Belonging as exclusion: the foreign language and the father as Yekkes at Manor Dory

From the inscription of the body to freedom

the novel The Gorillas (Grasset, 2026, cited as GOR) by Manor Dory is a novel that grapples with the question of whether and how a subject can escape the history that has shaped them. And the answer: they cannot escape it, they merely translate it. The book stages this impossibility as a literary program by being a translation itself: a writing in a foreign language about a father whose name was a translation, about a body onto which belonging was inscribed, and about a national identity based on the erasure of other identities. One thesis of the novel is that masculinity, Jewishness, Israeli statehood, and familial authority appear here as structurally homologous forms of power, all operating through the same mechanism: inscription on the body. Circumcision is the paradigmatic image of this inscription, but the novel shows that names, languages, military discipline, and family secrets perform analogous operations. Key questions that shape an interpretation of the novel include: What forms of violence constitute identity, and can writing offer an alternative to physical marking? How does Jewish identity in the Diaspora relate to Israeli statehood when both affiliations are neither compatible nor entirely negatable? What role do multilingualism and translation play as poetics? And finally: Can a masculinity that defines itself exclusively negatively—as non-father—establish a viable self-concept?

GOR is an autobiographically grounded text, constructed as a letter to a deceased father. The Israeli writer and translator, who lives in Berlin and Tel Aviv—the novel is written in French, although, or perhaps precisely because, French is not his native language—addresses his father, who died on November 29, 2019. Throughout the text, he consistently refers to his father by his German birth name, "Reinhard," even though his father had been known as "Ezer" his entire life. In a preamble, the narrator explains his choice of language: only in French, which was completely foreign to his father and contains no trace of his father's character, can he finally speak uncensored.

The avant-propos is the novel's poetics manifesto. The metaphor of the "double seal"—language and death—reveals that both layers of protection separate the writer from the reader-father. Yet both are unstable. Death does not protect against presence (the father's scent lingers in the pillow), and the foreign language does not protect against self-exposure. The sentence "C'est dans cette langue entièrement mienne" (It is in this language entirely my) reveals the paradox: French is "his" language precisely because no one else in his family speaks it—it is a privatized language, a language of exile within exile. This threefold linguistic constellation—Hebrew (shared with the father), German (the father's first language), French (the language of writing)—structures the entire novel as a multilingual field in which each language represents a different temporal layer and power relation. Autopoetologically, the scene shows that writing arises not from strength, but rather from protection: The text exists because its addressee cannot read it.

The book is divided into three parts, each highlighting a different stage of life – childhood, adolescence, adulthood – and ends with an epilogue dated November 29, 2023, the fourth anniversary of the father's death.

The first chapter, titled “Mon père mis à nu” (My Father Stripped Naked), opens with the father’s physical secret: his uncircumcision, which in Israeli society from the 1940s to the 1960s was tantamount to a radically deviant physicality. Starting from this physical detail, the novel unfolds a far-reaching analysis of religious, cultural, and gender norms: Who is in Jewish covenant with God? What does belonging mean when it is literally inscribed on the skin? The chapters on childhood and early adolescence describe the discovery that the father was originally named “Reinhard Schiffer,” a typically German name, before being renamed “Ezer Manor” by a Zionist kindergarten teacher. The family name is a translation: “Schiffer” (sailor) became “Manor” (Bome), one of the countless semantic Hebraizations that the German-Jewish immigrant generation in Palestine underwent. Left alone with his nanny Gaby for three weeks – his parents had travelled to Uganda and Rhodesia for over a month – the narrator receives postcards from Africa every day, including a picture of a mountain gorilla: the novel's titular image.

The introduction of the concept of deadnaming from trans discourse is one of the novel's intellectual strokes: it connects Zionist naming politics (Reinhard → Ezer) with the queer-theoretical debate on identity and coercion. The first name "Reinhard" is burdened in three ways: it sounds German, it evokes Reinhard Heydrich (the narrator explicitly mentions this), and it recalls the infantile humiliation of the story about the rabbit. That the father concealed this name from the world for 82 years—not because of its connection to the Holocaust, but because of the rabbit story—is one of the novel's darkest ironies. The narrator uses this name consistently, and this use is an act of appropriation that is simultaneously disrespect and love: he calls his father by the name the world never knew, thus restoring to him an identity that was doubly taken from him.

The second narrative phase is dedicated to the adolescent crisis. The narrator drops out of school, isolates himself, wages a physical war against his father—barricading the apartment door—and experiences how his developing physicality brings him closer to the hated paternal body: the body hair, the deep voice, the smell become signs of an unwanted metamorphosis. “Étais-je en train de devenir moi aussi un gorille?” is the key question of the adolescent. During this phase, the narrator is committed to the notorious Tsori Psychiatric Clinic in a nighttime act of violence by his brother and two strangers—an experience from which he frees himself through linguistic cunning and emotional calculation. In parallel, an initial, unspoken homoerotic attraction develops: The young Palestinian “Amin”, an informant pressured by the Shin Bet, who secretly enters the apartment, triggers in him a mixture of desire and politically motivated horror.

In the third part, the epilogue, the focus shifts to the adult narrator, who commutes between Paris, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. Following the father's death, the Shiv'ah takes place, the week of mourning during which secrets are revealed: the father's long-time lover, Alona (daughter of his former lover Valentina), had cultivated a father-son relationship with Ezer that resembled the narrator's biological sonship. The novel concludes with the announcement of the birth of a son—Rafael—the first child of the narrator and his partner Yossef, a child who will possess three citizenships, will not be circumcised, and will grow up in Berlin. The cycle of inscriptions that began with the father's body is programmatically interrupted at this point: the legacy of the gorilla becomes an unmarked, free body.

Autofiction, essayism, mosaic

GOR is a novel that systematically pushes the boundaries of genre. It contains elements of autofiction in the sense of Serge Doubrovsky—the coincidence of author's name, narrator's name, and protagonist's name is not complete (the narrator shares the author's name: Manor Dory, yet the novel is declared a "novel")—but the biographical foundation is ostentatious: The dedication page names the father, including his birth and death dates. The preface addresses the deceased father directly and dates the writing to November 29, 2022, exactly three years after his death. This framing establishes a paradoxical form of communication: The text is addressed to someone who cannot read and is written in a language he did not understand. The paratextual dedication reads: “Au souvenir exilé de mon père / Né à Berlin le 29 novembre 1930 / et mort à Tel-Aviv le 29 novembre 2019”. The “exilé” of the memory marks homelessness as a structural principle from the very beginning.

The narrative is not linear, but mosaic-like: leaps in time, flashbacks, parallel narratives, and essayistic reflections alternate. The novel imitates the structure of memory itself, which functions associatively rather than chronologically: from the father's body to circumcision rituals, to a translation of Descartes, to Holocaust commemorations, to Uganda and Idi Amin—the transitions are fluid, logically but not causally linked. This structure corresponds to the narrator's self-description as a poetics: he is a translator, and translating means becoming faithful to the text by betraying it. "Traduttore, traditore," it says in the Épilogue.

Key genre elements found in the novel include: epistolary literature (the avant-propos as a literary letter), the memorandum (the detailed reconstruction of family history), the confession (autobiographical admission without absolution), the Bildungsroman in its negative form (no education in the classical sense, but rather deformation and resistance), genealogy as a detective story (the narrator researches his deceased ancestors in Berlin archives like an investigator), and the picaresque tale (the escape from a psychiatric hospital through acting and linguistic cunning). A coherent genre would presuppose a coherent identity, which the novel precisely seeks to deconstruct.

The absent addressee

At the heart of the novel lies the dyadic relationship between the first-person narrator and his father, Ezer/Reinhard, around which all other characters are arranged in concentric circles. The father is a figure of radical withdrawal: he speaks little, shares little, leads a double life, and manages secrets as a professional principle (he was a Shin Bet agent and bodyguard). Yet this withdrawal produces in the son an obsessive attachment that drives the novel. The father is simultaneously too close—physically present through his scent, his footprints in the apartment, his biographical relics—and impossibly distant.

The mother, Léa, is a figure of paradoxical strength: professionally feared as a "spy hunter," yet completely subservient to the father within the family. She functions as a messenger, an emotional outlet for her son, a victim and simultaneously an accomplice of the system that humiliates her. The brother, Boaz, remains peripheral but appears at key moments—he is the one who has the narrator forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital, and he posthumously reveals the father's affair with Aliza. The father's mistresses—from Aliza in Kampala to his long-term partner, Valentina—form a counterweight to the marital order and reflect the instrumentalization of women within the paternal system.

Yossef, the narrator's partner, is the only character in the text who is consistently portrayed positively: He is the only person to whom the narrator confides his father's physical secrets before publishing them in his writing. Yossef acts as both a witness to and a counterpoint to the father's masculinity. The character of the Palestinian informant "Amin" is particularly complex from a narrative perspective: He condenses desire, political complicity, and the question of the "enemy" into a single body that stands silently before the narrator.

The novel consistently employs a first-person perspective with two distinct addressees: the dead father (directly addressed in the avant-propos and epilogue) and an implied reader, to whom the internal chapters are addressed. This shift is not incoherent but rather reflects the narrator's own divided communicative situation: he writes for someone he could never speak to (his father) and publicly for everyone to whom he never explained himself (the world). The direct address "tu" / "Reinhard" creates an intimate distance: the dead man is addressed informally in order to take possession of him – "je peux enfin te faire, en quelque sorte, mien" – as one can possess dead authors when there are no widows or curious children left.

The psychiatric ward scene is the literary mirror image of the entire novel's structure. Just as the father, in his professional role as an intelligence agent, strategically uses information, the son here strategically employs language and body—playing the role of the repentant child to free himself. Language does not become truth; it becomes tactics. Simultaneously, the father's olfactory perception prior to sight is characteristic: throughout the novel, smells occupy a central position (the father's "gorilla smell," the smell of deodorants, the smell of the pillow in the epilogue). The body is primarily an olfactory body, eluding visual scrutiny and penetrating deeper into the unconscious.

Communication in the novel is systematically disrupted or denied. The father spoke little and instrumentally; the mother communicated through daily interrogations of the son about the father; the son remained silent for years after the break with his parents or staged communication tactically, as in the psychiatric setting. Postcards—the medium through which the parents "explain" their absence to the three-week-old infant—represent the replacement of closeness with symbolic distance. They are cold, standardized, exotic, and at the same time tenderly banal: "Neshikot gdolot meAba"—big kisses from dad. This sentence reappears at the end of the novel as the dying father's last WhatsApp message to Alona, ​​the daughter of his lover. The postcard and the WhatsApp message frame the entire book as forms of communication from a man who always sent closeness, never gave it.

Tel Aviv, Berlin, Paris, Africa

The novel develops a spatial poetics in which the three cities of Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris appear as existential coordinates. Tel Aviv is the space of origin, conflict, and family—a place experienced simultaneously as home and as a cage. It is a city "built on sand," as the novel emphasizes: "Berlin, tout comme Tel-Aviv, est bâtie sur du sable." Sand is the material of incompleteness, porosity, and the ever-present possibility of change.

Berlin is the space of both ancestors and future: The father was born here, the narrator lives here today. Berlin is the city where one searches for traces of the father and cannot find them – the address Wilmersdorfer Straße 1 no longer exists, having been bombed in the war. At the same time, Berlin is the place where the narrator conducts genealogical detective work at the Weißensee Cemetery and finds the gravestones of his ancestors. Berlin embodies what Zionism sought to eradicate from German Jewry: It is the repressed foundation that nevertheless survives.

Paris is language itself. The narrator moved to Paris in 1995, “primarily to get away from my father.” Paris is not a geographical space, but a linguistic one: the narrator chose French as his written language there. Africa appears only on postcards, as an exoticized image: elephants, giraffes, zebras, and a mountain gorilla. These images are signs of absence: images of where the parents were while the child was here.

The three-week-old infant receives postcards, which a nanny reads aloud. The absurdity of this situation—a child who cannot yet read a letter receiving daily mail from Africa—is described by the narrator without comment, as if the absurdity itself were the statement. The postcards are a surrogate for presence, and the gorilla on one of them is the titular image of the entire book: the yawning animal, the last of its kind, becomes the archetype of paternal masculinity—animalistic, threatening, endangered, and yet fascinating. The postcard as a form of communication is emblematic here: it bridges distance without eliminating it. One sends a picture, not an embrace. The image of the gorilla is the first message the narrator receives from his father—and it anticipates everything: physicality, animalism, distance, fascination.

The novel's temporal structure is intricately interwoven. There are at least four time levels: the autobiographical present (Berlin, November 29, 2022 to 2023), the narrator's childhood and adolescence (1971–1990), the father's life story (1930–2019), and the family history of the ancestors (from the German Empire to Weimar). These levels are not clearly separated; they overlap—for example, a grave in the Weißensee Cemetery becomes the starting point for reflections on Shiv'ah, which lies much later in time.

Repetition is the central temporal principle: The date June 8th appears as the death of great-grandfather Friedrich and as the date of grandmother Zizi's suicide (exactly sixty years later), a coincidence that the narrator interprets as more than mere chance. "Neshikot gdolot"—the formula used on postcards from 1971—returns as the dying man's last WhatsApp message. These repetitions create a temporal structure of uncanny recurrence: The past is not past; it circulates. The Freudian "uncanny" is an explicit narrative category here: The novel shows how the family persists as a psychic object, even after its members have died.

Borders and transitions

The novel works with a few, but dense, interpenetrating semantic fields. The first is the field of the body: circumcision, body hair, smell, foreskin, muscles, blood—the body is never neutral, always marked and significant. The second field is that of language: translation, silence, names, prefixes, grammar, the Hebrew "being" without the present tense. The third field is that of animals: the gorilla represents raw masculinity, but also an endangered species; postcard images of zebras, elephants, and giraffes; rabbits as childlike tenderness that becomes a mark of shame; worms devouring corpses in Israeli soil.

The fourth field is that of borders and transitions: circumcision as an irreversible marker, name changes as a demarcation of identity, the Berlin city limits (Kreuzberg as a place of residence), the border between Israel and the occupied territories, the border between self and father. The fifth field is that of secrets and revelation: family secrets as a system that organizes the entire family (who still "exists," who has been "declared dead"). Writing the novel is the most radical form of revelation: "Mon père mis à nu"—the father naked, exposed, stripped of his shell.

The gorilla metaphor is multifaceted. It refers to the father as a body embodying raw power and masculinity; the men in Ezer's army unit, who are called "les autres gorilles de son unité" (the other gorillas of his unit); the pubescent son's fear of becoming a gorilla himself; colonial imagery (the animal from Africa, sent on a postcard); and the titular, structuring image of the entire novel. In the end, the father leaves behind "quelques reliques de ses années de gorille" (some relics of his years as a gorilla) – the phrase combines religious language (relics) with the animalistic, transforming the father into a kind of ambiguous saint's bone.

Masculinities and Identities

The theme of masculinity is omnipresent and radically destabilized in the novel. The paternal model of masculinity is clearly defined: silence instead of speech, physical strength instead of reflection, sexual dominance as the exercise of power, emotional inaccessibility as strength. It is a masculinity that draws from various historical sources: the German bourgeois ideal of duty of the parental generation, the Zionist pioneering spirit (which finds its institutional form in the military), and a Mediterranean patriarchy.

The narrator doesn't simply oppose this model with an alternative one; he establishes a practice of withdrawal: he refuses the Bar Mitzvah, avoids changing rooms, dresses contrary to the prevailing body image, chooses French instead of Arabic (which was supposed to be imposed on him as a military intelligence officer), and loves men. Each of these acts of refusal is a response to a specific demand of the hegemonic system of masculinity. The narrator's homosexuality is not a theme in the sense of a coming-out narrative, but rather appears as a further form of withdrawal from the father's mode of reproduction. At the end of the novel, the decision not to have his son circumcised becomes an emblematic gesture: the cycle of physical inscription is—perhaps—broken.

The novel develops a nuanced analysis of the relationship between German-Jewish diaspora identity and Israeli statehood, both of which appear as antagonistic constructs. The Yekkes—German-influenced Jews like Ezer's family—are a doubly marginalized group in Israeli society: assimilated as Jews in Germany, but never fully accepted; stigmatized in Israel as "too German." Ezer/Reinhard embodies this duality in his own body: uncircumcised like a non-Jew, yet Jewish in his entire history. The name "Reinhard" burdens him not because of Heydrich (whom he didn't know when he came to Palestine), but rather because of the Germanness itself, which was considered a legacy to be left behind in the new Zionist society.

This passage is the distilled paradox of the novel: In Europe, the uncircumcised body was a guarantee of survival; in Israel, it was a mark of exclusion. The father navigated between these two historical logics without explicitly addressing them. The son makes this entanglement—the Shoah and the foreskin—conscious: He considers them together, inseparably, in an association he himself describes as almost impossible to communicate. The sentence "C'est à peine avouable, mais c'est la réalité" (It's almost impossible to articulate, but it's reality) is characteristic of the rhetoric of the entire novel: the gesture of confession that anticipates and thereby defuses the transgression. The semantic field of nudity, shame, and visibility here links two levels: the collective history of European Jewry and the intimate history of an Israeli family. Jewishness is not presented as a religious or cultural category; it appears as physical visibility that, depending on the historical context, either costs or saves lives.

The novel's critique of Israel is never explicitly political, always mediated biographically. Israeli society appears as a system that produces and enforces identities: through military conscription (the novel portrays the military as an extension of the paternal principle of discipline), through language policy (Hebraization of names), and through bodily norms (circumcision as the default). The Nakba—the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948—appears in the novel through the destroyed houses in Apollonie and through the Palestinian salesman in the Berlin mobile phone shop: not as a political argument, but as a sedimented history visible in the very fabric of the space. The final scene of the Épilogue—the conversation with the Palestinian shopkeeper from Jaffa—ends with "Allah Yerhamo" (May God have mercy on him) in response to the mention of the deceased father: a gesture of humanity that transcends national boundaries without dissolving them.

Gorilla: a body that protects and threatens

GOR is to a high degree a self-reflexive text that constantly comments on its own methods. The narrator is both translator and writer—and both professions are developed as key metaphors within the novel. The act of translation provides the central paradox: one remains faithful to the text by treacherously recreating it. “Traduttore, traditore.” This principle also applies to the autobiographical writing: the father is recreated in the novel, becoming a “père-sonnage”—a play on words that merges “father” and “personnage” (in the sense of a fictional character). Writing is not an act of remembering; it is an act of fiction: a necessary distortion in the service of fidelity.

The text is labeled a "novel" on the title page: it is not a memoir, not a testimony, not an essay, although it contains all three forms. The choice of the genre "novel" signals an admission of distortion, a visible reliance on its constructed nature. The author-narrator draws a direct line between his translation work (Descartes, Baudelaire, Flaubert into Hebrew) and this book: here, too, he is translating—his father into a language, a form, an accessibility that is only achieved through loss.

Marguerite Yourcenar's motto – "On choisit son père plus souvent qu'on ne pense" – opens the book with a thesis on the constructed nature of kinship. Yourcenar, one of the authors whom the narrator explicitly names as suitable for his translation work (she is "bien morte, bien enterrée"), is paradigmatic for his intertextual strategy: He chooses ancestors in literature whom he can appropriate because they can no longer speak.

Several explicit references are woven into the text: Plato/Aristophanes (“Le Banquet”) for the theory of desire as a search for the lost part; Descartes (“Méditations métaphysiques”) for the question of “being” in Hebrew; Maimonides for the significance of circumcision; and the Bible (Genesis, Proverbs, Psalms) as the horizon of Jewish textual tradition. In pop culture, Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting”—the song about a son who helplessly watches his father being arrested—is the clear antithesis to the psychiatric scene: here, the son is arrested by his family while the song plays in his ears. Kafka’s influence is structurally present—the father-son conflict, the impossibility of communication, the figure of guilt—without ever being explicitly named.

The title itself is doubly intertextually anchored: it refers to the zoological animal (the postcard from Uganda) and to the colloquial term for a rough, physically dominant man. In the father's intelligence culture, "les gorilles" refers to the bodyguards – "les autres gorilles de son unité." The father is thus literally a gorilla by profession: a body that protects and threatens.

Fatherland and father tongue

The novel's opening (Avant-propos, dated Berlin, November 29, 2022) employs a twofold protective measure: language and death shield the narrator from the paternal gaze. The father is absent, and the narrator begins to write. The novel's conclusion (Épilogue, dated Berlin, November 29, 2023) executes a symmetrical movement: once again it is November 29—the father's birth and death day—once again it is Berlin, and once again the father is addressed. But the tone has shifted: the cautious necessity of the beginning has transformed into a kind of gratitude. The father—through his silence and his control—enforced the use of French, and French has granted the narrator a freedom he would not otherwise have possessed.

The thematic mirroring is even more striking: at the beginning, the narrator is childless, separated, his father's son; at the end, he announces the birth of his own son. The child will not be circumcised. He will learn Hebrew as his mother tongue, German in kindergarten, and French later. He will be named Rafael—after Yossef's father and his father's homosexual uncle. This name encompasses three generations and two sides (his own family and his partner's family) and dissolves the logic of deadnaming: there is no name to erase because the new name is, from the outset, a choice, not a necessity.

The circle with which the book begins—father, body, name, language, inscription—does not close; it transforms. The novel's last word is not the end of the story, but rather its continuation: “Allemagne sera son” Homeland, et l'hébreu – sa langue paternelle.“ The irony of the “fatherland” for the child of two fathers, growing up in Berlin, inherits the entire semantic field of the novel: fatherhood, language, nationality, body – all of this is further negotiated in a generation that is supposed to do things differently.

The epilogue is the poetics-based concluding chapter, which unites the metaphor of the body and the metaphor of translation in a single sentence: Writing in a foreign language is like masturbating without a foreskin. This formulation—deliberately provocative, intentionally adapted to the language of the father (who preferred sports and steak)—is an autopoetological statement that says: Writing in a foreign language is a sexual act that presupposes the loss of the foreskin equivalent—native tongue—and finds a new pleasure in this lack. Just as circumcision produces a modification of the body that enables new experiences, so writing in French produces a linguistic modification that allows for new statements. The father—through his silence, his control, his foreignness—enforced this way of writing, and the son is "reconnaissant" for it: grateful. This gratitude is perhaps the most surprising feeling in the entire novel.

Manor Dory's GOR is a novel that is unusual in three respects: linguistically, because it is written in French, although or because French is a foreign language to the author; formally, because it appropriates the genre of the novel for a profoundly autobiographical subject, thus deliberately leaving the boundaries between fiction and testimony open; and thematically, because it does not affirmatively address any of the categories around which it revolves—Jewishness, masculinity, Israeliness, fatherhood—but rather destabilizes them all through the lens of their own contradictions.

The novel shows that identity is always a violent construction—physical, named, linguistic—and that writing does not lead out of this violence, but rather is another form of it: one in which one sets the conditions. The father has bequeathed to his son a circumcised, Hebrewized, militarized world; the son gives his own child an uncircumcised, trilingual, transnationally situated world—but this transmission, too, is an act of shaping, not of freedom. The novel knows this, and it says so.

What makes GOR a special literary work is not so much the boldness of its themes—father-hatred, body politics, and Israeli social criticism are not unfamiliar in literature—but rather the precision of its form. The choice of language as a structuring problem (not merely as a medium), the metaphor of translation as poetics, the postcard and the WhatsApp message as framing devices, deadnaming as an intellectual concept that illuminates several levels simultaneously: all of this transforms autobiographical material into a literary study of the conditions of possibility for selfhood in history.

The animal on the postcard—the yawning gorilla, one of the last of its kind—is still there at the end of the book, but its meaning has changed: it is the father, it is the model of masculinity, it is the endangered remnant of a world that no longer exists. And it is, perhaps, also writing itself: a large animal baring its teeth while sitting with its eyes closed.