ablaze” when she thinks of him (1.599-600). Doña Inés’ choice of the word “ablaze” mirrors Don Alonso’s own speech at the beginning of Act One, when he says, “Those eyes that gazed on me has [​sic​] set / My soul on fire, ablaze with love” (1.11-12). Through these personal admissions of their passion, it becomes clear that their overwhelming emotions may cloud judgement. Doña Inés examines the possibility of this lowered faculty of sense in Act One, saying: “First love is irresistible. / When Nature rules, how can a girl / Be sensible?” (1.439-441). In other words, she is pointing out that the power of natural emotion can cloud objective reasoning. Yet, her own recognition of such a phenomenon also points to the fact that her later actions may not only be a result of muddied reason, but also driven by some unknown personal intention. A clear contrast develops between the examples of passion for each other and the puzzling choices both Don Alonso and Doña Inés make to construct obstacles to their union.

Doña Inés imposes numerous obstacles to her relationship with Don Alonso, both by striving unnecessarily to adhere perfectly to social expectations and by deceiving others about her love. At the outset of the play, Doña Inés’ father informs her that he cannot think of a better husband for her than Don Rodrigo (2.251-254). While her father’s wishes are important, especially given the patent authority of men in 17​^th​ century Spain, it appears that Doña Inés takes his wishes too seriously at her own expense. Doña Inés’ dilemma is grounded in her need to bow to her father’s wishes regarding her marriage, so his desire for her to marry Don Rodrigo is reason enough to insist to herself that she is out of options. Even after hearing about Don Alonso’s sizeable wealth and reputation from Fabia, Doña Inés says, “Oh, how can I become his wife / If father offers me to Don Rodrigo?” (1.711-714). Fabia objects to Doña Inés’ blind deference to social convention, responding: “You and your young man [Don Alonso] / Will overturn the sentence” (1.715-716). And Fabia proves to be somewhat correct.  While social obligations are key, especially in the deeply structured society of the play, passion, and love for one’s partner can bend the rules more than Doña Inés allows. In the subsequent example, it becomes evident that the social conventions on which Doña Inés places so much emphasis exist more as obstacles in her mind than impermeable barriers.

Doña Inés decides her only way out of her dilemma is through deception. So, she falsely confesses to her father “I am / Already married,” implying a decision to become a nun (2.262-263). Her father’s response, however, speaks volumes to his willingness to waver on his earlier opinion: he exclaims that he wants grandchildren, and his surprised tone suggests he is generally taken aback by his daughter’s rash decision. The possibility of his willingness to waver on his view of Rodrigo is only strengthened when Doña Inés’ father implores her: “Daughter, you wish / To poison me? There is still time” (2.440-441). At this point, it becomes evident that Doña Inés could tell her father with relative ease about her love for Don Alonso. In doing so, she would satisfy his professed desire for her to marry instead of devoting herself and their family bloodline to Christ. She consciously chooses, however, to take a circuitous route, masking her love for Don Alonso through deception. Perhaps it is the pervasive presence of social constraints in their society which Doña Inés has internalized, such that young women have little agency over their romantic choices. Yet, despite the confidence of those around her, including her sister, who later tells Don Alonso of the high possibility of their father’s favor for him, Doña Inés lacks sense in her approach to the situation. She deceives herself and her father instead of striving to be with her beloved, imposing unnecessary obstacles to her marriage to Don Alonso which are only compounded by his actions, or more precisely, ​inaction​.

Don Alonso’s inaction and lack of concrete plans for marriage create obstacles to his professed goal of a union with Doña Inés. In Act One, he mentions his “hopes of marriage” with Doña Inés, but such hopes for a real union with her seem to fade into a general indifference to such pursuits as the play progresses (1.145). In Act Two, Don Alonso recognizes a threat to his marriage prospects with Doña Inés, admitting, “… I should have a rival who / Has fallen for Inés and therefore seeks / To Marry her” (2.77-79). Yet, instead of proposing any concrete plan to unseat his romantic “rival” and resolve the proposed problem, Don Alonso chooses in subsequent lines to meditate on his “worship” of his beloved, as if she is an embodiment of the Divine (2.86). He says: “I worship her, I live / In her … I am / Her slave, I cannot live without her. / I come and go between Olmedo and Medina because Inés is mistress of / My soul, regardless of whether I live / Or die” (2.86-93).  In this passage, his plans are vague: he does not care if he lives or dies, since Doña Inés remains the “mistress” of his soul. Especially notable is his claim that he lives “in her,” which furthers the notion that he is disregarding the importance of, say living ​with ​her, since he already views their relationship as something which surpasses the physical realm. Later in the play, he remains notably vague on the future of their marriage. He tells her at one point, “To be thought of as your husband is /For me the greatest happiness” (3.316-317). In this puzzling word choice on Lope’s part, Don Alonso tells his beloved that merely being “thought of” as her husband provides him overwhelming contentment, implicitly disregarding the importance of a physical union. Arguably, Don Alonso deceives himself by disregarding the importance of a physical connection to Inés, and his view of death in relation to their union furthers this notion.

To Don Alonso, death does not prove a plain obstacle to his love of Doña Inés. It becomes evident that Don Alonso sees their pairing as something which could stand the test of death, and thus remains immortal. He says in Act Three: “I go, then, to my death, although / To die, I know, is not to lose you. / For if you still possess my soul, / How can I then depart and be alive?” (3.331-334). Here, Don Alonso is constructing an obstacle to his union with Doña Inés by implicitly disregarding the importance of their earthly, physical connection. After all, Don Alonso does not see death as an impediment to his passion for Doña Inés, for he sees their souls as already intertwined. His statement requires a deep faith in the everlasting nature of their passion for one another, especially given how humans lose their physical connection with loved ones when they die. Thus, it suggests a sort of falsity and a blurred conception on Don Alonso’s part of the heavy impact death can take on two lovers. And, despite having claimed he wants marriage earlier in the play, it appears to be a self-deception of sorts, in reality Don Alonso does little which brings the two closer to marriage since he believes so wholeheartedly in the eternity of their relationship.

Another notable example of Don Alonso’s choice to construct obstacles to his union with Doña Inés is his decision to leave and see his parents in Olmedo at an inopportune point in the play. Notably, his departure from Medina comes directly after he is advised by Doña Inés’ sister that he will be welcomed with open arms by their father. The sister insists with earnest, “My father is full of praise for you, / And well disposed. When he’s informed / You Love Inés and she loves you / He’ll welcome you with open arms” (3.250-254). Despite this critical information, which opens the possibility of marrying Doña Inés (which was his professed hope in Act One), Don Alonso ​continues ​his self-deception, leaving to see his parents in Olmedo, on claims that they will worry about him should he not arrive. Given the intensity of Don Alonso’s passion for Doña Inés and the recent news of her possible freedom to marry, it is puzzling that he should remain so insistent on avoiding even a slight delay in leaving for his hometown. In a soulful speech, he laments parting from his lover, despite truly not having to do so. Doña Inés says only a few lines later that her father “longs that you [Don Alonso] / Should marry Leonor,” which the sister, Leonor, had just plainly negated in her statement (3.276-277). Yet, Don Alonso does not object to Doña Inés’ point, despite his knowledge of her father’s approval. Instead of jumping at the opportunity to marry Doña Inés, Don Alonso chooses a circuitous route instead of any direct path to marriage.

Don Alonso and Doña Inés​ ​deceive themselves of their reality by constructing and imposing false obstacles upon their marriage prospects. Despite their passion for each other, and evident sadness and distress at parting, they (especially Don Alonso) remain inactive in making their union exist in a tangible sense. Though the two lovers practice self-deception of facts, and through constructing false social obligations which police their actions from ​within, it remains unclear why they do so. Possibly, their reluctance to move forward with physical plans to join each other in marriage could be an implicit fear of losing the passion which is so well-sustained through distance and rules; maybe they are trying to maintain the more exciting nature of their burning love by pretending it violates numerous obstacles which must be surmounted to be together.

Works Cited