Zion's Fiction Read online

  Though wary of engaging in bouts of unfettered fancy, Israeli writers were certainly well aware that Orwell, Huxley, and Burgess had crafted their respective literary nightmares while incurring the wrath of the writerly classes mostly because of their political underpinnings, not just on the basis of genre. Doubtless they were protected both by their literary reputations and their seriousness of intent in issuing cautionary storm warnings.

  It didn’t hurt Israeli dystopianism that one of the first Hebrew books to dabble with some of its tropes was written by one of Israel’s most respected authors. In 1971, Amos Oz published a novella, Ahavah Meuheret (Late Love).38 More psychological than classically prescriptive or cautionary, Late Love placed modern dystopian imagery and descriptors squarely on the map of contemporary Hebrew literature. Oz thereby reset the standard Zionist tableau, imbuing it with tropes borrowed and deployed, it sometimes seems, from dystopian and pulp science fiction. However distasteful to then-current Israeli literary sensibilities (and probably to Oz’s own stated intent), neither this new vocabulary nor the novella itself could be ignored.

  If Israeli dystopias eventually gained a measure of local acceptance, as Gail Hareven observes, it is because they had “a point, that [they had] some sort of connection to ‘the burning reality of our life,’ that [they examined] some fractured symbol or in short, as Gogol put it, ‘that it benefit the country.’”39 Indeed, even detractors of 1984, Brave New World, and A Clockwork Orange clearly understood that these books did not merely offer fanciful jaunts into the future but were in fact very much about the imminent realities of the day.

  This did not assuage all literary concerns. One of the editors of this book (S. T.) interviewed author Amos Kenan in 1984 about his novella The Road to Ein Harod, a near-future political thriller. Kenan bridled at the presumption that this book, though awash with SF/F tropes, qualified in any way as science fiction. “Look outside,” he barked. “This is documentary journalism.”

  It comes as no surprise that two of the best received and most enduring examples of Israeli dystopias—Kenan’s Ein Harod and Binyamin Tammuz’s Pundako shel Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah’s inn)—should have been published in 1984. That year’s advent, after all, provided cause for worldwide reflection and stocktaking. Israel, moreover, remained mired in the morass of its ill-conceived invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which was to defy extraction or hoped-for results for years to come. Its official title, Operation Peace for the Galilee, was as brazen an example of Newspeak as anything Orwell ever devised.

  The First Lebanon War profoundly embittered Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora, many of whom recognized it as an adventurist folly that had little to do with its stated aims. Misgivings over then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s scheme to reconfigure the entire Middle East, outrage over Israel’s inadvertent culpability in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the perennial sense of helplessness and vulnerability pervading Israeli society, the emergence of the first suicide bombers, the intimations of a tottering power structure culminating in the never-officially-explained abdication of Prime Minister Menachem Begin—all these found voice in dystopian visions.

  A generation later, Ein Harod begat an Arab-Israeli response in Sayed Kashua’s Hebrew-language novel VaYehi Boker (Let It Be Morning, 2004).40 This book is set in the Arab-Israeli columnist’s hometown of Tira, to which the unnamed protagonist, who nevertheless shares much of his biography with his author, retreats after being terminated by a left-wing Israeli newspaper in Tel Aviv. Where once he waxed nostalgic, now Kashua, one of the small number among Israel’s 1.7 million Arabs who enjoyed an urban, middle-class existence, confronts his alienation from the narrowness, parochialism, and despondency of traditional Arab-Israeli hometown life. His protagonist’s sense of entrapment increases severalfold when the town is surrounded by a military force bearing orders to shoot anyone trying to cross their lines.

  The reader may be excused for interpreting this predicament as a metaphor for, or even a symptom of, the fraught Israeli Arabs’ condition. But Kashua, whose earlier book, Aravim Rokdim (Dancing Arabs, successfully adapted for film in 2014) earned acclaim in Israel and abroad, is never obvious or hidebound. The book concludes with the protagonist’s discovering, to his horror, that the encircling army belongs to a Palestinian Authority engaged in a land swap with the Israelis as part of a final peace settlement.

  Tammuz’s Jeremiah’s Inn took a different, and to some Israelis no less alarming route to the apocalypse: an Ultra-Orthodox takeover of the nation.41 The plot transpires in an Israel temporally farther afield: one dominated by an array of warring fundamentalist rabbinical courts headquartered in a physically, religiously, and socially fragmented Jerusalem. At once hilarious and horrifying, the book is written as a pastiche of rabbinical parables. While certainly readable by anyone literate in Hebrew, it is befittingly written in parts in the archaic Hebrew style traditionally (as well as currently) used in rabbinical circles for religious discourse. As this style has no equivalent in English (nor, perhaps, in any other language save Ecclesiastical Latin), the prospects for an English-language translation are not favorable.42

  In 1987 author, playwright, and television host Yitzhak Ben-Ner published HaMal’achim Ba’im (The angels are coming), a novel, inspired by his 1977 short story “Aharey haGeshem” (After the rain),”43 that melds elements of Ein Harod and Jeremiah’s Inn with Burgess’s Clockwork Orange. Ben-Ner depicts a Jewish state buckling under the boot of a fundamentalist government that enforces its will by directing pogroms against the secular residents of Tel Aviv and other coastal environs. The fantastic tropes incorporated into the text include a pair of imaginary dwarves; a policewoman of extraterrestrial origin; a protagonist who emerges from a severe beating with new healing powers brought on by the slow appearance on his forehead of a blue Star of David; a country no longer threatened by Arab animosity, but which has subsequently turned upon itself; and a high-tech sector that colludes with or deliberately ignores the centrifugal forces tearing society apart.

  The reception extended to Ben-Ner’s opus is illustrative of the Israeli literati’s nearly implacable abhorrence of SF/F tropes. Initially, Gershon Shaked, already mentioned above as a primo literary gatekeeper, had touted Ben-Ner’s talent for “crafting of realistic plots and the accurate presentation of human situations.” But then, in 1987, Ben-Ner subverted his literary standing with HaMal’achim Ba’im, a hard-core science-fiction dystopia, leading to considerable wringing of writerly hands and gnashing of teeth. “How much longer will our readers … put up with the pranks of our writers?” asked one put-upon pundit. “Is it not time to turn our backs to a literature that treats us this way?”44

  It would take years for this attitude to change, as an increasing number of books garnered greater public attention and acclaim. In 2008, for instance, Assaf Gavron published Hydromania, an ecothriller (translated into German, Dutch, and Italian) set in 2065 and depicting a desperately parched and dramatically truncated Jewish State facing imminent destruction by invading Arab forces. The book offers a handy example of the notion that Israelis are more open to genre forays if these address societal concerns. The Italian newspaper La Stampa, for example, observed that Hydromania “captures and unfolds the two fundamental obsessions of the country: the fear of being crushed by the immense Arab world and the fear of dying of thirst.”

  In 2013, to offer another example, Yali Sobol, son of renowned Israeli playwright Yehoshua Sobol and lead singer of the prolific Israeli band Monica Sex, published Etzba’ot shel Psantran (A pianist’s fingers). The novel, yet another variation on the by now standard leftist Israeli dystopian theme—this one following the advent of yet another war—envisioned the tormenting by thought police of artists, Post-Post-Zionists, leftist columnists, kibbutz remnants, and the last remaining subscribers of Haaretz.45 For leftist columnists, kibbutz members, and Haaretz readers observing the country’s inexorable shift to the right, such scenarios bespeak very real anxieties.

  Orly Castel-Blo
om’s novel Dolly City (1992; translated in 1997) presents another, albeit more extreme, case. Dolly City, a nightmarish stand-in for Tel Aviv (named for the book’s eponymous protagonist-murderess), “the most demented city in the world,” is a singular creation. Here, explains Castel-Bloom—in a stripped-down style that many claim changed (some would say diluted) the tenor of Hebrew literature forever—everyone is on the run. And “since everyone is running, there’s always someone chasing them, and since there is someone chasing them, they catch them, and when they catch them, execute them, and throw them into the river.”46 Dolly, a surgeon, spares her son this fate, but only by inoculating him with poisonous microbes, carving a map of Israel on his back, and relieving a German baby of his kidney for transplant into her hapless boy. In no uncertain terms she strives to imprint her own Israeli nightmare on his still maturing flesh.

  Castel-Bloom’s Grand Guignol gives way to what at first appears to be a more sober and less flamboyant engagement with the purely dystopian in Halakim Enoshiyim (2002; translated as Human Parts, 2004).47 The book appeared ten years later, during the Second Intifada, when Palestinians armed with explosive belts regularly rendered Israeli civilians into unidentifiable mounds of bloody flesh at the push of a vest button. In her scenario the government proves unable to contain the carnage, the prime minister collapses, and the cabinet succumbs to paralysis. Suddenly, the country falls prey to a triple-whammy: an outbreak of the “Saudi flu,” eight-foot snowfalls, and hailstones the size of baseballs. The weather, it turns out, was caused by an undersea volcanic eruption; the outbreak of disease, by an Arab biological assault. As ocean liners careen down Tel Aviv avenues (an image that would later resound in Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv’s surrealistic novel The Tel Aviv Dossier), the country teeters on the brink of dissolution.

  In 2010 the acclaimed Israeli poet and novelist Shimon Adaf published a novel, Kfor (Frost), set in a far-future Tel Aviv in which a group of yeshiva students portentously begin to grow wings. Author and editor Nick Gevers applauded the novel’s “vivid description of life in Israel as well as … its subtle, incisive treatment of the fantastic as a phenomenon and as a literary genre.” Adaf is represented in the present volume with the story “They Had to Move,” selected from the commemorative thirtieth anniversary issue of Fantasia 2000.

  Perhaps the most sustained exploration of the nexus between Israel and the apocalyptic, however, can be found in Gail Hareven’s accomplished SF/F collection HaDerech leGan Eden (The road to heaven), published by Keter in 1999. In “Lir’ot et ha’Nolad” (literally, “to behold the newborn,” a Hebrew expression used to describe foresight), for example, a far-future society cognizant of impending end-times projects youngsters approaching their majority to near the end of human existence, where, it is hoped, they will witness glimmers of the causes of disaster and survive long enough to return home with useful intelligence. Gail Hareven is the most accomplished, and one of the few unabashedly genre savvy, of those mainstream Israeli authors to have discovered the promised land of SF/F.

  Israeli theater has proved particularly amenable to representations of apocalypse. Literary scholar Zahava Caspi argues that this is because the stage is adept at showing the symptoms of the profound existential traumas that Israeli society has suffered since the Yom Kippur War of 1973.48 The sense of redemption that emerged from the 1967 Six-Day War, and the sense of despair that followed the Yom Kippur War so soon afterwards, created an opening for messianic attitudes, in particular. Overall, theatrical representations of the apocalypse, especially during the 1970s, offered an outlet for what some might construe as a prodigious case of societal PTSD.

  Caspi identifies two waves of apocalyptic theater in Israel, one corresponding to the Yom Kippur War near-defeat and the other to the Lebanon War and the First Intifada during the 1980s. Notable examples included Shmuel Hasfari’s 1982 play Tashmad (the Hebrew date corresponding to 1984), about a plan by Israeli settlers to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque and replace it with a new temple; Motti Lerner’s Hevlei Mashiah (Premessianic tribulations), in which such a plan comes to fruition, sparking a regional war; Yehoshua Sobol’s 1988 Syndrome Yerushalayim (Jerusalem syndrome), which portrays Jerusalem’s destruction in AD 70 as an analogy to the situation in the occupied territories today; Hanoch Levin’s Retzah (1997; translated as Murder: A Play in Three Acts and an Epilogue, 2005), which depicts an endless procession of violent actions and reactions in the Middle East; Shimon Bouzaglo’s 2002 production of Geshem Shahor (Black rain), which ends with Israel under atomic attack; and Tamir Greenberg’s Hebron (2007), in which the earth denies burial to children killed in the conflict, spewing forth their bodies in a gallery of flames that engulfs the town of Hebron.

  Nava Semel’s And The Rat Laughed,49 which deals directly with questions of the Holocaust and specific memories of that event, was afforded an operatic adaptation by the Tel Aviv Cameri Theatre with the Israel Chamber Orchestra, staged in April 2005. The narrative transpires after a “Great Ecological Disaster” inaugurates a cybernetic society in the micro-nation of TheIsrael at the onset of the twenty-second century.

  Israeli author Savyon Liebrecht, also well known for her preoccupation with the Holocaust, creates an equally harrowing scenario in her novella A Good Place for the Night, which we include herein. Adam Rovner classifies the story as “futuristic Holocaust fiction.” If these stories present a variety of Israeli necropolises, Etgar Keret’s Tel Aviv, insofar as it figures in his 1998 novella HaKaytana shel Kneller (Kneller’s Happy Campers), is Limbo. A multivalent variation on Keret’s theme can be found in Ofir Touché Gafla’s 2003 Geffen Prize–winning tour de force Olam Basof (The World of the End). In it, a ghostwriter who cannot abide the death of his wife follows her into the afterlife. Michael Weingard of the Jewish Review of Books describes the book as “Orpheus and Eurydice meets Alice in Wonderland.”50

  Another recurring theme in Israeli speculative literature, alluded to above, is that of the alternate (or counterfactual) history. Literature itself is inevitably counterfactual by nature. As Rovner observes, “It represents possible worlds rather than a description of real states of affairs. Literature’s figurative language employs the creative potential latent in everyday language in order to open a horizon of new possibilities…. Gifted men and women marshal the incantatory power of words to vitalize the imaginary and render phantasms substantial.”51 The Arab-Israeli conflict as actually played out was never really foreordained. “No sequence of events ever is. Matters could always have turned out otherwise…. Inevitability is a chimera, a product of organizing contingencies into a narrative that elides the haphazardness of existence.”

  A number of allohistorical accounts have been published in Hebrew. Fans of Pulitzer Prize–winning American writer Michael Chabon, the author of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, winner of the 2008 Hugo and Nebula Awards, may be surprised to learn that Israeli novelist and playwright Nava Semel covered similar, though certainly not identical, ground four years earlier in her own novel, Isra-Isle. In Chabon’s opus the remnants of a defeated Israel settle temporarily in a small autonomous region of Sitka, Alaska, in 1941, where they live in various degrees of disharmony with the local Inuit and Native American populations. In Semel’s novel, they live in upstate New York on an island settled by Native Americans. Both narratives, not incidentally, rely heavily on the conventions of detective fiction, SF, and alternate history.

  Following on Semel’s consideration of a Territorialist solution to the Jewish problem, Yoav Avni considers the fortunes of a Jewish state based on the so-called Ugandist solution tabled by the British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain in 1903. The story, its original title Herzl Amar (“Herzl said,” the Hebrew equivalent of “Simon said”), transpires in a Jewish republic in East Africa whose problems in 2005 seem quite au courant with those of present-day Israel. For example, the Jewish state is planning a withdrawal from Maasai tribal territories while dismantling two of the country’s oldest Jewish settlements, threateni
ng a civil war. The book’s protagonists, meanwhile, are completing their tours of duty in the IDF, intent upon backpacking to the Middle East, and specifically to the eternally moribund Holy Land, a magnet for post-compulsory-service pilgrims and transients.

  In A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), Israel’s immensely prolific and preternaturally peripatetic author Lavie Tidhar presents us with Hitler as a hack private eye after decamping to Great Britain following his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. In The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld says of his first encounter with a Hitler-victorious counterfactual, Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992), that while the conceit startled him, the book itself was hardly a tour-de-force. At best, he attests, it was entertaining, a common descriptor of Len Deighton’s SS-GB and other such work. We may say much the same for former Israeli left-wing politician Yossi Sarid’s aforementioned novel Lefichach Nitkanasnu (“Accordingly, we are here assembled,” a memorable phrase from Israel’s Declaration of Independence), another bestseller in Israeli terms.52 The book begins in 1948 and extends in year-long-segments well into 1967. What, Sarid asks, might have happened had the Zionist establishment extended a more complete and fitting welcome to Jewish refugees from Arab states who began to show up in 1950 after expulsion by their Arab neighbors? What, moreover, if they had been treated not as an unwelcome afterthought deserving of across-the-board underclass status, but of the same material assets and support afforded German and European Jewry? The what-ifs go on and on.