Book Review: Hunting in America by Tehila Hakimi translated by Joanna Chen

The unnamed woman character of author and poet Tehila Hakimi´s debut novel Hunting in America, translated into English by Joanna Chen (here is an interesting dialogue between the author, the translator and the Jewish Book Council about the book) got promoted to the American branch of the Israeli company. A three-year contract as product manager, and the promise of a new life.

She moves, learns from the mistakes of addressing her colleagues in a very direct frontal way, not getting used with the tasteless food, and got invited by her direct supervisor to hunting. Weekend after weekend, this will be her intermezzo that makes the difference between work and non-work. And as she advances into the experience of the hunting her life takes a dark edge. Her job is unsafe, she is getting involved with David, her supervisor and hunting partner. 

First and foremost, except hunting - Hakimi brought the topic as a common bridge between Israel and USA - there is nothing else happening to the character´s life. (and here there are again similarities between the two cultures). The daily work instills importance and relevance to the day, consumes the energy. What else is left ? Therefore, the confusing experience of the hunting, where deers may acquire human features. Can you imagine the exhaustion of being took out of the safety of the office and the project management tasks? Work is an alienation (and the protagonist is fully alienated from herself during her intensive working episodes, manifesting her eating disorder) but not-work is a hallucination.

The timeline of the story is mixed, with the episodes leading to her American chapter being mixed with the accounts of the present time. The counting - ´on my first hunting in America...´ - split the story into different benchmarks. It is like an effort to make sense of a lonely life, who does not exist outside the work framework.

This is a short novel, that I´ve listen in few hours as audiobooks, read by Sharone Halevy - her use of the right Israeli accent at the right time in the story added more authenticity to the audio-reading.  

I´ve found the angle of the book very interesting, but sometimes a book built around a thesis may have shortcomings in terms of other elements, such as character development etc. But it is a concise explanation of the idea and would definitely love to read more by Hakimi, especially her poetry, hopefully in original.

Rating: 4 stars

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?

Book Review: The Drive by Yair Assulin

The Drive by Yair Assulin is NOT a book against the compulsory military service in Israel. Is NOT a book written from a leftist perspective - although the author is a regular contributor to the Haaretz, the fanion of the left in Israel. The Drive is instead a book about chronical depression and masculinity misunderstood.

An unnamed young man is driving with his father to the WHO (Mental Health Office) at Tal Hashomer in Ramat Gan. He is a non-combat unit after being discovered that he has asthma. His family, especially his father, although is fully supporting him, cannot understand what is happening to him and keep outlining the risks of leaving the army altogether. The further integration into civil life in Israel depends at a great extent of the evaluations one got durin the military service. Being officially stamped as mentally unfit means not only a stigma for life, but also a very limited chance of professional achievement and for finding a partner as well (especially in the religious circles, as the narrator of the story is religious too).

But he cannot ignore for ever what is happening to him. ´(...) I knew that someone looking from the outside could not even begin to comprehend the suffocation that filled me each time I took the train to the base, the insurmontable pain I felt when I walked through those gates, the fear of something I cannot describe or define, the horribly cramped sensation that was unrelated to anything, certaninly not to a particular place or space´.

As the story evolves, so it is the story of the chronical depression, through the eyes from his family and people he is in touch with at the military base. ´I looked at Dad. He saw my look and put his hand on mine. I told him I was sorry, and he said that was nothing to sorry about, that he knew I was telling the truth, but all he was saying, again, was that he could not understand what was so bad for me than, and that he throught or feared I wasn´t telling him everything, because if I was then he simply could not understand what it was so bad´. 

He is banging his head against the wall, he is crying, he is about to jump in the front of a car. His interest in politics and the surrounded reality is disappearing. There is no more ´us´, it is only him and his pain and anguist. He feels trapped inside himself. Meanwhile, he is surrounded by arrogant and self-important people, keen to humiliate the others. He is turning madder and madder from a day to another, but it is not enough for the other people to notice the pain. ´(...) that betrayal of words, the capacity of people to say things without really meaning them, or to say things or take them back, or even to say them and deny they´d ever said them - that betrayel drives me mad´. ´My soul was genuinely threatening to explore at any moment. I really wanted to die. Every morning I wanted to die when I woke up and saw that miserable gray room with its four bunk beds, and the other soldiers getting dressed and polishing their boots, and I realized that another horribly normal day was about to begin´.

The emotional pain and restlesness are described in the smallest details and it is written depression all over the pages. The torments of the mind and of the heart are heartbreaking.

The army system in itself, with sometimes false gratifications doesn´t satisfy him, it deepens his pains and alienation. ´I repeated that the army was suffocating me. I said that all around the world, this was the age when a person shone by flourishing and I felt as if I were dying in the army. Why did we Israelis have to do that? I said I was dying, that I couldn´t breathe in that place´. They say in Israel that army is the school of life, that it makes you grow up fast and mature faster, For many, the friendships made in the Army lasts a lifetime. Everyone knows from an early age how their life will be after finishing high-school: the psychometric tests, the medical evaluations, the army service. This is the duty as it is the miluim, the reserve duty. Those few who actually skipped for different reasons the army service do not share it. But unless one has rich parents to set up a company for them, applying for work without the army service is a recipe for long time unemployment. The very religious who are not going to the army by principle do not deal with such issues, as they are supposed to spend time learning Torah in the kollel anyway. 

It is a complex issue, but this is not the aim of the book. Depression is a lifelong companion and its fights are by far harder than the ones fought in the army. The Drive is a testimony of the terrible true of this disease, no matter where and what context.

At first, I was a bit disappointed how abruptly the book ends. But, after all, the book it is called The Drive and it ends when the drive is over and the military psychiatrist put him on extended leave. 

I´ve read the book, that was awardede Sapir in the English translation by the excellent Jessica Cohen, the artisan of all the good Hebrew books translations.

Rating: 4 stars

The Ruined House of Intellectual Self-Sufficiency

'He has never been a pedantic library rat. Scholarship is an art for for him. His light, airy manner suggest a painter or a sculptor working in a spacious, well-lit studio, whisting to himself as he works. Most academics of his generation, products of the ecstasis of the sixties, transliterated their own youthful rebellion into political radicalism, but that did not necessarily lead to methodological creativity. Andrew had never succumbed to the cheap temptation of being a professional rebel or playing the exhibitionistic role of the university enfant terrible. Although well versed in the standard critiques of capitalist society and proficient in teaching them to his students, he had never fallen prey to the anger and bitterness that characterized many of his colleagues. The buoyancy of his ideas keeps them afloat. From above, they can easily shift perspective, sometimes tumbling into creative free fall like Alice down the rabbit hole'.

Meet Andrew P. Cohen, professor of comparative culture at NY University. He is easygoing, divorced with 2 children, dating a much younger former student, enjoying the good life and the high social status conferred by his impressive intellectual and academic achievements. He is not going through an identity crisis and doesn't want to be anywhere else he is already. Moderate, not dillematic and crossed against himself and the rest of the world as the academics portrayed decades ago by Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. He doesn't care about religion more than he should. It doesn't match anyway the average aesthetical outline of the NYC intellectual landscape.

At least, he used to be so until the crisis occurred. His reality started to get intruded by strange creatures from the time of the Temple, Cohanim and their ancient rites, to whom theoretically Andrew belongs too. Only that his temple sits on a different ground or he insisted to believe so. It is not a matter of life and death and the world of comparative cultures doesn't accept a hierarchy. Can you live without a basis, your own, not all the world's cultures?

The fact that often, regardless of educational background one needs a basis to stand is a basic issue, and has often a stereotypical solution. The ways in which Ruby Namdar created his story, the construction of his literary temple is outstanding and although I've often felt overwhelmed by the bias, I couldn't leave the book because of the beautiful writing and images created. The book was beautifully translated from Hebrew which make me curious to look into the original version that it might be a fundamental work of Hebrew language too. The Biblical knowledge is equally outstanding, with Talmudic commentaries and episodes that require dozen of books and additional commentaries to understand.

The Ruined House is a fundamental literary work about intellectual perception and identity and marks a complete new shift into the mainstream contemporary approaches. Its contribution to the history of ideas and Jewish mentalities is an important brick into our Temple after the Temple projections.

Rating: 4 stars