Author Gila Green’s journey from Ottawa to Israel

Israeli-Canadian author Gila Green reads from her book White Zion during a recent author’s talk at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre.

By Michael Regenstreif

Editor

I discovered Israeli-Canadian writer Gila Green more than six years ago when I read her fascinating futuristic novel, King of the Class. As I noted in my review, published in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin (August 26, 2013), the novel was set in 2019, “and there has been a two-state solution – not to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, but to a Jewish civil war that pitted the fundamentally Orthodox against the militantly secular. Israel, with its capital in Tel Aviv, is the secular Jewish state, while Shalem, with its capital in Jerusalem, is the religious Jewish state.”

While Israel has made it almost all the way through 2019 without such a civil war, Green’s novel was somewhat prophetic in its predictions of the ever-growing tensions between Israel’s haredi Orthodox establishment, which controls religious affairs in Israel via the Chief Rabbinate, and other denominations of Judaism and secular Jews.

Earlier this year, I read Green’s novel Passport Control. Set in 1992, it tells the story of a Jewish student from Ottawa studying at Haifa University. As I mentioned in my Bulletin review (August 19, 2019), the book is “a compelling story encompassing identity, politics, religion, culture clash, family dysfunction, friendship and love in the Israel of almost three decades ago.”

I had a chance to sit down with Green recently when she returned to Ottawa for readings at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre and Carleton University.

A member of the Torontow family, Green and her five siblings grew up in Ottawa, the children of an Ashkenazi Canadian mother and a Yemenite Israeli father. She graduated from Hillel Academy (now the Ottawa Jewish Community School) – “It was a high-level education and it benefitted me a lot,” she said – and attended Sir Robert Borden High School for three years.

Green finished high school in Winnipeg while the family lived there briefly and returned to Ottawa to do her bachelor’s degree in journalism, with a double-major in English literature, at Carleton.

She also studied at Haifa University around the time that Passport Control is set and refers to the lead character, Miriam, as her “alter ego,” while stressing that the character is entirely fictional. While some of Miriam’s details parallel Green’s, there are also many differences, including that the fictional Miriam is an only child.

“In real life, I have five siblings and anyone who comes from a family of six will have a radically different life than an only child,” Green said.

Green’s husband is South African and after some time in Johannesburg around the time of the end of the Apartheid regime, the couple moved to Israel in 1994. They now have five children, aged from 12 to 21, and live in Beit Shemesh, a city near Jerusalem with a large English-speaking population. After moving to Israel, Green completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Bar Ilan University.

Green published two other novels in 2019. White Zion, which she describes as “a novel in stories,” with “characters who keep reappearing” in different stories, has an extended plot which migrates between Yemen, Ottoman Palestine and British Mandate Palestine. Green says British Mandate Palestine is a period she finds particularly “fascinating and often overlooked,” mentioning how that period impacted on Jewish and Israeli identity.

Her other new book is No Entry, a young adult novel set in South Africa, about a Jewish Canadian teenager who takes on murderous poaching ring. The book is the first in a projected series.

After setting her previous novels in Israel, Green said she wanted to get out of her comfort zone and challenge herself. “Can a Canadian who has been living in Israel write a convincing book set in South Africa?” she asked rhetorically.

Visit www.gilagreenwrites.com for more information about Green and her books.

Book Review: Former Ottawan’s story of identity and family dysfunction set in 1992 Israel

By Michael Regenstreif

Editor

Passport Control

By Gila Green

S&H Publishing

353 pages

It is 1992 and Miriam Gil, a 20-year-old university student is living at home in Ottawa with her widowed father, an Israeli who moved to Canada before meeting his future wife, Miriam’s mother.

Miriam’s mother had died five years earlier in a car crash and now her father finally seems ready to move on. He has invited his new girlfriend, Jacquie, to move in, but the last thing Jacquie wants is to share a home with Miriam. Her father lets Miriam know that it’s time for her to move out. Miriam, who has never been to Israel, decides to transfer to Haifa University thus setting the stage for Passport Control, a compelling story encompassing identity, politics, religion, culture clash, family dysfunction, friendship and love in the Israel of almost three decades ago. The book is written as Miriam’s first-person account of the events in the story and her reactions t_o them.

Like her character Miriam, Ottawa-born author Gila Green is the daughter of an Israeli father and Canadian mother, although she graduated from Carleton University before moving to Israel. She is also a graduate of Hillel Academy and Sir Robert Borden High School. I reviewed her earlier novel, King of the Class, in the August 26, 2013 edition of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.

Arriving at Haifa University, Miriam finds herself living with Jewish Israeli students, a Druze, a Palestinian, and an American, some of whom don’t get along well with each other. One of the Israeli roommates quickly lobbies Miriam to sign a petition demanding that the Palestinian student be removed from their quarters. At first, the idealistic Miriam resists signing a petition she knows is motivated by nothing but prejudice, but eventually she acquiesces – a deed for which she feels nothing but guilt.

She also reaches out to her uncle, her father’s estranged younger brother. Spending Shabbat at Uncle Moshe’s kibbutz, she is hurt and puzzled by the emotional distance, even hostility, of Leah, Moshe’s wife, a highly placed Israeli bureaucrat. (Eventually she learns the source of the hostility: Leah was her father’s first wife and the marriage did not end well.)

During that Shabbat visit, Miriam meets and falls in love with Guy, a student and former Israel Defense Forces soldier who yearns for peace with the Palestinians. As the plot to Passport Control twists and turns, the love affair with Guy becomes the most hopeful of the relationships Miriam will have in Israel.

As the daughter of an Israeli studying in Israel, Miriam is advised to get an Israeli passport. But her passport application is rejected when the background check shows Miriam to be the daughter of a Syrian Christian mother and unknown father – plunging Miriam into a bureaucratic nightmare that soon leads to her expulsion from the university.

Amidst subplots involving Leah’s role in the sabotage of her identity, and a tragic terrorist incident, the expelled Miriam finds herself in the crowded streets of the Old City of Jerusalem with Valerie, her American student friend, as throngs of Christian pilgrims mark Christmas Eve. Trying to make their way to the Kotel, Miriam and Valerie get caught up in a brawl between Palestinians and a group of Orthodox yeshiva students. While Miriam was roughed up in the brawl, Valerie was stabbed to death.

When the initial police check of Miriam’s identity again shows her to be Syrian Christian, she briefly becomes a suspect in Valerie’s murder.

In a period of a few short months, Miriam lives through difficult and complicated circumstances that eventually reconcile through the ultimately repaired bond of daughter and father and the imagined promise of a future with Guy. It’s a complicated story, but Green is a skilled writer who weaves Passport Control into an absorbing page-turner.

Gila Green will be at the Soloway Jewish Communi ty Centre on Monday, September 16, 1 pm, for an author talk presented by the Greenberg Families Library. Call 613-798-9818, ext. 245, for more information.