Pride and Politics
Readers of Emuna Elon’s columns in Ma’ariv and Yediot Aharonot over the past 15 years might find her debut novel, If You Awaken Love, a striking, unlikely diversion from her political crusading. In her novel, political rhetoric is cooled and sympathies are spread over the political Left and Right alike. If You Awaken Love is not a morality tale, but a love story, or rather, an unrequited love story. The heroine, Shlomtzion, is not a settler, but part of the Yeshivat Merkaz Harav milieu in the 1970s, the hothouse for the growing religious-Zionist movement after the Six Day War. Once her engagement to her teenage love, Yair, is nixed by the rosh yeshiva, the heartbroken Shlomtzion rebels against and questions that world. “Everything that happens to her and everything she thinks, I know. It’s all a part of me… I haven’t lived as a secular person, but I’ve lived the possibility of that,” Elon tells The Jerusalem Post over coffee at the Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem. READ MORE IN THE JERUSALEM POST