The Tel
Aviv Dossier
by Lavie
Tidhar & Nir Yaniv
CHIZINE
PUBLICATIONS 2009
The Odyssey
of Samuel Glass
by Bernard
Kops
DAVID PAUL
BOOKS 2012
As soon as
things get better, history has taught the Jews, they can only get worse. Emerge
from slavery a free people, enter your promised land, plant your vines and your
fig trees, inaugurate your capital, erect a temple—and a mighty empire will
descend on you, devastate your capital, demolish your temple and carry you off
to a strange land. Gather your exiles, return to your homeland, reconstruct
your commonwealth and your temple—and, soon enough, another great world power
will come along and do it all again, only worse. You will be exiled from your
places of exile. Your Golden Age (though what’s so ‘golden’ about it is a
matter for debate) will be followed by an inquisition and expulsion.
Emancipation will be followed by pogroms. The language you coin, the culture
you fashion will go up, quite literally, in smoke. Is it any wonder, then, that
there are those who say that the establishment of a Jewish state is merely a
convenient way to gather a sufficient number of Jews together for the next
major catastrophe?
Where will
this catastrophe begin and who will be its instigator? Speculation is rife. Israel,
naturally, is the location at the top of everyone’s list. The next Khmelnystky,
Haman or Hitler is a matter of debate. The current forerunner is a loudmouth
with nuclear ambitions. Novelists, Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv, concur with the
former conjecture, narrowing the location down to Tel Aviv, but deviate from
the consensus when it comes to perpetrator. According to them Tel Aviv will be
first obliterated, then transformed by an assailant the Children of Israel have
not yet faced—an assailant that is not an autocrat, theocrat, nationalist,
royalist, reactionary, national socialist or a dialectical materialist, an
enemy that is, in fact, not human at all. Sentient whirlwinds, would you
believe, will rise from the sea and wreak havoc on the party Mecca of the Mediterranean.
The Tel
Aviv Dossier by Tidhar and Yaniv, it goes without
saying, is a work of imaginative fiction. Though set in a distinctly Jewish
milieu this is not a work of Jewish imagination in the conventional sense.
Absent are the customary demons, dybbuks, golems, and metamorphoses familiar
from the fantastic writings of Bruno Schultz, Ansky, Cynthia Ozick, Der Nister
and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The preternatural is not here a device to contrast
tradition with modernity, a means to explore deeply buried psychological
states, abstruse mystical or theoligico-political insights, a Chagallian canvas
on which to paint the ills of society. Those are all Diaspora themes and this
(albeit written in English by Hebrew speakers and featuring characters speaking
in English and Hebrew translated into English) is an Israeli novel.
Well, not
quite. Israeli writers, including those who dabble occasionally in the
fantastic, are fairly hidebound in their allegiance to the aims of the social
novel. Their science fiction takes the form of Orwellian prophecy (think of The
Road to Ein Harod, Amos Kenan’s tale of an Israeli military coup)
and their phantasmagoria is expressionistic (David Grossman) or quirkily ‘magic
realist’ (Meir Shalev). Even Etgar Keret, a practitioner of the kind of
absurdism exemplified by Eugène Ionesco, doesn’t stray too far from social
realism. Tidhar and Yaniv, on the other hand, are the heirs of a
counter-tradition unjustly sidelined and derogated by the literary
establishment. They are the children of Wells and Verne and the lurid pulp
magazines that spawned today’s horror and science fiction genres.
The Tel
Aviv Dossier is a work of cosmic horror in the vein
of H.P. Lovecraft, a deranged sci-fi extravaganza that turns its back on the
world as we know it, and makes no bones about it. There is no plot, properly
speaking. The authors quite literally present us with a dossier consisting of
audio transcripts, chat logs, letters, podcasts and apocryphal documents—Bram
Stoker employed a similar device for Dracula; today’s readers will
recall the ‘found footage’ of films like Cannibal Holocaust and Blair
Witch Project—to decipher ourselves. The storyline, however, a neo-Gnostic
apocalypse narrative for the iPod generation, is easy enough to follow:
incomprehensible cosmic entities erase Tel Aviv from the map, transform it into
a bizarre other-dimensional zone, the arena for an eschatological battle
between the rival forces of love and brutality.
Readers
desperately seeking a cleverly camouflaged annex leading to social critique
will be pleased to hear that the authors have taken the time to take some very
pointed satirical swipes at contemporary Israeli culture, attitudes and
perceptions. The deftly handled cast is broad (ufologists, a holidaying
Londoner, the chief rabbi, a government assassin, documentary filmmakers, rogue
historians, countless bit players), the characterisation swift and spot-on.
They will, however, need a strong stomach, nerves of steel and an elastic sense
of disbelief to cope with feral kindergarten children (whose bewilderment and
descent into savagery is depicted with exquisite poignancy), a sociopathic
fireman who rides his fire truck up a mountain that rises out of Dizengoff
Center Mall, the floating disembodied head of a computer programmer, and
Yeshiva bochers with Uzis parachuting behind enemy lines. Brash and
blackly funny, the authors are well aware that they have tossed a hand grenade
into the stuffy house of Israeli literature. At one point a spy sent to
investigate conditions in the altered city encounters a gang of well-armed
academics riding a steam-powered bus, a marvel of engineering and ingenuity
powered by Tel Aviv’s great untapped natural resource—books. “Right now,” says
Dganit, their leader, “we’re powering the engine with as much Amos Oz to get us
to the moon and back! And when we run out—” “You never run out of Amos Oz!”
someone shouts at the back. “We will use A.B. Yehoshua!’ she continues,
unfazed. “Meir Shalev! Giants in their field! Mines to be, well—mined!”
For Tidhar and
Yaniv catastrophe is a metafictional goldmine, a license to mash up biblical
spectacle with Hollywood pyrotechnics, but for the eponymous hero of Bernard Kops’s The
Odyssey of Sammy Glass, catastrophe is a private matter. Sammy’s world,
Kops informs us, ends when his father drops dead of a massive heart attack.
Sammy Glass is
no ordinary seventeen-year-old. A connoisseur of poetry, he spends an
inordinate amount of time in his room fondling his leather-bound copy of
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (among other worthy tomes) and nursing his
grief like Achilles moping in his tent. The hours he spends on YouTube or
playing Diablo III with his Muswell Hill mates goes unrecorded, though Kops
does concede him a mobile phone, and he is visited occasionally by Katie the
foxy redhead from across the way who clearly wants more from Sammy than what
she receives, a recital of Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat. Will anything get
Sammy out of his room? His mother pins her hopes on chicken soup and matzo
balls, though she makes the mistake of inviting David Simmons, the new man in
her life, for Friday night dinner. Will anything get Sammy out of meeting his
dead father’s rival, a man the young aesthete is quite prepared to dislike
sight unseen? A trip through time with a rabbi who bursts out of his closet
(and his febrile mind, one supposes) might just do the trick.
The Red Rabbi
of Vitebsk, as the wonderworker calls himself, is a very unkosher Virgil.
Spouting doctrines more suited to a Marx or a Lao Tzu than a Rabbi Zusha or a Rabbi
Loew, he transports Sammy to the Russia of
1881. A significant year, as any student of Jewish history knows. The year
before the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by members of Narodnaya Volya
(‘The Peoples Will’, a Bakunin-inspired terrorist group) precipitated a
cataclysmic wave of pogroms, the first death throes of shtetl life. Sammy, it
turns out, is there to lend his great, great, great grandmother, Sarah, a hand
in her current enterprise—an anarchist and a member of the People’s Will, Sarah
has orders to kill the Tsar.
Kops, an
important British poet and dramatist writing what is most likely (but hopefully
not) his final novel, is the polar opposite of upstarts Yaniv and Tidhar, as
different, as the titles of their books suggest, as a modern functionary’s
dossier is to an epic poem.
The Odyssey
of Sammy Glass epitomises the traditional Jewish
imaginative novel. We have our momentous metaphysical themes (with his opening
sentence, ‘Do the dead know that life still exists, somewhere?’ Kops declares
his ambition), a meticulously constructed plot (we know, just as we know when
we spy an axe in a Chekhov play, that the ashes of Sammy’s father, which his
mother can’t bring herself to scatter, will play a symbolic role, sooner or
later), domestic drama mythologized (Sammy falls instantly for Sarah, his
passionate ancestor, a dead ringer for his beloved mom, and harbours an
ill-concealed animus towards her new husband, Akiva, a stand-in, we must
suppose, for David Simmons), allusions to the masters of literature and poesy
(Shakespeare, Beckett, Elliot, Dr Seuss) and a roster of characters (a Yiddish
acting troupe, a girl named Anne hiding in an attic, a gor’ blimey East End
urchin) that, sadly, now exist only in fiction, some vanished in the mists of
time, others brutally erased from it. We have, in short, a stupendous
Chagallian canvas, where, with the zest of a young sailor on shore leave and a zeida’s
hard-won bittersweet sagacity, Kops vividly illustrates the words he puts in
the Red Rabbi’s mouth: ‘Life is a celebration and also fatal’. And we have in
time travelling Sammy Glass, an embodiment of the Jewish—no, the human—condition:
the worst that can happen (worse than the malevolent cosmic monsters of pulp
fiction) has already happened, is going to happen (even in nineteenth century
Russia Sammy hears the echo of the cattle trucks) and the past, for better and
worse, is constantly present.
(Photo: Meira Puterman)
