On the Fault Line

Sayed Kashua’s fascinating new novel

By Laura Phillips

            Palestinian Israeli writer Sayed Kashua’s third novel Exposure is pungent with fear of the annihilation of the self by a hostile and mocking society and haunted by the compromises necessary to survive in it.  It is also riddled with his characters’ constant unease over their identity and status. 

 How could it be otherwise?  Kashua lives and works on Israel’s Arab/Jewish fault line.   A Palestinian Arab, he grew up in the Arab village of Tira (now in Israel), was educated in a Jewish boarding school and at the Hebrew University, writes for the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, lives with his Arab wife and family in a Jewish area of Jerusalem, has won five Israeli ‘Oscars’ for his bitingly black-humoured TV sitcom Avoda Aravit (Arab Labour) and awards – among them the Israeli Prime Minister’s prize – for his fiction.

Avoda Aravit (which also means ‘botched job’) – is an excruciatingly hilarious dramatization of the trials of an Arab family struggling to thrive in contemporary Israel. Kashua’s novels are darker, deeply discomforting, powerful tales, of the impossibility and necessity of Arab Israeli life. In his first novel, Dancing Arabs, the Palestinian Arab narrator from Tira decides to become a Jew and is gratified when Israelis tell him: “You don’t look like an Arab at all.”  But his attempt at escape and transformation ends in failure. In his second novel, Let It Be Morning, the narrator, an Arab journalist on a Hebrew newspaper, retreats to his village from the social and economic impossibility of surviving life in Jewish Jerusalem in the aftermath of the second intifada, and after a 10-year absence, feels totally alienated from its inhabitants and culture.  Worse, he awakes one day to find his village surrounded by Israeli tanks – the villagers have become pawns in a peace deal between Israel and Palestine.

 In Exposure, Kashua expertly weaves together two seemingly unconnected stories, exposing deeply problematic relationships among different sections of Arab society in Israel/Palestine and between Arabs and Jews in contemporary Israel. In the first story, an unnamed, highly successful Arab lawyer, whose material affluence cloaks his social and cultural unease, picks up a second-hand copy of The Kreutzer Sonata from his local bookstore in an effort to widen his reading of the classics – those “essentials of Western culture” so familiar to Jewish Israelis but yet to be encountered by those like himself, among “the first generation of educated Arabs in Israel.”    The book is inscribed in thin, delicate blue lettering with the name Yonatan. In it, the lawyer discovers a love note in his wife’s hand.  Tolstoy’s theme of an insanely jealous husband is thus transferred to the Jerusalem milieu of socially rivalrous nouveau riche Israeli Arab professionals (the kind of people who fret over whether they have served the right kind of sushi to their ‘friends’) and transformed from a murderous tragedy to a bitter, sad, alienating, farce.  The lawyer’s tortured jealousy is able to take hold in a marriage – begun in sexual inexperience and subject to codes of honour emanating from the village culture he thought he had left behind – which has never ripened into an intimate relationship.  The ‘discovery’ that his wife has a lover shakes his shallowly rooted social confidence and progressive ideas – and his very conception of himself – to their foundations.

 The second story is narrated by Amir, a young Arab social worker from Tira, who is living inJerusalemafter graduating from the HebrewUniversity.  To help make ends meet he takes a night job caring for a young Jew the same age as he, paralysed, mute and confined to an attic after an “accident”.  His patient’s name is Yonatan. On his first night in the job, a revolted Amir finds himself struggling to change Yonatan’s suddenly soiled nappy, pyjamas and bedding: “You have to act as though you’re under fire, I told myself…What does this person, this thing, even know?”  He vows never to return.  But Ruchaleh, the disabled boy’s mother, a no-nonsense, hard-drinking left –wing Israeli academic, has silently observed Amir’s struggle with Yonatan: “I know this will sound strange…but he was testing you,” she says.  Amir finds himself drawn in until his relationship with the two Jews “strays” far “beyond the ordinary”.  Encouraged by Ruchaleh, who declares man is only “smart” if he is “able to shed his identity”, Amir gradually begins to live Yonatan’s arrested life, becoming, in his own words, “the continuation of what he had been.”

  As for the troubling figure of Yonatan himself, in this imagining of Amir’s ‘appropriation’ of him, has Kashua created a form of ‘Occupation’ in reverse?  As Amir takes over more and more of the life that Yonatan could have led,  the invalid’s condition worsens, and images of Wilde’s picture of Dorian Gray rotting in the attic and Rochester’s mad, discarded wife in Jane Eyre come unavoidably to mind.  For the lawyer, Yonatan becomes a useful ‘blank screen’ on to which he can project his jealous rage, and his fear of social and cultural humiliation. 

 Kashua is a deft storyteller and admirably ratchets up the tension – each section of the alternating strands of the novel ends on a cliff-hanger until their inevitable merging.  And just when his hunted and haunted characters seem to have reached equilibrium, he introduces a new possibility for tortured doubt – or does he?

 He is also gifted at touches of wicked humour. The sexually untried lawyer, mortified at being unable to satisfy his new wife, researches the problem of premature ejaculation. He   manages “to increase his endurance by summoning sad images from his youth…The first time he was sure that his wife had been fully satisfied was after he had screened the footage of his grandfather’s funeral in his mind…He recalled the sound the body had made upon impact [with the grave] and realized that he had just given his wife her first orgasm.”

 Exposure is a compelling read and an uncompromisingly disturbing dissection of life on Israel’s Arab/Jewish fault line. 

•  EXPOSURE By Sayed Kashua

346pp.Chatto and Windus, £12.99,  978-0-701-18707-1.

The Fear of Leaving

FICTION BY SAMIR EL-YOUSSEF 

I

 “Don’t you have any beer?” Ahmad asked, heading for the fridge which was in the corner between the kitchen and the dining room.

 “We’re having Arak.” Walid’s voice came from the kitchen where he was finishing the cooking. “We are having Arak with the food.”

 Rebuked, Ahmad went back to the sofa.

 The four of them were at Adel’s flat, ready for a hearty meal. Adel and Walid had bought meat and vegetables and colourfully delicious bits of mezze from various shops on the Edgware Road. Ahmad and Mazen bought the Arak. Adel wanted to do the shopping and get the meal ready all by himself; it was his party after all, his duty. 

 “You don’t shop properly,” Walid had objected. “You behave like some bored housewife whose only concern is getting the food ready before the children come home from school and the husband from work.”

 They laughed, but Walid was serious. “You go to the Wadi Al-Akhdar and pick up whatever has been stacked on the shelves, pile it into your trolley, rush to the nearest check-out, pay, throw everything in the boot of the car and drive home.”

 “What else should we do?” Ahmad kept laughing. “Wadi Al-Akhdar is the best supermarket for Arabic food in London. I can do the shopping there and be back in less than an hour.”

 “Exactly, in less than an hour,” Walid retorted sarcastically.

 When it came to shopping, Walid believed that his three friends, along perhaps with the rest of humanity, were irredeemably useless. He alone, as he boasted often enough, had the right attitude.  He possessed the knowledge and experience to pick and choose and, most important of all, to pay the right price. Understandably enough, Adel, Ahmad and Mazen were bored with Walid admonishing them about what they should or shouldn’t buy. That night, however, especially when they were sitting around the table enjoying the food, drink and the conversation, they felt content and thankful to their fastidious friend.  Adel in particular felt fortunate. They were celebrating his obtaining citizenship. Adel was the last among the four of them to become a British citizen and until then he had had that unsettling feeling that his friends had been waiting for him to catch up with them.

 “You have become like us, natural!” Ahmad joked.

 “Yes. I’ve finally been naturalised!” Adel replied, extremely relieved.

 “I’m afraid you’ll soon find out that it makes very little difference to your daily life,” Ahmad said, shaking his head.

 “Don’t talk rubbish,” Walid replied immediately, as if he had been expecting Ahmad to make such an insensitive remark.

 “I don’t mean to spoil his happiness.”

 “You won’t,” Adel replied. “I’ve already heard similar remarks.” He was obliquely telling Walid that he didn’t mind about Ahmad’s comment.

 Adel hadn’t had to wait longer than the other three, or indeed anybody else he knew, but nevertheless he’d been worried his application for citizenship might be rejected. Though his friends had frequently assured him it was only a matter of time, he insisted that it was getting harder for people like him to obtain that status and he had practically resigned himself to the dark assumption that sooner or later he would receive a Home Office letter in a manila envelope informing him coldly and cruelly that his application had been unsuccessful. What with the increasing fear of terrorism in the country and him being a Palestinian who was born and brought up in the Lebanon, he’d become convinced he was going to be turned down. “Better to keep him as a suspect resident than give him the full rights of a citizen,” he imagined them saying at the Home Office, having gone through his file. He had become so paranoid that he had contacted an immigration lawyer, not to inquire about what was happening but rather about what he should do after receiving a letter of rejection. “The immigration people are not the most efficient,” the lawyer explained, “but believe me there’s no reason to fear that they will judge you according to your origin.”

 Adel, however, couldn’t feel completely reassured. At one time he believed he would be rejected because he had been unemployed for a number of years. “I haven’t paid enough tax, that’s it!”

 His friends laughed at him.

 “Who told you such nonsense?” Ahmad asked. “I would like to see them turning you down on the grounds that you haven’t paid enough tax.”

 “I wouldn’t like to see them turning me down for whatever reason,” Adel responded and remained convinced there was no hope. “I’m running out of luck. I feel it. Sooner or later something disastrous is bound to happen to me.”

 “What are you on about?” 

 “Yes, I feel it. Before I know it I’ll find myself deported. I’ll be on a plane to Lebanon.”

 “Don’t be so paranoid,” Mazen shouted at him. Mazen didn’t usually participate in such conversations. He felt it was shameful and preferred to remain silent. “Besides what’s so bad about going back? It could be the decent thing to do.”

 “Well, you can afford to say that. You’ve already got your passport,” Adel protested.

 I wish I hadn’t, Mazen wanted to say, but he remained silent.

 “Look, we all used to think this way,” Ahmad intervened, “but we were wrong then and so are you now.”

 Adel didn’t listen, “I’ve run out of luck.” His life relied on luck, he was convinced. He’d been unbelievably fortunate to have managed to leave the Lebanon unscathed at a time when Palestinians could not move from one city to another without the risk of being kidnapped or even killed. Palestinian refugee camps were under siege and only a few were fortunate enough to have survived. Adel ran away to Cyprus and - again, luckily enough – he found a job on the basis of which he obtained a residence permit for a year. Having received the right of residence he was permitted to apply for a British visa. He applied and to his unbelieving eyes received it the same day. “It was like a dream!” he would say every time he told the story of how he’d come to London. Sometimes he would even reach into his pocket or go into his bedroom and return with his passport. To the embarrassment of his friends who by then had become citizens and didn’t want to be reminded of their early humiliating experiences, he would open the passport to show the visa just as if he was showing a jackpot-winning lottery ticket.

 “The whole thing was like a dream. In the morning I entered the British High Commission, filled in all the forms and handed them back, quite certain that I would be rejected, but to my utter amazement, a miracle happened. A few hours later I was handed my travel documents with a British visa glaring out between its half-open leaves like a fresh red tomato. That was my saviour as a couple of months later I lost my job.

 Losing his job meant losing his right of residence in Cyprus; the British visa was his ticket to safety. “No way would I have gone back to the Lebanon. I would rather have killed myself. You could say that the visa saved my life.”

  “Would you really have killed yourself?” Ahmad asked, amused that anybody could think of killing himself because he was about to be deported. Ahmad was the sort of person to whom the idea of suicide would never occur, not even in the darkest moments of his life.

  “I would. Going back to Lebanon meant death and if death is inescapable then–”

 “Would you please stop talking nonsense,” Mazen who’d been listening impatiently yelled. It was humiliating enough to hear Adel telling the story of his obtaining a British visa in such a triumphant way, but for him to say that he preferred death to going back was too much. “Killing yourself is better than going back, than fighting and dying for your people? Is that what you are saying?”

 “Fighting and dying for my people, what are you talking about?” Adel objected in disbelief. “Fighting who exactly?”

  “Fighting our enemies.”

 Adel shook his head. “You don’t understand what was happening then. You had left long before.”

 “I know, but I’ve been following everything that happens over there.”

 “So in which war should I have fought?”

 “I don’t necessarily mean fighting in a war,” Mazen replied, annoyed by Adel’s sarcastic tone. “I mean being there, doing something useful for our people.”

 “Like what?” Adel asked. “The only useful thing we can do for our people is to help them get out of there.”

 Mazen made no reply and Adel now realised that Mazen was not so much angry with him as with himself for not being there, for not knowing exactly what to do.

 “So you came here?” Ahmad asked, trying to diffuse the tension.

 “Yes, and here too I was lucky and within a couple of weeks I had found a job,” Adel said but he was still distracted by his argument with Mazen. He was thinking of something else to say.

 “What kind of a job?” Ahmad was curious now.

 He’d worked as an editor of the economy section of a paper where conditions were relaxed and the pay good. He’d been lucky, yes, he said, but couldn’t help being worried. His friends, especially Walid and Mazen, shook their heads in disbelief.

 “You should appreciate the fact you’ve come thus far so safely,” Walid reproached him. “I’m sure if either of us had gone through what you’ve been through we’d have given up; we’d have chosen to stay in the camp waiting for a better, though probably, a remote chance. We could have never mustered up your courage.”

 Adel suspected his friends were flattering him only in order to make him forget his anxiety but they were not.

 Walid and Mazen had left before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when life became particularly intolerable for Palestinians. Mazen went to Hull to study political science, and a year later Walid too got a scholarship to study English in London. Secure in England they watched the catastrophic events which engulfed Lebanon through out the 1980s. “Had we been unlucky enough to remain there just a year or two more, we would have been trapped; we would never have survived.”

 They felt guilty too. At least Mazen did. During the war of 1982, he wanted to go back and join Palestinian fighters making their last stand in Lebanon. “Don’t be mad, it’ll be over before you get there,” he was told. He didn’t go, not because he agreed but because he was scared that he might lose his scholarship.

 “I was a coward,” he admitted when they discussed the subject.

 “Good for you,” Adel replied without being in the least sarcastic. “Had you been brave you’d have been dead or stuck in that bloody camp.”

 “You did the sensible thing,” Ahmad said.

 “The sensible thing?” Mazen was irritated. He was often irritated by such remarks, particularly if they were made by Ahmad. “Was it a sensible thing to abandon our people? No wonder we are in such a mess.”

 “We are no longer in a mess,” Walid objected hesitantly, not sure that he wished to start a debate.  “Now we have seen sense!”

 “Seen sense? Oh yes,” replied Mazen sarcastically, “we have the Peace Process and everything is fine now.”

 “No, I didn’t say that but things are better,” Walid said.

 “Nobody lives in refugee camps anymore.”

 Walid regretted raising the subject of the Peace Process, but he realised he had to continue the argument, saying what he’d been saying for several months. “Eventually, if things go right, then, yes, the problem of refugees could be solved.”

 “Sure!” Mazen interrupted, even more sarcastic and aggressive. “The Oslo Accords guarantee every Palestinian the right of return.”

 “The right of return is not the solution. The people of the camps want a solution not another problem,” Walid reasoned calmly.

 Ahmad agreed. “If every rich and peaceful country would allow Palestinians to come in and become citizens, the camps would be empty in no time.”

 Mazen gave Ahmad a look of contempt and turned to Walid to see whether he agreed with what Ahmad had said, but it was Adel who spoke. “Which country would do that? Which rich and peaceful country would accept hundreds of thousands of refugees?”

 And then Mazen carried on, “Why should we seek the charity of rich countries when we have a country of our own?”

 “Our country doesn’t exist anymore,” Walid stated with suppressed anger. He got annoyed when Mazen resorted to emotionally loaded slogans, believing that he was intelligent enough not to use such rhetoric.

 “That’s what they would like us to say.”

 “That’s the reality.”

 “Which reality; the reality of Oslo?”

  “Do you really think the Jews want peace with us?” This was Ahmad. Having been snubbed by Mazen, he was trying to get back into the debate by turning against Walid.

 Walid ignored him. Nor was his question appreciated by Mazen. Then they were silent. Ahmad wanted to say something but the look on the faces of his friends discouraged him.

 “This meat is delicious,” Ahmad declared, getting up and going into the kitchen for a second helping.

 With the break in the conversation Walid took the opportunity to say, as he made for the bedroom, “I must phone Jenny. I must see if she wants me to pick up anything on my way back.”

 “You aren’t going yet?” Mazen grinned.

 “You haven’t finished your food,” Adel protested, grinning too.

 Walid was in the habit of phoning his wife whenever he was out for more than a couple of hours. He always claimed that Jenny might need something. “She’s been working all day, poor woman, and the least I can do is to buy the things she needs.”

 Walid and Jenny had been married for more than ten years but, to the amazement of those who knew them, they were still madly in love. He couldn’t stand the thought of not being with her, or, at least, not hearing her voice. Jenny was the bread-winner and she also appreciated his fastidious shopping and cooking routine. She was considerably older than Walid, a fact which didn’t go down too well with his family back, nor, at the beginning, with his closet friends. But over the years, as it was noted how content and self-confident he’d grown, everybody learned what a great woman Jenny was. Before meeting her, Walid couldn’t get anywhere with any woman and it began to seem as if he were avoiding them altogether. Every time he met a woman he grew nervous and started pointing out her faults. Jenny, however, understood him very well and genuinely appreciated his love of cooking and accommodated his deep-seated anxieties. His friends couldn’t help but be delighted though envious. Their emotional life was either non-existent or a mess.

 Adel hadn’t had a long-term relationship nor did he seek one. Such a relationship would have been a huge responsibility for someone like him, someone who didn’t know whether he would be allowed to stay or be deported at any moment. “You cannot afford to have a partner when you don’t know where you are going to be living next.”

 Mazen too was unable to sustain a relationship for long, albeit for different reasons. At one time he was engaged to be married to his cousin. He was expected to return to the Lebanon after his graduation and get married but he didn’t. Mazen didn’t love his cousin but that wasn’t the only reason why he didn’t go through with it. “To be honest, I was worried that if I went back, I would have stayed there for good.  I would have got married and lived with my wife in the camp,” he once confessed to his friends.

 Adel was surprised to hear Mazen say such a thing. It was at the beginning of their friendship so Adel didn’t know him well. “Why would you stay there?” 

 “Because I believe I should go back for good,” Mazen replied.

 Mazen’s father was a martyr. Mazen was only seven years old when his father was ambushed, with four of his comrades, and shoot dead by the Israelis at the border. Mazen grew up believing that he was someone special, the son of a shaheed, and he received privileges which only the children of martyrs enjoyed. His scholarship to England was one of them. But things gradually changed, martyrs lost their aura and their children no longer received the same attention. Mazen became bitter and developed a sense of being betrayed. Worse he grew to believe that by accepting the scholarship to Hull he’d betrayed his own father. Instead of accepting payment for the martyred father, he should have stayed and followed in his track.

 “If you believe that you should go back for good, why don’t you?” Walid asked him once. The question was not meant as a challenge.

 Mazen was honest enough to admit it. “Yes the temptation to stay is too strong for me to do what I should do.”

 “Because you like it here, no? Anybody would, especially back there.  They would love to have anything that resembles the life we have here.”

 “Yes, I know, but they don’t have it.”

 “They don’t have it because there is no peace. Life is good here because it’s basically peaceful.”

 “Do you think I’m against peace?” Mazen was becoming irritated and felt trapped. “Do you think what is happening – these negotiations – mean peace? Do you think that those who are involved in the negotiations care about peace or people living a peaceful life?”

 Mazen and Walid never got so angry as to compromise their friendship. Walid understood Mazen very well: they had a lot in common. When Walid was still a young boy, his father, too, had died, though not as a martyr. Walid belonged to a family many of whom were members of Fatah and some, being very loyal to the Arafat leadership, held high positions. It was on account of his family that Walid was able to come to study in Britain. Like his three friends he had been born and brought up in a refugee camp; unlike his friends, however, he suffered the further disadvantage of losing the bread-winner of the family when he was very young. His mother, his brother and he relied on the help of relatives one of whom eventually got him a scholarship to SOAS.

 Nor was Mazen seriously angry with Walid. He had detected that Walid’s support of the PLO leadership and the Oslo Accords was not out of conviction but rather out of a sense of debt to those who gave him the chance to live and study abroad.

 “Walid mustn’t be allowed to do any more cooking for us.” Ahmad said stroking his tummy.

 “What are you talking about?  You would have eaten the same amount no matter who the cook was,” Mazen replied jokingly.

 By now they had moved into the sitting room and were relaxed in comfortable armchairs, in front of them a new bottle of wine, coffee and a platter full of baklava.

 “You could get a mortgage now,” Walid suggested out of the blue, casting his eyes appreciatively around the room.

 “I’ve been thinking about it,” Adel replied. Talking about him buying the flat in which he’d been living was a further reassuring sign that he’d at last arrived and had no more to worry about.

 “I think you should do that as soon as possible,” Walid went on, “Jenny tells me that property prices will soon rocket.”

 “You could get married too,” Ahmad broke in, but that wasn’t the wisest remark for him to make.

 Ahmad’s life was a mess and for years he had been the topic of frequent discussions. He was the oldest of their group, had lived in Britain the longest and thus, to his friends’ amusement, he believed his experience must be of a great value to them. His friends were certain that he was no more experienced or knowledgeable than they were yet they listened to him out of politeness. He’d lived in London for more than twenty-five years but it was noted how modest his achievements were. He was still working as an administrator for a charity which was often in so much financial difficulty it couldn’t pay its employees’ salaries. Occasionally Ahmad had to borrow from his friends.

 His marital state was worse.  Kathy, his wife, had left him after ten years of marriage. She took their daughter Sarah and went to live in Ramallah. Kathy was deeply disappointed in Ahmad and had regretted helping him to stay in England. It was Kathy who got him the job; the only full-time, permanent job he’d ever had. Kathy was an ardent supporter of Palestinians and had founded the very charity for which Ahmad worked. It was a small charity with no more than seven or eight employees and a similar number of volunteers, its aims ranging from raising funds for small Palestinian medical organisations to highlighting health risks and social problems which the Palestinians were facing under Israeli occupation. But to Ahmad’s dismissive eyes, the charity was simply a gathering of a small number of like-minded people who took more pleasure in meeting and talking about the Palestinians’ plight than in actually doing anything about it: hence their achievements were often very modest in comparison with their ambitions. On several occasions, especially when Kathy accused him of having no feelings for his own people, Ahmad made fun of her charity. Kathy thought him cynical but after visiting the West Banka few times, and once staying for a whole month, she came to realise that he wasn’t being totally unfair.

 Ahmad was pleased that at last Kathy had agreed with him on something. His happiness, however, didn’t last long. “We should leave the charity, leave London, and go to Ramallah where we could be useful,” she suggested.

 Ahmad was stunned. “LeaveLondonand go to Ramallah, are you joking?”

 “At least Sarah would have the chance to grow up among her own people and know their daily suffering.”

 “Ramallah, go to Ramallah? What is there for me in Ramallah,” Ahmad exclaimed. He sounded as if he was talking to himself. “If I must go back anywhere, I ought to go back to Lebanon, to Ain Hellowa, the camp where I was born and where I lived, and where my family still live, not to the bloody West Bank.”

 “Fine,” Kathy replied but she didn’t really want to give up on her crazy suggestion. “If you think that we could be of some help there then yes, by all means, we could go back to where your family live.”

 “Look if it’s a question of helping people over there I think we could be of more use here,” he pleaded, now regretting knocking down her charity.  He tried harder. “Over there we would be nothing but a burden to people. We could do better by working harder to make a success of the charity.”

 But Kathy knew that he was stalling and eventually took their daughter and went to Ramallah.

 “Where did you buy this baklava?” Ahmad asked, helping himself to a second piece.

 “A Turkish shop, Walid knows it,” Adel replied.

 “I should have guessed; such good stuff must be the result of Walid’s expertise,” Ahmad said and bit into the sweet and chewed with noisy pleasure, crumbs falling on his shirt. “The Turks do baklava better than us.”

 “They do,” Walid replied.

 They were silent for a while. Adel put on a record of Fairouz and the other three looked at him with gratitude; there could not have been a better choice.

 “You can afford to get nostalgic now,” Walid said looking at Adel and singing along with the record.

 “Don’t tell me you’re going to start missing Lebanon,” Ahmad protested friendly.

 “A secure present does make one yearn for the past,” Walid explained, “at least for those happy times in the past.”

 “Did we have any happy times in the past?” Ahmad laughed.

 “Oh, come on, it wasn’t all misery.”

 “No. Only 90%.”

 They all laughed but then fell silent again. It was the kind of silence which gradually helped them to regain the sense of contentment they had felt at the start of the evening. The carefully prepared food and drink, Fairouz’s voice and the joy that clearly overwhelmed Adel, a joy which each, in varying degrees, had felt when they had obtained their citizenship, was now recalled. They didn’t have to worry about anything anymore, all of them having reached a safe haven, and being exceptionally lucky to have come thus far. They were experiencing a collective sense of arrival. Even Mazen who often assumed it was his duty to keep reminding them of those who were left behind couldn’t help but be overcome by a sense of relief. Indeed so overwhelmingly relieved were they, so sure of the feeling that they had arrived, they were willing to embark upon an adventure which could risk the very security they were celebrating.

 A suggestion was made: “Let’s go over there!”

 It was Adel, the happiest among them, who suggested it first. They were laughing, totally immersed in one of those long laughs which kept going, not so much as a reaction to a chain of hilarious remarks, but as an expression of  pure happiness. They laughed and laughed and then paused for a while anticipating a remark that would trigger another fit of laughter. Then nothing more was said and they were silent until Adel spoke. “I could go to Palestine now.”

 “I was just wondering how long it would take you to say that,” Ahmad commented.

 “We all made the same statement when we first received our British passport.” Walid added, explaining Ahmad’s remark.

 “Well, a Palestinian needs a British passport to go to Palestine,” Mazen commented ironically.

 “That’s becausePalestineis still under British mandate,” Adel said sarcastically.

 “We can go now,” Walid suggested impatiently. He meant they should leave. He wasn’t happy with the turn the conversation was taking. He was also thinking of Jenny, waiting for him and he couldn’t let her wait for long. He wondered what she would say if he told her he wanted to go to Israel and was discomfited to realise that he couldn’t guess how she would react. He never talked to her much about the Middle East, how he himself felt about his past, his people and the country from which his family originally came. She never lacked interest in what he thought or remembered; she actually wanted to know more about his past, his family and how he felt being Palestinian but it was he who kept silent. Once she suggested they could visit his family or, at least, invite his mother over here, but no, he wouldn’t hear of it.

 “Yes, we can, all of us, go there now,” Mazen enthused, and looking at Walid and Ahmad, whom he assumed would be sceptical, added after a pause, “Why shouldn’t we?”

 “But what for?”

 “To see our country of origin,” he replied challengingly, “the villages from which our families come.”

 “Yes, but why? What’s the point of it?” Ahmad went on, a tone of alertness in his voice becoming sharper.

 “Perhaps because we need to confront our past. We need to deal with it,” Mazen said, annoyed with Ahmad. “To see what has become of it all.”

 Walid saw an opportunity to add, “Perhaps what you mean, my friend Mazen, is that we could gain some understanding and then reconcile ourselves with the present.”

 Guessing what Walid was driving at, Ahmad burst out laughing. “So we could give up the right of return, right?”

 “Yes, hopefully some of us would grow up,” Walid replied instantly, ignoring Ahmed’s sarcasm, “and realise that the right of return is pointless and that we should move on.”

 “Perhaps that’s what is convenient to your leaders,” Ahmad objected with the same sarcastic tone of voice, looking at Mazen. He expected Mazen to be pleased. Mazen had nothing on his face but an empty look.

 “Yes it would be convenient for my leaders but it would also be the right thing for the rest of the people,” Walid said and was about to add something else when he heard Mazen saying, “Perhaps we ought to go there simply to do what our parents couldn’t do!”

 They stared at him with a mixed sense of appreciation and astonishment. They had expected him to force his way back to the discussion with one of his heavy rusty slogans – “The right of return is sacred; it is not the right of one or a few” – or some such. But no he’d come up with a reason with which they could genuinely consider taking on the challenge of going to Israel. Yes, they would go there for the sake of their parents, whether those who were already dead or those who were still living in refugee camps without proper documents that would allow them to go anywhere near the home of their birth. 

 Their parents had left Palestine when the oldest among them, and that was Ahmad’s father, was fourteen. Most were dead now: both Ahmad’s parents and Walid’s and Mazen’s fathers. Adel was the only one whose parents were still alive but they were still refugees and they couldn’t afford to go anywhere. Yes, that’s why they should go there. They owed it to their parents, and all Palestinian parents who were forced to leave in 1948 and were never able to return, not even for a visit.

 “Father wanted to die in Palestine,” Mazen said. His intention was not to explain in his usual slogan-parroting way but rather to reveal something, to get something off his chest.

 It was a revelation to his friends. Ahmad couldn’t conceal his astonishment, “But I thought he was martyred in Palestine?”

 “No he wasn’t. He was killed on the wrong side of the border – the Lebanese not the Israeli.”

 “We thought –” Ahmad was still surprised.

 “Yes it was claimed that he was killed inside Israel,” Mazen interrupted him, “but that was only propaganda.”

 “How do you know that?”

 Mazen didn’t answer. He looked as if he was reliving some faraway time and place. “Father must have died not as a proud martyr but as a heartbroken man whose one hope of dying in his country was never fulfilled.”

 Mazen was speaking out of a sense of guilt and the desire to go back was probably one way to release him of that guilt. The other three, too, were feeling guilty, not specifically because of an unfulfilled wish of their parents, but rather out of a general awareness of having got away while the rest, relatives and friends, were still trapped, suffering a life of poverty and uncertainty. Now, after Mazen had explained about his father, the suggestion of returning was no longer the result of entertaining an affordable sense of adventure but out of a sense of duty. They could not give up the idea without looking evasive. Returning was a task which Walid, Ahmad and Adel felt they were not ready to carry out. Ahmad tried to change the subject hoping that the suggestion would soon be forgotten. They fell into a poignant silence and remained silent for the rest of the evening in spite of several attempts by Adel to resume the conversation. Being the host he considered it was his duty to cheer them up and keep the conversation going although he himself didn’t mind the state of quietness into which his friends had relapsed.

 “Are you frightened?” Mazen asked all of a sudden

 Adel and Ahmad exchanged embarrassed looks.

 “Well for people like us the thought of going to Israel is frightening,” Ahmad said while Adel nodded. “I mean going back to Palestine, or the homeland, simply means going to Israel, to the country of our enemies. True, we are living here, far away from the camps and everything that might actually remind us of our hostility to Israel, but that would hardly make us see it as a country which we could easily think of travelling to.”

 “But still we must go,” Mazen insisted.

 “We don’t have a single Israeli friend,” Walid suddenly broke in.

 “We are not talking about making Israeli friends,” Mazen objected.

 “But doesn’t it trouble you that we are going to a country in which we don’t have a single friend?”

 “We are not going to Israel, we are going to Palestine.”

 “It’s calledIsraelnow. This is the reality and you cannot ignore it.Palestinedoesn’t exist anymore.”

 “Except if you mean the West Bank and Gaza,” Ahmad said sarcastically.

 “My father didn’t come from the bloody West Bank and Gaza,” Mazen replied sharply, then, staring at Ahmad with a look of contempt he said, “You should go there. Your wife and child are in Ramallah.”

 Ahmad was hurt. He didn’t need to be reminded that his wife had abandoned him. But he said nothing. They all said nothing.

II

We have arrived, so why on earth do we want to go back? The question had buzzed in their minds since the evening they had decided to make the visit. It felt more insistent now at Heathrow, in the departure lounge, and it seemed as if they were waiting for one of them to have enough courage to state it publicly: what the hell are we doing? Are we mad?

 Their flight was an early one. Most of the shops and cafés in the departure lounge were still closed and there was none of the customary hectic airport atmosphere which could have made it easy for them to conceal their fear. They kept exchanging worried looks. What are we doing? What kind of madness is this? But they remained silent until eventually Ahmad, half-joking, wondered, “Are we really taking a plane to Tel Aviv?”

 “Yes, to Tel Aviv and from there to your parents’ village,” Mazen replied instantly, assertively, as if to prevent any possible discussion of the matter. Mazen was the most enthusiastic about this trip and since the decision had been reached, he had made the arrangements. He’d contacted acquaintances with Arab relatives and friends in Israel; he’d asked about the possibilities of staying in Acer for a week or two, about means of moving around, visiting the villages from which their parents originally came. Was there any risk involved? he asked, worried. However he was more worried that his friends might have second thoughts and instantly became irritable whenever he detected a trace of hesitation.

 “Do you think that we’ll spend the next five years in an Israeli prison?”  Ahmad asked jokingly, though a note of concern was easily detectable in his voice.

 “Our government wouldn’t allow that,” Walid responded sarcastically.

 “You think the British government would really care about people like us?” Ahmad asked, seriously this time.

 “Well they would have to complain and demand our immediate release.”

 “Yes. And they would send someone to see us and make sure that we’re all right, but that would be all.”

 “Would you two stop that? Why would they arrest us? What have we done?” They were projecting his worst nightmare and Adel was panic-stricken.

 “At worst we would be thoroughly interrogated,” Ahmad commented. “I actually know of a guy who was…”

 “Who’s that?” Adel asked. “What happened to him?”

 “Nothing happened to him. He just had to wait nearly two hours before he could pass the security check. They had to check with the intelligence first and then, when he was leaving, he was interrogated: ‘Where did you go? Who did you see?’  and so on and so forth.”

 “Do you know where I met the first ordinary Israeli?” Adel interrupted as if he was trying to register something important before he forgot it.

 “There are no ordinary Israelis,” Mazen said sarcastically. “They are all extraordinary people.”

Ahmad laughed.

 “No, I mean a civilian,” Adel explained.

 “Where?” Walid asked.

 “At Larnaka airport,” Adel went on. “At first he was frightened of me. I didn’t understand why anybody should be frightened of me. I mean I don’t look intimidating. Then it dawned on me; he’s an Israeli, I’m a Palestinian and we are in an airport.”

 “He thought you were a terrorist?”

Adel nodded.

 “And what happened?”

 “Well we got chatting while we were waiting for our flights. He was actually very nice. He told me a few jokes. So I told him I guessed what he’d been worried about. ‘Yes, I’m a terrorist,’ I said to him, ‘but don’t worry today is my day off!’”

 They laughed in an attempt to conceal how nervous they actually were.

 The time was approaching; the departures screen told them to go to the boarding gate.

 “What are we doing?” Ahmad asked as if waking from a dream. “Come on, men, let’s get our luggage back and go home.”

 Adel and Walid were grateful, and they looked at Mazen.

 “We are going home,” Mazen protested, angry that what he had anticipated had come true.

 “No we are not going home. We are just being stupid.”

 “We are not being stupid. We are cowards if we don’t go! Fucking cowards,” Mazen declared.

 “We are being reasonable. Why the hell do we want to go there? Out of defiance or simply to show off?”

 “To show off? I thought we had already settled this question. We are going to do what our parents couldn’t do.”

 “Oh, forget that. This is not about our parents. This is about us showing off.”

 “Going to visit the land of our parents and grandparents is showing-off, is it?” Mazen shouted, looking at Ahmad. “No wonder your life is such a mess.”

 “How do you mean?”

 “You know what I mean.”

 Ahmad was silent for a moment and then he burst into tears. “You bastard, you can’t wait to find an excuse to reproach me for what Kathy did, you bastard!”

 Adel moved closer to Ahmad, stretching out his hand trying to calm him down, but Ahmad pushed him away. “Keep away from me! All of you keep away! I know you all despise me. You are not friends. Keep away!”

 “Calm down Ahmad!” Walid begged him.

 “Keep away,” Ahmad yelled, walking backwards. “Keep away. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

 He turned and ran, yelling, “Bastards!”  He was still crying.

 “I hope you’re happy now!” Walid looked at Mazen, angry. He was expecting him to run after Ahmad and apologise but Mazen remained standing there; a slight look of regret on his face.

 “Why can’t you be content with what you have? Why do you have to be so angry all the time?”

 Mazen made no reply.

 “Oh, yes I know,” Walid went on, bitterly sarcastic, “because you didn’t stay over there and fight and die as a martyr.  Instead you came here and joined the league of cowardly escapees.  We know the story.”

 Mazen, to the further irritation of Walid, remained silent.

 “So why don’t you go back on your own? Why do you have to drag us with you?” Walid went on. “This is meant to be your show, isn’t it, going back to the fucking homeland?  But of course you need an audience; every show needs an audience and we are the audience of your show, The Return of the Hero! We have everything here but no we must walk away from it. Because everything here is nothing for you.”

 “You have everything?” Mazen asked challengingly. “You, Mr Perfect, have everything? Is that why you are married to a woman old enough to be you mother? Is that what Jenny gives you, motherly love?”

 “Bastard!” Walid shouted and flew at him. But Adel jumped in front Walid. “Stop it for God’s sake! Stop it!”

 Walid stopped. Angry as he was, he nevertheless looked grateful that Adel intervened. What would Jenny think if she knew that he had been in a fight with his friend at the airport? He felt ashamed of himself. Breathing heavily he turned and walked away.

 “How about you Adel?” Mazen asked, “Are you coming?”

 Adel shook his head.

 “Why not?”

 “Because it’s too early for me,” Adel said with the calm voice of someone who had thought things through and reached the wisest possible conclusion. He wanted to explain further but Mazen gave him no chance. He turned, heading towards the boarding gate.

 Adel stood there alone. Seeing his friends each going in a different direction, he was sad. He remembered the celebration, how happy he was that evening that at last he was on solid ground surrounded by friends who shared the same good fortune with him. Going back now was too early but wasn’t the celebration also too early, he wondered?

MATI SHEMOELOF

The cause of my death: too many love songs

Come with me, but don’t give me your hand

On our right there is Beirut

On our left there is Cairo

Behind us -Amman

In front us – Ramallah

And where are we?

And now give me your hand and let’s travel far away from Hebrew poetry.

The Past in Some Good Parts

Laura Phillips on Gabriela Avigur-Rotem’s novel

Heatwave and Crazy Birds is a novel of huge ambition and scope, thematically and formally. It tackles the archetypal Jewish and Israeli themes of exile, wandering, and return, and depicts the sense of dislocation, disconnection and marginality of the uprooted. It relates the painstaking and painful excavation of the past lives of the narrator and her family, uncovering tensions between the generation of traumatized Holocaust survivors and their offspring, and using the theme of archaeology to link late 20th century Israel with its ancient past. The novel is also an anatomy of small town Israeli society in the post-Holocaust period of the 1950s and in the fractious mid 1990s, against a background of Jewish and Arab terrorism just before the assassination of Rabin. It casts a bleakly revealing light on the place of Arabs in the lives of ordinary Israelis. Formally it is multifarious and stylistically very demanding of its readers.

 First published in Hebrew in 2001, it is the second novel by Gabriela Avigur-Rotem and the first to be translated into English. Her first novel, Mozart Was Not a Jew, relates the story of two families who migrate from Czarist Russia to Argentina at the turn of the 19th Century and their connection with the emerging centre of Jewish nationalism in Palestine. Avigur-Rotem was born in Buenos Aires in 1946 and came to Israel in 1950. She has said that she does not feel Argentinian, but also that she does not feel the same as a native born Israeli.

 This sense of distance from the mainstream is at the heart of Heatwave and Crazy Birds. Its first person narrator is Loya, a flight attendant – a rootless soul always in transit, most at home in the duty-free hall with its “international smell of yearning and money”. She returns to her home town in Israel for the first time in 25 years, following the death of her father’s friend and colleague Davidi, who has left her his crumbling house. Davidi and her father were archaeologists, discoverers of the relics of ancient civilisations, and Loya and her father, Davidi and his son Nahum, made up “an odd family” for Saturday outings to uncover the secrets buried beneath the soil of the Promised Land. But the two men’s passionate interest in excavating the past does not extend to exposing the traumatic secrets of their experiences of the Holocaust and how they had survived it.

 This excavation is left to Loya, the only survivor of this “odd family” of two children, two fathers and no mother. The house, her fragile legacy, with its cracked walls, withering orange grove and (as in fairy tales) three locked rooms and three sealed letters, is overshadowed by a huge ficus tree which threatens to upend it and turn it into “archaeology”. It is also the repository of life-changing secrets, – a psychic dig – where instead of potsherds, fragmentary written records of the past have to be discovered and pieced together with the glue of her own memories and those of old friends from the town to reveal the truth about her origins. But the incursions of unrestrained vegetation and the unearthed trauma of the past are not the only dangers. Israel’s unending conflict with its marginalised Arab citizens and neighbours – seen in the novel only as manual workers and terrorists – and the march of Israeli consumerism and civic ambition, also pose real threats to her existence there.

 Loya very gradually allows herself to explore the house and to nerve herself to uncover its secrets. In doing so she is forced to seek the help of estranged childhood friends, and to assess the failure of her past loves, (which have left her, in middle age, quite alone,) and finally to set out on a quest to complete the picture of her family.

 Her journey in time and space allows Avigur-Rotem to introduce a large cast of characters spanning different periods of history and different continents. Some of these are more successfully realised than others. Loya’s closest schoolfriend Ora and her waspish mother are vividly drawn, but tellingly, many of her friends, lovers or would-be lovers seem less substantial. Creating a fiction seen through the eyes of a heroine unable to ‘connect’ carries the danger of distancing the reader, and Loya herself arouses little sympathy. This alienation can itself be compelling where it is intentional and where a novel’s execution is impeccable. Unfortunately Avigur-Rotem’s intentions regarding Loya are unclear and this novel is unevenly paced, weighed down by its own displays of learning and accumulations of detail, trying the reader’s patience in places. It speeds up suddenly in an episode that would not be out of place in an action movie with comic touches, and is most absorbing when the narrative moves to the Holocaust period in Terezin and its aftermath. Several threads are left hanging at the end. It is difficult to guess whether this is deliberate – ‘archaeologists’ of the literal or literary kind are often left with unanswered questions – or the consequence of attempting to resolve an overly long and complex narrative.

 Formally the novel is highly varied, employing long passages of interior monologue, some ‘realist’ dialogue and description, dream sequences, Holocaust journal extracts, letters and even the detailed retelling of whole scenes from the film Shoah. It also uses conventions from fairy stories and children’s fiction: the legacy, the quest and the lonely heroine’s anthropomorphising of birds, and refers directly to Hansel and Gretel, Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince. It is extremely demanding of its readers, using em dashes and commas rather than speech marks and line breaks to signal the boundaries between thought and speech and between the thoughts and/or speech of one character and another. There are abrupt and confusing shifts in tone and chronology, and sudden changes in the identity of Loya’s addressee: the ubiquitous “you”.

 All in all, despite some fine writing and acute observation of Israeli society, it is less than the sum of its parts.

• HEATWAVE AND CRAZY BIRDS By Gabriela Avigur-Rotem

398pp. Dalkey Archive, $15.95, 978-1-56478643-2.　

Every Rose

A POEM BY ZELDA

Translated from Hebrew and introduced by Edna Shemesh

Zelda is Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky (1914 – 1984), an acclaimed Israeli poet and the author of several collections of poems. She was awarded major literary prizes, and is a much-loved poet in her country. At the later age of 53, and after 35 years of hard work, Leisure, her first book-  from which the following poem is selected - appeared to a warm welcome from both critics and general readers. Zelda was a religious person.  Her work deal with the sublime and holy she perceptively discerned in the most unexpected moments of everyday life. Her open-mindedness and heart made her close to secular readers as much as the religious. Her powerful yet delicate poems are written in a free style; complex thoughts and beliefs are rendered in lucid expressions.  

Every rose is an island

Of the promised peace,

The eternal peace.

In every rose there dwells

A sapphire bird

Named “beat”.

And seems so close

The light of the rose,

So close

Its scent

So close

The quiet of the leaves,

So  close

That island –

Take a boat

And cross the sea of fire.

The Fly Boy

Fiction by Eshkol Nevo

 Translated by Sondra Silverston

It was the last summer before they gave the Sinai back to Egypt. I was thirteen and I drove with my parents and their friends down to Ras Burka. I think that must have been our last big family trip. After that, I preferred going with my friends. In any case, one of the families traveling with us had a son with cerebral palsy. They put up their tent a short bit away from the rest of us so it took a few days before I even noticed him. And that was purely by accident too.

 I went into the water to snorkel and the current carried me too far out. The waves were high, salt water seeped into my snorkel and my mask steamed up. I wanted to go back to the shore but didn’t know how. After a long moment, I found a sandy path that wound through the corals and swam along it till I reached the shore. I rested there for a while, got my breathing regular again, took off my fins and started walking back toward our tent, swearing to myself that this was the last time I’d go underwater myself.

 And then I saw him. He was sitting in a wheelchair near his family’s tent. I couldn’t decide whether to go over to him, but he seemed to be smiling at me, so I turned away from the shoreline and walked toward him. When I got closer, I saw that the smile was actually an involuntary twitch that distorted his mouth. But that wasn’t the main thing.

 Dozens of flies were sitting on his face. There were flies on his lips, on his nose, inside his nose, in his ears, on his cheeks, his neck, his chin, his hair, his weird thick glasses. Big flies, small flies, flies that weren’t moving, flies that were rubbing their hands together in pleasure.  Where were his parents? How could they have left him there like that? 

 Do something, his eyes pleaded from behind his glasses. Save me from this torture. He moaned, the sound an animal makes. A wounded animal.

 I peeled off my shirt and started flapping it wildly around his body. Some of the flies took off. And some didn’t. I waved my other hand too, and kicked the air with my foot, close to his face. I did everything but touch him. I jumped and stamped, even went into their tent and brought out a piece of cardboard meant for fanning the barbecue coals, and waved it hard next to the back of his neck where an especially stubborn guerilla of a fly was hanging on.

 Finally, after a few minutes of hard work, I managed to cut down the number of flies by half. I knew that as soon as I left him, the flies would come back and retake his face easily. But there was no choice. I had to go back to the main tent for help.

 I’ll be right back, I said.

 He didn’t nod his head and he didn’t shake it. I thought I could see a thank you in his eyes, but I wasn’t sure of that either.

 I’ll be right back, I repeated. And again, not a muscle in his face moved.

 I started running back to the main tent, the soles of my feet burning in the sand, but before I reached it, I ran into his parents, who must have been on their way back. The mother was carrying their new, blond baby girl. The father was carrying two folding chairs.

 Your son, I blurted out, he’s there… alone… the flies. The words were all jumbled in my mouth.

 We know, the father said in a firm voice. Confident. What can we do, the mother said with a sigh. We can’t stand next to him all day and swat them away.

 Yes, but… I wanted to object. To demand. To wave my fins around. But my protest couldn’t find its way into words, into a coherent argument. I was only thirteen and still a little bit afraid of grownups.

 But thanks for taking an interest, the father said, and started walking again. She has sensitive skin, it isn’t good for her, being in the sun like this, the mother apologized, gesturing to the little blond girl, and walked past me. The little blond girl herself was asleep, her face bright and beautiful.

 That night, I told my parents about it. I was sure they’d be outraged. That they’d use the same expressions they used when I did something to make them furious: “shameful,” “disgraceful,” or worst of all – “deplorable.”

 To my shock, they were indifferent. Even worse: it turned out that it was nothing new for them. The boy had been with the group on their vacation at Lake Kinneret, and then too, he sat in his wheelchair outside the tent and the flies set up residence on him.

 I agree with you, it’s not a pretty sight, my father said. But what can they do? Stand next to him all day and swat away the flies?

 I actually think it’s nice that they insist on bringing him, my mother added. After all, they could leave him in the home. But they want him to grow up like a normal child.

 So why do they hide him? the question burst out of me at full volume, volume that was fine for home, not the Sinai. If it’s so nice and they have nothing to be ashamed of, why did they put up their tent so far from everyone else?!

 Because it took them a little more time to get organized and that was the only place left for them, my father said.

 Yes, my mother backed him up – I hadn’t heard her back him up on anything for a long time – it’s purely by chance. At the Kinneret, they were right in the center of things.

 Their arguments, added on to his parents’ arguments, paralyzed me. It all sounded so logical and convincing. But still, I had the feeling that an injustice was being done here. My father put out the candle and in the dark, my mother said it was nice that I thought about others, not only about myself, and maybe I should put that virtue to use by washing the plastic plates every once in a while because it makes no sense that she’s in the Sinai and the only thing she does all day is cook and wash up after us.

 When we woke up the next morning, we saw that a lot of other Israeli families had come during the night and planted their tents on the beach. You can’t imagine, Rina, the whole country came to say goodbye to the Sinai, my father said after finishing his morning exercises outside the tent. Oh my God, my mother said when she went outside, the whole country really is here.

 I hated it when they talked like that. As if they weren’t actually part of the country. But I didn’t say anything. I went outside and scanned the beach. The boy’s tent wasn’t on the edge of the camp anymore, but right in the middle of the rows of tents that now filled the small inlet from the little hill to the dunes. Terrific, I said to myself, now the whole country will see that boy being tortured on his wheelchair and someone will definitely say something to his parents.

 That day, when the sun had begun to sink toward the hills, I went into the water with my snorkel and swam back to the spot where the narrow sandy path wound between the large fire corals. After I came out of the water and dried myself off on the beach, I began looking for their tent. It wasn’t easy to find anymore because there were so many other tents surrounding it, but the flash of the sun’s rays on the iron of the wheelchair showed me the way.

 He was sitting there in the same small square of shade. I searched his eyes for a sign that he recognized me, remembered something. And didn’t find it. There were a million flies on his face. A billion. The whole country has been walking past him since the morning, I thought. And didn’t do a thing.

 I started the work of swatting them away. This time, I was determined to get all the flies, every last one. I wanted to see his face completely clear for once, I wanted to give him a few seconds of grace free of irritation.

 It took a long time – the sun was already turning the hilltops golden – but in the end, I did it. The last three flies turned out to be dead, and I peeled them off his cheek with my fingers. But while I was moving back a little to check if any flies had gotten away from me, four new ones landed on his nose.

 Furious, I went back and slapped the air next to his nose until they gave up and flew away. Then I stood beside him for a few minutes to make sure that not a single fly dared to come back. It was starting to get dark and I hoped my parents were already worrying about me, so I promised the fly boy I’d come back the next day at the same time, and left.

 I’d like to say that I went back the next day and the day after that. I’d like to say that, in the end, I started a protest demonstration, maybe even a hunger strike, near the fly boy’s wheelchair until his parents had no choice but to stand on either side of him waving huge palm fronds all day long. But at the moment, the truth is stronger than me.

 That evening, near one of the circles of people listening to a guitar player, I met a fifteen-year-old girl. I lied to her, said I was fifteen too, and she believed me and told me that in Ashdod, where she lived, there are some girls who’d gone all the way with older boys. She had big green eyes and chocolate skin, and she always wore a white bikini, day and night, and spoke loudly about her boobs, how big and beautiful they were. I fell in love with her instantly, of course. And I spent the next few days playing endless games of backgammon with her and her cousins, trying desperately to impress her.

 One afternoon, her cousins went into the water and just the two of us were left on the beach. The sun was behind us. I didn’t turn around, but I could picture it turning the hilltops golden now.

 We didn’t talk. I felt that it was my responsibility to rescue us from the silence.

 There’s this kid here, I said. He has some disease, I don’t know what. Anyway, his parents leave him in a wheelchair outside their tent the whole day, and all the flies in the Sinai come and sit on his face.

 How disgusting, she said.

 Yes, I agreed. And added, spitting out the words quickly, I go to see him every once in a while and swat away the flies. Want to come with me?

 What, now? she asked and buried her tan legs in the soft sand like someone who has no intention of going anywhere.

  No, I said, alarmed. Who said now? I was thinking later, tomorrow.

 We’ll see, maybe, she said, and jumped up suddenly. You coming in the water?

 I didn’t see the boy with the flies anymore. I was sure I’d see him the last day when my parents’ whole gang took down their tents and gathered together to make the trip to Eilat in a convoy of Subarus. I planned to tell his parents a thing or two, or at least say goodbye to him and apologize for not keeping my promise, but when we got to the meeting place, his family wasn’t there.

 They left yesterday, my mother explained. Their little girl had a bad upset stomach.

 And what about the… I started to ask, but my father changed the subject. Son, he said, take one last look at the beach and make sure you remember what you see. Inside of a year, the Egyptians will build an army base here. And that’s the end of the corals and the fish.

 No, my mother said, I think they’ll develop the place for tourism.

 And he answered her.

 And she answered him.

 And they were off, arguing till Eilat, and maybe even till we were on the Arava Road, I don’t know, because after Kibbutz Yotvata, I fell asleep.

 A few months later, the Sinai went back to Egypt and became cleaner and quieter. Ras Burka was taken over by an unpleasant blue-eyed Egyptian sheikh and his German wife. They let Israelis in the first few years, but then the intifada started and they hung out a little cardboard sign saying that only people with European passports could enter.

 The pretty girl from Ashdod starred in my fantasies for a few months. And when I couldn’t summon up her face anymore, I replaced her with Sharon Haziz, the latest, hottest singer.

 I haven’t thought about the boy with the flies for years, but during my last stint in the reserves – I was posted in Nablus, and when it was over, I asked for a transfer to a different unit – I suddenly remembered him. I was sitting alone in the small shed at the Ein Huwara checkpoint counting stars, listening to fragmented conversations on the radio, and I don’t really know why, but that boy’s face floated up before my eyes and my heart swelled all at once to the size of a watermelon, good God, there were even flies on his eyelashes, in his nostrils, in his ears. And I’d promised him I’d come.

 A thought buzzed in my mind: it’s funny that I never mention the incident to anyone. After all, I’ve revealed more embarrassing things to the world – secrets, lies, perversions – but for some reason, not that. I promised myself I’d tell my wife when I got home, I felt that I had to tell at least her, but when I got home, the twins had fever and we took turns sitting with them and hardly had any time to talk –

 Later I forgot about it. And I have no idea why I remembered it now, of all times. That terrible reserve duty was a year and a half ago, and I’m sitting at the computer now to prepare a laser optics marketing presentation for tomorrow morning. All the company’s head honchos will be there, and I still have a lot of work, so many slides that aren’t ready yet, so many slides I have to be proofread, and obviously, this is a text I won’t show anyone. Obviously, it’ll be buried in the depths of my hard disk, where it’ll keep buzzing.

THE LEVANT:

ZONE OF CULTURE OR CONFLICT?

By SAMIR EL-YOUSSEF

The following essay is an adaptation of the November 2012 talk that I delivered at Boston College, under the auspices of the Heinz Bluhm Memorial Lectures Series in European Literature. I am grateful to Professor Franck Salameh, my generous host and the editor of The Levantine Review, in which this text has firstly appeared.

I didn’t read Philip Larkin until the publication of his Selected Letters (1940-1985,) and the heated debate that they provoked. Larkin had been seen as one of the most beloved contemporary English poets, but in 1993, the year of the Letters’ publication, it was revealed that in some of his private correspondence this great poet had expressed views that could only be those of a racist. Some insisted that Larkin must be seen as the good poet he’d ever been. Others thought he should be dismissed. The intransigent question about Art and Politics had managed to make its way into the centre of attention again.

 My first reading of Larkin was more like a detective mission; thorough text searching for clues, which could link his poetry to those few offending letters. Larkin’s poems are riddled with signs of nostalgic yearning. In themselves such signs would have been deemed harmless were they not issuing from an English writer. In them were also hints of resentment towards anything modern or abroad. But there was no real evidence, no proof as it were, of a racist expression that could be used or brandished by way of indictment in any serious debate. My mission to impeach Larkin, I’m happy to report, was an absolute failure. 

 -Why happy?

 -Happy because as I read Larkin’s poems I came to enjoy quite a good number of them. Indeed I enjoyed more poems now than when reading many other poets whom I’d explored without the grudge of a detective-reader. Enjoying so many poems in such a small output made me come back to Larkin time and again, reading him with open mindedness and with no other purpose than the pleasure of reading poetry.

 Repeated readings over the years made Larkin one of my most favourite poets.

 Still, racism is a serious matter, and when one’s favourite poet is branded a racist, one must explain how it is possible to reconcile the irreconcilables. Some commentators and friends of the late poet tried the usual method of playing down the issue of racism. Some insisted that art and politics, especially politics expressed in private correspondence, are two separate realms that mustn’t be confused. Others argued that those letters should only been seen within the historical and cultural context in which they were written. But none of these arguments holds water. Larkin is a bigot and there is no way of getting around this disgraceful fact. So how could one read him knowing what he is or what he was?

 Larkin’s poems are good, and like all good art they have the ability to make the audience forget the repugnant views of the artist and bypass his personality too. Reading Larkin poems, just like listening to Wagner music, one temporarily forgets what such artists might have said, in either the private or public spheres. The ability of art to induce temporary forgetfulness is what I would like to make use of in answering the question that is the title of this essay: “Is theLevanta zone of conflict or culture?”

  When talking about the Levant, there are two important and closely connected issues one must keep in mind: memory and the attitude of each of theLevant’s communities towards the “other.”

  Jews, Palestinians, Kurds and many other nations and minorities in the Middle East have had a past of grief and a history of suffering, and therefore memory is a very important and popular term in many Middle Eastern quarters. Indeed memory is so important that it seemed to be the major source of informing and goading a given community’s political attitude towards the “other,” and sometimes towards the “self.” The trauma of the dark past is generated in deep fear and suspicion verging on paranoia. Accordingly the “other” is seen as someone who has no other wish and intention but that of defeating us, destroying us. Whatever statement and move the “other” makes is often seen as part of a wider, sophisticated, devious plot; an endless conspiracy within which whatever is prefigured years earlier is bound to take place. The “other’s” group, the opposite group, is usually given too much credibility, suspected of being always cunning, skilfully organised and highly coordinated, or at least having the benefit of unshakable determination to keep on fighting to the end. Willingness to negotiate and reach a peace agreement is often viewed with suspicion that even those who participate seem to be expecting little besides their suspicions being confirmed and justified.

  The protracted and farcical Palestinian-Israeli peace process is a good example of how such two aspects manifest themselves. In this context, any concession made, no matter how small and insignificant, is often considered the first of many other greater concessions to follow, leading eventually to the destruction of those surrendering to compromise. Indeed there were times when Palestinian and Israeli peace negotiators seemed to be waiting to see who is going to flinch first, who is going to fail to keep their part of the bargain. The desire to play the role of the tragic hero must have haunted the mind of those peace-makers and was ready to be animated on the world stage: “Look, we have tried everything to reach an agreement; we stretched out our hand to them but they turned it down!” I am sure that such attitudes and such discourse were rehearsed numerous times.

  With such paranoia left unchallenged, no wonder peace remains illusive and very difficult, not to say impossible, to achieve. Reconciliation is doomed to remain a distant hope, so long as the “other” continues to be viewed with distrust. And so, it seems that the common assumption that the Levant is evidently a zone of conflict, and worse, might remain so until doomsday, doesn’t lack justification. But is there a way to challenge such seemingly fated and enduring assumption?

  Let us mention another term, which is just as popular as Memory: Resistance, or The Resistance. This is a sacred cow in many parts of the Levant. “No voice shall rise above the voice of the Resistance!” is an oft-repeated slogan. Once a group anoints itself a representative of the “resistance,” or wraps itself in the mantle of some “resistance,” any “resistance,” it will have earned the right to do pretty much as it pleases—with impunity, as is often the case with many a “sacred” or “divine resistance” in the Levant today! So let us learn from the practitioner of “resistance” and establish our own resistance: The resistance against memory and paranoia. Indeed, what better way to resist unremitting “resistance” than to encourage forgetfulness?

  But let me first emphasize two points: First, that the attitude of suspicion towards vis-à-vis the “other” is peculiar to politics, or anything that is determined through politics. Secondly, that people are not necessarily enslaved to their dark memory. Indeed, whenever they can, they try to distract themselves from both memory and politics; the act of forgetfulness is not so strange to them. Indeed these two facts have encouraged me through the last two decades to challenge the assumption that the Levant is, or could only, be depicted as a zone of conflict.  However, the temporary forgetfulness that I am talking about is not the same as seeking distraction from reality, or escaping reality, or being cynical.

  Good art for me is that which combines pleasure with education, or simply an intelligent joke that makes one laugh and think and then laugh again. The chance to forget here is a chance to think, to discover something else, or something different, or at least to recognise the significance of something that one might have overlooked or dismissed. In other words, forgetfulness is a chance to unlearn an old lesson and learn a new one.

  I enjoyed reading Larkin’s poems, but I also learned a great deal from them; they taught me many things about the English language and post-war England, and how to distinguish between an attitude of disappointment and one of hostility, and between expressions of solidarity and appreciation, and hypocrisy and conceit. Within the Levant the moment of temporary forgetfulness might be a chance for learning how to pave the way for the imagination of peace.

  People who followed the Peace Process through its visual aspect must have noticed how hesitant and reluctant participants in peace negotiations looked. Starting from the notorious Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn, peace negotiators looked as if they were doing a dirty job; something that they were undertaking out of sheer necessity and desperation. The private argument, which was often made, seemed to confirm the implication of the image on the White House lawn; “we have to be realistic—we can do nothing but negotiate and reach a peaceful agreement.” “Nothing” here means “we couldn’t get rid of them or destroy them, so we have to make a deal with them.”

  No wonder the peace process has always looked like a half-baked process. When discussing what went wrong with the peace process an annoying expression was repeatedly used; “there is no culture of peace,” it was often said. This makes one imagine communities in the Middle East doing nothing all day long except digging trenches.

  That is not true! The Levant is no poorer a place than any other in the culture of peace. But what has been lacking in the Levant is actually the imagination of peace; people for a long time have been living in one state of conflict or another; or a state of no peace and no war, that they have no idea how the world might look like without war or the expectation of conflict and violence. Indeed people of the Levant seem to have got used to such assumptions that the alternative appears to them as an unreal world.

  In a literary event that brought together a group of Palestinian and Israeli writers, just before the failure of Camp David Talks in 2000, I remember the late Israeli writer Batya Gur commencing her talk by reading Cavafy’s famous poem Waiting for the Barbarians. There had been a moment of exaggerated hope at the time; a time during which a breakthrough in the Israeli-Syrian peace talks was expected. Such a breakthrough would have meant that the last major stumbling block before achieving total peace will have been surmounted. Yet, in spite of the exaggerated hope, as Gur explained, one could nevertheless still sense the feeling expressed in the last two lines of Cavafy’s poem: “Now what will become of us without barbarians? / Those people were some kind of solution.” Whenever there has been a breakthrough, the sense of “Now what will become of us without barbarian?” has spread. Why? Because imagination has failed to keep up with reality.

  Imagination is meant to precede reality and to provide examples, models, and images of how the new reality, the world in a state of peace, would look like. Instead, when the time for peace arrived, imagination seemed to lag behind, stuck within an old world languishing in the tyranny of the memory of a dark past and an attitude of scepticism towards the “other.” No wonder that every time a peace treaty has been signed, people felt that they were venturing into the wilderness or at least, like those who waited for the never-arriving barbarians, that they have been deprived from a source of consolation.

  The question in the title of this essay, “is theLevanta zone of conflict or culture?” is an ironic one indeed. Anyone with a mere general knowledge of the Levant knows that the Levant is of both, conflict and culture; it is only that the people of the Levant need to be reminded that theirs is a land of great culture, and that they need pay more attention to it. I was born and brought up in Rashidiyyé—a  Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Lebanon. Rashidiyyé was, and still is, as bad as a refugee camp could be. A fifteen minutes walk from the camp stood the ancient Phoenician port-city of Tyr. The refugee camp and the ancient city standing side by side is a stark example of the Levant being both a land of conflict and culture.

  When Philip Larkin’s offensive letters were published in 1993, some people suggested his poetry be struck off from school curricula. This reaction made me think back to the old school of my boyhood, back in the Rashidiyyé refugee camp. Our teachers then talked up a storm about politics, the conflict, the hopelessness and indigence of our situation. Yet I don’t remember any of them suggesting a school tour to the nearby Phoenician port-city of Tyre, a living testament as it were, to the ancient Levant; a place where we could, even for a fleeting moment, forget the misery of our present days and learn something new, something different, something hopeful; learn how when looking at what lay outside the “prison walls,” and when considering that which challenges prevalent assumptions, one might be able to see beyond the clouds of past traumas, and past the paranoia of the present. 

Laura Phillips on Egyptian Novelist Bahaa Taher                  

In Love with Isis         

  Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher takes the long view.  Born in Cairo in 1935, Taher, who won the first International Prize for Arabic Fiction, has a postgraduate diploma in History from the University of Cairo, and has declared “Reading history is one of my main hobbies.” His novels are studded with references to Egypt’s pharaonic deities and myths, linking his characters with his country’s ancient past.   He has also claimed that as a writer his interest is in how people subjugate others.

 He has plenty of lived experience of this theme, having grown up under the monarchy and the British military presence.  He is an alumnus of the 1952 revolution which overthrew the monarchy and led toNasser’s rule in 1954.  He lived through the euphoria of this supposed freedom and the subsequent renewed corruption and crackdowns on those seen as a threat to the new order. Under Sadat he was dismissed from his job in radio broadcasting and prevented from publishing his writing. Forced to seek work and refuge in Switzerland in 1981, he returned to Egypt only in 1995. He has now seen out Mubarak’s long reign, has witnessed and participated in the 2011 revolution and with his fellow Egyptians is waiting to see whether freedom will finally flourish.

 It is difficult to read Taher’s novel As Doha Said (1999; English translation published in 2008), set in the aftermath of the 1952 revolution, without searching for an answer to present uncertainties. But Taher is too fine a writer to provide definitive answers for his characters or for us.  In deceptively simple prose, he tackles the most complex and constant problems: the eternal struggle between hope and despair in both love and politics and the fight for justice by those subjugated by their ‘betters’, or women mistreated by domineering or bullying men. 

 His unnamed, over-educated and underemployed narrator, a minor civil servant in the “Supervisory Board for Administrative Organisation” – a non-title for a non-department, set up in the first flush of revolution, now nicknamed the “graveyard” – falls hopelessly in love with a beautiful married colleague, Doha. This infatuation and a deeper ennui, born of his disillusionment at the injustice and corruption which flourish under the new dispensation for which he fought, keep him stuck in a limbo of under achievement.

 His superior, Hatem, a childhood friend with whom he had demonstrated in Ismailiya (now Tahrir) Square before the revolution, whose life he saved from military sniper fire, and whom he betrayed in a moment of weakness, urges him to move forward with his life, and lobby the right “contacts” for a grant to study in Rome.  But the narrator refuses to advance his prospects by becoming a member of the National Union (effectively the ruling party).  Instead of lobbying forcefully for himself – he needs the grant money to pay for his sisters’ weddings – he asks for help for Sayyid, the parking attendant at the neighbouring stock exchange, left redundant, “sitting on the edge of the pavement like a suspended tear” by the abrupt closure of his workplace in the Nasser nationalizations. Sayyid gets a much-needed job, but his indebtedness to and reliance on the narrator, and his unanticipated, quixotic fight for justice and honesty amid the machinations of revolutionary bureaucrats, lead both of them into dangerous political waters. 

 Despite his lassitude, the narrator gets his grant, and finds himself travelling to Rome in the company of Doha, on whose behalf unknown, but powerful forces have successfully lobbied.  Amid the ruins and flowering parks of the eternal city the pair enjoy a brief, ecstatic affair.  But Doha, having escaped a controlling father only to fall into the arms of a philandering husband, refuses to be possessed.  As she recoils from him, the desperate narrator pleads silently: “Who are you? Which face is yours?”  She answers him by recounting a childhood vision of herself as the ancient Egyptian goddess Aset, now called Isis.  In a moment the intimacy of the lover can be replaced by the remoteness of an ancient deity.

 Taher refuses to allow his characters equilibrium.  Just when love is despaired of, it appears; no sooner enjoyed but it vanishes.  When justice seems to be served it is subverted; when it seems beyond reach, it beckons again.  Friends can be supporters and betrayers.

 In a powerful, eerily prescient passage, Hatem, worn down by the egregious corruption around him, exclaims: “I was determined to try everything and never give up.  But I discovered that injustice is invincible. So what’s the solution? Revolution? Angry people led by revolutionaries who promise them justice and the golden age?  Who begin by cutting off the serpent’s head…?  It sprouts twenty heads…and it rises again.  One of those heads is ‘Safeguard the revolution from its enemies.’…Another is ‘Stability,’ in the name of which everything reverts to exactly the way it was before the revolution.” Egyptis always in danger of producing new pharaohs, it seems. 

 But though the narrator sees the “quest for justice” as “the only disease that doesn’t afflict animals – a malady of which he and Hatem are “cured”, his admiration for Sayyid’s struggle is profound: “he probably won’t kill the serpent, but at least he’s saving his soul.”  This admiration, and his recognition that good people exist even in the coils of a corrupt system, inevitably kindles renewed support for the quest.

 His love for Doha too is “an illness” “an affliction” that cannot be cured by other women, or by his attempts to seek distraction or oblivion. Does Doha offer him hope when she tells him that although Aset’s husband and brother Osiris, was murdered by her evil brother Set, she’s still searching for Osiris. “Pieces of her fall off whenever she loses her way…But when she finds [and resurrects] Osiris she will be made whole again”?

 Taher’s novel is set in the context of an ancient, endless cycle of destruction and rebirth. It is too early, he seems to tell us, to despair or celebrate – in love or politics.

• AS DOHA SAID. By Bahaa Taher; 145pp. The American University in Cairo Press £7.99

ISBN 978-977-416-209-1

Writing for Peace!

 BY SAMIR EL-YOUSSEF

Last week, and only one day before the start of the new war in Gaza, I gave the following talk in Milwaukee. The event was organised by The Sam and Helen Stahl Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with the collaboration of the Boswell Book Company.

 The atmosphere was so relaxed and friendly that members of the audience, most of whom were Palestinians and Jewish Americans, ended having an enthusiastic debate about one of the most difficult issues of all, the Right of Return. But, surprisingly enough, no one got angry and no voices were raised. I wonder now how that debate would have sounded had it been taken place today. I wonder if anybody would have thought that it was convenient to discuss long-standing issues or indeed to talk about peace at all. But it has always been my belief that we must talk about peace not only during periods of calm and self-reflection but also and especially in such hard times: Neither the Israeli Government nor Hamas must be allowed to kill our hope!

 What is writing for peace?

 Let me first point out what I don’t mean by writing for peace. It is not preaching brotherly love or moral responsibility from an abstract point of view. Preaching in general, but particularly in the Middle East, is just like oration, has more chances of winning support for war rather than establishing audience for peace. And as much as I admire pacifism; I am not a pacifist; the hope I have managed to extract from my peace campaigning is not high enough to allow my holding such a position.

 Since the Oslo Accord in 1993, I have campaigned for peace, through writing and participating in various writerly activities. The following is an attempt to define how I gradually understood such task, and how I came to believe that calling for a lasting peace in the complex situation of Palestine-Israel could only mean occupying a place across-fire between not only those who don’t want peace, or don’t believe that it is achievable, but also some who work for peace. It’s the position of one who’s willing to consider matters free from dictates of one’s national interests and even without one’s awareness of one’s identity.

-Is that possible? Let me explain!

 In his theory of a social contract that aims to reconcile Liberty with Equality, the American philosopher John Rawls made a brilliant use of the concept of The Veil of Ignorance. Rawls argued that basic principles for such contract could only be reached by rational people operating within a condition in which they don’t know their actual position in society; they don’t know whether they are rich or poor; privileged or not, owner of the company they are running or mere workers with modest wage. Similarly, I argue that in order to reach principles or accords for a lasting peace, the concept of the veil of ignorance must be applied; our knowledge of our identity must be suspended. When writing, campaigning and working for peace, we must do so not as Palestinians or Israelis, and regardless whether we benefit more from war or from peace, but rather as people who belong to the Land of Palestine-Israel and anxious to see a peace solid enough that no group of militant extremists or war mongers of a military establishment could destroy. How do we achieve that? How is it possible to overlook our identities and national interests? The answer is, by adopting the knowledge that has been either overlooked or deliberately excluded. I shall explain through the two following illustrations:

  In one of my unwritten stories- and I have a huge collection of unwritten stories- I imagine two snipers from two fighting forces in a divided city. Each sniper occupies the top floor of a high building on the opposite side of the divide. Each is able to see vividly what is happening in the other half of the city.

 The two men come to be there first out of conviction, but then the war goes on that it outlasts any sense of commitments or belief. Still they soldier on, only now they do so out of a sheer sense of loyalty- some kind of tribal loyalty- to their part of the city and their political group. Again the war doesn’t stop, and though their sense of loyalty is exhausted too, nevertheless they don’t quit. What would they do if they quit? The war has lasted for so long that fighting has become more like a habit or a profession.

 Eventually and after twenty years of conflict, exhausted warriors give up. Our two snipers are now two middle-aged men who have spent the best twenty years of their adult lives trapped in a protracted war. But at last the city is unified in peace, and people from both sides meet and talk; our two snipers do too. What do they talk about, the war or the politics of the war? Who started it? Who was responsible for its going on for so long? Or indeed who was wrong and who was right?

 These are inconvenient questions which should be avoided or postponed until the state of peace has been consolidated that a brave and honest look back at the past could be cast without the risk of opening old wounds. Nor do the two old warriors wish to talk about all that. It sounds like an embarrassing and tedious episode the discussion of which might sound more like listening to a broken record. What, however, they talk about, and enjoy talking about, is their shared knowledge of the life of the city during the 20 years of war.

 For unlike most people, these two men had the privilege of knowing directly what was going on in the whole city; each is familiar with what had been happening, and through this privileged position they were made to realise that when it came to the course of daily life people’s habits and costumes are pretty much the same everywhere. They reminisce through a shared memory of numerous familiar images and ordinary tales. 

Here is the second illustration:

 Four years before his death, W G Sebald launched a furious attack on post-war German writers. Sebald argued that writers such as Gunter Grass had deliberately failed to register the extent of destruction German cities had suffered. Several commentators were slightly confused or surprised. Sebald was not a patriotic German, and certainly wasn’t the kind of writer who would try to introduce a back-door apology for Nazi-Germany.

 On the contrary, he was a voluntary exile. He lived in England since the age of 22 until his untimely death. He was a compulsive traveller and a restless mind and must have believed, in the words of his follow countryman Theodor Adorno that it was immoral to feel at home even when one is actually at home. Above all, he had produced some of the most moving writings about Holocaust survivals. But Sebald’s point, I believe, was not meant to be a pointedly political or moral verdict but rather one which indicates that an aesthetic failure is the source of moral and political failure.

 Writers, especially post-war German writers, prided themselves for standing witnesses of the catastrophe that had engulfed Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Witnesses, especially honest eye-witnesses, are meant to record what they see, and accordingly Gunter Grass and others said with brutal honesty what they saw and, therefore one can’t blame them for not saying what they haven’t witnessed, what they haven’t seen. But, the question is, how could a reliable honest witness have failed to see something as massive as the destruction of one’s own cities? The answer is: Because they didn’t look, because they decided not to look in order not to see. It was not convenient to look and see certain things; the neat moral argument (we are ashamed and guilty) practiced through a collective, or ostensibly collective, act of exorcism and self-purification left no room for registering Germany’s own loss.

 Where reality and history are concerned, aesthetic failure is bound to indicate or lead to ethical deficiency. Those who failed to see after the war are no better now than those who had failed before; indeed they might be the same ones who had failed to look out of the window and see their Jewish neighbours being deported to the concentration camps. They probably will fail again to see signs of coming catastrophes.

 Sebald’s views were presented in 1997, nearly ten years before the publication of Gunter Grass infamous memoirs, Peeling the Onion. Now the great writer, Grass, the man who for more that half a century have played the role of moral and political conscience, made the shocking confession that he had been conscripted into the Waffen-SS. Naturally his credibility was shaken, not exclusively for serving with SS, but rather for keeping it secret all this time. Why the loudly outspoken writer remained silent all this time, failing to be conscientious about his own past? Probably because it was inconvenient; it would have compromised his role as a moral judge or compromise the parties and causes over the years he had campaigned for. The deliberate failure to see! 

 To acknowledge our long awareness, and familiarity, with what has been happening to all of us, and our moral obligation to see what might be inconvenient to see, does not require one to be faultless or exceptionally brave, but rather to hold firm to that basic belief that the duty of the living is to defend life especially when the agents of death seem to be in charge. These two illustrations are not only meant to point out basic conditions for writing for peace, but also to show that they are already present in books which are the best example of this kind of writing, and from an author who, ironically enough, have always identified himself with the mainstream politics of his country, albeit the left of it. The books I mean are The Yellow Wind and Sleeping on a Wire; the author is David Grossman.

Grossman has never stopped being an Israeli who campaigns for peace from the point of view of those described as ‘liberal left Zionists’. But his two remarkable books are exemplary exercises in considering matters from behind the veil of ignorance and therefore they are classic achievements in the business of writing for peace.

 In 1987 David Grossman published The Yellow Wind, a book of investigative journalism in which he passionately argued against the Israeli military occupation, warning that the situation couldn’t be kept as it is for long. A year later the first Intifada erupted in the West Bank and Gaza.

 Again, a year before signing the Oslo Accord, he brought out another brave book of non-fiction, Sleeping on a Wire, a set of interviews with Arab Israeli. Here is the first two paragraph of the last chapter:

‘How can it be that I knew so little of how the Palestinian in Israel aspire to autonomy? I had, after all, heard of them in the past, but still, didn’t know. I read about it- but I didn’t know.

‘Had I put myself in their place, in their circumstances, for even an hour, I would certainly have known. Had I but imagined myself, for example, as a Jew in another land that rejected me, watching and restricting every move, I would certainly have felt the desire to separate myself from that country.’

  Seven years later, and after the failure of Camp David Talks and the start of the second Intifada in 2000, many Arab Israeli citizens took into the street and clashed with the police; 13 of them were killed. Several commentators, who had always boasted of having Arab friends, condemned the killing but at the same time expressed disappointment and surprise that their fellow citizens of the Arab minority would side with their Palestinian brothers in the West Bank and Gaza. Had those commentators read Grossman’s book they would have spared themselves the surprise and disappointment. But, then again, those who don’t wish to see don’t want either to read the account of those who have managed to raise the fruit of their human experience into a source of knowledge or those who felt the obligation to look and see even what is considered inconvenient. No wonder that the ones who are sincerely writing for peace today are remarkably few.

 His Way!

Laura Phillips on Israeli Yoram Kaniuk

 In a teasing note at the start of Yoram Kaniuk’s Life on Sandpaper, he says: “It isn’t entirely incorrect to call this book a work of fiction, despite its being an account of my memories from a certain period of my life”.  Kaniuk quotes Aristotle: “It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened but what may happen”.  The English title on the original Hebrew edition of the book is I Did It My Way and evidently Kaniuk is a force to be reckoned with: clear about the ambiguous nature of written recollection, sure of his imaginative calling, and in a volume of 417 densely typed pages without chapter divisions, challenging the reader to keep up with his brusque, breathless prose and relentless storytelling. 

 His terse opening is a stylistic and thematic declaration of intent: “There had been a war and I was wounded.  When I got back I was remote and detached from everything, didn’t speak for days and would draw on the walls because I’d killed people before I’d kissed a girl.”  By the end of the first page he has not only kissed a girl, but slept with her, walked away and instantly regretted it, “defeated in my new country”.

 Life on Sandpaper is a reincarnation of Kaniuk’s life as a young painter and emerging writer after he escapes Israel – a physically and emotionally scarred 18-year-old veteran of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War – via Naples and Paris to New York, the home of bebop and abstract expressionism.  It details his voracious appetite for sex, reading, drinking and jazz and his unerring knack of cultivating A-list acquaintances.  He paints his hero Charlie Parker; is watched painting by James Dean; has Billie Holiday make up a song for him; passes “brief violent messages” between Isaac Bashevis Singer and his enemies during the internecine warfare between Lower East Side Yiddish and Hebrew writers; dances with Ginger Rogers; parties with Tennessee Williams; is paid to applaud Sinatra; alienates Brando and lectures Willem de Kooning on the evils of abstract art.  If that list seems like a namedropper’s nirvana, it is just a sample of Kaniuk’s encounters, fictionalised or factual, with the famous.  As he remarks in an infinitesimal pause for breath: “I was in the lives of all these people by mistake.  A time of anarchy in America.  I was passing through.”  

 The book is also stuffed to the gills with less glitzy characters with whom Kaniuk spends his formative artistic years. They include Avi Shoes, his childhood friend, who after watching a man struggling to do up his shoelaces, invents adhesive shoe fasteners and makes a fortune; fellow soldier and road buddy Oved, who, dry-eyed when his parents and friends die, breaks down when he kisses a cow and with whom Kaniuk explores the vastness of America; Boris, Stalin’s “pet Jew” who proclaims: “the people’s love of tyranny is the great existential secret” and Boris’s beautiful daughter Mira, who like Kaniuk, is “looking for love” but is “incapable of being loved or loving”.

  Kaniuk meanwhile is living from hand to mouth, selling paintings, washing dishes and waiting tables in the legendary jazz club Minton’s Playhouse, struggling to pay the rent for one cheap lodging after another and failing to make a fortune by selling frozen falafel.  He is also defiantly refusing to join New York’s abstract expressionist hegemony: “There was no fear in the new art, no love or envy or hate, there was just decoration, wall illustrations.”  Wrestling with his own feeling of artistic inadequacy, he eventually gives up the struggle to paint, “I would never be the painter I wanted to be, would never be more than just another painter” and turns to writing.

   His frantic approach also extends to his love life.  His first marriage, to dancer Lee Becker, is doomed, driven by the need and desire for love and fear of being alone, rather than love itself, and sabotaged by Kaniuk’s numerous reckless and hurtful infidelities.  His telling description of their relationship – “we each became the other’s retribution” – is echoed in her devastating parting denunciation of his character in his dealings with the famous – “being Charlie Parker’s friend was more important for you than Charlie Parker himself” – and with women – “you know how to love, but only for a moment, only when you conquer someone new.” It’s difficult not to sympathise with this view. 

  The breathless prose, (likened to the pace of bebop itself), frenzied storytelling and piling up of characters, many of whom make a fleeting appearance, threaten to choke and alienate the reader and turn the book into an endurance test set by an uncompromising taskmaster.  It is as if the ageing Kaniuk – he was seventy-three when the Hebrew version was published – is racing to tell all before it is too late.  And indeed he has gone on to publish an autobiographical novel Between Life and Death about four months spent unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital and another, 1948, detailing his wartime experiences. 

  But redemption arrives in his meeting with “the fairest of the fair”, his second wife Miranda (a teenage WASP beauty, whom he likens to a goddess in a Renaissance masterpiece), his change of artistic direction and perhaps in utter weariness after a decade’s debauchery.  The pace slows enough for an appreciation of some fine prose – he likens the dying Billie Holiday’s remnant of a voice to “a tender miraculous scalpel” – and for the enjoyment of a comic set piece: Kaniuk’s battle for acceptance with Miranda’s ignorant, patrician anti-Semitic grandmother.  Her defences are weakened by Kaniuk’s lack of a crooked nose and side locks, and her defeat comes with his revelation that her cinematic gentleman hero Leslie Howard, is, in reality the part-Jewish Leslie Howard Steiner!

   Kaniuk’s return to Israel at the end of the book is characteristically presented without explanation, but feels emotionally and artistically ‘right’. Take it or leave it, I do things my way, is his message.

• LIFE ON SANDPAPER

By Yoram Kaniuk; 417pp. Dalkey Archive Press

978-1-56478-613-5 $15.95U.S.