Apocalypse, Nu?

The following review appeared in the Jewish Quarterly (Number 222 Summer 2012)

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)