«The Liar», Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

"Liar" is a book by Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen that shows how dangerous an unfair accusation of violence can be.

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (Hebrew: איילת גונדר-גושן) was born in Israel in 1982 and holds an MA in Clinical Psychology from Tel Aviv University. Her film scripts have won prizes at international festivals, including the Berlin Today Award and the New York City Short Film Festival Award. Her debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, won the Sapir Prize in 2013 for best debut and is being translated into five languages.

The book of the Israeli woman Ayelet Gudar-Goshen also addresses the topic of trauma, but from a fundamentally different position - not from personal, but rather from social. Her novel is a study of slander and the thin border beyond which an unpleasant person who behaves in a way that is not acceptable to society becomes a "rapist", which means a legal object of bullying and persecution.

Seventeen-year-old Nofar, the most ordinary and ordinary-looking girl, not only in her environment, but, perhaps, in the whole of Tel Aviv, works part-time in an ice cream parlor during her holidays. Once a famous singer in the past, Avishai Milner, enters there, annoyed by another refusal of the recording studio. Avishai insults the hesitating Nofar, she, sobbing, runs away into the dark courtyard, he follows her in a rage, grabs the girl by the shoulder - and thus makes a fatal mistake. Nofar lets out a heartbreaking cry, and then, when people from the street come running to her, she accuses Milner of attempted rape. From that moment on, the inconspicuous mouse Nofar becomes "the girl who was not afraid to scream" - a star and role model for thousands of women, and the irritable and narcissistic rude Milner - the subject of an equally ardent and sincere popular hatred. However, the trouble is that two more pairs of eyes saw what was happening in the courtyard: a lonely and insecure teenage boy and a dumb beggar. And now both of them know that there was no attempted rape.

"The Liar" by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is a book that explores not so much the psychology of heroes (sculpted with a confident hand and very plausible, but without excessive details), as social mechanisms that legalize and even encourage such a development of events. Here, sympathetic witnesses actually tell Nofar a ready-made version of an explanation of what happened - in order to evoke sympathy, sympathy and approval, she just needs to nod. Here television turns her into a martyr and a heroine, leaving not the slightest chance to back down. No one is ready to question her story: in fact, even before the ill-fated boor Avishai Milner opens his mouth to justify himself, he is already doomed.

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen in her novel opposes today's public agenda, which prescribes with joyful readiness to accept on faith any - even the most absurd - accusation of violence (especially if the "rapist" seems to be a bad person). And although for the heroes everything ends relatively well, the general pathos of The Liar is obvious: unconditional and unconditional trust in the victim is just as dangerous and destructive as the neglect of her feelings. Perhaps all the same could have been told a little more subtly and inventively, with great nuances and human depth, but even in this simple and straightforward form, the Gundar-Goshen novel remains an extremely useful, important and timely book.