Tel Aviv Noir

 ´In Tel Aviv, only real estate moves quicker than death´.

I wanted for a long time to read the Tel Aviv Noir collection of short stories, part of a wider project of Akashic Books featuring various cities around the world. The collection is edited by Edgar Keret and Assaf Gavron, which often writes with an unique ironical voice, inspired by the everyday life Israeli realities. 

There is a myth of the hip Tel Aviv, the beating heart of start-ups - but Google has offices in the ´boring´ Haifa -, drugs, clubbing, secularism - although Bnei Brak where the religious heart beats sometimes harder than Jerusalem´s, is just around the block - sky scrapers and beaches - there are also religious beaches in Tel Aviv, just sayin´. Like every time when it comes to myths, some of these assumptions are true, but there is much more left behind those simplistic descriptions. Maybe once upon a time, it was more truth in this, but right now, decades after the creation of the state of Israel, the landscape is more diverse and it´s nothing to be ashamed about.

There is a sense of decaying that sometimes is in the air, early in the morning when the parties are over and the girls are lonely going from work, and homeless people hanging the Central Bus Station are about to wake up. This feeling permeates some of the stories in the Tel Aviv Noir. Maybe too often. But there is also a sense of inter-connection, that Edgar Keret outlines admirably in the Introduction: ´The workers washing the dishes in the fluorescent-lit kitchen of that same club are Eritrean refugees who have crossed the Egyptian border illegally, along with a group of bedouins smuggling some high-quality hash, which the deejay will soon be smoking on his little podium, right by the busy dance floor filled with drunks, coked-up lawyers, and Ukrainian call girls whose pimp keeps their passport in a safe two streets away´. I do recognize some fragments from the Tel Aviv I know - and sometimes missing dearly, more with other fragments that are not displayed in the book.

Don´t get me wrong, I enjoyed reading the stories, most of them, authored by more or less known - outside the Hebrew-speaking realm - like Gadi Taub, Matan Hermoni, Lavie Tidhar and many many more. But after a while, I felt like I am reading almost the same story, told on a different voice and a different wording, still...Like simple humans are missing being left only with the exceptions, but not the extraordinary. At the end, I am still missing dearly my Tel Aviv - of my dreams, stories and rooftop/beach parties, with real, simple humans of Tel Aviv.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Kibbuzim versus Settlements - The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron

Very often one can read in the media opinions, news and condemnations of the 'settlers', 'settlements' and 'hilltop youth'. Who are they, what do they believe in, what are they fighting for, and against whom?

Kibbutzim versus Settlements

Instead of thinking in terms of religious choice and ideological apologies, the literary setting is the best for an easy immersion into this new 'political soul'. At the very beginning of the state of Israel, the kibbutzim, with their revolutionary communist perfect social and political matrix were the main ideology. Money and children education and daily working tasks were shared among the members, whose membership was accepted only by a explicit decision of the va'ad - local committee. It was a fascinating adventure that fascinated not only the European Jews that escaped the WWII horrors, but also non-Jewish visitors from all over the world, inclulding the ayatollahs' advisor Jalal Al-e Ahmad who even wrote a book The Israeli Republic where he shared his enthusiasm about this political and social setting (more about this book on another occcasion). The members of the kibbutzim were deeply non- and anti-religious. Some religious kibbutzim - or rather moshavim, where a certain form of property was allowed - were later created in order to answer a newly need for religious expression. 

After the 1970s, with an Israel more self-aware and confident in its military strength and political identity, new religious waves, both among the locally-born Jews (the sabras, literally translated as cacti, with their rough character but with a juicy soul ) and the new immigrants, especially from America. Some might say that those ones brought from the exalted Evangelist communities a certain fanatical approach to religious fervor, introducing music and dance and outbursts of feelings as part of their new 'born-again' identity. The traditional Hasidic/Haredi Jews will rather stay away of those. Those 'born-again', among them highly educated intellectuals and rabbis, will rather prefer to settle themselves and their growing families in the 'settlements', communities created in Shomron, Gush Etzion or the late Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip that Ariel Sharon brought to an end in 2005.

Therefore, as the kibbutzim are slowly dying, and they lost their appeal, especially among young people, and many of them even went through a relative 'privatization', they are replaced by the settlements. A religiously-centered Zionism is what for many is the right vision of a country that against all odds insist to exist. Based on the religious learning attributed to the Rav Avraham Isaac Kook - as most of his learning was not written by him and during his lifetime, but collected and turned into volumes by his son Zvi Yehuda - the settlement movement infused a different layer into the original Zionism, with a Biblical basis and a spiritual direction. It is not the time and the place to delve into a deep critic/analysis of it.

Meet the Hilltop people

This was a very basic introduction to the 'settlement' movement as a counter-reaction to the kibbutzim phenomenon, as The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron is mostly building his story along those lines. Gavron, which is considered one of the most important Israeli writers of the 'new generation', wrote part of the book in a cabin in a West Bank settlement. 

His people and their animals - a camel cow (whose milk is apparently kosher enough to feed the holy people) or a dog called Condoleezza - are populating a fictional community neighbouring an equally fictional community called Ma'aleh Hermesh. How they succeeded to settle there, survived and easily escaped several attempts to get evicted, only the complicated kafkaesque Israeli bureaucracy can answer. But when officials - of any kind - are appearing in the book, be sure that you are guaranteed a good laugh, exactly as in the everyday reality. 

The members of the community are equally hilarious and tragi-comical. Gabi, the born again Breslav, Shin Beth informers, teenagers 'bravely' fighting against Arabs in Second Life. Each of the characters present in the book are interesting, but I've find most of the time their interaction rather uninteresting, repetitive and relatively boring. It's like you have a lot of good cards on your hand, but at the end, the final combination is predictable. When the novel is over 400 pages, you might have a lot of good expectations, actually.

However, although the construction is relatively sloppy sometimes, and especially if you have a realistic and direct experience of life in the 'settlements' once in a while it is boring to tears, for someone not familiar with it, it might bring some good information and insights and a comical edge that is obviously missing in the (only) tragical media reports. 

Rating: 3 stars