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PRAISE FOR ZION’S FICTION
“This splendid new anthology will open a window on contemporary Israeli fantasy and science fiction—a stream of powerful work that we need to know more about.”
—Robert Silverberg, author and editor of SF, multiple winner of Hugo and Nebula Awards, member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Science Fiction Writers of America SF Grand Master
“Zion’s Fiction will supply a distinctive bright line to the spectrum of futuristic fiction, which stands in sore need of broadening, in the cause of promoting cross-cultural understanding as well as showcasing exciting new talent.”
—Brian Stableford, author of over 70 novels and renowned SF historian
“Zion’s Fiction explores the unlimited dreams of a people who have learned to stand on shifting ground. To face a future filled with danger and hope, forging into territory that can only be surveyed with the lamp of imagination on our brows.”
—David Brin, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award recipient and author of EARTH and Existence
“When my collection Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction was published in 1974, it became a classic. And now … we have the first ever anthology in the entire universe of Israeli fantasy and science fiction: Zion’s Fiction…. Go forth and read … and may you find Zion’s Fiction unexpected, delightful, and delirious!”
—Jack Dann, award-winning author and editor of over 75 books including The Memory Cathedral and The Silent
“The basic joy in science fiction and fantasy is the chance to look inside minds different from your own. Here’s your chance. Some bright minds in the nation of Israel have been exercising their imaginations, sharing their different dreams and nightmares, and the results are ours to enjoy.”
—Larry Niven, a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of The Ringworld Series
Zion’s Fiction
Zion’s Fiction
A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature
EDITED BY
Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem
FOREWORD BY Robert Silverberg
AFTERWORD BY Aharon Hauptman
ILLUSTRATIONS BY Avi Katz
Mandel Vilar Press
Copyright © 2018 by Mandel Vilar Press
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.
“Foreword” by Robert Silverberg, © 2018 Robert Silverberg; “Introduction” © 2018 Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem; “The Smell of Orange Groves” by Lavie Tidhar, © 2011 Lavie Tidhar; “The Slows” by Gail Hareven, translated by Yaacov Jeffrey Green, © 1999 Gail Hareven; “Burn Alexandria” by Keren Landsman, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 2015 Keren Landsman; “The Perfect Girl” by Guy Hasson, © 2004 Guy Hasson; “Hunter of Stars” by Nava Semel, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 2009 Nava Semel’s estate; “The Believers” by Nir Yaniv, © 2007 Nir Yaniv; “Possibilities” by Eyal Teler, © 2003 Eyal Teler; “In the Mirror” by Rotem Baruchin, translated by David Chanoch, © 2007 Rotem Baruchin; “The Stern-Gerlach Mice” by Mordechai Sasson, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 1984 Mordechai Sasson’s estate; “A Good Place for the Night” by Savyon Liebrecht, from A Good Place for the Night, translated by Sondra Silverston, © 2006 by Savyon Liebrecht, reprinted with the permission of Persea Books, Inc. (New York), www.perseabooks.com, all rights reserved; “Death in Jerusalem” by Elana Gomel, © 2017 Elana Gomel; “White Curtain” by Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel, translated by Anatoly Belilovsky, © 2007 Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel; “A Man’s Dream” by Yael Furman, translated by Nadav Almog, © 2006 Yael Furman; “My Crappy Autumn” by Nitay Peretz, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 2005 Nitay Peretz; “Two Minutes Too Early” by Gur Shomron, © 2003 Gur Shomron; “They Had to Move” by Shimon Adaf, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 2008 Shimon Adaf; “Afterword” by Aharon Hauptman, © 2018 Aharon Hauptman
This book is typeset in Alegreya. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39-48-1992 (R1997).
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Names: Teitelbaum, Sheldon, editor. | Lottem, Emanuel, editor. | Katz, Avi, illustrator. | Silverberg, Robert, writer of supplementary textual content. | Hauptman, Aharon, writer of supplementary textual content.
Title: Zion’s fiction: a treasury of Israeli speculative literature / edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem; foreword by Robert Silverberg; afterword by Aharon Hauptman; illustrations by Avi Katz.
Description: Simsbury, Connecticut: Mandel Vilar Press, [2018] | “The stories come from Hebrew, Russian, and English-language sources.”—Provided by publisher. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781942134527 | ISBN 9781942134534 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Israeli fiction (English) | Fantasy fiction, Israeli. | Speculative fiction. | Science fiction. | Short stories, Israeli.
Classification: LCC PR9510.8.Z56 2018 (print) | LCC PR9510.8 (ebook) | DDC 823/.010895694—dc23
Printed in the United States of America.
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Mandel Vilar Press
19 Oxford Court, Simsbury, Connecticut 06070
www.mvpress.org
To my wife, Lilith, and kids, Adam, Shiran, and Liam, for keeping my sense of wonder afloat; to my mom, Roz, whose fortitude is something to behold; to my late father, Harry, and to uncles, Jack and Ben (ZT”L), who would have had a hoot with this, and to Grand Master Bob, who bent space and opened portals.
—SHELI TEITELBAUM
To Larry Niven, who showed me how science fiction ought to be written; to my friends at the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy, those who feature in this anthology and everyone else as well; and to my wife, Liana, my sons, Amos and Eran, and their children.
—EMANUEL LOTTEM
IN MEMORIAM
Keren Embar
Amos Geffen
Mordechai Sasson
Nava Semel
Aharon Sheer
CONTENTS
Foreword • ROBERT SILVERBERG
Introduction • SHELDON TEITELBAUM AND EMANUEL LOTTEM
The Smell of Orange Groves • LAVIE TIDHAR
The Slows • GAIL HAREVEN
Burn Alexandria • KEREN LANDSMAN
The Perfect Girl • GUY HASSON
Hunter of Stars • NAVA SEMEL
The Believers • NIR YANIV
Possibilities • EYAL TELER
In the Mirror • ROTEM BARUCHIN
The Stern-Gerlach Mice • MORDECHAI SASSON
A Good Place for the Night • SAVYON LIEBRECHT
Death in Jerusalem • ELANA GOMEL
White Curtain • PESAKH (PAVEL) AMNUEL
A Man’s Dream • YAEL FURMAN
Two Minutes Too Early • GUR SHOMRON
My Crappy Autumn • NITAY PERETZ
They Had to Move • SHIMON ADAF
Afterword • AHARON HAUPTMAN
Acknowledgments
About the Contributors
Foreword
Robert Silverberg
What we have here is something like a message from another world: a sampling of the powerful imaginative work that emanates from a small, struggling nation on the shores of Asia, a nation created in the twentieth century on a foundation that dates back into biblical antiquity, a nation of thinkers and fabulators that exists in constant uncertainty and has used that uncertainty as the fuel for deep and often very moving speculative thought.
That is to say, an anthology of Israeli science fiction and fantasy.
The Jews have often been called the People of the Book, and the Book meant by that phrase is the Hebrew Bible—known to the non-Jewish world as the Old Testament but to Jews everywhere as, simply, the Bible. To believers of all faiths, the Bible is a sacred scripture, the record of God’s dealings with mankind from the moment of creation (“In the beginning,” the very first sentence tells us, “God created the heaven and the earth.”) through the travails of a wandering desert tribe, the Hebrews, who had renounced pagan idolatry and polytheism in favor of belief in a single deity of austere and remote nature, the migration of that tribe out of Mesopotamia into Egypt, the escape from the tyrannical rule of Egypt’s Pharaoh into the land of Canaan, more generally known later as Palestine, and the foundation in Palestine of the Hebrew Kingdom of Israel, where the Jewish people, as the Hebrews came to be known, attempted with varying degrees of success to live according to the moral and ethical codes of their religion. The later books of the Hebrew Bible provide a chronicle of the division of the Jewish land into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, the struggles of the two kingdoms against external enemies—the Moabites, the Philistines, the Syrians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and others—and, finally, the loss of Jewish independence as God’s punishment for a relapse into idolatry and other iniquities.
The Hebrew Bible isn’t just an historical chronicle plus a set of law codes, of course. It also contains an anthology of poetry—the Psalms of David—and a collection of proverbs, and what is essentially a short novel, the Book of Job. Nor is the Book of Job the only story that the Bible tells. It is, in fact, full of stories throughout, stories that have held the attention of mankind for three thousand years. It begins with the story of creation, goes on to tell of the life of our first ancestors in the Garden of Eden (“And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man.”), continues to the temptation of Eve and the expulsion from the Garden, and on and on: the murder of Abel by Cain, the coming of a great flood from which only Noah and his family escape, the episode of the instructions of God to the patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac and everything that proceeded from that (and Isaac was not exactly his only son, and a long story descends from that, too) and on and on, a richness of narrative that can stand comparison with any other body of literature ever created. (The adventures of Joseph in Egypt; the career of the shepherd boy David, who became king of Israel; the Exodus from Egypt; the little affair of Samson and Delilah; the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon—oh, yes, on and on. One doesn’t have to be a believer of any sort to succumb to the storytelling power of the Hebrew Bible.)
A potent fantastic element runs through many of the biblical tales as we have them now. (All of them are fantasy, if you are a nonbeliever and evaluate the whole collection from the premise that God is an imaginary being.) The Deluge of Noah, which has its antecedents in Sumerian and Babylonian legend, is a splendid apocalyptic fantasy. Moses miraculously parts the Red Sea so that the children of Israel can depart from Egypt on dry land. God manifests Himself as a pillar of fire to guide them by night in their journey through the wilderness. Samson is an early version of the superman, and like the twentieth-century comic-book incarnation has a special area of vulnerability. The visions of the prophet Ezekiel involve humanoid creatures with four faces and four wings, who carry him on something much like a voyage through space to bring him before the Lord on His throne. (The postcanonical Book of Enoch, which probably dates from the third or fourth century before Christ and has survived only in an Ethiopian translation, offers a great deal of astronomical lore and describes yet another prophet’s space voyage.) And there is ever so much more, a vast wealth of wondrous imaginative incident that remains alive and vivid in our minds even after nearly three thousand years.
Eventually the kingdoms of Israel and Judah disappeared. Their people were sent into exile by the Babylonians and brought back to Palestine by the next set of conquerors, the Persians, and upon the defeat of the Persians by Alexander of Macedon were swallowed up into his new empire, and then into the one founded by the Romans. Under the Romans, Jews emigrated to every part of the Mediterranean world, but some always remained in Palestine, which now was beginning to be called the Holy Land, the Jews sharing it with non-Jewish tribes that eventually coalesced into a population of Muslim Arabs.
Through those years of exile, diaspora, and shared occupation of Palestine, the hope of a return to the ancient days of the Kingdom of Israel surfaced again and again in Jewish thought and writing, reaching its most explicit form in Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land), published in 1902. Herzl had first proposed a self-governing Jewish republic outside of Europe in his 1896 book Der Judenstadt (The Jewish State). He thought Palestine was the preferable location, for historic reasons, but at that point would have found Argentina just as acceptable. But Altneuland explicitly locates the Jewish state in Palestine. Jerusalem would be the capital; Haifa, the center of industrial activity. (Tel Aviv did not yet exist at that time. That was the name, meaning “Mound of Spring,” that the first Hebrew translator of Herzl’s novel gave to the book, and which also was given to the new Jewish settlement on the coast of Palestine that was founded in 1909.) Herzl’s republic was an egalitarian one that verged on socialism, with agricultural cooperatives and public ownership of land and natural resources but also private ownership of industry, and its citizens would converse mainly in German or Yiddish, though some attempt would be made to revive the ancient Hebrew tongue.
Thus a thread of speculative thinking, often mingled with a degree of mysticism, runs through the whole history of the Jewish people, from the visions and wonders of the Bible to Herzl’s prophetic work of utopian fantasy. It should be no surprise to find that elements of speculative fantasy and even science fiction appear in Jewish literature over the many centuries that separate the Book of Genesis from Altneuland. An episode in the Talmud has Moses traveling in time, making a brief visit to the future. The ninth-century Jewish merchant Eldad HaDani imagined an independent Jewish state in East Africa, perhaps Ethiopia. The medieval Jewish legend of the Golem foreshadowed the Frankenstein story and provided one of the first examples of the robot in literature. Medieval lore also gives us dybbuks, wandering ghosts who take possession of living bodies, a theme often used in modern science fiction. For good and proper reasons I hesitate to use any such broad generalizing term as “the Jewish mind,” but there does seem to be some affinity between Jews and speculative thinking, an affinity that has produced not only some great works of philosophy but also many works of fantasy and science fiction.
Science fiction in its specialized modern form, though it had its origins in the nineteenth-century works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, was largely a product of American creativity—and a significant number of Jews were involved in its development. Jacob Clark Henneberger, the publisher who in 1923 founded Weird Tales, the first all-fantasy magazine, was Jewish. So was Hugo Gernsback, who brought Amazing Stories, the pioneering science-fiction magazine, into being three years later. Such notable magazine and book editors as H. L. Gold, Donald A. Wollheim, David Lasser, Samuel Mines, and Mort Weisinger were Jews. The roster of Jewish-American science-fiction writers includes such illustrious names as Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Avram Davidson (who completed a stint as an army medic during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence), Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Joanna Russ, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Cyril Kornbluth, Philip Klass, Robert Sheckley, and Barry N. Malzberg. Even the German-speaking novelist Franz Werfel, born in Prague, turned to science fiction for his last work, the magnificent imaginative fantasy Star of the Unborn, when he was living in exile in the United States in 1946. (It takes place a hundred thousand years in the future, but Werfel places a small congregation of Jews in that otherwise utterly transformed distant epoch, presided over by a leader called Saul, whose title is “the Jew of the Era.”)
But modern Israel, too, a country of which it could be said (without stretching things too far) that it owes its origin in part to a work of speculative fiction and which is compelled by external forces to live in a state of perpetual existential crisis, has been a center of the sort of intellectual inquiry that leads to the writing of fantasy and science fiction. The Jewish War II, by Reuven Rupin, sends its protagonist back to Roman times to provide the rebellious Jews of Palestine with sophisticated weapons with which to establish an independent Jewish state. Secrets of the Second World by Yosef Soyka puts the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, living in subterranean tunnels, in contact with alien species who watch over mankind. Yaakov Avisar’s People from a Different Planet shows Israeli spacefarers encountering Hebrew-speaking aliens, with whom they defeat a third species, a warlike one that threatens galactic peace. Other novels portray an Israel jeopardized by neo-Nazi plots or by the seizure of control by Orthodox Jews, strife between Israel and its Arab population, a postapocalyptic Israel that consists of little more than Tel Aviv, and many another possible futures.
Contemporary Israeli writers of speculative fiction have been active as well in the short-story form, which since the time of H. G. Wells has had a central position in science fiction. Such magazines as Fantasia 2000, which was published between 1978 and 1984, provided a venue for original Israeli science fiction as well as stories translated from English and other languages, and there also have been more than a few one-author collections of short science-fiction stories.
But nearly all of this work was written in Hebrew, and Hebrew is not a language widely spoken beyond the borders of Israel; and so this plethora of rich and stimulating Israeli science fiction might just as well have been published on some other planet, for all the impact it has had on science-fiction readers in the rest of the world. Hence this anthology, the first English-language collection of recent Israeli speculative literature. Some of the stories, like those by Lavie Tidhar, Nir Yaniv, and Eyal Teler, were written in English and even published originally in American science-fiction magazines, but the bulk of those included here, those by Gail Hareven, Gur Shomron, Nitay Peretz, Nava Semel, and others, have been translated from the Hebrew and thus brought back to Western readers from beyond the linguistic barrier, and there is one, by Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel, that is a translation from the Russian.