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