Zion's Fiction Read online

  Messages from another world, indeed. Bulletins about a version of the future different from the one that most of us perceive, sent to us from a far-off place that happens to share this small planet with us.

  Zion’s Fiction

  Introduction

  Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem

  The State of Israel may be regarded as the quintessential science fiction (SF) nation—the only country on the planet inspired by not one, but two seminal works of wonder: the Hebrew Bible and Zionist ideologue Theodor Herzl’s early-twentieth-century utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land).

  Only seventy years old, the Jewish state cranks out futuristic inventions with boundless aplomb: wondrous science-fictional products such as bio-embeddable Pill-Cams, wearable electronic diving gills, hummingbird spy drones, vat-grown chicken breasts, microcopter radiation detectors, texting fruit trees, billion-dollar computer and smartphone apps like Waze and Viber, and last but not least, those supermarket marvels, the cherry tomato and the seedless watermelon.

  What Israel has yet to generate—and in this it stands virtually alone among the world’s developed nations—is an authoritative volume, in any language, of Israeli speculative fiction.1 Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature is intended to remedy this oversight. The book will pry open the lid on a tiny, neglected, and seldom-viewed wellspring of Israeli literature, one we hope to be forgiven for referring to as “Zi-fi.”

  Zi-fi: We define this term as the speculative literature written by citizens and permanent residents of Israel—Jewish, Arab, or otherwise, whether living in Israel proper or abroad, writing in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian, or any other language spoken in the Holy Land.

  In the main, however, this volume spotlights a small but growing pool of Israeli writers who have pursued deliberate vocations as purveyors of homegrown Hebrew-, English-, and Russian-language science fiction and fantasy (SF/F), and other brands of speculative fiction, aimed at both the local and international markets.

  We showcase here a wide selection of stories whose authors range across the entire gamut of the modern Israeli SF/F scene: men and women, young and not-so-young, Israel-born and immigrants, professional writers as well as amateurs; some continuing to live in Israel and some expatriates. More than a few have already published stories overseas; for others this is their first foray into the international arena. Many are part and parcel of Israel’s SF/F fandom (more about which, see below); others are mainstream writers who at some point in their careers decided to use SF/F tropes as the best vehicles for their message and their whimsy. All of them, however, share one thing in common: by adopting the tropes of speculative fiction, they have all bucked, if not kicked in the teeth, a deeply rooted, widely held, and long-standing cultural aversion, shared by a preponderance of Israeli readers, writers, critics, and scholars, to most manifestations of indigenously produced as well as imported speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and horror.2 It is the underlying contradiction between the aforementioned science-fictional roots and this primal aversion that, we believe, renders the very publication of this book a wondrous event.

  Author Hagar Yanai lamented in a 2002 essay in the daily Haaretz that “Faeries do not dance under our swaying palm trees, there are no fire-breathing dragons in the cave of Machpela [the Cave of the Patriarchs], and Harry Potter doesn’t live in Kfar Sava.” Local fantasy is so weak, she declared, that an original series like the Harry Potter books “couldn’t be published in the state of the Jews.”3

  Hence a paradox: In a nation whose very existence was inspired by an SF/F vision, SF/F was until recently completely beyond the pale, and even now most cultural luminaries shun it. This despite the fact, pointed out by scholar Danielle Gurevitch, that “in early Jewish tradition, fantasy literature … [involving] marvelous acts, magic, and miracles aimed at hastening the Redemption, as well as a rich diversity of unbelievable stories of journeys to the Holy Land … was a driving force in the nation’s history and thinking.”4

  Scholar Adam Rovner reminds us that whatever value they place on imagination, and however much they may have stigmatized some forms of fantasy, all nations and countries become the incarnations of fabulous stories told by their inhabitants or their invaders. This was certainly true of England, for instance, which took its cue from Arthurian legends, and it is also true of the early incarnations of the biblical Jewish homeland, which derived inspiration from the Book of Joshua. “Zionist historiography and literary history,” says Rovner, “have long demonstrated the intimate bond between what is now alliterated as nation and narrative.”5

  On the other hand, in present-day Israel, as during the nation’s prestatehood years, “willingness to open the door to weird strangers and unusual occurrences that benefit nothing but the spirit of whimsy is minimal,” says author Gail Hareven.6

  How come? Where did this allergic response to imaginative fiction come from?

  Several explanations have been offered. One is the simple importation of the aversion to SF/F from abroad. After all, we must admit that for many a year, Western culture had regarded SF/F with mild condescension, to say the very least. Until quite recently it was not culturally accepted as High Literature: fit for teenage boys (not girls!), lacking in veritable literary qualities, ignoring the exigencies of ordinary life, or worst of all, escapist—choose or add your favorite condemnation—for which alleged faults it has not historically passed universal muster. It was (and often continues to be) ghettoized, relegated to special-interest shelves in bookstores and libraries. This attitude was carried forward to and prevailed in prestatehood Israel, thoroughly unmodified. Furthermore, since cultural influences tended to spread rather slowly to and through the Jewish state, it has persisted well after the attitudes towards SF/F in the United States and the United Kingdom, for instance, became more congenial.

  Yet another explanation hinges on the unusual contempt normative Judaism held even for its own nondidactic and lighter-hearted forms of literature. The Hebrew word for “imagination,” dimion, did not appear in this sense in the Hebrew language until the twelfth century, in Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed, despite the fact that seminal biblical and postbiblical Jewish texts often resorted quite freely to narrative embellishment. Frequently they crossed over into outright fantasy, either to fill in gaps in the original Torah narrative or to resolve textual contradictions.

  Such imaginative works included Midrashim (exegetic tales); Meshalim (parables and fables); Aggadot (rabbinical legends); and medieval apocalyptic literature, including hagiography, Ma’asei Merkavah (mystical theories of creation), or apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Heikhalot texts describing heavenly journeys, such as the maqama—rhymed prose narrative—by Abraham Ibn Ezra (twelfth century), Hai ben Mekitz, about a journey to the six planets of the medieval solar system and their imaginary inhabitants. The sages nevertheless dismissed this massive corpus as “mere stories and profane matter.”

  It is possible, of course, that outright faith even in the most outlandish events trumped whimsy, obviating any acknowledgment of the fantastic. Magic and sorcery, despite the miraculous deeds of Moses, Elijah, and other biblical figures, were and continue to be considered off-limits by most observant Jews. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” commands the Bible (Exodus 22:18).

  While admitting the existence of grains of truth in both these explanations, we would prefer to emphasize the inherent tension between having a dream and actually living it. Forging a semblance of Herzl’s Altneuland vision in a long-ravaged ancestral homeland very nearly forced the nascent Jewish republic, by dint of human cost alone, to deplete its imaginative reserves. “If you will it,” the latter-day prophet (depicted on the cover of his book in his role as space-bound SF/F writer cum ideologue) famously declared of his proposed Jewish state, “it is no fairy-tale.”7

  The publicistic intent implicit in Herzl’s choice of classical late-nineteenth-century science-fictional romance as a vehicle for prop
osing the Zionist enterprise to the masses, however, probably added an inconvenient literary fillip to the nation-building effort—one that, although inherently fanciful, regarded unfettered imagination as anathema. The very idea that Israel might have been inspired by a science fiction novel would have rankled. Consequently, Altneuland was deliberately misconstrued by Zionist ideologues as sui generis.

  Creating a nuts-and-bolts nation, whether or not inspired by a literary fantasy, called on resources of faith of a much more practical nature. This task proved totally consuming, utterly grueling, costly in blood as well as resources, and fraught with calamity. Implementing the Zionist project left little capacity and even less taste for imaginatively unfettered ventures, whatever their pedigree. An avowedly pragmatic lot, the Zionists remained painfully wary of pie-in-the-sky schemes and stars-in-your-eyes stories.

  The Zionist enterprise, moreover, was from the outset an all-out effort: each individual was expected to make his or her contribution to the fulfillment of the joint dream to the utmost of their abilities, regardless of personal cost, desire, ideal, or proclivity. It was a dream of a new nation, a rightful member of the world community, living in peace and harmony with its neighbors; of a new, just, vibrant society, where everyone has equal rights and duties and works for the common good; of a newly revived language, Hebrew, used for any and all purposes, lofty or mundane, to replace the various languages spoken by Jews in the Diaspora; and of a new person, the sabra: an independent, strong-willed, prickly, hard-working, idealistic individual, the diametric opposite of the downtrodden Diaspora Jew. Epitomized in the character of Uri, the hero in Moshe Shamir’s 1947 novel (later a play, then a movie) He Walked through the Fields, and depicted in numerous other stories, poems, novels, plays, and films, this idealized new breed of Jew became perhaps the greatest hope and ultimate achievement of Zionism.8

  There was no room in this scheme for freeloaders, including people who wished to write about imaginary worlds or predicaments. They had no moral right to pursue their idiosyncratic leanings; what they should write about must relate directly to the building of the new nation. Criticizing its faults in their stories was allowed, even encouraged; extolling it was still more welcome. Divert from these options, and no one would publish or indeed read your work.

  Furthermore, the leadership of the highly politicized Yishuv, the Jewish community in prestate Mandatory Palestine, had become, since the turn of the twentieth century, increasingly socialist in orientation. By the late 1920s the political domination of the labor movement was nearly complete. The significance of this in the present context lies in the fact that both socialism and Zionism put a great emphasis on the role of intellectuals in the shaping of a new society—with a new culture and a new kind of people—and the combination of these two ideologies tended to make this emphasis even stronger.

  Well before the Jewish state came into being, therefore, Israeli writers were expected to render the outlandish fantasy of a Jewish homeland in starkly mimetic, or naturalistic, literary terms. This is an activity commonly referred to by fantasy and science-fiction writers (that is, when they don’t avoid it as a tiresome cliché) as worldbuilding.9 Yet this necessity, paradoxically, required stripping a then-fifty-year-old body of Hebrew literature of its artificial biblicism, its romantic strivings, its unduly nostalgic, unrealistic, idealized concerns and tropes. These characteristics, some argued, had rendered nineteenth-century Hebrew literature dangerously escapist. To counter this tendency, ideology demanded that writers, poets, and other artists depict the Zionist mission—as unlikely and fraught an undertaking as the Exodus from Egypt—with all the grit and realism they could muster.

  Ideological control was rather exacting, even though few would say it aloud. The Yishuv had always been a democratic polity, and theoretically any artist, poet, author, or thinker enjoyed complete freedom of expression. Yet social pressures were overwhelming: it was the intellectuals’ sacred duty to inspire and be inspired by the common venture, enrich and if so inclined criticize it, and above all imbue the younger generation with the values, attitudes, and aspirations of their elders. Deviation from this role was frowned upon, sometimes fiercely, and on a more practical level, those not inclined to hew to such strictures could hardly find the means (for instance, a publishing house) of reaching out to the general public. Institutional publishers with telling names like Am Oved (“A Working People”) or Sifriyat Po’alim (“Laborers’ Library”) had very clear agendas. But even private-sector, bourgeois publishers regarded themselves as part and parcel of the Zionist enterprise.

  Thus developed a cohort of gatekeepers that effectively controlled the Yishuv’s cultural output: publishers, literary magazines’ and journals’ editors, literary critics, professors of literature, and so on. This small but highly influential group had a final say over what the public could read, and steeped as they were in ideology, Zionist-socialist or just Zionist, their say was practically final.

  Needless to say, aversion to speculative literature was but one of the gatekeepers’ endearing qualities; in fact, it was quite a marginal facet of their overall control, since they had very few cases to contend with in that sphere. Much more than that, they were the keepers of ideological and moral purity.10 Consider the case of Dr. Yaacov Winshel (1891–1980), a well-known physician who also dabbled in writing. In 1946 he authored a novella, The Last Jew, which offered up one of the first postwar alternative history scenarios postulating a Nazi victory in World War II—a forerunner of what would become a distinguished SF subgenre. Winshel was able to find only a minor publisher for this work, which was simply ignored by the Yishuv’s literati. Ironically, the reason for this cold shoulder had little to do with the novella’s literary quality, nor even its genre affiliation. Alas, Winshel was a prominent member of the Revisionist movement, a disciple of its leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The Revisionists were Labor Zionists’ mortal enemies (sometimes literally so); therefore, Winshel’s writings remained firmly outré.

  Although susceptible to a secular messianism that promised redemption through national renewal, the Labor Zionists in those days turned their backs on the mystical, supernatural aspects of the Hebrew Bible. They had no use for miracle-ridden Hassidic lore. Yet they also despised outright the supposedly more rational Judaism professed by the Mithnagdim, the fervently religious but excessively dogmatic opponents of Hassidism. They believed that religiosity in all its guises had helped instill and perpetuate Jewish rootlessness, passivity, frailty, hyper-intellectuality, dependence, and helplessness, brought to its horrific culmination in the Holocaust. Instead, the founders focused on geographical, historical, and archaeological accounts of a continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land that could, they believed, ultimately be validated by empirical means.

  Not surprisingly, speculative literature—what the rest of the world commonly referred to as fantasy, science fiction, and horror—did not have any kind of place in the world of Hebrew-language belles lettres, or even in what counted as popular literature. Certainly, some Israelis read commercial fiction in translation or in the original language of publication, and this may have included some SF/F. But indigenously produced genre fiction, mainly in the form of the particularly low-rent, originally Yiddish, offshoot of pulp fiction called shundt, “trash,” held no possible relevance to the ongoing effort of building up the nation and consolidating its gains—or to the attempt to accrete a vibrant Hebrew corpus of literature. Consequently, it found neither reputable publishers nor widespread readership.

  According to Hebrew University sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda, an expert on social deviancy, Israel’s cultural commissars designated science fiction as a particularly egregious example of cultural inauthenticity.11 Apparently unaware that Herzl had modeled his utopian novel Altneuland on Theodor Hertzka’s utopian work Freiland, while seeking to emulate the success of American protosocialist Edward Bellamy’s 1888 bestseller Looking Backward: 2000–1887—a genre classic of no uncertain stature—they regarded
SF/F as a childish distraction.

  Ironically, some of these very same people had championed the wholesale importation of Russian, particularly Soviet, literary forms and tropes that had informed their evolution as revolutionaries. The more left-wing ideologues among the Yishuv’s literary gatekeepers saw a parallel between Labor Zionism’s nation-building enterprise and the supposed success of the efforts to create a Workers’ Paradise in the USSR.

  These proclivities extended as well to the types of books selected for translation into Hebrew. To be sure, publishers were expected to import, translate, and publish works from the accepted Western literary canon. Otherwise, they published books that ostentatiously reflected the supposedly uplifting, revolutionary spirit of the times in the Soviet Union (yet another form of wild fantasy, in retrospect) or the perceived decadence of its adversaries. In a publisher’s note added as a postscript to the Hebrew translation of Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, for instance, the publishers (the aforementioned Sifriyat Po’alim) felt duty-bound to explain to their readers—this as late as 1960—that “the author purported reassuringly to show us the triumph of the spiritual-moral strength of the spokesmen for that great nation [the United States], but truthfully, he gave us reason for much anxiety. It turns out that even the honest and decent ones among them are consumed by hatred [of the Soviet Union],” and so on.