ABSTRACT
Seen from old age and death, postmodern love provides a retrospective view of disillusion in romantic and political ideals. Zeruya Shalev’s The Remains of Love and Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark each ponder the end of love and the end of life, while we return to the body-nation trope in the decay of desire. Yearning for the Promised Land or for a lover turns out in Zeruya Shalev’s work to be all that remains; in post-Zionist terms, yearning in exile is like yearning for a bride, a love that is passionate as long as it is unfulfilled. Exilic yearning is an alternative to sovereignty and to the redemption promised by left Zionism and religious messianism, which taught that redemption would come through working the land. However, Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark penetrates the mind of an American Jewish writer who experiences dissociation disorder, both in Israel, where she is staying in a Tel Aviv hotel, and back home in America, an expression of the divided identities of the Jewish American writer. Finally, the prospect of love in the afterlife in Ofir Touché Gafla’s The World of the End is countered by Michael Chabon’s metafictional memoir Moonglow, which undermines any certainty that life on earth has meaning.
