Dog by Yishay Ishi Ron translated into English by Yardenne Greenspan

´I´m not in Gaza, I´m in Tel Aviv, and there are no shells here, only a dying dog, and no one is helping, no one comes´.

A short and intellectually sharp novel set in Tel Aviv, Dog by Yishay Ishi Ron, brilliantly translated into English by Yardenne Greenspan is emotionally powerful and dramatically realistic. It is a very well constructed story, that doesn´t dramatize, but inserts the elements of drama into the characters in a seamless way. 

Nicknamed Geller - the magician able to bend a spoon with the power of his mind, the main character was wounded during the Operation Pillar of Defense, suffering of severe, untreated PTSD. (The author himself is a survivor of severe PTSD). ´Everyone was so proud of me. They say I´m a hero, but I didn´t feel like one´. Now, he is a heroine-addict, living with other addicts in Tel Aviv. He is befriended - against his will, but he doesn´t have any will anyway ´So I seem friendly to you? (...) I´m a heroin addict. I need drugs, no friends´. - by a woman who lost her son many years ago, living alone with a dog. 

There are short dialogues and short scenes succeeding, sometimes similar with traumatic episodes, only that for Geller - who is only later on named with his real name, Barak, when he is arrested for a framed murder - those episodes are now more than isolated flashes; his whole ife is a long endless traumatic flash.

Depictions are realistic, as well as the life-like setting. It ends - after a crime-story intermezzo - with no promise, but it as the end of a sequence. The end of a tragic story beautifully told.

For me, it was the best Jewish/Israeli-related read of the year so far. 

No one Wants You to Disappear

 

One morning, Israel wakes up with its Palestinian residents disappearing out of nowhere. 24 hours after, there is still no trace of them, and it seems there is no security danger to cope with either. The Book of Disappearance by Jaffa-born, Hebrew University of Jerusalem educated Ibtisam Azem - translated into English by Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon who also translated Mahmoud Darwish- explores exactly this premise: what will happen if suddenly all Palestinians in Israel disappear unexpectedly. 

The story is told through the inter-twinned stories of Ariel, a Jewish journalist, and Alaa, a young Palestinian who converses with his grandmother in the diary he left after disappearing. They are neighbours on Rotschild Boulevard and Ariel ends up by translating Alaa´s testimony and taking over his home, whose locks is planning to change at the end of the story.

Although the writing is good - in its political satyric take - and the details are realistic, any book that imagined the disappearance of a group of people only to narrate the same ideological truism about various interpretations of the ´occupation´ it does not have any of my sympathies. It just extends the ´either or´ mindset, creating a mentality that in any way will improve anything but the high level of hate and intolerance, taking away any chance of building a new world, outside the one based on a hyper-historical narrative. 

Kafka, the Middle East Version

 

What if Kafka had been lived in the Middle East? Would his writing be even more painful and heartaching? How absurd life can be, especially when humans meet the institutions made by men?

Although acknowleding her disillusioning, Lizzie Doron is far from being an apologetic for one cause or another. At least not in Who the Fuck is Kafka, a personal account of an encounter with a Palestinian writer, Nadim, at a Peace Conference in Rome. I had access to this book in audiobook format in an exceptional arrangement played, among others by Corinne Kirchhoff, translated from Hebrew into German by the late Mirjam Pressler. 

Doron´s first person account can be compared from the point of view of the information with the stories of Sayed Kashua. It starts though as a two-way effort to understand the situation of Palestinians, through coming back and forth from fears to compassion and human understanding. The voice of the author, as an Israeli living in the proximity of the terrorist attacks of the Second Intifada, a mother, daughter of a Holocaust survivor. 

It is important to try to understand the other side, it is the first step towards trust, but it is not enough though. Personally, I want to see solutions, I want to see a future without conflict, but how exactly this future may look like should be the task of people living there. Although now I am more informed about the conflict as I was 5 or even 4 years ago, I am still convinced that peace has two different meanings for each of the two sides. Will it be possible, any time soon, to go out of the kafkian paradigm?

About ´Fate´ by Zeruya Shalev (translated into German by Anne Birkenhauer)

 

Fate (translated into German as Schicksal by Anne Birkenhauer, who translated among others David Grossman or Yehuda Amichai) is from all the books by Zeruya Shalev I´ve read until now, the most Israel-oriented. All of her books are taking place in Israel and do include elements of the everyday life in the country, particularly terorist threats or the religious context, but the main topics mainly have to do with relationship, betrayal, love and pain (the book before, Pain was by far my favorite, for the complexity of the characters and the surgical precision exploring suffering).

Fate - that was completed during the Covid pandemic - has a completely different spin and is partly inspired by Shalev´s own family history, namely her father´s. After the death of her father, a famous brain researcher, Menachem (Mino) Rubin, her daughter, Atara wants to find out the woman her father was married before, Rachel. Atara, an architect specialized in historical monuments, lives in Haifa (like Shalev herself). Rachel, whose son is a Breslev hasid, met Atara´s father during their time in Lechi, an armed group active during the British Mandate whose aim was, among others, to push the Brits out of the country, with any price. 

Most of the book is an exploration of memory, the ways in which we remember. Memory is an emotional business and its authenticity is at a large extent doubtful. The names of the Lehi members killed are repeated in the story as a mantra. Likewise, the story of the doll stucked with explosive who blew up. For many reasons, the history of Lehi in the creation of the state of Israel is rarely mentioned openly - compared to Irgun or Palmach, for instance. In the account include in Fate, they look like promoters of a Jewish-Arab entente and co-existence, with the only enemy being the Brits, which is a too edulcorated and romanticized version for my taste. I would have loved much more a rough version of a Lehi member, maybe confused, violent, idealistic, but more authentic than by being assigned ideas and intentions that just resonate with current political concerns. This distorted voice is a big pity for the overall representation of Lehi, given that they were, in fact, a very interesting movement, to be understood and placed in the equally complex context of the times.

I had access to the book in audiobook format, read by actressed Maria Schrader and Eva Meckbach. 

Rating: 3 stars