Skinned

 
Paper Children by Mariana Marin
 

L'apparition

One day the Great Them will come.

It will throw open the windows,

sit at our table,

drink the untasted wine—

then tear us to tatters.

The most beautiful Mediterranean civilization

will have long ago drowned in the sea,

and the thirteen months of the Ethiopian calendar

set ablaze our Flemish gloom.

One day, like a child in its mother-of-pearl placenta,

the Greta Theme will come,

and we'll set out for the swamps.

We'll exult in the vision of horizontal (universal) mud

swallowing the surrealist sleep that still shelters us.

The insomnia of reason produces monsters—

soon the mud will start to howl.

And the hours of salvation when the poem writhes every which way;

the desert fresh with fiery ashes;

the gaiety of these open arteries

through which I the mud rush, howling...

One day the Great Theme will come.

Possibly it will find us rereading passages

from Gabriela Mistral.

In its wake the wind

will continue

to tear to tatters

your white shirt,

my fire-bright nails,

their red like roses.

 

My clearest, most persistent memory of the Romanian Revolution of 1989, of the  popular overthrow of the communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was the rumor I'd heard on the news that he'd escaped with his wife, Elena, under cover of darkness in one of the army tanks patrolling the city that night. I pictured them cowering in the small, cramped space, trembling with outrage and fear. As it turned out, they were not hiding out in a tank after all; instead they had escaped by helicopter from the roof of Bucharest's Central Committee building, had been tricked into landing shortly thereafter, when they were promptly arrested. Once in custody, they were tried by a kangaroo court and summarily executed by firing squad, thus ending what was a nearly 25 year reign of terror and oppression, a toxic cult of personality from which the nation has still not recovered.

While initially championed by his fellow Romanians for his open, often defiant challenge to Soviet control, Ceauşescu remained strict, even creedbound, in his communism—in the centralization of his authority and in his notorious use of the secret police, the Securitate, to control education and the media, and to crush all heterodox expression and dissent. Under Ceauşescu, the Securitate, employing over 11,000 agents and at least a half a million informers, was one of the most brutal secret police forces in the world, responsible for the torture and killing of thousands of people, including, if not limited to, the usual suspects: teachers, intellectuals, artists, and writers.

On the Fifth Floor

Poetry,

when the putrefied loneliness of each morning

thunders inside your skull.

On the fifth floor of a drab apartment building

in a notorious proletarian district,

poetry restores to you the migratory instinct

of small gray birds.

How much love

              “When must everything depart from us?”

              Does everything abandon us?”

(yes, time once held cherry trees and ivy).

In your rabbit-like shamelessness

what kind of death

did you make your bedfellow in these recent years?

Oh, poor earthbound terror!

Poetry,

when inside your skull, like a miracle,

you feast on yourself.

There will come a time for frost and for the snout,

a time for the whip that lashes your cheek

and for small gray pigs.

Mariana Marin lived most of her life—as a woman and poet—under Ceauşescu's imperious thumb. Silenced, forbidden to publish her work, for her outspoken criticism of the government and for her "proud, accusatory" poems, Marin was widely recognized as one of Romania's most gifted poets by the time she died in 2003 at the age of forty-seven. For years a grade school teacher and librarian, she made a name for herself among poets and critics with her first book of poetry, A Hundred Years' War, for which she was awarded the Romanian Writers' Union Prize. Yet it was her membership in the eminent critic Nicolae Manolescu's Monday Poetry Circle, "a self-aware, productive and influential avant-garde," that really brought her work to fruition throughout the 1980's, most of which was first published in France. While translator and fellow Romanian, Adam Sorkin argues, in his fine introduction to Paper Children, that Marin was "not at heart a political poet"  as illustrated by her often knot-like syntax and by the stubborn opacity of her imagery, her poetry is nevertheless distinguished, not by wordplay and wit, conventions for which she'd had little patience as a poet, but by "its mood of stoic resignation and attitude of moral condemnation," by her stern assessment of the world around her, a verdict, a judgment, rendered up—like the words of the Prophets—by means she herself described as "the machinery of  my sickened glance." In her poems there is no vanity, no self-pity. Indeed, as Adam Sorkin remarks in his introduction, Marin’s poems are often so raw it is as if, in writing them, she had skinned herself alive. 

Elegy IX

Oh, the guilt and horror

before so many strangled truths!

Who will testify

about the crimes committed against us?

Today's simple words,

screwed into our only body

which can be given over to death,

will they, I wonder, make us good?

I am not a moral being,

Yet can anyone alive manage to remain

unsullied, maintain integrity?

Sometimes on tropical summer nights

when I climb down the evolutionary ladder of the species,

I see and think with a single eye in my forehead,

isolated and shattered.

Then I seem to hear curses and incantations

in a language in which we used to dream.

Paper Children, translated by Adam J. Sorkin, is published in a beautiful bilingual edition by Ugly Duck Presse as part of their Eastern European Poets Series.

Peter Adam Nash

Almost Summer: Knausgaard, Farrell, Bellow, Murakami, Wright, and Shlaim

Summer comes early to the high desert--it was 86 degrees today, clear until late afternoon, then a brief shower--not the monsoon season, but a foretaste. We had an oddball May: lots of rain, winds of the sort that usually peter out by the end of April, and too many (for my taste) overcast days--more than I can remember. June is a double relief: it finally gets scorchingly hot and my day job is temporarily suspended, which means I can lounge about the house and read the books I've been accumulating through the interminable winter. I have read a few these past ten days that I wanted to recommend to any reader who is casting about for something to take on holiday.

I haven't written here about volume four of Knausgaard's My Struggle, the story of his teaching job and (mostly fruitless) search for sex at age nineteen.  If you've been reading this series then you've already read volume four and I have nothing to add to the multitude of reviews already published (Dwight Gardner's in the Times was quite good). I have noticed that though Knausgaard is as puerile and mawkish as ever, the critics have taken a shine to his life story. Indeed, in the mainstream press, where the early volumes were mostly ignored, the artlessness of KOK's monumental memoir has become part of its charm. My friend Peter Nash dislikes the books; I find them, well, charming. A great idea for a literary salon in your own home would be a discussion of Knausgaard as a literary litmus test. No one I know is neutral on these four books (with two more in the offing)--it's interesting to think about why this chronicle of the life of an insecure, priapistic, vain, and gloriously loquacious Norwegian should have taken hold of so many readers, myself included. If I were to say I "identify" with Knausgaard I'd be lying; nor do I like him "as a person." No, what I find irresistible is the ambition, the dogged recording of every cigarette, every lustful thought, every car ride, every piece of bread and cheese consumed. That KOK writes "Hi Mom!" just like that, on every fifth page, seems to me as beautiful as literature gets. Hi Mom! What else is there to say? The plums are cold and delicious--here, taste it, life.

I have written in these pages about my Murakami problem: I start every one of his books the minute it appears and have about a 50% rate of completion (I only batted .333 with IQ84: it sits on my desk, taunting me). Murakami is someone I like immensely--his energy, his devotion to his craft, his being at one and the same time utterly hip and completely serious. But his books...As with Knausgaard, the problem I have with Murakami grows out of my suspicion that the novel is dying. Not just because there are so few readers, but because the culture that spawned the form is disappearing. The novel grew out of a particular aspect of 18th century bourgeois experience--its earliest practitioners took ordinary life, mythologized it, and invested it with both philosophical and ironic meaning (it was a lie, and we all knew it: see Sterne, Fielding, Samuel Richardson). Auerbach wrote a monumental study of mimesis, beginning with Homer and ending with Mrs. Dalloway. His thesis was that "the representation of reality" in western fiction was not only a representation of the world but a central mode through which reality was created--fiction of the highest ambitions was not only a form of entertainment--Mr. Bennett sequestered in his study, chuckling over a jape of Fielding's--but the real thing, life itself offered up to a literate and critical public. The greatest of these novels, a book like Madame Bovary, wasn't only a character study, it was also a merciless dissection of the hypocrisy of provincial France--it wasn't only a mirror held up to nature but the lamp of genius illuminating and preserving for us a part of the world in all of its complexity. But with writers like Knausgaard or Murakami I feel as if I am in a different realm. The world of these books feels diminished, neither representative nor exemplary--Knausgaard isn't Everyman, and Murakami's mythologized Tokyo, full of aimless young people leading the kinds of mysterious lives that make contemporary urban experience both interesting and unknowable, are fables that veer between profundity and banality--too often, for me, the latter. I read the latest--Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki--in a day, almost against my will, waiting for a revelation that never came. It's a clever book, readable and engaging, but like many of Murakami's fables it feels a little like a trick, a dazzling magic trip--forgettable.

On the other hand, I won't soon forget the two books I've read on the Middle East. I've just finished Lawrence Wright's Thirteen Days in September, an account of Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin, and Anwar Sadat attempting to make peace at Camp David in 1978. The outcome of nearly two weeks of grueling and acrimonious talks among this trio and their closest advisers is called an"accord" in the history books, but as Wright makes clear, the two-weeks that the American, Israeli, and Egyptian delegations spent sequestered atop Mt. Catocin (there was a single day trip, to the Gettysburg battle ground, chosen as a destination by President Carter for tactical reasons) were anything but concordant. Begin had no intention of following through on the promises he made to Carter on day twelve; both sides were intransigent, though Sadat had resolved to solidify Egypt's relationship with the US and to preserve his own friendship with Mr. Carter. Wright, deftly, tells not only the story of Camp David, but sketches the entire tragic tale of the Middle East since 1948. Reading about the negotiations concerning the governance of Jerusalem made me despair of a solution, under any regime, to the most profound and intractable human tragedy of the age. It's an utterly compelling story, told with Wright's typical attention to detail and in sparkling prose. Will every reader agree with his analysis and conclusions? Not likely.

Reading Wright led me directly to Avi Shlaim's revisionist history of Israel and the Arabs, The Iron Wall (after a theory developed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky regarding the impossibility of Jewish-Arab coexistence). This comprehensive history--from the Balfour Declaration to the "Road Map to Nowhere," explores in great detail the terrible history of Zionist-Arab (especially Palestinian) relations, focusing in particular on the Ben-Gurion/Golda Meir regime and Israel's early relationship to Jordan. This is an impossible book to review, at least for a non-specialist like myself, but I've read a bit in this area, including other revisionist histories by Benny Morris and Simha Flapan, and so feel confident at the very least in recommending this detailed (850 pages) history to any serious student of the Middle East.


Since I will be spending a month in Chicago this summer I'm reading the two great Chicago novels--James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy and Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March: the Irish and the Jews and their gritty neighborhoods not unlike the one in which I grew up, though ours was also Italian. Marx was right: the working classes have no country, and the distinctness of their culture pales beside the similarities of their lives. Studs and Augie are hardly soul brothers--Studs is a pugilistic punk doomed from the moment he has his first street corner brawl; Augie is an up and comer, a poor boy who uses his brains and mettle to live the American Dream, not unlike Bellow himself. Both books are epic in scope, vernacular in language, and as densely plotted as classic Russian fiction (Farrell and Bellow had read their Gogol).  I have been going back and forth between them, conflating the stories in my imagination, dreaming about Chicago in the 30's and 40's, a city I often visited in the 60's, the most American of American cities, far more "authentic" than New York, whatever that means. Manhattan has pushed out the working class, gentrified and Disneyfied every neighborhood from the Lower East Side to Times Square to Harlem, ruined the rest of us with its greed and self-regard, demolished and commodified literature, baseball, and food, and pushed the price of viewing the great masterpieces of European art outside the reach of ordinary people. All the more reason to read about Chicago, which is hardly a workingman's paradise either. In any case, Farrell's compassion for his pathetic Irish poor is touching; Bellow's nostalgia for Jewish life in burly and corrupt Chicago pays homage in memorable fashion to a lost world. What city better represents us? Large and diverse and obsessed with money--rotting factories, clogged streets, gun shots in the night: it's us in a nutshell. US. Read about Studs and Augie--and weep.                                                                

                                                                               

                                                            

                                                            
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Le Mot Juste or To Goad the Ox

The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas by Gustave Flaubert

To dissect is a form of revenge.

        George Sand

“From infancy, we are told, [Flaubert] refused to suffer fools gladly;” writes French-born American historian of ideas and culture, Jacques Barzun, in his introduction to his own translation of this remarkable literary curio, known in French as Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, “he would note down the inanities uttered by an old lady who used to visit his parents, and by his twentieth year he already had in mind making a dictionary of such remarks. And of course, like every French artist since the Romantic period, he loathed the bourgeois, whom he once for all defined as ‘a being whose mode of feeling is low.’" A highly deliberate writer, he detested platitudes and clichés, those borrowed, self-satisfied, expressly unconscious ideas and expressions “with which the ‘right thinking’ swaddle their minds.”

No mere pedant, Flaubert believed that language truly mattered, that the words and phrases with which people interacted with one another, and with which they described and imagined the world, was a faithful reflection of both who they were and who they might be. For Flaubert, already wary of the 19th century’s mass production of words and ideas, platitudes and clichés were not merely literary faux-pas, to be mocked and derided by those in the know, but "but philosophic clues from which he inferred the transformation of the human being under machine capitalism. This he took as a personal affront. Representing Mind, he fought the encroachment of matter and mechanism into the empty places that should have been minds." Significantly, the very word cliché has a mechanical origin, referring, as it does, to the sound made by the metal printing plates for moveable type (called stereotypes) that click and reproduce the same image mechanically without end. Yet Flaubert's war against linguistic complacency was also something more: it was a revolt against the tyranny of convention, an attack on mindless dogmatism, an assault upon the smugly stable status quo. Writes Barzun, in describing Flaubert's critique of all such ready-made phrases and expressions: "They all indicate fixity, which on reflection is seen to go beyond forms of speech or lack of ideas or aimless parroting. Social in origin, it is lust for order through convention." 

Here is an illustrative, often humorous sampling of some of the reigning bromides of his day, quite a number of which will certainly be familiar:

Accident. Always "regrettable" or "unlucky"—as if a mishap might sometimes be a cause for rejoicing.

Ambition. Always preceded by "mad," unless it be "noble."

Baldness. Always "premature," caused by youthful excesses—or by the hatching of great thoughts.

Beethoven. Do not pronounce Beathoven. Be sure to gush when one of his works is being played.

Buying and Selling. The goal of life.

Congratulations.  Always "hearty," "sincere," etc.

Conversation. Politics and religion must be kept out of it.

Darwin. The fellow who says we're sprung from monkeys.

Descartes. Cogito ergo sum.

 

Evidence. Is "plain" when not "overwhelming."

Greek.  Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.

Heat. Always "unbearable."

Hydra-Headed (Monster). Of anarchy, socialism, and so on of all alarming systems. We must try and conquer it.

Hypothesis. Often "rash," always "bold."

Indolence. Product of warm climates.

Languages (Modern).  Our country’s ills are due to our ignorance of them.

Locket. Must contain a lock of hair or a photograph.

Machiavelli. Though you have not read him, consider him a scoundrel.

Machiavellian. Word only to be spoken with a shudder. 

Mephistophelean. Applies to any bitter laugh.

Nature. How beautiful is Nature! Repeat every time you are in the country.

Nectar. Confuse with ambrosia.

Old. Always "prematurely."

Original. Make fun of everything that is original, hate it, beat it down, annihilate it if you can.

Oysters. Nobody eats them any more: too expensive!

Paganini. Never tuned his violin. Famous for his long fingers.

Philosophy. Always snicker at it.

Photography. Will make painting obsolete.

Principles. Always "eternal." Nobody can tell their nature or number; no matter, they are sacred all the same.

Progress. Always "headlong" and "ill-advised."

Property. One of the foundations of society. More sacred than religion.

Regards. Always the best.

Seashells. You must bring some back from the seashore.

Suicide. Proof of cowardice.

Taste.  "What is simple is always in good taste." Always say this to a woman who apologizes for the inadequacy of her dress.

Wagner. Snicker on hearing his name and joke about the music of the future.

Workman. Always honest—unless he is rioting.

If you are anything like me, as you read these entries you were thinking of the clichés and platitudes, the many howlers, that you yourself would add to the list. Surely first, most pressing, of my own many favorites would be the trusty epithet, looters, a term recently resurrected by liberals and conservatives alike, following the riots in Ferguson, in their smug, often specious coverage of the similar, more recent rioting in Baltimore. It seems that few if any of them saw the irony in chastising the rioters—mostly restless, disenfranchised African American youth—for their ransacking and burning of a local CVS (not a cozy ‘mom and pop shop,’ mind you, but part of a billion dollar corporate empire) in a nation the entire economy of which was recently brought to its knees by the ruthless, catastrophic, still-unpunished, ultimately government-sanctioned, looting of the American middle and working classes by our own hallowed banks and corporations. This even-then-well-known, well-documented bundle of brazen corporate swindles resulted, not in the pilfering of some aspirin, lipstick, hand cream, and diapers, but in an economic earthquake felt round the world, one that crippled the U.S. stock market, shattered the U.S. housing market, triggered a dangerous spike in U.S. unemployment, and has been calculated to have cost the average U.S. household between $50, 000 and $125, 000 in lost revenue, lost earnings, and additional taxes, taxes which subsequently were used by the federal government to rescue these same corporations and banks. Of course not even the term ‘looters’ is sufficient to describe them. 

 

If Flaubert was concerned about this matter then, in the late 1800's, it might behoove us, in this "global village" of ours, in this dazzling era of high-tech media union and collaboration, to give the matter of our language some thought. Even among my most progressive and skeptical friends, I have long-detected a startling uniformity of ideas, of modes of expression, of political and rhetorical thinking about the world, most if not all of which appears to have been gleaned from the same four 'right-thinking' sources: The New Yorker, The Economist, NPR, and The New York Times. It is a phenomenon that Walter Lippmann, in his astonishingly fresh and provocative 1922 book, Public Opinion, famously termed "the manufacture of consent"—a phrase, an expression, the great Flaubert would have certainly called juste.  

Gustave Flaubert is best known for his novel Madame Bovary. Read the lovely, light-as-air translation by Lydia Davis, if you can. The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas is published by New Directions.

Peter Adam Nash

Destruction

The Silence and the Roar by Nihad Sirees

How easy it is to destroy what has taken so long to build! The ruins of Syria--the impulse toward destruction is irresistible. History: the struggle of a few to build something they are condemned to see blown to bits by the fanatics while the indifferent look on. 

“The split in America, [and elsewhere] rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.”  [Chris Hedges, American Fascists]

"O soldiers of the Islamic State, be ready for the final campaign of the crusaders. Yes, by Allah’s will, it will be the final one. We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market." [Public statement of ISIS, 2014]

"Mythical world of intuition"--this is surely the world of, among others, ISIS and its enemy Bashar al-Assad, the optometrist turned Leader of Syria.  The Arab Spring came late to Syria. "Bashar al-Assad, helped by the nasty reputation of his security services, looked as thought he would survive...What changed everything was an incident which threw into sharp relief the untackled problems of his security state. At the beginning of March 2011, children aged nine to fifteen wrote graffiti on the wall of their school in the depressed southern town of Der'a calling for the fall of the regime..." It was this simple act--and the later arrest, detention, and probable torture of these school children that brought the Arab Spring, at long last, to Syria. Assad's mythical world met reality in that year, and the unraveling of Syria began in earnest. [John McHugo, Syria]

"Where once your eyes met the walls of buildings, a silent plain now extended to infinity. Was it a cemetery? But what beings had buried their dead there and then put chimneys on the graves? Nothing grew there but the chimneys emerging from the ground like monuments, like dolmens or admonitory fingers. DId the dead lying below them breathe the blue ether through those chimneys?" [W.G. Sebald, "Between History and Natural History," from Campo Santo] 

"To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is a part of environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited." [Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, file under 'the treason of the intellectuals']

“Out of the night of history old shadows are appearing which menace their bourgeois complacency. Growing groups of unknown men out of the streets are laughing the unbeliever’s hollow laugh at all those things the democrat has taught the people to hold dear. Worst of all, a figure appears that they had thought was gone for ever over the great scaffolds of the Reformation … The oligarchs and the democrats dread this classic figure more than anarchy – for it is the figure of the Leader …” [James Drennan, Oswald Mosley and British Fascism]

The Silence and the Roar by the great Aleppian novelist Nihad Sirees asks the question: what is the cost of defying a corrupt status quo? The answer, not surprisingly, has it origins in Kafka, in all the obvious places, but also in one of the parables:

"Everything came to his aid during the construction work. Foreign workers brought the marble blocks, trimmed and fitted to one another. The stones rose and placed themselves according to the gauging motions of his fingers. No building ever came into being as easily as did this temple--or rather, this temple came into being the way a temple should. Except that, to wreak a spite or to desecrate or destroy it completely, instruments obviously of a magnificent sharpness had been used to scratch on every stone--from what quarry had they come?--for an eternity outlasting the temple, the clumsy scribblings of senseless children's hands, or rather the entries of barbaric mountain dwellers." [Kafka, "The Building of the Temple"]

Fathi Sheen, the protagonist of Sirees' deceptively simple novel, falls unwittingly into the mechanisms of the temple, the Temple of the Leader--and from the moment of Sheen's fall,  The Silence and the Roar becomes a savage satire of all dictatorial regimes, but of Syria's in particular. The first half of the novel certainly invokes Kafka; the second half Orwell--in any case, as Sirees puts it in the afterword (written in 2012 as Aleppo was destroyed), "We must ask, alongside the characters in this novel: What kind of surrealism is this?" 

Or perhaps a better way to approach the civil war in Syria--the formation of ISIS, Assad's deliberate destruction of his own country as a means of denying a dizzying array of rebel groups a nation to aspire toward governing, the exploitation of Syria's misery by cynical forces throughout the Middle East--how did the surreal become the real?

The Silence and the Roar, by Nihad Sirees, translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss, is published by The Other Press (2013).

George Ovitt (5/16/15)

Where the Stones Come From

Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments by Oz Shelach

One Afternoon

            A professor of History from Bayit Va-Gan took his family for a picnic in a quiet pinewood 

            near Giv’at Shaul, formerly known as Deir Yassin. It was not too cold to be in the shade and 

            not too warm to build a fire, so the professor passed on to his son the camping skills he had 

            acquired in the army. They arranged three square stones in a U, to block the wind, leaving 

            access on the fourth side. They stacked broken branches on top of the twigs on top of dry pine 

            needles. He let his son put a match to it. Listening carefully, they heard a faint low hum from the 

            curves of the winding highway, hidden from view by the trees. The professor did not talk of the 

            village, origin of the stones. He did not talk of the village school, now a psychiatric hospital, on 

            the other side of the hill. He imagined that he and his family were having a picnic, unrelated to 

            the village; enjoying its grounds outside history.

From 1947-1949 the newly minted Israelis, the majority of them just arrived as refugees from Hitler’s Europe, conspired, in their ironic and headlong embrace of nationalism, to forcibly remove more than 700, 000 Arabs from their homes and villages in what is now the State of Israel, terrorizing the people, burning their houses, and pillaging their goods—their livestock, their utensils, their tools. The photograph above depicts the remains of an Arab village after the Arabs themselves had been removed (see George Ovitt’s earlier post on the remarkable 1949 Israeli novel, Khirbet Khizeh, 9/2/13).

For all of the post-war wonder that was the birth of Israel, for all of its phoenix-like glory and potential as a force for good in the Middle East, it cannot be understood today (nor truly, justly, appreciated) without also recognizing the violent and systematic expulsion of Arabs from the land, a fact that is now and will always be an essential part of its national-cultural DNA. It is a practice (this ethnic cleansing avant le mot), begun as early as the 1930’s, that continues to this day in the cynical, nearly relentless government-sanctioned expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a movement now motivated less by the utopian (if still fundamentally racist) Zionism of the early European settlers than by the hidebound, often hateful, always fiercely anti-democratic fanaticism of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox, the aggressive, politically intractable Haredim, who exert (with the help of U.S. taxpayers and such bullying right-wing American lobbying groups as AIPAC) what is now a veritable stranglehold over public policy and discourse, both here in the U.S. and in Israel itself, what is still a predominantly secular, democratic, and cosmopolitan state.

Now here is where it gets tricky. Take all that you have ever read about Israel, about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, then spend a few weeks there and see what sifts out in the end. I can almost guarantee you (even those of you who—like me—are intensely critical of Israeli policy and practice toward the Palestinians) that you will leave the country charmed, not only by the general brilliance and sophistication of Israeli Jews, but by their humanity and compassion as a people, not to mention astounded by what they have done, in some sixty short years, to transform that arid, much disputed patch of land. You will leave deeply moved by them (for, such is the climate there that, unless you have connections, you are not likely to get to know any Arabs) and inspired by the land itself. Which is not to say that you will leave convinced of anything political at all. If anything your convictions will be muddled by your stay. What is clear is that, however deep and well-founded your criticism of the Israeli government itself, you will like the people there and suddenly find it hard, if not impossible, to generalize about them, to critique them as a lot. It is exactly what happened to me. It is why the Jews of Israel still fill me with hope.

Which brings me to the point of this post: In my many years of living and traveling, it has become clear to me that one of the truest ways of experiencing the lives of others, short of meeting them in person, in the homes and neighborhoods where they live, is by reading about them in their own books, by seeing them fleshed out before you—in novels and poems and plays—as living, breathing, struggling human beings. "Literature is by its very nature humanist," writes Jewish-Italian author Alberto Moravia in his cogent, deeply heartening collection of essays on humanism called Man As An End—making reading itself a powerful act of faith.  

So if you really want some clarity about what is happening in Israel today, if you wish, as author Damon Galgut puts it, to "see through events to the people behind them," then forget the newspapers and cable news programs for awhile and read a novel or a volume of poetry instead. As I have insisted before, what the regional novelists, playwrights, and poets have to tell us about the conflict there is exactly what we need most: the reminder that the wages of every political stunt and machination, every embedded news report, every grandstanding politician, political lobbyist, and religious extremist, are tallied in human lives—lives like yours, lives like mine. A good place to start might be this short, easily accessible novel, Picnic Grounds. 

When interviewed about this 2003 novel, author Oz Shelach, in an effort to describe the often deeply conflicted attitude of Israeli Jews toward their own history, told the following story, plainly echoed in the first short chapter of his novel with which I opened this post:

I think denial is built into the national culture… Let me illustrate with an example: My cousin’s husband published a guidebook in Hebrew called Fun Family Tours, which is basically an outdoors tour guide with additional games to play with the kids in the car. He took many of the pictures himself, and they’re striking—there’s so much rubble, so many structures that used to be people’s homes, and traces of their agriculture. Of course these are all indigenous Palestinian traces, but they’re described variously as “an abandoned orchard,” “a deserted village,” or as “ancient structures.” The people who used to live there are sometimes two miles away in a refugee camp, but they’re invisible. 

 

Inspired by Thomas Bernhard’s laconic miniatures, The Voice Imitator, Shelach’s “novel in fragments” reads like a collection of modern parables about the tormented land he loves, stories as remarkable for the things left unsaid as for those so beautifully said. Described as “the most relentlessly restrained cartographer of the current Israeli scene,” Shelach is also an archeologist, preoccupied with the ever-more-pressing facts and implications of the past, so that if history is in part the record of our complicity as human beings, we have writers like Shelach to show us the stones. 

Oz Shelach was born in West Jerusalem in 1968 and has been a journalist and editor for Israeli radio and magazines.

Peter Adam Nash