The Polar Circle Club: A Dark Comedy on Grief and Survival
A moving literary review of Noa Chovra's debut book, 'The Polar Circle Club,' exploring grief, black humor, and the raw reality of a young widow after October 7.
Noa Chovra and her husband Ido Chovra, of blessed memory, lived with their three children on Kibbutz Sufa. On October 7, Ido volunteered to defend the kibbutz, went into battle with a borrowed weapon, and did not return. A year and a half later, Noa and her children returned to the kibbutz. The Polar Circle Club, a dark comedy about a young widow, is her debut book.
She considers herself a woman who knows a great deal. She compares her brain to a sponge capable of soaking up enormous amounts of information. She hears a song once and can hum it afterward. She sees the face of a main character on television and can place them as a guest star in a series that aired a decade ago. She simply knows things. She is fine with the fact that regarding most of her obsessions, and the things stuck in her head, she has no one to talk to about them.
She is always learning new things, which also take up permanent residence in her brain. For example: she knows that according to Jewish tradition, delaying the burial of the deceased past six days is considered linat hamet (withholding burial), and that is a very bad thing indeed. In the six days that passed from the moment her husband was killed until she was able to bury him, she learned many new things: the names of Knesset members from across the political spectrum, the difference between an IDF casualty and a victim of hostilities, and she discovered that the secret base where she had served in the army no longer exists, and that a bank account can be automatically locked when one of its owners passes away. She also learned that when there are too many dead people in the country all at once, suddenly delaying burial is not such a terrible thing after all.
That is just a small sample of things, of course. She does not have much to do with herself and this information, except to stare into the eyes of the cruel reality and catalog the new data: a bereaved family certificate, a temporary gravestone, a temporary burial, acquaintances she lost touch with who apparently still love her—everything is tagged for the road ahead.
Life on 50% Brain Capacity
People who do not know Omer Atias well tell her that she will not remember anything from these days. She will not argue with the fact that her brain was indeed operating at only 50% capacity during those days, but even when her brain is at 50% capacity, it works better than the brain of most people she knows. So it is very likely she will forget people she spoke with, forget who she yelled at and which media outlet she was interviewed by, but she will certainly remember her insistence on delaying the burial by one more day (we already delayed five, what does one more matter?) and the conversation with her favorite restaurant, which agreed to send her chicken nuggets even though the chef, as a matter of principle, does not approve. It turns out that for a Third World War widow, he makes an exception—go figure.
Those days were filled with what one might expect—deliveries of burekas and other baked goods, deliveries of donations from people who want to help and do not know how, a mountain of questions she did not know how to answer, and a host of people she would have gladly thrown off a tall building.
There was also plenty of anger, in case that wasn't clear.
Anger, Reality, and Missing Recipes
What can Omer Atias do? Correct people when they spell her name with a vav when she is interviewed by the media? That is already so last year, she is not in high school anymore. Go enter and flatten Gaza? Who is she kidding, she barely finished basic training.
So she is angry. At the government, at the army, at her idiot husband, at her annoying children, at her nagging family... at herself. At the fact that she is completely useless, yet during a war—a real war with an army and an internal war inside her head—she knows how to find the best deal for a robotic vacuum cleaner, but cook? Change the sheets? Install car seats? Damn it, these are things she must know now, as the head of her small tribe.
Why, for heaven's sake, didn't she pay attention to how he made the cutlets she loves? Now the recipe went with him to the grave. It remains stuck in her grandmother's brain, but extracting information from there is like pulling data out of a computer running DOS. She ate those cutlets without knowing it was the last time she would ever eat them. You could say that about many things, but she mourned the cutlets specifically.
It is perhaps worth noting that Omer Atias does not really know Omer Atias well either. Certainly not now. Perhaps never.
After six days of the body lying unburied, they finally put him in his final resting place. For this purpose, she had to commit that she would not demand to be buried next to him, because it turns out this is an extra-premium spot for the dead—the Gindi of the burial world.
