Adama by Lavie Tidhar

´They´re good boys, but bad things happen in war´.

 

The Hebrew word ´adama´ - earth, do include the word ´dam´ - blood.

Lavie Tidhar´s noir story of Israel, is subversively embracing a different, less romanticized narrative of the country. An inter-generational story that does not act according to the usual back and forth towards the memory lane, with gangster kibbutznik women following revenge until death do us apart. I laughed and had second thoughts and even checked some references that were obviously fictional, intentionally confusing the reader.

In Adama the kibbutzim and their inhabitants are everything we wished they are, and what some of them really were: fierce, boiling revenge, breaking up every single rule, breathing freedom. Tidhar moves with a joyous irony through fragments of Israeli history, with fine irony and historical references made in full honesty.

Ruth, the matriarch of kibbutz Trashim - ´rocky ground´, not ´trash´, but who knows - a fictional location placed in the North of Israel, is the perfect new Jew. A Holocaust survivor from Hungary, hard as stone, fierce. She hates Zohar Argov. Unstoppable even when touched by early setting of dementia. But some things simply cannot be forgotten. 

I always despised the Romantic view on kibbutzim. Pioneers, hard working, patriots. They were all of it and a bit more. Tidhar, a prolific science fiction writer and pulp fiction consumer, instilled life in the usual stereotypical kibbutznik. And how I love the gangster touch of it. After all, history is made by people, people like Ruth and the boys hidding weapons between the freshly harvested vegetables. 

The book is the second installment from the Maror Trilogy, and it was only my personal choice to start with the second one. I will continue with the reviews of the other two books at a later time.

Rating: 5 stars

In another time and space 'A Man Lies Dreaming'...

This is a very challenging book, unique for its approach and creativity. Every successful book should be unique for...but, some topics are much harder to be creative with than the others. 

In 'A Man Lies Dreaming', Shomer (watcher, in Hebrew) an inmate of Auschwitz is re-creating a world where the cursed German dictator is just a refugee turning into a refugee, in an England openly unfriendly towards the difference - actually this last part is not a fictional projection. 

The time of the story alternates from the adventures of detective 'Wolf' aka Adolf, hired to find the whereabouts of a Jewish girl mysteriously missing on her way from the - communist - Germany to the free England. In the good tradition of the shund - the Yiddish version of pulp noir openly despised by Sholem Aleihem who criticized the popular author Shomer for his un-literary and bad taste writings - there are a lot of sexual encounters and misadventures. During the story, 'Wolf' is having his own private 'bris' and will emigrate to Palestine with Exodus, while 'In another time and space' Shomer lies either 'dreaming' or 'sleeping'.

The entire story - with its many stories and references, from the top members of the Nazi establishment to various literary references, more or less familiar - with its absurd episodes and hard-core moments its a run against the clock for survival. This is how Shomer, who lost his children and wife at Auschwitz is able to survive the daily nightmare, so well that it will simply disappear, becoming maybe himself one of the characters of his own stories. Or this is the hope that he did so. 

In a very gentle way, this book is a praise to the world of imagination and the work of spirit, which sometimes can won even in the most disgraced places. It is not guaranteed but at least it is worth a try. It makes life more bearable, whatever the circumstances.