People and places | Review of Shmuel T. Meyer’s ‘And the War Is Over’, translated by Gila Walker

Shmuel T. Meyer's award-winning short story collection explores post-war Europe and New York, translated by Gila Walker.

The description of an era as “post-war” has become ambiguous, since at any given time a war is just ending. French-Israeli author Shmuel T. Meyer’s short story collection And the War Is Over starts in Europe just after World War II and takes us to New York just after the Korean War. The three-volume boxed set seems to be actually designed by an artist, not patched together from stock images. It is a pleasure to behold. The print is easy on the eye. The pages number fewer than 250, and the effect of that restraint is to slow us down to taste every word. The translation from the French Et la Guerre Est Finie, by Gila Walker, lets the prose shine through.

Meyer’s storytelling follows a similar pattern in each volume: a series of seeming short stories shape themselves into a narrative mosaic, revealing connections but also leaving tantalising gaps.

In the first tale in Grand European Express, a woman in a nameless village watches passing trains and imagines the lives in them. In her bleak world, even the moon is hostile, unlike the “milky moon tender as a boiled bean” that shines over a resort in the Alps in the second story. In that “sovereign splendour”, a young man revisits the scene of his pre-war love. Ten years have passed and he is thinner, but the beautiful people at Bella Tola in 1947 enjoy their gleaming cars and fat cigars, just as they did in 1937. 

Meyer’s characters are crisp line drawings that develop a muscular reality for the reader. His descriptions of scene, on the other hand, are a sensory extravagance from which we must discover what happened. If we look away for a minute, we miss it. Grand European Express is a veritable train of events, with impulsive lovemaking born from shock, an assassin followed by an avenger, and a passenger who writes a book about it all.

The central volume, Kibbutz, treats the newly formed nation of Israel with affectionate satire as well as savage thrusts. With a light touch, Meyer evokes the poultry, tractors, shared washing machines, and all the humanity and inhumanities acted out in the communal farms that impressed the first Jewish footprints in Israel. In the last, densely allusive story, the narrator, a committed but clear-eyed patriot who has helped to build his world brick by brick, realises it is now irremediably divided. When he recalls the day a prime minister was assassinated for having signed a peace deal that might have taken the two nations down a better road, it is with a howl of despair and loss. 

The Great American Disaster follows Saul Gantz, a detective in Manhattan’s East Side, whose cynical carapace still houses a small habit of faith. A small habit of something, anyway, which breaks his heart when he finds a girl’s body in a river, or hears of her mother’s suicide.

Et la Guerre Est Finie won the author France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2021, and it is not too early to call this work a classic.