With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature 9781618110688

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with both feet On the clouds FANTASY IN ISRAELI LITERATURE

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ISRAEL: SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND HISTORY Series Editor: Yaacov Yadgar, Political Studies, Bar-Ilan University Editorial Board: Alan Dowty, Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Notre Dame Tamar Katriel, Communication Ethnography, University of Haifa Avi Sagi, Hermeneutics, Cultural Studies, and Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University Allan Silver, Sociology, Columbia University Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Ethnicity, London School of Economics Yael Zerubavel, Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University

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with both feet on the clouds FANTASY IN ISRAELI LITERATURE

Edited by Danielle Gurevitch Elana Gomel Rani Graff

Boston 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A bibliographic record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-936235-83-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61811-068-8 (electronic) Book design by Adell Medovoy Cover design by Imri Zertal Published by Academic Studies Press in 2013 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

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Contents

Acknowledgements

7

Introduction

9

I. DEFINITIONS AND DEBATE Section 1.1 Danielle Gurevitch, What Is Fantasy? Section 1.2 Elana Gomel, What Is Reality? Section 1.3 Gail Hareven, What Is Unimaginable? II. REALISTIC FANTASY AND FANTASTIC REALISM IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAELI LITERATURE Section 2.1 Danielle Gurevitch,‘May He Come in Haste’: Urban Fantasy in Soothsayer by Asaf Ashery Section 2.2. Orley Marron, Etgar Keret’s Fantastic Reality Section 2.3 Ruby Newman, Postmodern Jewish Superstition in David Grossman’s To the End of the Land III. VISIONS OF HEAVEN AND HELL: THEATER, CINEMA AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Section 3.1. Eitan Bar-Yosef, Dybbuk, Husband, Home: Shmuel Hasfari and the Fantastic Tradition in Israeli Theatre Section 3.2. Shmulik Duvdevani, Magical Realism in Israeli Cinema Section 3.3 Noa Manheim, The Grand Old Witch of Dreams IV. DIASPORA DREAMS: CULTURAL ROOTS OF JEWISH/ISRAELI FANTASY Section 4.1 Elana Gomel, The Man from the Yellow Star Section 4.2. Ioram Melcer, Why Doesn’t It Rain Fish Here? Section 4.3. Sahara Blau, Kosher Vampires: Jews, Vampires and Prejudice —5—

11 26 39

56 87 103

112 141 163

170 190 199

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V. “Messiah Does Not Call Back”: Fantasy in Jewish Sources and Ancient Jewish Literature Section 5.1. Anat Aderet, Travel Literature: Itinerary of an Armchair Traveler’s Journey to Eretz Israel in a Seventeenth Century Yiddish Story Section 5.2. Ido Peretz, Ghost Stories in Medieval Hebrew Folktales: The Case of Sefer Hasidim and Sipurei Ha-Ari Section 5.3. Bilhah Rubinstein, A Terrible Fable and Enchanting Fiction: The Story of Josheph DeLa Reina and its Reflections in Two Novels of Yhoshua Bar Yosef Section 5.4. Dov Schwartz, The Borders of Messianic Imagination in Jewish Thinking

207 220

248 263

Appendices List of Israeli Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction Published from 1948 to 2011

282

Contributors

287

Index

291

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Acknowledgements

“Science is in the hands of wizards,” said Lynn Thorndike back in 1923, and I would add, “And the future is in the heads of believers and fans of fantasy.” With Both Feet on the Clouds, which deals with the literary genre of fantasy from a unique perspective, would never have seen the light of day without the collaboration, partnership, and companionship of my two fellow editors, Professor Elana Gomel of Tel Aviv University and Rani Graff, chief editor of Graff Publishing House. Their tireless efforts, and most importantly their steadfast belief in the importance of the project, enabled the publication of this volume, which would have been impossible without Rani’s generous and passionate support and Elana’s conviction, wisdom, and composure. For me, Elana is a great source of inspiration, as well as knowledge, and her serene demeanor throughout work on the project made the whole process a real treat. A special word of gratitude goes to my very dear friend Noa Manheim. Noa, one of the most influential people in contemporary Israeli literature, first planted the seed that grew into this lush essay tree, in both the Hebrew and English versions, by asking us at a social gathering: Why is original adult fantasy literature missing from the vast canon of modern-day Israeli literature? Thank you for starting me on a road that became a passionate journey of research into a fascinating subject in an effort to seek answers to your intriguing question. My deep appreciation goes to the excellent, professional work of Sara Kitai, who translated and copyedited the majority of the essays, most of which were originally written in Hebrew. I am grateful to all the wonderful authors for their contribution to this collection. We wished to provide a multidisciplinary framework that would examine the Israeli fantasy enigma from a variety of angles for writers, students of literature, and their professors. Thanks to the broad perspective we were able to present here, I am confident this book accomplishes that mission. Moreover, I firmly believe it helps to bridge the gap between critical theory and creative writing. So, from the three of us, Elana, Rani and myself, thank you to Gail Hareven, Orley Marron, Ruby Newman, Eitan Bar-Yosef, Shmulik Duvdevani, Noa Manheim, —7—

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Ioram Melcer, Sahara Blau, Anat Aderet, Ido Peretz, Bilhah Rubinstein, Dov Schwartz. Finally, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the wonderful supportive team at Academic Studies Press: Dr. Yaakov Yadgar, the academic editor of the “Israel: Society, Culture, and History” series, who read the Hebrew edition of this book and encouraged me to produce an improved and updated edition for English readers, Kira Nemirovsky, the production editor, and Stephanie Monasky and Lauren Taylor, the sales and marketing coordinators. And last but certainly not least, to dear Sharona Vedol, the acquisitions editor, for her great support throughout the long, complex procedures, both academic and bureaucratic. Thank you for your devotion, patience, and tireless help. I thank you all for making my fantasy come true. Dr. Danielle Gurevitch, Chief Editor

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Introduction

Why do Israelis dislike fantasy? Put so bluntly, the question appears frivolous. But in fact, it goes to the deepest sources of the Israeli historical identity and literary tradition. Uniquely among developed nations, Israel’s origin is in a utopian novel: Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902), which predicted the future Jewish state. Jewish writing in the Diaspora has always tended toward the fantastic, the mystical, and the magical. And yet, from its very inception Israeli literature has been stubbornly realistic. The best-known Israeli writers, such as Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A. B. Yehoshua, have perfected a mimetic style that strives to represent faithfully the complexities of everyday life. The literary emphasis has always been on the “true to life,” in an almost nineteenth-century sense of the word. Until very recently, any departure from this mimetic consensus was frowned upon by the critical establishment and readers alike. The situation has begun to change recently under the influence of global postmodernism, popular Hollywood movies, and shifts within Israeli culture and society itself. But it still remains the case that to speak critically of Israeli/Hebrew fantasy and science fiction is to invite polite incomprehension, if not outright hostility. The present volume challenges this stance. Originally published in Hebrew in 2009 by Graf Press and the Heksherim Institute at BenGurion University of the Negev, it is the first serious, wide-ranging, and theoretically sophisticated exploration of fantasy in Israeli literature and culture. Its Hebrew edition has already earned widespread attention and popular interest unusual for a book of literary criticism. The present volume is a new edition of the 2009 book, reflecting new developments and responding to the lively critical dispute occasioned by the original volume during the last two years. Although the vast majority of its contributors are academics, the present volume also includes essays by writers, poets, and cultural critics who jointly attempt to answer—or to contest—the question posed at the beginning: why do Israelis, living in a country whose very existence is predicated on the fulfillment of a utopian dream, distrust fantasy? —9—

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The broad range of issues raised in the book corresponds to the multiple implications of this question. Fantasy is not merely a literary genre whose importance in contemporary literature is beyond doubt: it also has a social role. It functions as a mirror, reflecting society’s hidden fears, tensions, and anxieties, but also as a beacon of its dreams. The essays in this volume probe the artistic aspect of Israeli fantasy, arguing that critical neglect has led to the overlooking of significant fantastic elements in Israeli literature, theater, and cinema. They trace the complex web of relations between Israeli and Jewish fantasy and the influences of biblical and Jewish sources upon the Western fantasy tradition. They define the literary conventions of fantasy and magic realism, and they address the wider cultural, social, and ideological significance of fantasy (and its rejection) within the fraught field of Israel’s search for self-definition. Among the contributors to the volume are internationally established scholars and academics in the fields of cultural studies, literary studies, cinema, theatre, and religious studies Dr. Danielle Gurevitch, Professor Elana Gomel, Dr. Eitan Bar-Yosef, Dr. Shmuel Duvdevani, Dr. Orely Marron, Dr. Ruby Newman, Dr. Bilha Rubinstein, Dr. Anat Aderet, and Prof. Dov Schwartz, as well as well-known writers, poets, critics, and translators Gail Hareven, Ioram Melcer, Sahara Blau, Ido Peretz, and Noa Manheim. Each of them brings his or her unique perspective to bear upon the multiform and complex issues of the meaning, history, and cultural role of Israeli fantasy. The book is organized thematically. Proceeding from a generic definition, continuing through an overview of the many faces of fantasy in contemporary Israeli literature, cinema, and theater, it broadens up into a consideration of the dialogue between Israeli and Jewish cultures in the diaspora and culminates in a discussion of the roots of Israeli fantasy in the Jewish religious and mystical tradition. It is our goal to advance both studies on Israel and studies on science fiction and fantasy. In this volume, we present essays with innovative subject matter and interdisciplinary approaches in order to further develop the rapidly growing academic field of fantasy and science fiction studies.

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What is Fantasy? Danielle Gurevitch

1. Fantasy literature uses poetic means to examine the limits of the possible. Although characterized by vision and rich imagination, it is not detached from reality: fantasy must begin with individuals and the world around them.1 In ancient times, mythic consciousness helped people to understand their pasts, the circumstances of their lives, and their fates, and it was from this mythic consciousness that the literature of fantasy2 developed hundreds of years later. However, while in the ancient world myth (Μύθος) aspired to describe a concrete and enduring reality, fantasy as we understand it today is essentially fiction, and therefore bound neither to the world of phenomena nor to historical truth. Admittedly, fantasy stories in contemporary literature tend to deal with existential questions, but they are mainly issues of freedom of thought, such as, how much are human beings capable of directing or controlling space and time, of changing or bending the laws of nature to their will, of independently determining their fate, of striving for achievement, of dreaming dreams, or of fulfilling secret wishes. The use of the term “fantasy” to identify a literary genre requires clarification because of its many connotations in everyday conversation. When critics use the word, they mean that the story “didn’t really happen,” that the literary work is not based on actual historical reality. In ordinary language, we call something “fantastic” if it is exceptional and arouses our curiosity. On the other hand, to dub a person a “fantasist” or “fantasizer” is to claim disparagingly that they are delusional or, in 1

2

Consider: “A man does not possess a ground outside himself on which he could both stand and know that he is standing there. He must start with himself,” Leszek Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth, trans. from the Polish by Adam Czerniawski (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 12. The word “fantasy” is derived from the Greek phantastikόs, meaning fictitious, unreal, or imaginary. It is interesting to note the closeness in Hebrew between the word dimyon (imagination or outside reality) and the word domeh (similar or resembling reality). — 11 —

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popular Hebrew idiom, that “they live in the movies.” J.R.R. Tolkien, the well-known philologist and writer, defined fantasy as “arresting strangeness.” In its ancient and exalted meaning, Tolkien explained, fantasy is synonymous with “imagination,” with “non-reality” or “unreasonableness” in the primary world,3 that is, contrary to the familiar world. As people have always recoiled from changes in the world they know, any innovation or discovery is likely to be perceived initially as unreasonable, and perhaps even dangerous.4 With this in mind, we can now refine the genre definition, and say that fantasy literature uses poetic means to examine the limits of the possible out of a belief in a purposeful order. Through this belief, people organize their thoughts in the realm beyond the familiar. The borders of the familiar, however, must always remain relative, because perceptions of what is “familiar” and “known” and what is “choice” and “free will” differ in different times and places. The fantastic creation engulfs us in varying degrees of fear, doubt, and danger, but above all it encourages action and resourcefulness while also raising philosophical questions, such as “what if?” This unique literary style is divided into sub-genres, including the marvelous, science fiction, weird fiction or strange stories, magical realism, and the fantastic. While these categories may overlap to a certain extent, there are clear distinctions between them. Understanding the precise definitions can help create a bridge between the reader’s expectations and the work in question. 2. The marvelous is a narrative style, born in the Middle Ages, which combines supernatural foundations with an adventure in the natural world. In medieval times, there was no essential difference between reality and thought, between the visible and the conceptual, or between the concrete and the imaginary. People believed that the world was filled with supernatural phenomena and had no doubt as to the existence of wondrous creatures, whom they saw as integral parts of their lives. This belief was incorporated into the conventional worldview of 3 4

J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), 60. See Gail Hareven, “What is Unimaginable,” in this volume, p. 39. — 12 —

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Western-Christian culture.5 Integrating supernatural phenomena into a literary plot was therefore a reflection of the beliefs and traditions, customs and rituals, and aspirations and needs of medieval Christian society, in which the possible and the impossible were interwoven into a single tapestry. Thus the lion and the fox could coexist with werewolves, basilisks, and unicorns, and human beings could live side-by-side with angels and demons. It was only around the twelfth century that these stories started to be associated in Western literature with fiction. The process began in the British Isles with the appearance of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, which describes how Beowulf the Geat fearlessly fights Grendel, the man-eating demon, and overpowers him.6 It continued in Middle Age Arthurian tales, describing the adventurous and courageous dragon-slaying knights.7 In early Jewish tradition, fantasy literature of this nature was a significant driving force in the nation’s history and thinking. The tales in Aggada and Midrash are replete with marvelous acts, magic, and miracles aimed at hastening the Redemption, as well as a rich diversity of unbelievable stories of journeys to the Holy Land.8 A contemporary work is classified as belonging to the sub-genre of the marvelous if it contains two parallel worlds that do not merge. The events that take place in the natural world can be rationally, logically explained, while those in the other world include spells, magic, and sorcery, and it is perfectly reasonable to move from place to place on a broomstick. In the marvelous story the hero requires the services of an unnatural agent to reach the other world. The tale begins with a few introductory words that take the reader directly into the parallel world, 5

Pierre Mabille, Mirror of the Marvelous: The Classic Surrealist Work on Myth, translated by Jody Gladding (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1998 [1962]), 13; “Le Merveilleux dans l’Occident Medieval” in Jacques Le Goff, Un Autre Moyen Age (Paris: Quarto-Gallimard, 1999 [1977]), 460. 6 See Beowulf, ed. and trans. by Howell D. Chickering, Jr. (New York & London: Anchor Books, 1989 [1977]). 7 Arthurian romance appeared in an uncharacteristic Hebrew version published in 5039 (1279 AD), King Artus: A Hebrew Arthurian Romance. This was an unacceptable literary choice in Jewish medieval culture. Indeed, the writer apologizes for writing about the trivialities of foreign culture, rather than about holy matters. See Haim Pesah and Eli Yassif (eds.), The Knight, the Demon and the Virgin: An Anthology of Hebrew Stories from the Middle Ages (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1998), 132-150. 8 See in this volume Dov Schwartz, “The Borders of Messianic Imagination in Jewish Thinking” (p. 263); Bilhah Rubinstein, “A Terrible Case and Wonderful Fiction: The Story of Rabbi Joseph della Reina in the Novels of Yehoshua Bar-Yosef” (p. 248); Anat Aderet, “Travel Literature: Itinerary of an Armchair Traveler’s Journey to Eretz Israel in the Seventeenth Century Yiddish Story” (p. 207). — 13 —

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where everything is possible, as in “Alice in Wonderland” the white rabbit leads Alice down the rabbit hole in the opening lines.9 Alternatively, the story may begin in the area of the familiar, describing daily routine, when “suddenly” a marvelous agent appears to direct the hero toward the entrance to the other world. In the first volume of the Harry Potter books, for example, the genial giant Hagrid makes an unexpected appearance in the book’s fourth chapter and shows Harry the way to the hidden passage on Platform 9¾, from which he catches the train to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In Hebrew literature, the category of the marvelous includes the adventures of Amir Mor-Tal on Shinar Estate in A Mere Mortal, the experiences of Jonathan and Ella in the horrific empire of Marduk in The Whale of Babylon, and the tales of Tom, Iris, Beigel, and their friends, the heroes of Maladar: The Magical Amulet.10 A marvelous story recounts an exciting adventure interspersed with a sequence of supernatural events and alternating triumphs and failures, none of which cause the young and (necessarily) inexperienced heroes to lose their heads. On the contrary, their shock and astonishment at the marvels revealed to them in another world are soon replaced by the sense that they are embarking on a journey of discovery and gaining emotional fortitude not accessible to them in the natural, conventional world.11 Furthermore, not only are the heroes visible in the other world, but it is they who set events in motion: their name is on everyone’s lips, since they are “the chosen ones.” As part of the grueling journey of apprenticeship they undergo in the other world, every so often they are asked to save the world from destruction, with the salvation of all of humanity resting on their leadership ability and bold decisions. The hero’s young age and the fact that the adventures always end on an optimistic, triumphant note imply that the target audiences for these stories are primarily children and adolescents, although they may also be enjoyed by adults with fertile imaginations. The marvelous, Pierre 9 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (London: Macmillan, 1865). 10 Shimon Adaf, A Mere Mortal (Tel Aviv: Ahuzat Bayit, 2006); Hagar Yanai, The Leviathan of Babylon (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 2006); Liat Rotner, Maladar: The Magical Amulet (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 2010). 11 Alice: “There’s no use trying, one can’t believe impossible things.” The White Queen: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (London & New York: Penguin Classics 1998 [1871]), 251. — 14 —

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Mabille explains, is a “mirror experience,” a world of images into which a person journeys to discover the inner truth, and at the end the promised kingdom awaits in the form of the discovery of self-esteem.12 We learn from the marvelous story that although the world is indeed filled with dangers and threats, we will ultimately get the reward and fame we deserve if we only hold our ground and defend principles that are moral, ethical, and worthy. Another sub-genre of fantasy literature is science fiction, which deals with higher dimensions of space and time, and to a large degree represents a worldview similar to the religious. Like religious faith, science fiction is based on a belief in the existence of a purposeful, organizing cosmic order inherent in the flux of human experience. The story aims to instill in the reader the belief that there is a logical explanation for every phenomenon in nature, even if a reasonable person finds those phenomena implausible, or does not understand their significance. In science fiction, wizards are replaced by scientists, sorcerers by doctors, and magicians by engineers.13 This category features the application of sophisticated models and futuristic theories that employ advanced technology which might not yet exist, but certainly could in the future.14 Examples include David Niven’s Ringworld, or Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, in which instant displacement from place to place leads to the appearance of the electric monk in the trunk of Gordon Way’s car. In the classic television series Star Trek, the immortal words of Captain Kirk, “Beam me up!”, ostensibly demonstrated the technological simplicity of this kind of displacement, causing generations of youngsters to wistfully whisper this instruction into their plastic watches. In Israel, there is very little original science fiction literature. What 12 Mabille, ibid., 7, 26. 13 This category also includes stories of demented physicians, such as Jules Verne, A Fantasy of Doctor Ox, 1874; H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896; Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus, 1831; Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, 1886; and in contemporary literature the character of Doctor Tyler in Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), 1968. In Hebrew literature, with the necessary reservations, we could include the legend of the creation of the Golem of Prague, attributed to the Maharal of Prague. For more on the Golem, see Sahara Blau, “Kosher Vampires: Jews, Vampires, and Prejudice,” in this volume, p. 199. 14 Clute and Grant propose a more cautious definition of science fiction: “Whether or not a SF story is plausible, it can at least be argued.” In John Clute and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (New York: St. Martin Griffin, 1999), 844. — 15 —

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does exist is known only to a closed circle of sworn fans of the genre. There are, however, two local periodicals devoted to science fiction, Fantasy 2000 and Dreams in Aspamia, as well the occasional film.15 The category of science fiction also embraces a more limited sub-genre, which is actually far removed from science and sophisticated technology, namely Utopia and its opposite, Dystopia or Anti-Utopia. The utopian vision in modern literature, which originated with Thomas More (1516), depicts an ideal world, a sort of Paradise on earth, where there is a cure for every ailment, education for all, no suffering, old age, or widowhood, and the inhabitants of the entire universe, humans and animals alike, live in peace, happiness, and well-being.16 In Jewish literature of the modern era, Altneuland might be said to fit into this category. Dystopia, on the other hand, is the complete opposite: a gloomy, suicidal vision that does not bode well for the future of humanity. Canonic dystopian literature includes Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), and this genre can be found in Israeli literature in Amos Keinan’s The Road to Ein Harod (1984) and Binyamin Tamuz’s Jeremiah’s Inn (1984).17 As opposed to the marvelous and science fiction, which both embody values and beliefs that might leave the reader with some sense of relief and comfort, three other sub-genres of fantasy literature deal with disorder. These categories, which relate to realms that originate deep in the recesses of the modern mind, are labeled weird fiction or strange stories, magical realism, and the fantastic. 3. The development of modern philosophical, critical, and intellectual thought has led to a significant decline in literary writing on supernatural themes, and indeed in imaginary literature in general. In an 15

For an interesting review of science fiction in Israeli cinema, see Eli Eshed, “Star Wars in Israel,” on the website of the Society for Science Fiction & Fantasy, http://www.sf-f.org.il/story_253. 16 Thomas More, Utopia, 1551. Compare the Old Testament prophecies of Isaiah 11: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,” and in Christianity, the reconciliation and tolerance proposed in De Civitate Dei in the fifth century, Saint Augustine, The City of God, translated by Thomas Merton (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), as well as the structure of the state in the Dialogues of Plato. On Messianic fantasy and imagination in Jewish philosophy, see Dov Schwartz, ibid. 17 For a complete list of Israeli fantasy and science fiction since 1948, see the appendix (p. 282). — 16 —

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age of cynical skepticism, the human mind cannot (and does not wish to) depart from the stable basis of reality. Thus, over the years, works that exuded a “non-realistic” air were relegated to the sidelines or were perceived as lacking any scientific foundation. The strict rationalist taste that characterizes the modern era forces writers to lean on at least a possible reality, diverging from it only minimally and with caution. In order for a supernatural event in a work of literature to be accepted as credible, it has to be sequential, consistent, and, above all, short. The author is required to integrate the supernatural phenomena into the plot as a surprise, and even then, as part of the world of experience. Starting in the eighteenth century, effort was required to convince rational readers to willingly allow themselves to be drawn into the fiction. The renewal of interest in ghost stories, which had largely been neglected since the Middle Ages, can be attributed to the Gothic novel, which enjoyed short-lived popularity (1760-1820).18 These ghost stories, which appeared on the extreme fringes of the dominant Romantic Movement, portray people being haunted and tormented, sometimes to death, by mysterious terrifying entities that are not subject to the laws of nature (life and death or the restrictions of a physical body). However, unlike the literature of the Middle Ages, most Gothic novels aroused synthetic terror, that is to say, fear for the sake of fear intended to freeze the reader‘s blood, virtually to the degree of self-parody. In a Gothic ghost story worthy of its name, the spine-tingling incident was the climax of the story and the point at which it ended. The realistic frame, if it existed at all, served only as a preface or psychological preparation for the impending unbelievable event at the core of the story. This principle is demonstrated by an amiable tale, familiar to all researchers of the genre, entitled “Climax for a Ghost Story”:19 “It’s so scary!” the girl said as she advanced cautiously. “And what a heavy door!” She touched it as she spoke and the door slammed shut. “My God!” the man said, “I don’t think there is a handle inside here. Why did you do it? You’ve locked us both inside.” “Not both of us, only 18 The name was inspired by gloomy Gothic architecture. 19 Alexander Laing, Great Ghost Stories of the World: The Haunted Omnibus (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1941). — 17 —

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one of us,” the girl answered, and before his very eyes she passed directly through the door and disappeared. A small, and rather eccentric, group of ghost story writers emerged who called themselves “the graveyard school of poetry” because of their fondness for telling chilling tales in cemeteries on dark nights. In Jewish culture, however, ghost stories have always been relatively rare. In “Ghost Stories in Medieval Hebrew Folktales” in this volume,20 Ido Peretz bemoans the paucity of such stories in Hebrew literature, as opposed to their narrative richness in European Christian society. He posits that the reason for this lies in the essential gap between Christian society, which sanctifies death, and Jewish society, explaining that “Judaism never introduced the liturgy of death into the religious canon, and kept its cemeteries at a distance from the town in order to prevent a cult of the dead.” In the first half of the nineteenth century, secret passages and trapdoors inspired storytellers such as Edgar Allan Poe to work in a new narrative style known as weird fiction or strange stories. In macabre tales such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat,” Poe, considered the father of this genre, created a literary prototype never before seen. As opposed to ghost stories, which are essentially groundless, the weird does not represent a forced attempt to instill fear, but rather touches on our deepest secret anxieties, the most primeval of which is the fear of death. This style arouses semi-belief in the credibility of the event, thereby shaking and troubling the reader and generating uneasiness. The story aims to engender a genuine sense of distress and shock, and ultimately sufficient confusion so as to undermine the reader’s sense of personal security, sometimes to the verge of paranoia. Weird fiction seeks to prove how limited and restricted our view is, how the little we think we know about our immediate world is mistaken, and perhaps even delusive. Among the stories in this disturbing narrative category are Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla,” which describes the paranoia experienced by a man who is constantly being watched, and Marcel Ayme’s “Le Passe-Muraille,” which relates how one day a person who can pass through walls loses this ability and remains forever imprisoned

20 P. 220. — 18 —

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within a wall.21 The feeling of being cursed and persecuted, the horrifying thought of a living person imprisoned in a wall or a girl buried alive, intensify the reader’s growing sense of dread as the tale unfolds. In contrast to the weird, which was regarded as a marginal literary category and did not initially earn the respect it deserved, the detective story, which appeared at around the same time, enjoyed overwhelming success. In the spirit of the times, the detective story pushed aside the world of the mystical, supernatural, and mysterious, replacing it with the character of the scholarly detective/investigator who provides an acceptable, reasoned explanation of events while tamping his pipe and, in a nonchalant, not to say patronizing, manner, remarks: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”22 At the end of the tale, the detective reveals who “was pulling the strings,” and proves beyond a shadow of doubt that everything in the natural world has a rational explanation. 23 Edgar Allan Poe, who turned to the detective Monsieur Auguste Dupin for assistance in solving strange mysteries in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” understood this principle very well. Nevertheless, the genre of the detective story reached its height at the beginning of the twentieth century with the appearance of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Despite its relative marginality, we cannot dismiss the importance of the weird, as it constitutes an essential stage in the development of another unique narrative style, magical realism, or the surrealist story. This genre was not only warmly received at its inception, but still continues to command great interest and undergo further development. The features of the style took shape in the 1920s in parallel to surrealist art. In both surrealist painting and the literary style that emerged from it, dreamlike elements (disruptions of time and place, skewed proportions) are placed within a realistic, at times hyper-realistic, framework. Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” belong to this category, although the South American author Jorge Luis Borges 21 Guy de Maupassant, Stories, 1887; Marcel Ayme, Short Stories, 1943. 22 This well-known phrase does not appear in any of Conan Doyle’s books, but has come to be identified with his detective as a result of the Sherlock Holmes films. See: http://www.phrases. org.uk/meanings/elementary-my-dear-watson.html 23 Over the past few years, several contemporary Israeli writers have adopted the detective story narrative woven into the fabric of an urban fantasy, which seems to please Israeli readers. See Danielle Gurevitch, “May He Come in Haste: Urban Fantasy in Soothsayer by Asaf Ashery,” in this volume, p. 56. — 19 —

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is usually considered the leading writer of the genre.24 Borges succeeds in making impossible situations, no matter how strange, appear totally plausible. In “Why doesn’t it rain fish?” in this volume,25 Ioram Melcer relates to Borges’s work and describes the underlying power of magical realism as the ability to merge physical reality with psychological reality in a way that intensifies the specific expression in question. Among all the branches of fantasy in Hebrew, magical realism is clearly the most popular, with Israeli artists dealing both with the written word and the performing arts (cinema and theater). In literature, the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer may be classified in part as belonging to this strange genre, as may most of the stories of Etgar Keret, whose unique writing style, like that of Edgar Allan Poe, strikes the readers between the eyes, leaving them stunned and perplexed.26 In “Magical Realism in Israeli Cinema,”27 Shmuel Duvdevani explains the significance of the relative flourishing of this style in contemporary Israeli cinema in movies such as Sh’Chor (Shmuel Hasfari, 1994), The Gospel According to God (Assi Dayan, 2004), and Jellyfish (Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen, 2007). In the opinion of Duvdevani, the popularity of the genre directly results from three situations of difference (or “otherness”) that are perceived to threaten the homogeneous Zionist Israeli identity: the historical (Israel’s wars), the cultural (Ashkenazi versus Mizrachi, ultra-Orthodox versus secular) and the social (displacement and exile).28 That is, Israeli fantasy is possible as long as it has, in Gail Hareven’s words, “a point, that it has some sort of connection to ‘the burning reality of our life,’ that it examines some fractured symbol, or in short, as Gogol put it, that it ‘benefits the country.’”29 Magical realism, it would seem, serves the required purpose of “benefiting the country.” Theater researcher Eitan Bar-Yosef directs specific attention to a recurring motif in contemporary Israeli plays, noting that playwrights and 24 Franz Kafka, Stories and Fragments, 1915; Nikolai Gogol, Petersburg Tales, 1842. 25 P. 190. 26 See Orley Marron in this volume, p. 87. Among Etgar Keret’s books, see The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001); The Nimrod Flipout (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004); Missing Kissinger (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007); and The Girl on the Fridge (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2008). 27 P. 141 in this volume. 28 Magical realism can also be found in the Yiddish theater of the beginning of the twentieth century, See, for example, The Dybbuk (S. Ansky, 1922), and The Golem (H. Leivick, 1925). 29 Gail Hareven, What is Unimaginable?, p. 39 in this volume. — 20 —

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directors such as Hanoch Levin and Shmuel Hasfari deal at length with bereavement, sometimes with chilling, macabre humor.30 According to Bar-Yosef, the surrealistic Israeli reality, in which parents constantly carry on their hunched backs the memories of their children killed in terror attacks or in combat, is to blame for the affinity for this poetic sub-genre. We can only conclude that the need of the readers or spectators to identify with the burden of bereavement has led to the acceptance of this intense literary style here in Israel, of all places.31 4. The last sub-genre in fantasy literature the fantastic. Rather than merely a synonym for “fantasy,” the fantastic, which is currently enjoying great commercial success, is a self-contained narrative genre structure, and in a certain sense is the most significant of the sub-genres of fantasy because it encompasses characteristics of all the others.32 As a literary style, it is based on reality in crisis and deals with the characters’ anxieties about the future. Contrary to the marvelous, in which the hero is required to pass from one world to another, in the fantastic the arena of events is the world as we know it, or more correctly, as we think we know it. The story casts the familiar in a different light, and like a torch revealing what is hidden in dark corners, it draws attention to the dangers lying in wait for us. It aims to dismantle our indifference and warn us that dark forces are lurking under the surface. If we ignore their existence and wrap ourselves in a bogus sense of complacency and security, a bitter end awaits us.33 The fantastic story presents an adventure suffused with extreme violence, and often blatant, not to say pornographic, sexual contents. Monsters and demons heighten the aura of threat, but unlike in the marvelous, where they are a crucial factor in the plot, here they are used as a manipulative technique to intensify the message. Fantastic heroes, generally reasonable, realistic people (not super-heroes), find themselves in complex situations from which they must extricate them30 On magical realism in Israeli theater, see Eitan Bar-Yosef in this volume, p. 112. 31 See, for example, Shmuel Hasfari’s 2003 play, Woman, Husband, Home. 32 On the controversy surrounding the definitions of “fantasy” and “fantastic,” see Clute and Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 335-338. 33 On the fantastic, see: Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction a la Littérature Fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970). — 21 —

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selves. And just as in real life, they are required to deal endlessly with situations that are demanding both physically and mentally, to make painful decisions, and to pay the full price for them. In short, the fantastic describes an experience that might very well be our own. Awareness of this fact arouses in the readers not only profound shock but also anxiety, compounded with a sense of powerlessness to effect change or rectification, however courageous the reader might be. The encounter between the frightening fictitious scenes and the familiar scenes of daily life creates the fantastic’s “terror effect.” By virtue of this juxtaposition, the familiar and the mundane are transformed into something alien, threatening, and dangerous. The fantastic is characterized by one of two narrative styles that describe extreme emotional states, namely terror and horror.34 The dictionary defines “terror” as an extreme state of fear.35 In literary fiction, it is the feeling of shock that the heroes (and the readers along with them) experience when they find themselves in a situation of unbearable tension resulting from mortal danger in the natural world, such as a terror attack, an assassination attempt, a natural disaster, or a disastrous relationship. Although Alfred Hitchcock, the master of the suspense film, did not differentiate between these two narrative styles, all his films portray fantastic terror. He created a diversity of fears and anxieties to suit the characters of his various protagonists. But they all belong to the same model of terror, whether it takes the form of attacking crows (The Birds, 1963), a serial killer (Psycho, 1960), or, to quote Hitchcock himself, “a curious person who gets into someone else’s room and starts searching through his drawers. You see the person whose room it is going up the stairs, and the audience wants to say to the person in the room: ‘Be careful, someone is coming up the stairs’. . . for example, Grace Kelly in Rear Window” (1954).36 In contrast, “horror” is defined as a painful, strong emotion caused by extreme fear, dread, or repugnance, the product of an event that might occur in the most terrifying of nightmares. Fantastic horror fic34 On the distinction between terror and horror, see H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., 1987 [1927]). 35 “An overwhelming impulse of fear; extreme fright or dread,” Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary (New York: Lippincott & Crowell, 1980), 698. 36 Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). Compare with: Noel Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, or Paradox of the Heart (London: Routledge, 2004 [1990]). — 22 —

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tion conjures supernatural powers outside the world of experienced phenomena, such as when the seduction of an innocent girl ends with a bite on her neck by a vampire, or a moment when two terrified hobbits hiding in the thicket are pursued by the Nazgul, its talons extended. As early as 1943, the actor Boris Karloff, whose role as the monster Frankenstein transformed him into a cinema icon, warned against overstepping the boundaries when he cautioned, “Horror carries a connotation of revulsion which has nothing to do with clean terror, and if we are not careful we will end by giving simple terror a bad name.”37 Regrettably, this warning was not heeded, with the horrific depictions given in books and films such as The Ring, Saw, and A Nightmare on Elm Street descending to the basest level. A good artist does not need nauseating anatomical details in order to capture the audience’s attention. On the contrary, the value of a fantastic work is measured by the precision of the dose of “fear” it administers to the reader/viewer. In Lord of the Rings, for example, J.R.R Tolkien, who can be considered a master of the fantastic-horror story, confronts his reader with the recognition that the most frightening beings are not demons, spirits, and dark creatures, but rather humans. The actions of a cruel, power-crazed mortal who has lost his humanity transform him into a destructive monster who deserves to elicit real fear. On the other hand, the affable Frodo, who wants nothing more than a comfortable, quiet life, and to be left alone to deal with his own private matters, does not see himself as having exceptional qualities, and certainly prefers to avoid those “big wars” that he feels do not concern him.38 This may explain why Lord of the Rings has been so well received. Its message is loud and clear: “the big war” is the war for the survival of the human species, and each of us is Frodo Baggins. 5. It behooves us to ask why the tremendous success of fantasy literature shows few signs of abating. Tolkien, who was asked this question many times, claimed that fantasy literature has three major objectives:

37 Boris Karloff, Tales of Terror (Barlow Press, 2008 [1943]), 10. 38 Not coincidentally, the book was written against the thunderous background of war. Although the war in question was World War II, the author’s memories of World War I, in which he fought, were clearly still very strong. — 23 —

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recovery, escape, and consolation.39 First, it serves as a rehabilitative, curative means of mental convalescence. As adults, he explains, daily routine dulls the senses and blinds us to the wonders of the world, the magic and the mystery around us. Because of this, we need “window polishing.” The fantasy world is a means of mental recuperation that enables us to once again perceive the real world clearly. By liberating us from the grayness of our surroundings, fantasy enables us to see things around us glittering and sparkling, as we are meant to see them, or as they seemed to us when we saw them for the first time. Furthermore, fantasy allows us to escape. Although the term “escapism” is frequently used in a derogatory sense, Tolkien does not regard it in this way. For him, escape into fantasy literature does not involve thoughts of fleeing from the terror of death, but the more minor escape of a momentary detachment from the burden of making a living and the ugliness around us that allows us to transport ourselves to a place of freedom of the spirit. In general, Tolkien was disgusted by the industrial world, and manifested a fondness for green, natural, simple surroundings in utter contrast to the technological, gray, ugly Mordor, “with the sophisticated machines.” Part of his antipathy towards Mordor is allied with a traumatic childhood memory that later found expression in his writing. Opposite his house in Birmingham was a forest that was mercilessly cut down and replaced by ugly buildings and factories. As he put it, “Part of the basic illness of those times—which arouses a desire to flee . . . from this period that makes itself miserable—is in making us so aware of the ugliness of our actions and of their latent evil.” The third objective of fantasy that Tolkien suggests is consolation, the human yearning for a “happy ending,” for “miraculous grace [in the Christian sense] . . . the possibility of which is essential to the joy of deliverance . . . giving a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” I would like to add a further aspect of fantasy that may help explain its popularity. As I see it, fantasy is a driving force that changes worlds. In effect, the origins of fantasy lie in people who dreamed of the return 39

J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 69-83. Compare: Richard Purtill, “Why Fantasy?”, in: Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Corporation, 1974), 15-30. — 24 —

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of the dead to the land of the living (the hope for the return of King Arthur), or who invented underwater vessels (Jules Verne), or who envisioned a journey to the moon (Kepler). More than anything else, fantasy would seem to be a way of conveying a conceptual model with a distinct message: those who do not dream do not achieve.

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What Is Reality? Elana Gomel

What can a literary genre tell us about the culture it is embedded in? Or, more to the point, what can the absence of a literary genre tell us about the culture that refuses to accept it? Fantasy is scarce in Israeli literature: that fact is the impetus for the writing this book. But why? Jews have excelled as writers of fantasy and science fiction in other countries, as will be discussed in Part 4, Israel has world-class literature and cinema, and the Israeli public’s appetite for fantasy and science fiction is attested to by a flourishing fandom and such popular events as the annual ICON, the Israeli science fiction and fantasy festival. Recently there have been several new horror and fantasy movies and TV shows locally produced and shown. There are signs of change in academic attitudes as well, and this book represents another such sign. And yet fantasy and science fiction are still regarded as marginal, quirky and “non-literary,” as evidenced by the reluctance of local publishers to employ fantasy and science fiction logos, in opposition to the international practice, which arose as other publishers discovered that such logos all but guaranteed good sales.1 This issue is at the core of many essays in this volume, from Gail Hareven’s personal sketch of the Israeli unwillingness to confront the “unimaginable” to Orley Marron’s careful analysis of the interpenetration of fantasy and realism in Etgar Keret’s work; from Danielle Gurevitch’s broad overview of the abundance of fantasy in the West to Duvdevani’s and Bar-Yosef’s focus on its tender shoots in Israeli theater and cinema. But here I want to take a different tack. Instead of regarding Israeli literature as in some way deficient, I want to analyze the connection between the generic form of fantasy and the cultural form of reality. Perhaps Western-style fantasy cannot thrive in Israel because it does not fit the country’s cultural matrix. If fantasy is rooted in the soil of reality, 1

See Boaz Cohen, “Science Friction,” Haaretz, December 20, 2011. — 26 —

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perhaps Israeli reality is in some way inhospitable to this exotic plant. Working Magic Asked to offer examples of fantasy, most people would probably name something like the Harry Potter books, or Stephen King’s The Shining. Perhaps those with greater affinity for science fiction would bring up Avatar or War of the Worlds. Asked why these books and movies are not realistic, a majority would shrug and point to their deployment of magic, ghosts, and aliens. As we all know, ghost and aliens do not exist, and magic does not work. But do we really know this? If a comprehensive survey across time and space were possible, the answer might be quite different. For millennia, a vast majority of humanity accepted the existence of disembodied spirits. In fact, it was the embodied spirits that were something of a problem. The New Testament asks, “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” (1 Corinthians 6:19). Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) reflects a Victorian worldview, in which ghosts and spirits were as familiar as uncles and aunts: “Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits; this world is round us, for it is everywhere.”2 These words are spoken by Helen, a young girl whose joyous acceptance of early death might strike the contemporary reader as false and melodramatic. And yet, since Helen sincerely believes in “the invisible world,” from her point of view death is merely a fortunate escape from her gloomy boarding school. Jane Eyre is not a fantasy but a classic realistic novel; it is just that the reality it portrays is profoundly different from ours. But who are “we” here? How can I presume to speak for the majority of humanity that, even today, subscribes to Helen’s point of view? I am not here referring to superstitious Third World “natives,” who we love to condescend to. In the United States, 92% of the population believes in God (with 6 in 10 adults having a “personal relationship” with the deity); 74% believe in life after death; and 79% believe that miracles still occur today just as they did in ancient times.3 Belief in aliens is 2 3

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 1981), 101. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the — 27 —

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somewhat less widespread, but nonetheless in one poll almost 80% of respondents said that the US government is hiding some information on the subject, while 50% said that aliens have abducted humans and taken them to their spaceships.4 Membership in fundamentalist denominations is rising precipitously throughout the countries of the world (with the exception of those in Europe); millions are impatiently waiting for the Rapture, in which the faithful will be lifted bodily into the air to escape the End Times; and tens of millions of people are conversing with the dead, photographing UFOs, or poking pins into voodoo dolls. A similar poll in Israel shows similar results (even discounting the 20% of the population that defines itself as ultra-Orthodox and would probably not participate in such a survey). And yet, any literary text that features ghosts, aliens, or magic is automatically relegated to the bookshelf ghetto labeled “Fantasy and Science Fiction,” to be segregated from “serious” literature—the literature that expresses the world-view of a tiny (and shrinking) non-believer segment of the population. Even though Israel stands out among developed countries in its deeply entrenched popular predilection for the literature that is so “realistic” and “about us,” it is hardly unique in appreciating this genre.5 Harry Potter may have outsold War and Peace, but J.K. Rowling’s’ place in the critical pantheon is not thereby ensured. Even theoretically sophisticated studies of fantasy often begin with an apology for tackling the subject: Neil Cornwell, in the preface to his important book on the subject, humorously suggests that it was the hardships of Thatcherite economy that sent him off “fleeing to the realms of escapist literature.” 6 Danielle Gurevitch, in the previous essay, has provided a comprehensive survey of the critical definitions of fantasy and its various sub-genres. But this survey also demonstrates the critical impulse to justify fantasy, as if its very existence were somehow illegitimate. Even J.R.R. Tolkien who, with The Lord of the Rings, has done more to shape contemporary popular culture than any other twentieth-century figure, felt the need to do so. And significantly, in his seminal essay “On Fairy-Stories,” he

4 5 6

World (London: Penguin, 2009), 131. CNN poll, 1997. http://articles.cnn.com/1997-06-15/us/9706_15_ufo.poll_1_ufo-aliens-crashsite?_s=PM:US. Accessed on 10.11.2011. See Gail Hareven, in this volume. Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (New York: Harvester/ Wheatsheaf, 1990), xi. — 28 —

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justified it by appealing to an alternative world-view, one presumably not widely shared by his secular critics: Christianity. The scandal of fantasy lies in the fact that it exposes something problematic about reality itself. And nowhere does this become as clear as in the critical attempts to pinpoint the elusive essence of this annoying genre (or concatenation of genres) by pitting it against “the real.” It turns out that the problem lies not in defining fantasy but in defining what it is not. Many definitions of fantasy rely on a sort of commonsensical empiricism that inevitably results in categorical confusion. The object of their study becomes as wayward as Alice in the Wonderland, either spreading across the entire literary field or shrinking to an infinitesimal portion of it. William Irwin, for example, describes fantasy as “a story based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility.”7 Rosemary Jackson argues that it is “any literature that does not give priority to realistic representation,” forming a category that has to include “myths, legends, folk and fairy tales.” But then she inexplicably narrows her actual study to a handful of Victorian texts.8 Kathryn Hume has an even broader definition: “By fantasy I mean the deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually accepted as real and normal. The works covered range from the trivial escapes of pastoral and adventure stories to the religious visions of Langland and Dante.”9 This is tantamount to offering a critical equivalent of what physicists call TOE—Theory of Everything—but without its scientific rigor.10 The key words in these definitions are “generally” and “usually.” They express a highly subjective point of view: “usually” means what I consider to be usual and normal. Thus, the more theories of fantasy lay a claim to universality, the narrower their scope becomes. “Reality” is what is seen as real in the small world of the Anglo-American academy. But there are whole cultural galaxies beyond this world, and not a single rule of possibility travels across their boundaries. 7

W. R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), x. 8 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 13. 9 Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (London: Methuen, 1984), xii. 10 The Theory of Everything is the colloquial name for a physical theory that would unify quantum mechanics and general relativity. No satisfactory TOE has yet been developed. — 29 —

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Every convention of contemporary fantasy was once upon a time embedded in some culture’s model of reality. Magic was the working equivalent of technology for thousands of years. Rather than dreamlovers for the teenaged fans of “Twilight,” vampires in medieval Europe were a terrible affliction, often devastating entire villages. Zombies were not a blockbuster gimmick but an everyday component of the voodoo cults’ practices in Haiti and the Caribbean. Conversely, what was part of “the game of the impossible” a couple of generations ago is boringly familiar today. A trivial example is technological progress, such as today’s smart-phones, which easily outdo Star Trek communicators. A more interesting situation arises with shifts in the basic understanding of nature: physics now enshrines as real the theory ofquantum entanglement, which demolishes our ordinary ideas about space as effectively as do Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast and Kafka’s Castle. Fantasy and realism constantly pass into each other as reality shifts and fluctuates. But this passage is not automatic: it requires re-contextualizing familiar texts. There is a thriving pop-culture cottage industry that rewrites the religious visions of yesteryear—the epic of Gilgamesh, Greek mythology, and even Dante’s Divine Comedy—as horror novels or fantasy blockbusters. It is as if such visions can become fantasy only when clearly and unambiguously situated against the implicit secular, scientific background of contemporary Western civilization. We need this background to enjoy Inferno as a zombie fantasy rather than shrinking away from its alien realism. 11 A similar process of re-contextualization occurs when works of literature cross cultural and national boundaries. The Japanese novel The Ring by Koji Suzuki has been read as science fiction in its native land and as supernatural horror in the West. The distinction is clearly seen in the Japanese and American movies based on it. The former preserves the rational framework of the novel, which appears strange and even mystical to the Western eyes; the latter discards it altogether in favor of ghosts and demonic possession. So fantasy has to be defined in relative, not absolute, terms. The “deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually accepted as real and 11 The Divine Comedy has been rewritten as fantasy/horror several times, most notably by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle as Inferno (New York: Pocket Books, 1976) and by Kim Paffenroth as Valley of the Dead: The Truth Behind Dante’s Inferno (Cargo Cult Press, 2010). — 30 —

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normal” (Hume) has to be set against some definition of what “real and normal” is. I Am Real. Are You? In their classic 1971 book Social Construction of Reality, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann argued that our understanding of reality is culturally contingent. The book has ushered in a storm of controversy, which it is not my purpose here to revisit. 12 It is enough to point out that constructivism is especially problematic in the realm of natural sciences, as it is hard to see nature as so accommodating that it allows both astronomy and astrology to be true (though some theoreticians, such as Paul Feyerabend, have subscribed to this view). But while controversial philosophically, constructivism is self-evidently true in relation to literature, since every fictional text constructs its own world. It is up to the author to decide whether this world will or will not conform to the rules of the extra-textual reality. Hence the rise of fictional-world theory of literature. Fictional-world theory offers a way to analyze both text and context in terms of the relationship between different ontologies. 13 A realistic text reflects the author’s cultural reality; a fantastic text violates it. As Eric Rabkin shows, the fantastic text is characterized by a “180-degree reversal” of the “ground rules” of realistic representation. 14 The fantastic fictional world is deliberately subversive of what the author and his/ her readers accept as reality. Fictional-world theory avoids the pitfalls of trying to define fantasy independently of its cultural matrix. Such attempts, as I have argued above, result in a sort of critical imperialism, labeling as fantasy every major literary text written before the eighteenth century. Fictionalworld theory, on the other hand, is heuristically precise and yet philosophically modest: instead of comparing apples (literary texts) to oranges (the material world), it juggles two varieties of the same cultural 12 A fair summary of it can be found in Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 13 See Lubomir Dolezel, Hetercosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 14 Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 21. — 31 —

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fruit. The comparison is between two constructs: the world of the text and the cultural universe of the author. Fictional-world theory has been successfully applied to fantasy by such critics as Darko Suvin, Carl Malmgren, Brian McHale, and many others. It offers an analytically rigorous framework for generic analysis, since “any study attempting to establish generic distinctions between fictional forms necessarily relies on the comparison between the fictional world and the ‘real’ world,” the world of the author’s consensus reality.”15 The quotation marks here do not indicate any supposedly postmodern disbelief in the existence of the real world but rather emphasize the fact that fantasy is a result of the modal relation of possibility inscribed within the text itself. As Thomas Pavel puts it: “Realism . . . is based upon the notion of possibility . . . with respect to the actual world. Different kinds of realism vary, of course, according to the description of the actual world and to the definition of the relation R that connects this world to its possible alternatives. The actual world, as well as the relation of accessibility, are different for the authors of medieval miracle plays compared to the author of a modern mystery novel.”16 According to Pavel, the generic spectrum of literature can be understood in terms of the modal relation of possibility between the author’s consensus reality and the fictional world of the text. Depending on this relation, fictional worlds may be possible (realism), impossible (fantasy), or improbable (science fiction). But whether as a reflection, inversion, or extension, the literary text is inextricably connected to what Pavel calls “the book about the world”: the author’s consensus reality. 17 If the “book about the world” is written in an unfamiliar language, its opposite will be equally illegible. If the conditions of possibility in the author’s consensus reality differ from ours, the “game of the impossible” will also be played by different rules. A ghost story written in sixteenth-century England, when most people fervently believed in apparitions, does not belong to the same genre as a ghost story written today. It is enough to compare the rather nonchalant reactions of the Hamlet guards to the ghost that apppears in front of them with the horror evoked by the mere hint of the supernatural in Stephen King’s 15 Carl Malmgren, Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1. 16 Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 46-47. 17 Ibid., 50. — 32 —

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blockbusters, or in such movies as Paranormal Activity, to realize fantasy’s dependence on the cultural consensus of its time and place. And so fantasy can become a mirror of this consensus, illuminating what is through its representation of what is not. In one of his most beautiful stories, Jorge Luis Borges describes the imaginary Book of Sand: an infinite volume containing all the knowledge in the world. The “book about the world” is like a specific culture’s Book of Sand: it is a metaphor for the knowledge and belief that we imbibe from a multitude of sources that shape our view of the world and our place in it. The Book of Sand contains all the literary texts that can be potentially written within the culture, but it houses them in different folders depending on whether they conform to the rules of possibility (realism) or break them (fantasy). In different cultures, these folders are of different thicknesses. The contemporary Anglo-American Book of Sand is bursting with uncountable fantasy trilogies replete with brave hobbits, magic rings, and miraculous swords; it can hardly contain all the zombie mayhem and vampire romance; and even good old science fiction is still holding its own. The Israeli Book of Sand, on the other hand, stuffed with realistic descriptions of Tel-Aviv angst, kibbutz disillusionment, military drudgery, and provincial poverty, barely allows for a modest appendix with some children’s fantasy and urban magic, mostly known only to a coterie of dedicated fans. We can bemoan this fact, and I definitely do, but perhaps we have been looking for fantasy in wrong places. What if instead of rooting in this thin fantasy folder in search of some forgotten masterpiece, we took a second look at so-called Israeli realism and see it for what it is: the reflection of a different genre of reality. The Israeli Book of Stones Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902), a literary utopia that consolidated the Zionist project, has cast a phantasmagoric light upon the subsequent development of Israeli statehood. Whatever successes the yishuv and then the state itself have chalked up, they have always fallen short of the utopian dream. This is not because of the specifics of Herzl’s visions, many of which are irrelevant or outdated, but because of the very genre through which the new Israeli entity first defined itself. Utopia, etymologically both a “good place” and a “no place,” represents an unreachable — 33 —

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horizon of expectations, a vision of perfection against which the muddle of actual history inevitably appears as a mere transitional and fleeting stage. Twentieth-century utopian ideologies, communism, Nazism, and fascism, all failed because of the unbridgeable gap between the promised and, not even the achieved, but the achievable (and here I disregard the question of whether the ultimate goal was worth striving for). Zionism has fared better than its twentieth-century rivals: Israel is a social, political, and cultural reality, and a fairly successful one as nationstates go. But precisely because of this, it is haunted by the sense of its own fragility and even illegitimacy. No matter how impressive its historical achievements, they are measured against the impossible standard of what Walter Benjamin called the “messianic time”: the vision of a decisive rupture that will bring about a total transformation of both society and the individual. No matter how tragic its political flaws already are, they are further exaggerated into signs of an approaching apocalypse, an eschatological nightmare of End Times that will wipe away the unacceptable reality. And it is unacceptable precisely because it is the reality. The fate of Tel-Aviv, the Israeli “white city,” epitomizes the foundational role of utopia in the Zionist enterprise. The name itself (meaning Hill of Spring) appears in Altneuland and is borrowed from the Bible, thus expressing the way in which the Zionist utopia attempted to reconnect the mythical past and the prophetic future, skipping over the drudgery of everyday history. When the city was founded in 1908, its architecture was meant to embody the utopian aspirations of Zionism. Tel-Aviv was designed in Bauhaus style, and still remains the largest in concentration of Bauhaus buildings in the world. And Bauhaus, part of the Modernist architectural revolution of the early twentieth century, was a utopian movement. It was a radical attempt to remake the urban space and urban subject. Le Corbusier, the architect, and Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, dreamed of the crystal “city of tomorrow” populated by healthy and enlightened citizenry, freed from the shackles of inequality and ignorance. Architecture was “a question of morality.” 18 This world-wide architectural revolution that swept away the cumbersome Victorian metropolis resonated well with the Zionist vision of “the new man in the new land.” Today, Tel-Aviv is a thriving global city, architecturally heteroge18 Le Corbusier, Toward a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1987), 6. — 34 —

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neous, technologically savvy, and economically prosperous, so distinct from the rest of Israel that its inhabitants are often accused of living in the “Tel-Aviv bubble.” And yet, this most materialistic of Israeli spaces is also its most phantasmagoric, haunted by the sense of its own transience and incompleteness. Joachim Schlor eloquently describes the city’s apprehension of its own impossibility: “As far as Tel-Aviv is concerned the pioneering days are over; normalization has come, in the form of the city, but its image is still unreal, a stage-set, a novel, a symphony. . . . Tel Aviv is open to change; it is ‘still only the draft for a city.’”19 This “unreality” in the city’s self-image comes from the disparity between its utopian genesis and its actual existence; a disparity that is irreducible by social improvement or urban renewal because history and utopia are always at odds. So it is not surprising that the emergence of magical realism and urban fantasy in Israel centers on Tel-Aviv, as in the recent works by Orly Castel-Bloom, Etgar Keret, Nir Baram and others. If “the book of the world” constitutes the reality of a given culture, it, like any book, must have a genre. So what is the genre of Israel itself? Defined by its failure as a utopia and its (relative and precarious) success as a nation-state, Israel exists in the same generic continuum as other post-apocalyptic and post-utopian texts. A popular sub-genre of science fiction, this continuum includes such classics as John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, Leigh Bracket’s The Long Tomorrow, and Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz. As opposed to frank dystopias, such as Orwell’s 1984, the post-utopia is not about the horrors of a historical rupture but rather about the sadness of historical continuity. In 1984 utopia—embodied by the ideology of Ingsoc, English Socialism—triumphs, and the result is a perpetual nightmare. In post-utopia (which is always simultaneously post-apocalypse), the transition to a new stage has failed. Instead of ushering in a perfect millennium, the revolutionary upheaval has created a modest, though livable, civilization, forever haunted by the ghosts of lost greatness and squandered opportunity. The world of post-utopia is fragile and precarious, always comparing itself not to what was or what will be, but to what might have been. If Israeli reality itself is cast in the generic mold of post-utopia, fantasy in the Western sense will indeed find it hard to gain a foothold here. For in post-utopia, the impossible constitutes an integral part of the real 19 Joachim Schlor, Tel Aviv (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 79. — 35 —

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itself and thus provides no basis for an alternative. Herzl’s proverbial saying, “If you will it, it is no dream,” has become an unofficial motto of Zionism, but this motto is cast in the subjunctive mood, collapsing the distinction between reality (the establishment of the state) and fantasy (fairy tale) through an act of desire. Israeli reality is hollowed out and infested by shadows of the abandoned collective dreams. Measured against its post-utopian “book of the world,” the entire generic spectrum of Israeli literature shifts away from its Anglo-American counterpart. Magic realism does not require the qualifier “magic,” as it truthfully reflects the fusion of dream and action as the very foundation of the Zionist state. Horror merely attests to the persistence of trauma and violence in everyday life, and therefore an Israeli Stephen King would have no need for supernatural monsters. Epic fantasy in the mold of Tolkien requires no mythical Middle-earth because the land of Israel itself overlays the myth of the Bible upon the actuality of shopping malls and busy highways. And science fiction, which needs the blank page of the future to write its narratives of unlimited technological progress, is discomfited by the tortuous temporality of Zionism, in which the ideal future lies in the past. Perhaps this is why psychological realism has remained the dominant genre of Israeli literature. The stunning popularity of Amos Oz, David Grossman, A. B. Yehoshua, and others attests not only to their considerable literary talents but also to the hunger of the Israeli public for the ordinary and the commonplace. The middle-brow psychological novel becomes an existential fairy tale because it wistfully invokes a stable reality that that does not exist. The “thick” texture of everyday life that constituted the foundation of classic literary realism in nineteenth-th century Europe is lacking in Israel because the continuity of history that deposits collective memory in layers of progressive sediment has been repeatedly interrupted by catastrophes. The Israeli “book of the world” is rattling with the rocks of its incessant wars and the shards of its broken dreams. In such a consensus reality, one longs for the quotidian and escapes into boredom. Realism is the Israeli fantasy. Words, Worlds, and Weapons The ontological approach to literature and culture has implications far beyond critical theory. In an era of globalization, the question of how — 36 —

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(and by whom) “the book of the world” is written becomes of paramount theoretical and political importance, and the number of such books is growing. Instead of unifying humanity, the technologies of mass communication have only exacerbated its divisions. The Internet has become the “echo chamber” of self-reinforcing ideologies and beliefs. Humanity is increasingly splintered into cultural and epistemological communities which no longer correspond to national boundaries but rather coalesce on the basis of shared religions, ideologies, and beliefs. If we have “epistemological dissidents” who defiantly insist that ghost (or aliens, or vampires, or UFOs, or guardian angels, or living messiahs) are real, then reality is much more like political consensus than it is like the Platonic absolute truth. Reality becomes a matter of majority and minority, coalition-building and negotiation. And though we do not think of political power as policing the borderland between fantasy and realism, in fact it does precisely that. The seventeenth-century wars of religion, in which thousands were killed over such arcane theological matters as transubstantiation, were at bottom about possibility: is it possible for a piece of bread literally to become living flesh? The unbridgeable gap between the secular and the ultra-Orthodox in Israel is not merely political but ontological. The same is largely true of the Arab and Russian communities. Their realities are profoundly different, and yet they all have to share the same small piece of real estate. It used to be believed that people might disagree on opinions, but facts are facts. This is no longer the case. The raging debates in the USA over climate change, evolution theory, and macro-economics are not about what is desirable but about what is real. The climate-change skeptics or the proponents of the so-called Intelligent Design theory (a religious alternative to evolution) do not dispute particular scientific explanations but rather challenge the validity of science itself. They now demand equal time and consideration for their own narratives. Wars are being waged not over consensus politics but over consensus reality. This has been viewed by some proponents of postmodernism and multiculturalism as liberation from the tyranny of the “truth.” As Zygmunt Baumel puts it, “emancipation . . . entails the acceptance that there are other places and other times that may be with equal justification (or equal absence of good reason) preferred by members of other societies, and that however different they are, the choices cannot be disputed by reference to anything more solid and binding than preference and the — 37 —

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determination to stick to the preferred.” 20 This was written in 1991, but since then, the experience of multicultural societies (Israel included) has demonstrated that such an acceptance is hard to sustain. Without a shared epistemological and ontological framework, society is likely to turn into a battlefield of vicious inter-communal violence rather than a garden of peaceful coexistence. And indeed, while we may easily accept that other people’s tastes differ from our own, we can hardly compromise on the nature of reality itself. The distinction between real and unreal is the bedrock of mental and social health. We can enjoy The Lord of the Rings because we know that it is fantasy, and the “willing suspension of disbelief” guarantees a pleasurable vacation in the land of the impossible. But if a friend insists that he has a hobbit in his bedroom, we are likely to inquire whether he has forgotten to take his medication. Nevertheless, millions of evangelical Christians in the USA unquestioningly believe that a series of fantasy novels, Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, describes the actual course of future events, so much so that this fantasy “highly structures readers’ understanding of the world they live in.” 21 In other words, they regard it as realistic. Similarly, the graphic novels produced by the ultraOrthodox community in Israel may strike the secular reader as fantastic, but it is not clear that their intended readers regard them as such. The seemingly academic question of whether Left Behind or ultraOrthodox graphic novels are fantastic or realistic becomes central to the political and cultural struggle between fundamentalism and secular democracy. Even for families and individuals, this question has to be resolved one way or another. Contra Baumel, no one on the safe side of schizophrenia can hold two mutually exclusive world models in their minds. But literary fantasy can still point to a place in which reality is not one; in which the game of the impossible is played not with sticks and stones and bullets but with words and images; and in which many different books of the world are able to share the same library shelf. Perhaps, after all, what is—no matter how we conceive of it—is less important than what is not. 20 Zygmunt Baumel, “Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence,” in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (New York: SUNY Press, 1993), 13. 21 Amy Frykholm, Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 106. — 38 —

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What is Unimaginable? Gail Hareven

“Lo ya’aleh al ha-da’at,” “It’s unimaginable,” is ranked very high on the list of common Hebrew phrases I find curious or amusing. It can mean different things in different contexts, but in essence it is an expression of revulsion in response to some event of which the speaker is made aware. While it sometimes refers to an action that may happen in the future, in many cases the event has already occurred. Thus, for example, sentences such as “It’s unimaginable that a pupil would get up and throw a chair at a teacher,” or “It’s unimaginable that the army would leave a wounded soldier behind,” are condemnations of acts that have already been performed. On the other hand, “It’s unimaginable that the Iranians would bomb us” relates to a potential scenario that the speaker can clearly envision. At times, the scenario is so clear in the speaker’s mind that he goes on to describe in detail the action that he supposedly is incapable of imagining, as in “If they drop a bomb on us, the very same day the air force will wipe Iran off the face of the earth, and that goes for Ahmadinejad’s children, too. Not even a chicken will be able to survive there for the next hundred years.” In terms of its function as a magic incantation, “it’s unimaginable” is a first cousin of “don’t think about polar bears,” or more precisely, “don’t think about polar bears ripping into your sleeping bag, taking a bite out of your toes, and then aiming their bloody reeking maws at your belly.” It is also a relative of the tunes whistled in the dark, particularly the happy ones convincing you that you’re not afraid. Along with its uses as a condemnation of an action that has already happened and a magic spell to prevent one that might, “it’s unimaginable” is also a means of striking out at someone with whom you disagree, as in the statement, “It’s unimaginable that Israel should sit back and do nothing while Iran arms itself,” which is utterly distinct from “It’s unimaginable that they would bomb us.” The former is meant to deny the legitimacy of an opinion by marking it as a preposterous idea, that is, as “unthinkable,” whereas the latter is aimed at quieting — 39 —

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inner doubt and keeping the polar bears at bay. What does it say about a society when it invents this kind of idiom and makes such diverse use of it? It seems more than obvious that it is a society coping with considerable threat and attempting to erect a fence of normalcy around itself, to create a jurisdictional district ruled by normative logic, in which there is no point in occupying oneself with scenarios that are supposedly unlikely, in which fear-provoking actions are called “preposterous,” and from which dreams and anxieties—deriving from events in reality—are excluded. It is a territory unprecedented in human history, a place where people get up in the morning and know exactly what today will bring and what tomorrow will bring. Citizens of the twenty-first century live in a world that was “beyond imagination” a hundred years ago. That cliché, like “it’s unimaginable,” is fallacious; “beyond imagination” cannot possibly take into account the imagination of every person on the planet. The Internet, the mapping of the human genome, the flight of spaceships to Mars, the granting of the right to vote to women, or, from a very different perspective, the destruction of the Twin Towers and the murder of nearly five thousand people with the help of a few box cutters, are all the work of human beings who imagined things that were ostensibly “beyond imagination.” They envisioned these acts in their mind’s eyes, and when they envisaged them, they did not rush to close their noses with a clothespin and snort “Well, that’s just unimaginable.” Instead, they stuck with their visions and nurtured them. Indeed, after the fact they are known as “visionaries.” And since it has been shown that some visions can be very financially rewarding, it has become fashionable for investors and company executives to charge their subordinates with the daunting task of coming up with a “creative vision.” These visions are summoned at scheduled times in the conference halls of air-conditioned hotels. Those who commission them can readily distinguish between ideas that are “suitable for this seminar” and those whose very suggestion in such a forum is “unimaginable.” The products of the collective, artificial imagination are recorded in an approved format, and the investors and executives sleep very well under the illusion that they will not only be able to trap the wild forces of the ideas “beyond imagination,” but will actually succeed in taming them for their own purposes. That was not how the work of fantasy entitled Altneuland, Herzl’s visionary novel of a Jewish homeland, was written. — 40 —

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Of all the “unimaginable” events of the twentieth century, the rebirth of Hebrew culture is particularly amazing. In order to grasp just how amazing it is, it is worth looking under “Hebrew” in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1911. Written by Theodor Nöldeke, a researcher of Semitic languages, it states that the dream of some Zionists that Hebrew will become a living language spoken widely in Palestine is even less feasible than their vision of reestablishing a Jewish empire. Nöldeke the scholar was a realistic man; it is just that reality does not always obey the laws of realism. Contemporary Hebrew authors produce works in a society that was no more than a figment of the imagination less than a hundred years ago. Reality has taken a form that realistic people believed was preposterous, unimaginable. We live in a world “beyond imagination,” surrounded by magical devices whose technology most of us can not fathom, and uphold values and norms that are different from those accepted throughout the majority of human history. And we do all this in a country whose very existence was “preposterous” just a short time ago. One might expect the literature produced against this backdrop to evidence an especially wild imagination. It would be reasonable to assume that authors writing in this context would speak of inconceivable things. It might be reasonable, but it is not accurate. On the contrary, readers of modern Hebrew literature can select from a menu that was, and still is, largely skewed toward painstaking realism. Until recent years, we enjoyed a wealth of books written in the style of social realism, psychological realism, or psychosocial realism, that told stories of the sort that could have happened to our next-door neighbor, with very few authors venturing into the realms of fantasy. Several years ago a friend of mine, a writer who had immigrated from Russia, asked me a question I found difficult to answer. In fact, it may not have been a question at all, but rather an accusation. “Tell me,” she said, “Why is Hebrew literature so lacking in freedom?” My friend can be annoying. That is one of the things I like about her. Without thinking, I deflected her awkward interrogation with a question of my own: “Why is it that Russia, a nation that never tasted freedom, gave birth to such extravagant and uninhibited literature?” It is hard to explain why artists create what they do. Most of the explanations I have heard tend to be—and there is no polite way to say this—inane. My friend had to agree with me, and as a result my question nipped — 41 —

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hers in the bud and put an end to the discussion. We never really talked it through, but from time to time, when she finishes another contemporary Hebrew novel, she calls me and complains about the odor of socialist realism that rises from nearly every book she reads. She was born and raised in the “birthplace of socialism.” I was not. Our olfactory senses are different, and sometimes I tell her she is exaggerating. Israeli publishers, I reassure her time and again, do not choose which books to publish by criteria of style or ideology. Ideological editing, of the type Berl Katznelson performed on David Meletz’s wonderful book Ma’agalot from 1945, is a rarity. To the best of my knowledge, it was a rarity even in the 1940s. Moreover, Meletz, a member of Kibbutz Ein Harod, most probably collaborated willingly with the editor of the socialist-oriented Histadrut Publishing House, since it is very likely, to say the least, that there were other options open to such a talented author. There is no ideological screening or editing in Israel. That is simply a fact. Artists are not sent to the gulag for not toeing the stylistic line, and great works of art are not discarded or secreted away in dark cellars or attics. In our small, cramped country, I tell my friend, we do not even have cellars or attics. What we have here are communal bomb shelters and tiny crawl spaces with nothing mysterious about them. But publishing houses are just the first gate through which a book has to pass on its way to popularity with the readers. The other gates—and here my friend might be right—are guarded by commissars who might not always be fully aware that they are serving a political ideology. After Ma’agalot came out, Meletz received a letter from one of his readers, a student at a teachers’ college, who demanded that he explain why he chose the characters in the book and not others, and why he decided to describe kibbutz life in such a subjective manner. This sort of question/complaint is still raised around here, and is actually quite common in Israeli book reviews. Critics tend to judge books by how close they are to social and political reality as the reviewer sees it, how faithfully they represent “us” and the “other,” and what “voice” they give to one sector of the population or another, an approach based on the premise that each character is a “type,” the representative or spokesperson of a group. In general, books are too often judged by their assessed contribution/damage to the march of Israeli society toward a brighter horizon. Thus, for example, a substantial portion of the discourse on David Grossman’s To the End of the Land was devoted to the questions of “What — 42 —

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kind of society does the book depict?” and, “Is this the true face of Israeli society?” Similarly, Sara Shilo’s No Gnomes Will Appear was highly acclaimed for its use of a pseudo-spoken language that “gave voice to the silenced populace of the periphery.” Further evidence of this trend can be seen in several of the reviews of Zeruya Shalev’s Thera, which took issue with what the critics considered the protagonist’s anachronistic attitude toward the patriarchal institution of marriage. And the back cover of a new Israeli novel I received this morning informs the reader that the story “uncompromisingly examines Israeli solidarity, with its fractured symbols,” a sentence more suited to a sociology paper than a literary blurb. Not long ago, in a review of Irit Linor’s new translation of Jane Austen’s nineteenth century novel Pride and Prejudice, the critic described the book as “a conservative heterosexual love story,” implying that it represented the non-progressive elements in society. One could easily find additional examples of this approach to literary criticism in the weekly book section of any Israeli newspaper. Readers imbued with political ideologies do not generally have much of a sense of humor, and are largely put off by carnivalesque freedom. They tend to turn up their noses at any deviation in the direction of the “unimaginable.” If you were to show them a pygmy giraffe of the sort that appears in Orly Castel-Bloom’s Taking the Trend, they would most likely say, “There’s no such animal,” or, “That’s not believable,” and would undoubtedly wonder what message the creature is meant to convey. It was to readers and critics of this type that Gogol was referring in the final section of “The Nose,” one of the most brilliant concluding passages I know: To think of such an affair happening in this our vast empire’s northern capital! Yet general opinion decided that the affair had about it much of the improbable. Leaving out of the question the nose’s strange unnatural removal and its subsequent appearance as a State Councilor. . . . Oh, I cannot understand these points—absolutely I cannot. And the strangest, most unintelligible fact of all is that authors actually can select such occurrences for their subject! I confess this too to pass my comprehension, to—But no; I will say just that I do not understand it. In the first place, a course of the sort never benefits — 43 —

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the country. And in the second place—in the second place, a course of the sort never benefits anything at all. I cannot divine the use of it. Although literature with a blatant political message is not common here, it is reasonable to assume that authors, who are regularly asked to sign petitions written in the first person plural, find it hard to rid themselves of the collective consciousness and sense of mission when they sit down at their desks to write. Israeli reality is loud and insistent. Every news broadcast is a rallying call. And in view of the profusion of urgent rallying calls, immersing yourself in alternate realities is often considered self-indulgent—and in any case, the ambient noise makes it impossible. Fantasizing is fine, and no one has ever said, or would say, otherwise. But you should be very sure that the fantasy has a point, that it has some sort of connection to “the burning reality of our life,” that it examines some fractured symbol, or in short, as Gogol put it, that it “benefits the country.” The Harry Potter books have no benefit whatsoever. Nor does Moby Dick, or Gogol’s writings, despite the frequent attempts to depict them as “social criticism.” In contrast, Jeremiah’s Inn by Benjamin Tammuz and The Road to Ein Harod by Amos Keinan are easily identifiable as works intended from the start to influence social reality, and are consequently tied to that reality by bonds of commitment. Luigi Pirandello was relating to a similar war-torn reality when he wrote: I hung a little sign on the door of my study that said: NOTICE Starting today and until further notice, no interviews will be held with characters who have submitted an application (along with the necessary documents) to appear in a novel or story, with no exception for gender, social class, age, or profession.1

1

Luigi Pirandello, “Conversations with My Characters” (1915). Quoted in Jennifer Lorch, Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author. Plays in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). — 44 —

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Fictional characters who were unaware of “the maelstrom of appalling horrors” pervading Europe at that time, and did not understand “the meaning of the words ‘in these tumultuous times,’” ignored the notice, however, and continued to show up tenaciously on the writer’s doorstep. It seems likely that in the small hours of the night they also knocked on the doors of numerous Hebrew authors. But Israelis’ willingness to open the door to weird strangers and unusual occurrences that benefit nothing but the spirit of whimsy in a story is minimal. “Serious” authors insist that they give no thought whatsoever to the readers when they write. Since I tend to say the same thing about myself, I have no doubt that this statement is sincere and true. True, but not the whole truth. Authors do not write for themselves or, as they say in Hebrew, for the “drawer.” No act of writing, not even a personal journal, is utterly devoid of consciousness of the eye of the external reader. Hebrew readers are definitely open to fantasies imported from abroad, but they appear to have different expectations from “our own writers.” The most common expectation was expressed by President Shimon Peres in his opening speech at the International Writers Festival in Mishkanot Sha’ananim in May 2008. The president complimented the participants, casting them in the role of contemporary prophets who hold a mirror up to society and admonish the nation. Thus, he did more than merely imply that he was offering them a contract: you lambast us for our social and political sins, and we will reward you richly. Perhaps it is no accident that this contract brings to mind the one employers offer their staff when they direct them to come up with a “vision” for the company. I will ignore the question of whether writers as a group are endowed with more political wisdom and moral integrity than, say, bus drivers. If you look at the political views of some of the finest of the twentiethcentury authors, you cannot help but feel that this may not be the case. Nevertheless, the president used the word “prophets.” But he certainly does not expect “our own writers” to produce wild visions as astounding and disturbing as those of Ezekiel. “Every one had four faces apiece, and every one four wings” (Ez. 10:21)? I’m sorry, but what does that mean? We don’t get the message. Coherent prophecies of recrimination? Yes, please. We like to be rebuked, and we especially like to picture ourselves as people of conscience who want to be rebuked. But fantasies and — 45 —

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things that are “preposterous” and “unimaginable”? That is something else altogether. In my opinion, Kafka was one of the greatest prophets of all time. And yet it is utterly clear to me that if we had a Hebrew Kafka, his work would not be acceptable under the terms of the contract with the writer endorsed not only by the president, but by a large part of the reading public as well. In fact, it is more than likely that a local Kafka would be dubbed “irrelevant.” Thus, for example, many people are more comfortable with the popular literary genre, “let’s peer into the bedrooms of the ultra-Orthodox”—a later version of socialist realism—than they are with Taking the Trend, which has “vacuums” and secret units known as the “Black Brigades,” or with the nightmarish journey in Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City, in which the mother, the narrator, inoculates her infant son with toxins and carves a map of his homeland on his back. If we are looking for the properties of prophecy, we can find them in Castel-Bloom’s bold, horrifying, and comical forays into the realms of Hebrew language, in which she picks apart the consciousness of its speakers. That is where I see those properties, and not in “amazingly realistic” works like S. Yizhar’s Khirbat Khizeh or Eli Amir’s Scapegoat, although they are both very well written. If I have given the impression that I do not appreciate Hebrew literature, I would like to clarify: in my opinion, modern Hebrew literature is nothing short of a miracle, and comprises quite a few books I hold very dear. There is no doubt in my mind that the body of modern Hebrew prose contains excellent works of literature. That conviction notwithstanding, both as a reader and an author, I sometimes feel like a tiny parcel of land surrounded by enemies. A recent conversation among my students made me realize why. I heard one young man recommend to his classmates a book that had been on the bestseller list for several weeks. “You’ve got to read it,” he said, explaining the reason for his enthusiasm: “It’s so realistic. It’s all about us and it just makes you feel good.” I kept out of the conversation, but had I decided to intervene, I would undoubtedly have said I am not very fond of books that make me feel good—not in the usual sense of “good,” at least—that I prefer books that disturb me and cause me to encourage my friends to read them as soon as possible so we can talk about them. I would also have said that “realistic” books that are “all about us” bore me, and I am uncomfortable when a reader says something like, “I felt like you were writing about — 46 —

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me,” or, “You expressed exactly what I feel.” I am going to put aside the question of who the “we” is who is hiding smugly behind the “us” in my student’s comment, and I do not wish to waste time debating whether a good work of literature can really be about a collective. Let’s just assume it can. After all, I can’t think of a single character created by Yizhar Smilansky (S. Yizhar) who had an individualistic spirit. Smilansky depicted a certain collective consciousness, and he was an accomplished writer. So it is patently possible. In fact, it is not only possible, but in a sense it could be argued that every meaningful work of literature speaks in one way or another about “us.” The Odyssey is about us, “Oedipus Rex” is about us, “Metamorphosis” is about us, and so are the flying island of the intellectuals in Gulliver’s Travels, the unidentifiable human-like creatures in The Other Side of Darkness, the subjugated woman in The Handmaid’s Tale, the children who abandon their parents and relocate to another planet in Childhood’s End, the constructors of new worlds in The Cyberiad who grapple with the question of divine justice, and many more. They are all “us” and all about “us,” because good fantasy literature is by no means a form of escapism, but quite the opposite. Good fantasy literature makes us go back and reexamine ourselves and our world in light of the fictional world it depicts, generating a type of self-examination that does not simply rely on the readers’ identifying fully with the characters. In terms of soul-searching, such stories have a significant advantage over those that are well-polished mirrors. The crystal-clear mirror shows us what we already know about ourselves. Fantasy changes the rules and proportions, and by doing so it can reveal things we never imagined. It is understandable why a society whose mantra is “it’s unimaginable” would not tend to create or embrace this kind of literature. Since it is virtually a cliché to say that modern Hebrew literature is largely realistic, I think it is worth trying to be a bit more precise and ask ourselves what type of realism it evidences. As I have said, we do not have children with telepathic abilities, or adolescents floating on a raft with wild tigers, or eight-hundred-year-old teachers who terrorize their students. You will not find that sort of thing here. Fine. Instead, we have “reality.” But what sort of “reality” is it? If thus far I have committed the sin of generalizing, from this point on I will commit the sin of generalizing even more broadly. I apologize in — 47 —

———————————————————— Gail Hareven ————————————————————

advance to all those works of literature that will be sucked into these generalizations undeservedly. Every discussion of “literature,” as opposed to the consideration of a particular work, has its blind spots, and I do not know of any way to relate to a question as wide-reaching as the one I have raised here without crass generalizations. So here goes. I would venture to say that the “reality” portrayed in the works of Israeli-born writers is different from any reality I am familiar with, different not because of what is present in it, but because of what is absent from it. In our mainstream textual reality there are no grand villains, for instance, nor are there grand heroes. When I say “heroes,” I am not referring to quasi-saints like John Irving’s Owen Meany, a character who moves with the utmost caution on the very edge of realism. But what about a character like Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules, who is simply a good person—exceptionally good? In our non-literary reality there have been security officers who threw themselves on a suicide bomber. But to the best of my knowledge, our literary reality does not contain acts of self-sacrifice. No religious woman in a book throws herself on a disarmed terrorist in order to protect him from a lynching. I am not asking, Heaven forbid, for literary documentation of these acts of heroism, but for fictional characters and fictional deeds of a similar moral weight. It is hard to describe true heroism nowadays. And this does not just apply to Hebrew authors. In other literary arenas as well, it is rare to find heroes like Achilles, Prometheus, or Sisyphus. In contemporary dialects, “hero” is merely a synonym for “protagonist,” and a statement like “the hero is a coward and scoundrel” does not cause today’s reader to as much as raise an eyebrow. Apparently, no one still expects a “hero” to do anything heroic. So let’s forget about magnificent exploits of the Promethean variety. But what about exemplary deeds that are less spectacular than stealing fire, such as the action of the cook at a school on Hanivi’im St. in Jerusalem? Immediately after a terror attack at the school, she noticed that the suicide bomber’s head was lying in the yard and quickly picked it up and put it in a garbage can to keep the children from seeing it. Not only a cook of that sort, but even the sight of a severed head in a schoolyard, seem to be absent from our literature, although I do remember one severed head. It appears in Helen on the Roof by Yoram Yovell. But that head was pulled out of a reeking toilet in a detention camp for Lebanese — 48 —

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prisoners-of-war, a site of atrocities where somehow it is not “unimaginable” to find a head. In Lebanon, yes; in a Jerusalem schoolyard, no. Although Israeli reality gives rise to occurrences that are “preposterous” or “unimaginable,” native-born authors tend to create a reality in which such things do not happen. The daily papers periodically print small items about kidney donors, families who adopt disabled children, or people who devote their lives to caring for the terminally ill. But we seem to have a greater chance of encountering such individuals in a doctor’s waiting room than in a work of literature. Having mentioned the press, it is only right that we give some thought to the villains, as well as the heroes. Without going into the question of whether Voldemort or Satan actually exists, or whether evil powers really move among us, I think we can all agree that there are some very depraved people in the world, like those who torture the elderly, molest children, or commit genocide. For our purposes, it makes no difference if they are aliens, mutants, or suffer from deprivation or mental illness. What does matter is that whereas such people appear daily in news items, they very rarely show up in a novel, or more precisely in a book labeled “literature” rather than “entertainment.” There are depraved villains in thrillers and fantasies, but depraved villains also ride our buses, and as far as I know, they are absent from the mainstream works of native-born Israeli authors. And what about medium-grade villains? Not the ones who slaughter populations, but the ones who are merely corrupt? Corruption is a topic of considerable concern to the Israeli public, and a fascinating subject in and of itself. Assuming that no one is born corrupt—and the assumption that they are is inexpedient in literary terms because it is just not interesting—what are the mental and social mechanisms that made them that way? What stages does a character go through on their way to becoming corrupt? How do they explain the process to themselves? Corruption of all sorts plays an important role in thrillers and mysteries. It features prominently in newspaper headlines. But it is almost nowhere to be found in the “realism” of modern Hebrew literature. Most—although naturally not all—Israeli writers focus on the family, and even when they venture outside it, they tend to take baby steps, weaving plots that move securely between the local shop and the military base, between “a psychological problem” and a “dilemma” for which — 49 —

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there is, in principle, a solution. In fact, given a competent psychologist, an able commander, or a wise prime minister, most of the human predicaments in our literature can, in principle be solved by some sort of “social change.” Melodramatic elements are also rare. There are no wild dogs running around that attack a woman and spark a religious awakening, no violent criminals who break into the home of a senior neurologist, no passenger planes that crash into the ocean killing half a family, and no stuffed dogs that float on the water. Israeli ships similarly seem to be safe means of transportation. Our ships do not sink, and consequently there are no adolescents who find themselves on rafts with wild tigers. I do not know of a single Israeli writer who would dare to involve his characters in a traffic accident, followed by a robbery, rape, fire, and landslide, as T.C. Boyle did in The Tortilla Curtain, which, by the way, is a highly political novel. We might be able to abide a robbery and rape, which are “social crimes,” but a fire and a landslide too? Not here. The incorporation of melodramatic events into the plot line is apparently considered a “cheap” device unsuited to psychological realism. The result is a “reality” that is so controlled it is virtually sterile, a “reality” in which bridges never collapse, so no one is ever thrown into a polluted river and infected by deadly bacteria. Such a conjunction of disasters is impossible. In our literature there is no INS Dakar and no Lockerbie, not even a loose nail that sets off a whole chain of events. Not one. On the other hand, no one wins the lottery. What exists is a reality in which there is a clear connection between cause and effect, and therefore, in principle at least, it can be controlled. But this “reality” which we find in literature, this dietetic reality for people suffering from ulcers, in no way resembles the reality I know. The reality I know is full of melodramatic events, amazing coincidences, and “fantastic” occurrences of the sort that the other people in the doctor’s waiting room or your taxi driver are eager to tell you about. Nineteenthcentury English literature is also full of fantastic occurrences. We have to ask ourselves whether Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte, who allowed these incidents into their characters’ lives, were not more “realistic” than most of our authors. The Unbelievable Simply Is is the title of a very clever book of poetry by Israel Eliraz. And indeed, the unbelievable simply is, but until ten or twenty years ago, it was extremely hard to find it in our mainstream literature. — 50 —

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To return to “The Nose,” which to my mind is one of the greatest short stories ever written, it contains the following description of a fantastic event: “Farce really does occur in this world, and, sometimes, farce altogether without an element of probability. Thus, the nose which lately had gone about as a State Councilor . . . suddenly reoccupied its proper place (between the two cheeks of Major Kovalev) as though nothing at all had happened. The date was 7 April.” And then we come to these marvelous concluding sentences: “Yet, even considering these things, even conceding this, that, and the other (for where are not incongruities found at times?) there may have, after all, been something in the affair. For no matter what folk say to the contrary, such affairs do happen in this world—rarely of course, yet none the less really.” Gogol openly scoffs at those of his readers who expect literature to meticulously reflect reality. On the parodically rational pretext that this sort of thing happens in the world, “rarely of course, yet none the less really,” he invites the reader to think about other “farces” that “occur in this world,” and about our misguided confidence that we understand the way reality works. “Where are not incongruities found at times?” They are found in Gogol. And indeed, things “without an element of probability” happen everywhere. Even in Israel. But not in our mainstream literature. We live in one of the most interesting countries in the world. At least fifty percent of the passengers on any bus have a life story that is simply “unimaginable”: the little old lady sitting in front of you is a hero of the Soviet Union who served as a medic in the Battle of Stalingrad; the elderly gentleman beside her survived both Hitler and Stalin due to a series of improbable coincidences; the girl standing next to the driver lost her whole family on the trek from Ethiopia; the driver himself once won the lottery, and then a month after he had spent the last of his winnings was mistakenly diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a social reality like this, is it any wonder that you can often hear people sigh, “life is stranger than fiction” or reality is “beyond imagination”? And reality really is beyond imagination when, for whatever reason, the powers of the imagination are limited. What could account for the dearth of fantasy in modern Hebrew literature? And why has it at last begun to show itself in the last ten or twenty years? The fading influence of socialist realism can’t be the only reason. Throughout history, there have been writers who swam against stronger and more daunting tides than that. — 51 —

———————————————————— Gail Hareven ————————————————————

I said earlier that there is no serious explanation for why authors write what they do, and there is something very infuriating about the question of why a certain author does not produce a different type of work. My late mother used to call such a comment a “Why doesn’t Mona Lisa have legs?” question. In most cases, it is not a question at all, but a barb with a question mark tacked on. The Mona Lisa is what it is, and that is how we should relate to it. And yet, by voicing the criticism/question of the lack of fantasy in our literature, I seem to be joining the ranks of the student who demanded that David Meletz explain why he chose certain characters and not others for his book and described kibbutz life one way and not another. And I most definitely would not like to be caught in the company of that young man. Let me make it clear that my grievances are not addressed to a particular author or book per se, and I repeat that in my opinion the body of realistic Hebrew prose contains some excellent works of literature. But although I acknowledge that freely, I cannot avoid wondering about what I regard as an intriguing cultural phenomenon. No matter how much I think about it, the only answer I can find is that the Zionist program demanded all the power of imagination of those who took part in it, and the consuming passion invested in the ongoing work of “realizing the vision” ate away at any other fantasies. In 1892, Elhanan Levinsky published a Hebrew novel entitled A Trip to the Land of Israel in the 800th year of the Sixth Millennium. “My country and people!” he wrote. “I am yours and my dreams are yours.” And then, in a seeming contradiction of his own words, he went on: “As you will see, dear readers, my stories. . . . do not go beyond the limits of reality and the possible.” In other words, this is a dream, but it is a “realistic” dream, set not in a fantasy world but in the Land of Israel. Ten years later, Herzl published the more familiar work of fantasy, Altneuland, with its famous epigraph “If you will, it is no dream.” This, too, is a product of the imagination meant to be turned into reality. I have no idea how much time and effort went into dreaming up these fantasies and putting them down in writing, but I do know that a hundred years later people are still toiling over them and suffering because of them. It is reasonable to assume that people who know the heavy toll a fairy tale can exact and how demanding a fantasy can be will approach the power of the imagination with extreme caution. It is not logical to expect them to be in a hurry to invent further fairy tales or release fan— 52 —

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tasies into the world with carefree abandon. Herzl fantasized about full equality for the Arab citizens of Israel, and that has not yet been achieved. Nor has free medical care, which both authors imagined. According to Levinsky, by 2040 we are meant to invent “electric ships” and “flying towers” on which to cross the ocean, and to spread Jewish values the world over. So now we have to concentrate on our mission and store away any other fantasy in the crawl space. There is a time for everything, and now is not the time to look, people feel, for a Hebrew equivalent of the baby born with the tail of an iguana. Any fantasy writer knows how much work it takes to build a fantasy world with every detail in place, and how hard it is to create a fictional reality whose functioning and setting are realistic. Levinsky and Herzl imagined different worlds, and the picture becomes even more complex if we consider that they were not the only ones who constructed “realistic fantasies.” The fathers of Zionism in general had wild imaginations that demanded heavy lifting: their work days did not end at six p.m., and they did not take time out from “framing the vision” to try out the special at the cafeteria. These people laid the foundations for fantasy worlds, and their heirs were charged not only with choosing among them, but also with continuing to design the thousands of details they omitted. Did I say thousands? Hundreds of thousands of details of the fantasy. And it is those elements, each of which is a world in itself, that ultimately create the story. An army, mother and baby clinics, a police force, special education classes, theaters, kibbutzim, hospices, newspapers, schools—creating each component required a huge practical effort. But even before they were actually built, and certainly during their construction, there was a need to adopt the mindset whereby “the unbelievable simply is,” and remain firm in the belief that a Hebrew army or cinema or school “does not go beyond the limits of reality and the possible.” Moreover, people did not simply step into the roles that the fathers of Zionism wrote for them. They developed the storyline further. They wrote roles for themselves and took the plot in additional “unimaginable” directions. And so here we find release not in fantasies, but in “building the nation,” without even realizing that the whole project is steeped in fantasy. In order to devote themselves to a task that seems unrealistic, people must believe that they themselves are realistic. They must assume that — 53 —

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they understand reality and how it operates, that they know the cause and the effect and what impact any action they take will have. And they must take great pains not to think about polar bears and to steer clear of eccentrics and deluded visionaries. If there is any truth in what I say, it can explain not only the unrealistic realism that dominates our literature, but also our writers’ preference for relatively small stories in which conventional logic can predict where things are moving, as well as the popular mantra “it’s unimaginable.” “It’s unimaginable” is aimed at keeping the monsters of the imagination at bay and shoring up a fictitious world in which everything can be comprehended, diagnosed, and controlled. Philip Roth, one of the great Jewish writers, fantasized a reality in which Lindbergh was elected president of the United States and signed a pact with Hitler. I do not believe any Israeli Jewish writers would allow themselves to make the mistake of imagining such a horrific fantasy. Our history is quite enough for us, and even that history is hard to offer up as a credible story. Nor would any Israeli writers create the character of a “good girl” who for no apparent reason becomes a terrorist, as Roth did so brilliantly in another novel. We contend with terror on a regular basis. It would appear that in order to continue to endure in the face of this threat, we have to hold on to the belief that there are comprehensible reasons for every act of terror, and understanding them will ultimately lead to a solution. In other words, if we can just “be realistic” and “remain rational,” things will turn out well in the end. In view of everything I have said, how can we explain the changes we are seeing in Hebrew literature? How did we suddenly get pygmy giraffes, a woman transformed into a tiger, and clones of an abusive father? Where did the Bedouin internet wizards Walid and Hamid come from, and how can they be so audacious as to tip their hats to Khalil and Aziz from My Michael as they save the wheat crop with the help of telepathy? How did the Israeli police get a unit specializing in the occult arts? Since when have we permitted women to bury themselves in a bunker and then rise up and envision the Apocalypse? And how did a whale appear out of the blue, and how come he has a lawyer? Undisguised fantasy is a novelty in modern Hebrew literature, if we discount the Horror Series published from the early 1970s to the early ‘80s, which was actually an adaptation of a second-rate German — 54 —

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series. Moreover, along with the appearance of the first explicit works of fantasy we are increasingly seeing signs of fantasy elements in books whose covers do not scream “fantasy,” as well as other indications of the awakening of the power of the imagination in mainstream Hebrew literature. My friend, the immigrant author, would probably describe this as a process of liberation. So how can we explain it? The obvious answer seems to demand the use of terms such as “post-Zionism,” “the Zionist uber-narrative,” “the collapse of the great narratives,” “the decline of the great ideologies,” “globalization,” “collectivism,” “individualism,” “New Age,” “social cohesion,” “social hegemony,” “subversive texts,” and “the privatization of ideas.” In fact, recourse to these terms is so obvious that I see no reason to incorporate them into coherent sentences. I will take it for granted that readers who have gotten this far can do it just as well themselves, and might even be able to stick in a few unexpected words like “the National Water Carrier,” “hoopoe,” or “steam iron.” After all is said and done, what do we really know? Maybe someone slipped imaginationenhancing drugs into our drinking water? Then we have to ask who. The hoopoe is an odd bird, or to put it bluntly, a shifty creature, and no one seems to be able to explain why it was selected as our national bird. And there are plenty of witnesses who will testify that they saw hoopoes near the reservoirs. It is only the steam iron that I am not sure what to do with, but I am still working on it. Who knows? One day we may discover that the solution to the riddle has something to do with steam irons.

— 55 —

——————————————————— Danielle Gurevitch ———————————————————

May He Come in Haste: Urban Fantasy in Soothsayer by Asaf Ashery Danielle Gurevitch

I declare with perfect faith  that prayer preceded God.  Prayer created God.  God created human beings,  human beings create prayers  that create the God that creates human beings.1 1. In the collective memory of the Jewish people, the Prophet Elijah is a revered mystical figure. A compassionate man, he appears magically to help those in need and rescues people from the jaws of death, each time adopting a different guise so as to hide his identity. To the more fortunate, he appears in dreams, which is a sign of good luck to the dreamer. Indeed, a Jew being saved from calamity or death by a mysterious visitor who shows up seemingly by chance, disguised as an impoverished old man dressed in tatters, is a central motif of Jewish legends and folktales. Elijah is also said to be the harbinger of the Messiah, and is therefore a supreme spiritual authority about whom there has always been a broad national consensus. In Asaf Ashery’s fantasy novel Soothsayer (2008), however, where Elijah is the focus of an intense experience, he is conceived of in a manner very different from his characterization in Jewish tradition, raising serious questions about leaders and leadership, faith, and the reason for the presence of evil in the world. While he retains his façade as an elderly man who appears out of nowhere on a chariot of fire, that is the extent of his similarity to the venerated figure of popular lore. The prophet reveals himself to the 1

Yehuda Amichai, “Gods Change, Prayers Are Here to Stay,” in Open Closed Open, trans. by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000). — 56 —

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reader as a character out of a horrific vision, a hellish nightmare, who lands his fiery chariot near a well-guarded building on Passover eve, “a figure in black, with flowing hair, holding a gray wooden staff cut from an almond tree. . . . His eyes gleamed and he seemed to be humming a marching song in a thick dark raspy voice” (Soothsayer, 14).2 Ashery’s Elijah brutally murders nine security guards, slicing one of them in two with a single swing of a knife and tearing out another’s heart with his bare hands. He then addresses the residents of the fortified house, all of whom turn out to be Nephilim (ancient fallen angels with divine powers), and declares solemnly that the time has come: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a utter destruction” (ibid.). The author thereby strips the national messianic ideal of its familiar symbolic meaning and topples the prophet from his mythical perch. Divesting a saintly figure of divine foundations is not an uncommon device in Western literature, with books like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989) and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2006) achieving huge popularity, but it is new to Israeli prose.3 Ashery’s version of Elijah leads to the inevitable conclusion that yearning for the coming of the prophet who will herald the Redemption is no more than a naïve sentimentalism that serves to compensate for subconscious desires. It is a false belief that has grown to 2

3

The quotations from the novel are taken from Asaf Ashery, Soothsayer (Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 2008), and were translated from the Hebrew by Marganit Weinberger-Rotman. The page numbers refer to the Hebrew edition. In contrast, in Israeli poetry saintly figures are often given lowly human form and divested of their religious holiness. Consider this poem in Open Closed Open (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998) by Yehuda Amichai: “Two lovers lie together bound in a binding/ And they are happy. They do not think about a knife or fire/ She thinks about the ram and he about the angel. Another version: He is the ram and she is the thicket/ He will die and she will continue to grow wild/ Another version: They got up and disappeared among the partygoers.” Two further examples can be found in the Ha-panim hayu hafshata collection of Yona Wallach’s poems published on the fifteenth anniversary of her death: “Come lie with me like God/ only in spirit/ Answer me as well as you can/ Be forever unattainable/ Leave me alone in my suffering/ I shall be in deep water/ I shall never reach the shore”; “When angels are exhausted/ We fold their wings for them / Gently, gently/ we prepare the whip/ When angels begin / we cut at them/ until the ground is covered in dew./ I am the holy virgin/ Can you hear me/ You suffer no more/ You do not suffer any more/ Over,” Yona Wallach and Aviva Uri, The Faces became Abstract (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001). The poetry in this note was translated from the Hebrew by Sara Kitai. — 57 —

——————————————————— Danielle Gurevitch ———————————————————

mythological proportions, a mere illusion masking the search for the meaning of suffering and the purpose of life. But Soothsayer stands out not only for how far it takes the anti-conservative manifesto; even as a suspense novel it is highly unusual in contemporary Israeli literature due to the incorporation of elements borrowed from Jewish mythology. Very little high-quality original fantasy for adults based on Jewish heritage has been written in Hebrew since its establishment in 1948.4 Among the few Jewish fantasy novels that have appeared recently is the futuristic story Nuntia [Kfor] (2010) by Shimon Adaf, which combines the apocalypse, the Jewish faith, and a mystery that needs solving. Other fantasy novels include The Book of Creation [Yetzer lev haadama] (2007) by Sarah (Sahara) Blau, The Seventh Poet (2008) by Yossi Yzraely, and The King Has No Land (2005) by Hagai Dagan. None of these books ever achieved its rightful place on the bestseller list, and most remain unknown to the reading public, or are considered to be only for a niche audience. On the surface, it seems surprising that the people of the Bible do not regularly take advantage of their historical and mythological sources to create convincing fantasies in which the sea parts, the sun stands still over Gibeon, and the herald undergoes a spiritual epiphany in the belly of a whale. Nevertheless, in recent years there have been encouraging signs that post-modern fantasy detective stories are making their way into mainstream Israeli literature. Some conduct only a veiled dialogue with Jewish fantasy. Yoav Blum’s outstanding book Mosaic of Events (Mitzrafei Ha-mikrim) (2011) is an excellent example of the new trend. Although the writer avoids employing the conventional terminology of God and angels, he makes use of these non-human presences in order to provoke a fascinating discussion of determinism, Divine Providence, and human liberties.5 The final example I will offer in this context is Lilith Tale [Midrash Lilit] by Yehuda Igos (2012), whose main character is Lilith, the mythological first wife of Adam, who vanishes, shows up in Hell, where she instigates a rebellion against the dominion of Heaven. Why has it been so difficult for fantasy in general, and Jewish fantasy 4 5

See appendix for a list of all adult fantasy and science fiction books published in Israel since 1948. The idea underlying Blum’s novel also appears in the film The Adjustment Bureau (2011), written and directed by George Nolfi. — 58 —

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in particular, to establish itself in the mainstream of Israeli literature? Why are the people of the Bible so reluctant to embrace modern original fantasy that draws on its ancient historical legacy? Is it, in fact, possible to speak of a genre that incorporates elements of magic, mysticism, and messianism without characterizing it as religious, sectarian, or traditional? Below I seek to tackle these questions, and through them to draw a portrait of contemporary Israel. With the aid of a critical reading of Asaf Ashery’s Soothsayer, I shall attempt to demonstrate that Jewish fantasy touches sensitive nerves in Israeli society, and its relegation to the margins of local literature may be attributed to a variety of historical, political, social, and cultural factors. I have chosen to focus on Soothsayer, published in 2008, because of its exceptional status. Innovative and bold, this superb novel was printed in several editions and won critical acclaim, proving that the genre of Jewish fantasy can indeed make it into the mainstream. What it takes is a shrewd, and even more importantly empathetic rather than patronizing, combination of the familiar and rational on the one hand, and the speculative and magical on the other. Ashery succeeds in maintaining a balance between the two worlds in a way that is acceptable to a broad Israeli audience. 2. Soothsayer, the third book by author and screenwriter Asaf Asheri, is an exciting, fast-paced novel that revolves around characters and events taken from Jewish mythology.6 It describes ruthless murders committed by the Prophet Elijah on Passover eve, which are followed by the inexplicable serial abductions of seven women and girls: a professor of Jewish philosophy, an actress, a lawyer, a doula, a police woman, the 14-year-old daughter of a judge, and a seven-year-old child star.7 There appears to be no motive linking these events. The case is handed over to Mazy Simantov, head of the Soothsayer unit, which is charged with solving crimes for which there is no reasonable explanation. A small marginalized squad within the police force, the unit consists of only three 6 7

I use “mythology” here not only in the sense of the story of Creation, gods, and larger-than-life heroes, but also in the sense of a foundation story that shapes a culture and identity. It is not an accident that the ages of the victims are all multiples of seven, from 7 to 49. — 59 —

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members: Elisha Itzkovitz, an ultra-Orthodox master of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah specializing in gematria and letter combinations; Larissa, a cartomancer from the Ukraine whose brother, a security guard, is the first murder victim; and Izzy, whose field is crystals and auras. Mazy’s professional work on the case is intertwined with her personal life, a complex story in and of itself. In the course of her duties, she is forced to collaborate with Yariv Biton, a former lover who still has feelings for her. Her marriage to Gaby, a surgical doctor, is strained, her two-yearold daughter Noga has yet to start talking, and her domineering mother Rachel reads her mind without her permission and, in Mazy’s opinion, plays mind games with her. The motive and inevitable connection between the abductions and the murders gradually come to light. As Mazy and her team learn, it all began with the divine injunction: “Angels don’t belong on this earth. It’s time to restore the order of creation” (19). Following this command, Elijah instigates a war to the death between the Nephilim and the daughters of Lilith, those women and young girls who fight (whether in actuality or potentially) for their freedom, or as Mazy puts it, “women hurtling toward their destiny” (317). The genre structure of the novel is particularly interesting. Under the thin veil of a familiar, reassuring detective story whose end is virtually predictable, Ashery inserts threads of urban dystopia that weave a tissue of doubt into faith and draw a map of the deepest anxieties of the Jewish people in their homeland. There are two detectives in Soothsayer, a “standard” detective who operates within the realm of the possible, and misinterprets the clues (Yariv),8 and a woman who is underappreciated, but thanks to her ability to recognize subtle clues at the crime scene ultimately solves the case, deciphers the mystery, and uncovers the driving force behind the crimes (Mazy). But whereas in the classic formula of the detective story the solution offers a scientific, rational, reasonable explanation of events from beginning to end, in Soothsayer the solution reveals an apocalyptic supernatural motive with strong Kabbalistic/Gothic foundations. While a twist in the plot is typical of the genre of crime fiction, here it brings the story in line with the principles of urban fantasy, a relatively new sub-genre of fantasy literature which belongs to the category of contemporary or instauration fantasy. 8 In Theory of Prose (1925), Viktor Shklovsky presents the nine stages in the schema of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The fourth stage is “Watson misinterprets [the] clues.” — 60 —

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Unlike traditional fantasy, in which the protagonists cross over into secondary worlds, in stories of this type the events or feats of detection take place in a familiar urban setting.9 In other words, the protagonists undergo “unimaginable” adventures in the real world.10 Ashery sets his novel in a large city in the center of Israel, and occasionally refers to a specific place as the site of an event or encounter, including the Ajami market in Jaffa and the cities of Raanana, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Yet aside from the sporadic mention of actual place names, the geographical descriptions in the book paint generic pictures of a typical Israeli landscape. Thus, for example, when searching for the home of one of the winged-nephilim, Barak Almadon, Mazy says to herself: “The address was in an area that looked as if it had been deliberately designed to have no distinctive character; an architectural conglomeration of cottages, terraced houses, condos, and single-family homes. None of them left any impression or possessed any individual traits” (138). Ashery chooses, deliberately, to give the concept of “city” a vague, colorless interpretation, making it “any city,” or as the theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin states in respect to Greek romance, “What happens in Babylon could just as well happen in Egypt or Byzantium and vice versa.”11 The plot of Soothsayer could just as well unfold in any Israeli city with a police station, buildings, streets, a tree-lined boulevard, a night club, and a theater. The same applies to the realistic occurrences in the book. Although specific to Israel, they could happen to any family in any city. But while the geographical space may not be distinctly Israeli, the timeline of the plot creates a hermeneutic frame that distills the historical Jewish memory of thousands of years into a single explosive and meaningful period in the Jewish calendar. The series of incidents begins on Passover eve and ends shortly before the festival of Shavuot. The elapsing of physical time, which constitutes the chapter titles, places the events within the framework of the counting of the Omer, a specific period in the Hebrew calendar, with Jews commanded in the Bible (Lev. 23) to count the fifty days between Passover and Shavuot. In ancient times, this was the height of the ag9 On the Unimaginable, see Gail Hareven in this volume. 10 Merriam-Webster defines “instauration” as “restoration after decay, lapse, or dilapidation.” 11 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of time and chronotope in the novel,” in M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 100. — 61 —

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ricultural season, which concluded on Shavuot when the farmers would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to bring an offering of first fruits to the Temple.12 Passover is a major holiday for the whole of the Israeli population (both religious and secular), and is seen to bear a significant national message, as it tells the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and thereby symbolizes the independence of the Jewish people, that is, their physical freedom. Shavuot, which occurs when the counting of the Omer is concluded seven weeks after the departure from Egypt, marks the giving of the Torah to the Israelites on Mount Sinai. This event, too, has great symbolic significance, as it signals the start of the Israelites’ consolidation as a nation, the highest goal of the Jewish people throughout the generations, and thus symbolizes spiritual freedom. The arc of the nation’s attainment of physical freedom followed by spiritual freedom is also the arc of the personal journey made in Soothsayer by the protagonist, Mazy Simantov. 3. Mazy Simantov, whose family name is the title of the book in Hebrew, is the only daughter of a single mother of North African descent who deals in witchcraft and magic. She has never met her father, a hermitic monk named Israel. Without question, telling the story through the eyes of a Sephardic Jewish woman is an interesting choice for a male Ashkenazi writer. As a police detective, Mazy fights for official recognition of her competence and professionalism. Her private life as daughter, mother, and wife is also fraught with tension and conflict. Her situation demands that she maneuver like a tightrope walker on a thin wire, moving one step at a time as she battles for the right to live her own life and not what is expected of her. Even her name, Mazal Simantov, is a testament to the fate intended for her: mazal means “luck” in Hebrew, and simantov means “good omen,” an ironic choice given that she considers her life a succession of misfortunes, Sisyphean struggles, and missed opportunities.13 This perception becomes even stronger over the course of the 12 The ritual is spelled out in “Commentary on the Blessings and Prayers,” commonly known as Sefer Abudirham, by the fourteenth-century rabbinical writer David ben Josef ben David Abudirham. 13 The traditional saying “there is no luck to Israel” (taken from the Talmudic debate on astrology, Babylonian Talmud, Shabbath 156a) is given an ironic twist in the choice of the names of the characters in the book, as there is no Israel (her father) to Mazal (Luck) Simantov either. — 62 —

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story as one by one she seemingly loses the three sources of stability in anyone’s life: police (the rule of law), family (mother), and faith. The book describes the sorry state of the Israeli police force, whose officers reveal themselves to be far from a reliable source of support. From the standpoint of the heroine, even the best and brightest of them, the team leaders and chief inspectors, suffer from two serious deficiencies: non-original thinking and male chauvinism. The official force is slowmoving and ungainly, and its members appear to be incapable of ridding themselves of conservative, dogmatic patterns of reasoning. Although an unconventional unit was formed to deal with cases requiring creative thinking and alternative solutions, its huge potential is never tapped because of the sluggish minds of the higher-ups. “The ‘Soothsayer’ closes cases,” explains the veteran officer Moscovitch, “often cases that would never be solved otherwise. As far as I’m concerned, New Age, Old Age, it’s all the same to me. I don’t care what you call it, as long as it works” (45). No thought whatsoever is given to the reasons for the success of the bizarre unit, and in fact, the precinct “did its best to marginalize its members” (47). At one point in the story, Chief Goldberg (known as “Goldfinger”) tells the team: “I am putting an end to this investigation. If you want to talk to this witness again, check with me first. And I suggest you keep your witches away from him” (149). After the final battle, a pretext is found to disband the unit entirely. Mazy is a detective of a different sort. Her keen senses, unusual genetic make-up, and personal qualities such as professionalism, determination, and self-discipline enable her to peel through the outer layers and reach the core of the problem. Little by little, often while fighting inner battles between rationality and intuition, she realizes that in this campaign, which is claiming many victims, she must stand firm and operate almost totally on her own. Despite her enforced exclusion in the organization, she calls on her characteristic tenacity and manages to put together the pieces of the puzzle and wage a courageous war to eliminate the threat. Her willingness to learn and change direction in midstream, her persistence and ability to endure hostility, and of course the strong character that allows her to work in isolation, are distracting to the “misguided detective” Yariv Biton, who cannot perceive the whole picture of events without her. Nevertheless, he remains convinced that the problem is a localized one and believes that they are closing in on the force behind the murders and abductions. But “it was clear to Mazy — 63 —

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that he did not see the urgency; he was a conventional detective and he had a lead. To him, it was only a matter of time; the hunt had just begun. Not so from her perspective” (164). Chief-Inspector Biton, head of the Special Investigation Team, does not grasp that the logic governing this case is different from anything he has ever previously encountered in his professional life. When they reach a dead end, Mazy sets out in search of an alternative solution while Yariv continues to hold fast to the reality he is familiar with, which is tainted by stigmas and prejudices. Confronted with a witness who holds the key to solving the mystery, he is distracted by his male ego, which dulls his senses and clouds his vision. When he first meets the Nephil, Barak Almadon, who stands before him in the guise of an attractive mortal, the image of the ideal man, we are told that “as soon as he laid eyes on him, Yariv decided he couldn’t stand him. He ascribed it to a detective’s gut feeling. The fact that the stranger was taller, stronger and handsomer did not help, either. He was the type Yariv saw at fitness centers, admiring their own reflection in the mirror in the weight-lifting hall” (139). The plot of Soothsayer is driven by power struggles, competitiveness, and personal rivalries, and they are present not only in the tense relations between Mazy and Yariv, but also in every exchange the protagonist conducts, every event she is involved in, and even in her inner world. They can be found in the contrast between Yariv’s complacency and the sense of urgency which haunts Mazy (the existential fear that the sands of time are running down), and indeed in the widening gap in her professional life in general between the official, conservative, approach of the police force and the alternative investigation methods of the Soothsayer unit. In her personal life as well, all her relationships are marked by unsettling tension and power struggles, including her interactions with her mother and the world she represents, with her mother-in-law, who believes her Moroccan daughter-in-law is not good enough for her son the doctor (“her wonderful successful son married the daughter of a Sephardic witch,” 21), and with her husband and his strict devotion to science as opposed to the superstitions she continues to believe in (“There were clashes over ancient and modern beliefs, deep rifts and contradictions reflecting the differences between a Sephardic policewoman and a Western surgeon, between a progressive woman and a conservative man,” 24). She even wages an exhausting campaign against her two-year-old daughter, who stubbornly refuses to talk. — 64 —

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While Mazy’s personal ambition makes her determined to win each of the battles she is fighting, she remains utterly oblivious to her central role in the greater war. She is always tired, yearning constantly for a few hours of sleep in which to gather her strength. But the relentless, draining battles and the professional isolation forced upon her are an integral part of the arduous journey of self-realization she must undergo. In the course of that journey she loses her treasured sources of security and protection one after the other, only to win them back when she is able to free herself from the shackles that inhibit her growth and prevent her from achieving the total freedom she longs for. Her most obvious source of security, and the first to be called into question, is her mother. Rachel Simantov eschews the pattern of the doting mother who attends every parent-teacher conference, despite young Mazy’s wishing she would be more involved. To an outside observer, Rachel appears to be the embodiment of the stereotypical primitive Sephardic woman, a Moroccan who deals in black magic and reads coffee grounds. In fact, however, she is the exact opposite. A single mother, she is an independent woman who leads an uninhibited post-modernist life, free of the restraints of “what will people say” and the bonds of religion and tradition. She forbids her daughter to call her “Mom,” and when Mazy asks her to explain the unusual nature of their family unit she answers sardonically that “she had been born out of wedlock to an illegitimate mother” (21). There is nothing normative, expected, or standard in the way she runs her life, a fact demonstrated by the manner in which she raises her only daughter. Mazy reveals that she grew up feeling like a guest in her childhood home. A few days after she left home at the age of 20, she discovered that all her things had been packed in plastic bags waiting to be collected, and the house had been renovated, leaving no sign that she had ever lived there: “Mazy had been swept out like sand” (22).14 But although Mazy may be unaware of it, Rachel is the Great Mother, omniscient and protective, the mentor who trained her and leads her to victory in the Great War. “Who are you trying to con? You’re not even a Lilith’s Daughter,” a Naphil taunts Rachel in the midst of the battle. Staring deep into his arrogant eyes, she replies: “‘I am something 14 In a private conversation, Asaf Ashery noted that this sentence is a paraphrase in reverse of God’s promise to Abraham: “That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies” (Gen. 22:17). — 65 —

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much worse, Armaros.’ The Naphil’s face registered his astonishment at the pronouncement of his name” (241). Names and their precise pronunciations are a key element in the plot. Knowing the names of the Nephilim both brings them to life and causes their deaths. The source of Lilith’s daughters’ power over the Nephilim lay in their knowledge of the Nephilim’s true names, but this contract was broken when the names were forgotten, paving the way for the Nephilim’s rebellion. The names of the characters in the book are no less significant: unlucky Mazal, and Yariv, her rival, which is the literal meaning of the Hebrew name). The contention between them requires her to be focused and incisive every time they come together. It is logical to assume that her mother’s name, Rachel, was no random choice either. Rachel is one of the four matriarchs in Jewish tradition (along with Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Sarah), the spiritual equivalents of the goddesses of the earth and fertility, Matrona or the White Goddess, in ancient pagan cultures.15 Like them, Rachel Simantov bears cosmic responsibility for the future of the human species, or the feminine side of the species to be precise, and she has the wisdom needed to fulfill this mission. Israel, her daughter’s father, calls her Salsibylla, the name of the goddess of wisdom in a story by S.Y. Agnon.16 The name may be an allusion to the sibyls, the female oracles in Greek mythology who possessed the powers of prophecy or divination. When reading tarot cards, Larissa overturns the High Priestess, representing Rachel, and refers to the double protection Rachel and Israel grant their daughter, Mazy: “This is women’s power, their wisdom, but there are also horns, which is something masculine, aggressive. It surrounds her but she doesn’t mind, she’s too sure of herself” (107). Mazy is well aware that her mother is different from other women, and says so in so many words, describing her as the “Great Mother . . . the sun around which revolved all heathens and idolaters” (22). Like the chief goddesses of mythology, Rachel sees all and can even see into the future. “How much do you know?” the leader of Lilith’s Daughters, the Athaliah, asks her, and she replies unhesitatingly:,“I know who, and I know where and when” (171). With her keen perception, Rachel realizes long before 15 Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Straus and Giroux, [1961] 1966). 16 In the story “Nights,” based on myths, the poet Hemdat addresses the symbol of wisdom as “Salsibylla”; in S.Y. Agnon, At the Handles of the Lock: Love Stories (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998), 305315 [Hebrew]. — 66 —

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anyone else that the startling events taking place on Earth are merely the tip of the iceberg, and in her own unique way she takes care to prepare her daughter for what is to come. She is fully cognizant of the fact that the murders and abductions which her daughter the detective is devoting all her time and energy to solving are only a link in a chain of cosmic events that began in other worlds, in the realm of magic powers and beings from higher spheres, on the mountain that stands before the Gate of Heaven. Rachel offers her daughter veiled clues to the identity of the “crazy serial killer,” but Mazy fails to comprehend them: “Her daughter did not understand, or perhaps was not yet ready to understand” (149). Nevertheless, she persists in her attempts and does not relent until Mazy sees the truth for what it is. Other clues are sent to Mazy as they sit around her mother’s seder table on Passover, even before the detective is made aware of the first murders. Rachel conducts the seder like a high priestess in a pagan rite, in an atmosphere that gives new meaning to the traditional holiday ritual: This night was different from any other night; it was a “night that is neither day nor night,” a night of deep silence and earsplitting noise. Across the table sat mother and daughter, with candles burning in their holders—patches of flickering lights, kindled and extinguished in a complete cycle of life. The guests at the table sometimes eat and sometimes are eaten, in some ancient ritual of creation and destruction, as they sit around the round wooden table at Rachel’s Seder” (20). Rachel hugs her granddaughter, Noga, but to Mazy it is clear that this is not the simple act of a loving grandmother: “Rachel was not in the habit of hugging people for no reason. Her display of affection always had an agenda, always had a motive” (ibid.). Rachel tells Noga a story, which is also, and perhaps mainly, intended for her daughter’s ears. It is about the creation of the world, the creation of man in the image of God, male and female—Adam and Lilith. Lilith, Rachel relates, decided to change things and left Adam behind. When God saw that Adam was afraid of change, he created a world of helpmates to keep — 67 —

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him company, and Adam gave names to each living thing. “When he was done giving names and exercising control, he was ready to receive a new woman,” she says (21). The story of a three-fold Creation is meant to hint at something fundamental, but Mazy is still insensitive to the voices. Interpreting her mother’s behavior primarily as an attack on her parental authority, she rushes out before the Seder is over. Mazy was not raised in a normative home. She regards growing up in her mother’s house as a journey of survival. At this stage in her life, she feels threatened by what she perceives to be a manipulative game by a domineering mother who in her opinion has too much control over her emotions and takes advantage of her vulnerability before the eyes of her silent daughter. Her soul is scarred by the sense that her mother’s look conveys “at once expectation, disappointment, satisfaction and resentment. All those years. Always” (22). She wages a tormented war with that soul, promising herself on this Passover eve that “tonight she will change; tonight she will lead herself from slavery to freedom” (23), or in other words, that she will wrest away control over her life. She is totally blind to the paradox in her mother’s parenting style: on the one hand, she reads her daughter’s mind obsessively, and on the other hand she leaves her alone to cope with the world on her own. As the story unfolds, the tale of Creation the grandmother tells her granddaughter begins to play out and also runs like a thread through the subplot, which ultimately merges with the main plot. In the subplot, Mazy is caught between two men: her husband, Gaby, and her colleague and former lover, Yariv. In depicting this complex web of relationships, Ashery makes no reference whatsoever to moral issues or the concepts of infidelity and adultery. Instead, he draws inspiration from the Bible to portray a woman’s struggle for self-realization and control of her life, or as Mazy puts it, to go “from slavery to freedom.” In the spirit of contemporary times, he constructs a formula of relationships parallel to the Creation story of Adam-Lilith-Eve, but reverses the roles, shifting the balance of power in the love triangle in favor of the rebellious woman. In this formula, Gaby perfectly fits the role played by the mythological prototypes of the faithful wife, whether it be Eve in the Bible or Penelope in Greek legend. In an act of pure sincere love, he waits at home for his wife for as long as it takes, displaying infinite patience, until such time as she returns to him from her long sojourns abroad. Gaby is a faithful

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husband, a “helpmeet” who builds a home for her to come back to.17 Like the model of the devoted wife, he does everything in his power to placate Mazy when she is angry, to avoid confrontations with her, and to give in to her whenever they clash: “His voice expressed genuine distress . . . because he had hurt her, caused her grief. She was always the first priority with him” (61). As we have seen, in Jewish legend Eve was not Adam’s first wife; she was preceded by Lilith, who was formed from earth, just like Adam, and was his equal. In Soothsayer, the role of Lilith is played by “the other man.” In the precinct, Yariv and Mazy share equal status and authority over the case they are working on. Their relationship is a whirlwind of impulsive emotions and loss of control. Like his biblical counterpart, Yariv represents temptation, sin, and debauchery, as well as the pleasure of unrestrained sexual attraction. And like Adam and Lilith, Mazy and Yariv constantly cross swords with one another. In line with modern realities, their fights take the form of verbal sparring in which neither emerges victorious: “Is it your birthday today? So why the balloons?” says Yariv, teasing her about her bra size (55). She returns as good as she gets. But like Lilith, who vanished into the light of the world,18 Yariv abandoned his lover, disappearing with no explanation. Mazy went on with her life and married Gaby, and now Yariv is back as head of the Special Investigation Team, fogging her senses and rocking her world again. 4. On first reading, one is likely to miss Rachel’s warning to her daughter at the seder. As the guests recite from the Haggadah, they reach the climax of the story of the exodus from Egypt. “This year we are slaves, next year free men!” they exclaim, and fill their glasses with wine, “however, Rachel had forbidden [Aelina] to fill up Elijah’s cup” (27). No one attributes any particular significance to this fact, as they have all learned to expect the unexpected from Rachel. But this time she seems to be talking directly to her daughter. Sensing through her otherworldly powers 17

Cf. Gen. 2:18: “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” 18 Louis Ginzburg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, [1928] 1999), I 65, V 87, note 40. See also Nitza Abarbanel, Eve and Lilith (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press [1994] 1997), 26 [Hebrew]. — 69 —

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that the Prophet Elijah should no longer be a welcome guest in their home, she seeks by this symbolic act to hint that the rules of the game have changed. But as we have seen, at this stage Mazy’s senses are not yet attuned to receiving the message. As noted above, the seder night is a major event in Israeli life for the secular population as well as the religious, much like Christmas dinner in Christian societies. On Passover, the extended family gathers to celebrate the holiday together. In addition to reading the story of the exodus from Egypt from the Haggadah, the traditional ritual includes putting out a glass of wine for Elijah, who is said to visit each Jewish home over the course of the Seder. It is customary to sing the praises of the biblical prophet, whose name is associated with miracles and wonders. In a certain sense, he might be compared to the figure of Santa Claus which is beloved by Christians. Like Santa Clause, Elijah the Prophet is envisioned as an old man full of compassion, good deeds, and a warm heart.19 The original Elijah is a complex figure about whom little is known. According to the Bible (II Kings 2:1-18), he did not die like other mortals, but rose to heaven in a whirlwind on a chariot of fire pulled by horses of fire. Thanks to his wondrous disappearance, his eventual reappearance came to be recognized as the harbinger of the Messiah. His central role in the End of Days is stated explicitly in Malachi 3:23: “Behold, I send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.” Given that he is one of the most enigmatic of the biblical prophets, it is not surprising that Elijah is the subject of innumerable legends, kabbalistic stories, folktales, poems, and ballads.20 He is depicted as a mysterious figure who magically appears and disappears (his biblical story runs from I Kings 17 to II Kings 2), and stories about him relate to anticipation of the new era he will usher in, described in Yalkut Shimoni (an aggadic compilation on the books of the Old Testament) as “peace comes upon Israel and redemption upon the world”:

19 It would be interesting to examine the parallel transformation of each of the two characters from the original figure to his modern perception. Much like the stories of the Prophet Elijah, the legend of Santa Claus is based on a real person, Saint Nicholas, who lived in Asia Minor in the third century. 20 Ginzburg notes that although he is popularly known as Elijah the Prophet, he is generally referred to in Talmudic literature as Elijah alone, with the phrase “remembered to good” often added to his name (Ginzburg, The Legends of the Jews VI, 1998, 316). — 70 —

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When the Holy One Blessed be He redeems Israel, three days before the coming of the Messiah comes Elijah and stands on the mountains of Israel and weeps and mourns for them, saying: mountains of Israel, how long will you stand in ruin, desolation, and wilderness? And a voice is heard from one end of the world to the other end. Then he says to them: peace has come to the world! On the second day he comes and stands on the mountains of Israel and says: goodness has come to the world! On the third day he comes and says: salvation has come to the world! At that time the Holy One Blessed be He shows Himself and His kingdom to all inhabitants of the world and redeems Israel and sets it at their head. At that time the Holy One Blessed be He brings Elijah and Messiah with a bowl of oil in their hands and their rods in their hands, and all Israel gathers before them, and the Divine Presence is before them and prophets are behind them, and the Torah is on their right and the ministering angels are on their left. (Yalkut Shimoni, Isaiah 60:11-12) In the synagogues of Jewish communities the world over, Ashkenazi and Sephardic alike, songs have long been sung in expectation of the coming of the good prophet Elijah. Rumor had it that he visited the most eminent rabbis and Torah scholars, that he responded to the questions of Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi, that he appeared in the cave of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, that he debated issues in the Guide for the Perplexed with the Rambam, that he spoke with Rabbi Yehudah he-Hasid in his house of study, that he sat at the bedside of the Baal Shem Tov, that he was seen in Safed as well as in Jerusalem, that he completed minyans—quorae of ten men required for communal worship—and that he revealed secrets and divinations to sages. Even today it is said that Elijah makes an appearance in Jewish homes at the end of the Sabbath, and consequently it is customary at that time each week to sing of his great acts of kindness. One well-known song tells of the pious man who had no food or money until Elijah appeared before him and rescued him, providing for his welfare. Other songs entreat him to hasten the coming of the Redemption, as in the familiar lyrics: “Elijah the prophet/ Elijah the Tishbite/ Elijah the Giladite/ In haste and in our days may he come to us — 71 —

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with Messiah, son of David/ . . . he man who will be sent from the skies of the plains,/ The man responsible for all good tidings/ The man who can be relied on to return the hearts of sons to their fathers.” In the Havdala service, marking the end of the Sabbath and the return to ordinary life, songs are sung in hope of his arrival, such as: “May He who separates between the sacred and the everyday/ forgive our sins/ May He multiply our offspring and our money like the sand, and like the stars at night/ In honor of my beloved Elijah the Prophet.” Tales of Elijah appearing as a kindly old man who brings salvation and prosperity in times of trouble were especially popular in periods in which Jews suffered from persecution, blood libels, and pogroms. The hope that the cryptic prophet with his thousand faces would pay a visit was a point of light in the darkness, giving rise to his popular perception as the “messenger of the covenant” (Malachi 3:1), the mystical prophet protecting his people. This characterization led to another popular belief, that Elijah is present at every circumcision ritual, engendering the practice of momentarily placing the infant on a richly ornamented Chair of Elijah to receive the prophet’s blessing. Numerous other traditions and legends relate to Elijah’s festive visit during the seder. According to the custom established in the Second Temple Period (Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 10a), four cups of red wine are drunk during the Seder, and a fifth is added for the Prophet Elijah. In Judaism, the cup and wine symbolize divine plenty,21 and the consumption of four full cups of red wine indicates remembrance of and gratitude for the fulfillment of the four promised acts of redemption.22 A fifth promise of redemption is said to have been given as well: “And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for an heritage: I am the Lord” (Ex. 6:8). As Malachi informs us that Elijah was chosen to herald the final redemption after the fall of the kingdom of Gog and Magog, a fifth cup of wine, larger than the others, is poured out for the prophet, the door is opened, and he is invited to join the seder with the words: “Elijah is the angel of the covenant and he will bear witness for us 21 Ruth Netzer, Masa el atzmi—alkimiyat ha-nefesh—smalim ve-mitusim [The Quest for the Self—the Alchemy of the Soul—Symbols and Myths] (Moshav Ben Shemen: Modan, 2004), 402 [Hebrew]. 22 These four are: “And I brought you out of suffering in Egypt”; “And I rescued you from your slavery”; “And I redeemed you”; “And I took you for my nation”; Eliahu Kitov, Sefer Ha-toda’ah (Jerusalem: Beit Hotza’at Sefarim [1958] 2008). According to another interpretation, the four cups of wine symbolize the release from slavery to freedom from the four ancient enslaving nations: Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome. — 72 —

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that we fulfilled the commandment of circumcision and the commandment of Passover, and by virtue of this we will be redeemed by him.” Of this Rabbi Yehuda Loew, known as the Maharal of Prague, wrote: “When the door is opened for Elijah the Prophet and we wait for his coming, this prayer should be said before the passage ‘pour out your wrath’: ‘The Merciful One, He will send us Elijah the Prophet remembered to good, and will bring us good tidings, salvation, and comfort’.”23 Elijah’s miraculous appearance in every Jewish home on Passover eve continued to capture the imaginations of writers and poets of Yiddish folklore in Europe, including Itzik Manger, Shimshon Meltzer, and Y.L. Peretz. In their stories and poems, Elijah shows himself in a different form each time, whether it be that of an impoverished man, a beggar, a craftsman, or a Gentile who happens by and rescues a Jew from death, illness, or some other threatening circumstance.24 At a later stage, Hebrew paeans were written to Elijah in what is now Israel before the establishment of the State, including Zalman Shneour’s lyrics (to music by Hanina Karchevsky): “On the Seder night when we open the door for a moment / Wrapped in a mantle the old man enters softly/ His face glows with grace and majesty, his eyes hold a secret,/ And from his cup 23 Eliahu Kitov, Sefer Ha-toda’ah, 395. Cf.: “Rabbi Yossi ben Halfata writes in the following words: ‘Elijah still lives’. The phrasing of the statement by the last of the prophets, Malachi, ‘Behold I send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord’, written in the present tense, also implies that in every generation the Lord always sends Elijah the prophet to rescue Israel from every misfortune and miracles are performed by him for Israel at all times. . . . He is Elijah the prophet, Elijah the Tishbite, Elijah the Giladite, who will come to us in haste with Messiah, son of David. He is the harbinger of good tidings, he redeems and rescues in times of trouble, he is the man of truth who built a palace overnight for the pious man and vanished, blessed is he who has seen his face in a dream, blessed is he who is greeted and was greeted by him in return.” Cf.: Babylonian Talmud, Moed Katan, 26a: “Said Resh Lakish to R. Johanan: Elijah is [however] alive!” Rabbi Yisroel Klapholtz, Stories of Elijah the Prophet (Jerusalem: Mishor, 1968) [Hebrew]. 24 In Y.L. Peretz’s story “The Magician,” Elijah takes the form of a poor stranger who enters the home of penniless Haim Yona and performs miracles that fill the house with light and cause all the fixings of the Seder to appear. See also the poems by Shimson Meltzer, “The Revelation of Elijah the First,” “Hagazda,” and “The Little Cossack of the Grandmother from Shpoli.” In Itzik Manger, Sefer Ha-shirot ve-ha-baladot [Book of Poems and Ballads] (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1940), 42-45; 46-50; 103-112 [Hebrew]. See also Itzik Manger, Mi-shirei tavas ha-zahav [Poems of the Golden Peacock], trans. by Jacob Orland (Jerusalem: Carmel, 1995) [Hebrew]; Itzik Manger and Leonard Wolf, The World According to Itzik: Selected Prose and Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Itzik Manger,  “A song about  Elijah the Prophet,” trans. by Cynthia Ozick, in Congress Monthly, 28 April 1969, 13. Cf.: David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, “Genres and types of Yiddish folktales about the Prophet Elijah,” in Uriel Weinreich, ed.,The Field of Yiddish, Second Collection (The Hague: Mouton, 1965). — 73 —

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he drinks and then he blesses us.”25 Even Nathan Alterman, one of the most popular Hebrew poets, wrote: “He will reach out his hand to the cup as is the custom/ In silence will stand before the assembly and in the doorway/ Like a huge tear of gold and festivity/ The moon will blaze in the skies of Passover.”26 Even after independence, popular songs were written about Elijah as part of the genre of lyrics based on the Bible. Sung by leading Israeli artists and army entertainment troupes, they promised that his coming would bring prosperity, as in “The Barrel of Meal” by Naomi Shemer (1986), performed by the Northern Command Entertainment Troupe: “I read of a man of God/ Who said: ‘The barrel of meal shall not waste,/ Neither shall the cruse of oil fail/ Until the day that the Lord sendeth rain/ Upon the earth,”27 or Yoram Taharlev’s “With His Hands He Will Bring,” with music by Yair Rosenblum and a stirring performance by Rivka Zohar, which describes the personal dream of the day of Redemption of the carpenter, the cobbler, and the builder who pray for Elijah to appear: “And he carries one dream in his heart/ To build a chair for Elijah when he comes,/ With his hands he will bring it to Elijah the Prophet./ And he sits and waits for him/ For years, dreaming that he will live to see him,/ He keeps his secret and awaits him/ When will the day finally come.”28 5. Although the misogynist non-mortal who ruthlessly murders nine security guards on Passover eve and unhesitatingly cuts the femoral veins of the bound women before slashing their throats answers to the name of Elijah the Prophet in Ashery’s novel, he would seem to be the complete opposite of the utopian figure of myth. The source of inspiration for this extreme transformation is abundantly clear. While the popular model of the benign and benevolent bearer of good tidings grew up in the literary/liturgical tradition of Jewish communities worldwide, there 25 A recording of the song, along with the lyrics, can be found at http://www.zemereshet.co.il/song. asp?id=258 . 26 The song, performed by Dorit Reuveni, can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJmKQ_ J6a4w&feature=related. 27 I Kings, 17:14; The song, performed by the Israeli army troupe, can be found at http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=CeRvSDeJx-I. 28 The song, performed by Rivka Zohar, can be found at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PtbxOAVD3nI. — 74 —

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is no indication of the existence of such a character in the Biblical text. In fact, the contrary is true. The Elijah who appears in I Kings lived during the reign of Ahab and his son Ahaziah (ninth century BCE). As he came from Tishbe in Gilead, he is also known as Elijah the Tishbite. He is portrayed as a prophet of rage with an extremely stormy temperament, who was eccentric in his actions, behavior, and dress. He is considered one of the cruelest of the Jewish prophets, a vengeful zealot. Elijah curses King Ahab, Queen Jezebel, and their household and kingdom, thereby sealing his own fate. He later curses Ahaziah, again placing himself under threat of death. He describes himself as a fanatic, unswerving in his principles and religious and moral monotheistic belief in the God of Israel as the one and only God, saying twice: “I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts” (I Kings 19:10; 14). Throughout his life, he fights ferociously against any world-view that conflicts with his own rigid principles, a stance that ultimately leads to the mass murder of the prophets of Baal and Asherah, along with all idol worshippers. After cursing the king and pronouncing his prophecies of doom, Elijah flees at the order of God to a hiding place at the brook Cherith by the Jordan, where he is fed bread and meat by ravens (I Kings 17:2-7).29 Ashery makes use of the fanaticism, uncompromising nature, and even external appearance of the Biblical prophet. Elijah “was a hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins” (II Kings 1:8), giving him a monastic look, and his mantle is described as having magic powers (II Kings 2:8, 13). With this mantel he installs Elisha as his successor and parts the waters of the Jordan. It later passes to Elisha: “And it came to pass, as they [Elijah and Elisha] went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more: and he took hold of his own clothes, and rent them in two pieces. He took up also the 29 The ravens play an intriguing symbolic role in Soothsayer. Before they are attacked by Elijah, the security guards see flocks of ravens (9), and hundreds of ravens are circling in the sky during the sacrifice at the start of Chapter 8 (295), strengthening the connection between the character in the book and the Biblical prophet. A further symbolism might also be implied here. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves contends that the name of the god of time, Cronus (Saturn), is the source of the word “crow,” so that the appearance of crows or ravens indicates that time has run out. — 75 —

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mantle of Elijah that fell from him” (II Kings 2:11-13). In Ashery’s book, Elisha appears as an ultra-Orthodox member of the Soothsayer unit whose specialty is gematria and mysticism (Kabbalah). At the climax of the Day of Judgment, Elisha uses Elijah’s mantel, which he dropped while fleeing from his pursuers, to cover the dead body of Izzy, who has been burnt by the flaming chariot: “He lifted his eyes across the hill and saw Elijah’s cloak. He picked it up, shook off the dust, and spread it over his friend’s body, a last act of loving-kindness” (316). And then the incredible occurs: Izzy returns to life. In contrast to Elijah’s miraculous disappearance in the Bible, Ashery does not allow the fanatical prophet to rise to heaven in the chariot of fire. Rather, he subdues him with the aid of the members of the Order of Israel, including Mazy’s father, who surround him and prevent his escape (ibid.). Ashery is not the first Israeli author to tackle the biblical image of the prophet, but he is the first to suggest that the mythology of the figure of legend is a misrepresentation with no foundation.30 He offers an interpretation in which the dream of the return of the prophet, cherished for so many generations, is a nightmare, or as Elisha explains: “And the solution is also from the book of Job. Chapter Two verse One. ‘Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lords, and Satan came also among them to present himself before the Lord’. . . . The silence was deafening. ‘Apocalypse!’” (167-168). Ashery may have relied on the opinions of greater authorities for his characterization of the prophet, since the Rambam, too, did not attribute to Elijah the role of harbinger of the Redemption. Rather, he described his function as “to rectify Israel’s conduct and prepare their hearts” and “to establish peace in the world” (Hilkhot Malachim, 12, 2). However, even the Rambam admits that we do not have the capacity to know that things will actually unfold in this manner, as “all these and similar mat30 In the play “Tyre and Jerusalem” (1933), Matityahu Shoham describes the struggle between the prophet “jealous” for the God of Israel and the Phoenician queen Jezebel, a priestess of Baal who represents the erotic idolatry of the rites of Ashtoreth and Ashera. The play was staged for the first time in 2003 by Beit Lessin, but was not a success and had a run of only 15 performances. In Christianity and Islam, Elijah is envisaged as an ideal figure. In the Gospels, after revealing himself to his disciples as the messiah, Jesus climbs a mountain where he meets Moses and Elijah, who he recognizes immediately, saying that “there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1). See also Luke 9:3031. Elijah is also mentioned twice in the Koran (Sura 6.85; Sura 37.130-132), where he is lauded as one of “our believing servants” and reference is made to his righteous war on Baal. — 76 —

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ters cannot be known by man until they occur.”31 This leaves the question of just how Elijah will return and “establish peace in the world.” The option Ashery suggests in Soothsayer is consistent with the Rambam: the prophet will bring redemption, but he will not be a changed man. Instead, he will cause a transformation by way of the negative, by intensifying evil.32 Larissa, the cartomancer on the Soothsayer team, asks the cards to reveal the face of the villain: “She opened a single card and the hermit showed up, reversed. The bearded wanderer with the cane and the lantern . . . isolation, alienation, rashness, mistaken identity and bad counsel; fear of the external world, resistance to new ideas, frustrated search for answers, despair” (268). Ashery shatters the utopian dream and the delight in reflecting upon it, describing a scenario in which longing for the dream to come true is actually the enslavement of the consciousness by a false ideal. The paradox is that emptying the ideal of its conventional meaning does not result in nothingness; on the contrary, the void that is created can now be filled with new meaning and significance. The psychoanalyst Ruth Golan explains this notion with the help of Freud’s “Negation,” in which he proposes that it is through the negative, more than the positive, that we develop an awareness of absence or lack.33 Thus, once the prophet is stripped of his status as a utopian spiritual ideal, we become aware of an emptiness that we must fill with real meaning. Furthermore, the use of the symbol of deceptive redemption gives rise to the broader issue of good and evil, along with the conflict between secular rationalism and religious mysticism. Rational Israeli intellectuals have long since lost their naïvete, and do not truly believe that evil 31 It has been suggested that the Talmudic word teiku (“it remains unanswered”) is an acronym of the words in the Hebrew phrase for “Tishbite will explain questions and riddles,” that is, when a controversy can not be settled, it will remain an unanswered question until Elijah comes and provides the solution. See Mishna, Baba Metzia 3 Mishna 4: “Two who entrusted a man one with one hundred and one with two hundred, one says the two hundred are mine and the other says the two hundred are mine, give one hundred to one and one hundred to the other and leave the rest until Elijah comes. Said Rabbi Jose if so what did the liar lose? It will all lie in wait until Elijah comes.” See also ibid. Pesachim 1 and Rosh HaShana. 32 Cf.: “For there is no light save for that which emerges from the darkness” (Zohar, T’tzaveh a). This is similar to the classical approach as expressed in “Cui malous est nemo; quis bonus esse potést?” [He for whom no man is evil, how can he perceive good?], Martialis, Epigrammata, XI, 80, 2. 33 Ruth Golan, Loving Psychoanalysis: Looking at Culture with Freud and Lacan (London: Karnak Books, 2006). — 77 —

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can be conquered by magic. In fact, their world-view is not even rooted in a dichotomous war between good and evil, such as that which is characteristic of a large proportion of Western fantasy literature. Ashery can be said to have developed an original structure for his book: although it is built on the principles of post-modern dystopia, he introduces a twist that creates a bridge between fantasy fiction and realism. To a large extent, Western/Christian fantasy literature feeds off the war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, or absolute good vs. absolute evil. Prominent examples include the battle of the White Witch, Jadis, against the lion, Aslan, in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (19501956), or Gandalf’s struggle against the Dark Lord, Sauron, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954). Christianity has a long tradition of dualism between equal forces, allowing for the horrifying possibility that evil could overcome good, plunging the world into a turmoil of death and disease until it sinks into total darkness. In Judaism, the power of evil is limited. Satan (aka Ashmedai or Samael) is ultimately bound by the laws of God and severely punished when he rebels against Him.34 Consequently, Ashery chooses not to create a strict division of good and evil, joy and suffering, “them” and “us,” but rather maintains the hierarchy, framing the Day of Judgment as a “family problem.” After all, Elijah is a Jewish prophet, not some hostile antagonist from outside the group who can be blamed for everything. Ashery refrains from going for the easy solution customarily found in fantasy literature for young readers, in which “good” faces off against the nation’s sworn historical enemies.35 Rather, he deals with the crisis of faith and society’s inability to understand its leaders without placing responsibility on the “other.” “This nation no longer believes in miracles” (326), Rachel says. Since it’s obvious to her that no one will find her daughter’s explanation of the war between mankind and the Prophet Elijah and his evil angels credible, she suggests that they do “what we’ve always done. We’ll tell the plausible story, instead of the truth. As they say, the best part of a poem is its exaggeration. Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain, etc. We have an ancient tradition of false 34 See Rambam’s commentary on the Book of Job in The Guide for the Perplexed, Part III, chapter XXII. 35 See, for example, Shimon Adaf, A Mere Mortal [Ha-lev ha-kavur] (Tel Aviv: Achuzat Bait, 2006) [Hebrew]; and Hagar Yanai, The Leviathan of Babylon (Jerusalem: Keter, 2006) and The Water betwixt the Worlds (Jerusalem: Keter, 2008) [Hebrew]. — 78 —

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prophets and false poets. If they were so reprehensible, why do you think they left them in place all these years?” (327). 6. In 1973, on October 6th, the eve of Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and atonement and the holiest day in the Hebrew calendar, a simultaneous attack was launched against Israel by Egyptian forces in the Sinai to the south and Syrian forces on the Golan Heights to the north. The fighting lasted about three weeks and ended with military victory for Israel. Nevertheless, the war later came to be known in the country as the “blunder” (michdal), and it led to a severe crisis in Israeli society. The surprise attack that signaled the start of the war was etched on the collective consciousness as the most traumatic event in the history of the young country. Israel had been born only twenty-five years earlier, when its defense forces had succeeded in staving off a joint invasion by the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Against all odds, the tiny state, whose population numbered a mere one and a half million, had emerged victorious in an all-out war launched by its enemies, making it possible to fulfill the utopian vision formulated by Theodor Herzl in 1897: the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. The Yom Kippur War revealed the fragility of the hallowed Zionist dream. With a single blow, the war itself, and most particularly the date on which it broke out, evoked the collective memory of another traumatic event from the distant past. In the whole course of its history, the Jewish people had enjoyed sovereignty in the Land of Israel for only two short periods: the First Temple Period under Saul, David, and Solomon, who reigned over a united kingdom for 270 years (1200-930 BCE); and the Second Temple Period under the Hasmonean kings, who ruled for 90 years (160-63 BCE). Both eras ended in division, civil war, exile, and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Yom Kippur War sparked the fear that we were on the verge of the destruction of the Third Temple. Soothsayer begins with two security guards discussing S. Yizhar’s description of his experience of the war in Discovering Elijah (1999) as they start their “shift from hell” (9). “Isn’t that a Jewish Holiday?” asks the burly Russian Borislav Sverenko. “Yes, but there was also a war in 1973,” replies Jacob. And the dialogue continues:

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“How many died in it?” “Twenty five hundred, maybe more.” His companion’s nostrils flared disdainfully, but he said nothing. Jacob felt a little resentful that the national trauma was not even mentioned in the annals of Borislav’s private secret history. “What?” “It’s no big deal, really.” “What are you talking about?” “Look, you think on a small scale. You’re spoiled. Look, in Russia, in Stalingrad, how many died there? A hundred thousand people. It didn’t stop Russia from electing Khrushchev head of state.” . . . Jacob tried a last, almost desperate defense: he brought out the big guns of pathos. “We’re a small country, not many people. We thought it was the destruction of the Third Temple. . . .” (11-12). In a society at war, built on a vision, a country whose existence is a miracle and whose survival is astonishing, a nation that harbors the constant sense that it is living on borrowed time and a collective memory of crisis and destruction, there is no room for disgruntled elves or fauns behind wardrobes, who trudge through the snow with umbrellas. In other words, the rational Israeli can no longer find comfort in tales of a visit from a kind old prophet who takes his place at the seder table and drinks from the cup of wine poured out especially for him. Rational Israelis strive to deal with their primal fears in a much more sensible manner. 7. Soothsayer contains all the elements crucial for a classic fantasy: magic, strange worlds, demonic forces, dualism, and myth. But it also adds a local Jewish-Israeli twist. The book highlights the tension in Israel between the duality of the material world and the spiritual world and raises an overriding issue: the other concerns (the status of women, equal opportunities) and the diverse identities (Ashkenazi and Sephardic, young and old, parents and children) in Israeli society, all of which are influenced by the events of Jewish history in the distant and recent past. — 80 —

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The national Jewish memory plays a major role in the story. The interpretation of the conflict offered by the author demolishes a sacred cow, the 2000-year-old narrative that portrays Elijah as the harbinger of the Redemption. In the course of Jewish history, the name “Prophet Elijah” became a shared value that bred organic national unity by means of a world rich in resplendent imagery. Elijah himself does not indicate a particular time in Soothsayer, as historical time is intertwined with the familiar present of everyday life in contemporary Israel. Instead, the figure of Elijah serves the writer as a tight descriptive focus that distills the whole of the historical past of the Jewish people into a single name, including all the memories of events, songs, stories, legends, traditions, homilies, beliefs, and customs that have been passed down from one generation to the next. The social critic Mikhail Bakhtin refers to this structure as a historical chronotope. Bakhtin coined the term “chronotope,” literally time/space, to describe the poetic configuration of narratives. The historical chronotope creates an experience of condensed time that makes it possible to bring collective memories of past events to the surface and give them new life in the present, or as Bakhtin puts it, “the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins . . . the chronotope . . . provides the ground essential for the showing-forth, the representability of events.” According to Bakhtin, the full significance of a novel is achieved if it can create an “intersection of spatial and temporal sequences.”36 To a large extent, the quality of a novel can be measured by how successfully the writer concentrates the infinite array of times and places into a single consistent sequence that cuts through them all with a sharp knife. When this happens, the division into the time “before” and the time “after” disappears, and all events take place within the given time of one moment in which the whole world is perceived simultaneously. Ashery accomplishes this with great skill, condensing into one narrative moment prophesy, exile, pogroms, destruction, redemption, Israel’s wars, national crises, ethnic rifts, the status of women, the gender war, law and order, the family structure, faith in God, and the future of the country. In Soothsayer, the experience of past events (historical36 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” In Brian Richardson, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frame (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 19-22. — 81 —

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folkloristic time) and the routine of the local present (historical-realistic contemporary time) are fused together, creating chronotopes which at times are interwoven and at other times collide. It is the occasions when they crash into one another that produce the stunning effect of narrative suspense. Once we recognize the Bakhtinian chronotope as the formulaic principle underlying the narrative, we also become aware of the distinctiveness of Ashery’s novel as a complex Jewish fantasy. Although the author moves freely among a series of chronotopes that alternately coincide and conflict as he directs them, each of us is ultimately a reflection of the landscape of our homeland. In Soothsayer, Ashery not only stands outside the book pulling the strings, but is organically linked to the text. The writer and his natural surroundings move on a distinct axis that he himself positions unmistakably at the intersection between the events that left their mark on him during his life and the collective memory of the past in which he grew up. In typological terms, the intensity of the adversarial destinies (of Mazy Simantov and the Prophet Elijah) on the space-time continuum of the plot characterizes it as what Bakhtin calls the “chronotope of threshold,” conceived as the “chronotope of crisis and break in a life.” As Bakhtin explains, “the word ‘threshold’ itself already has a metaphorical meaning in everyday usage . . . and is connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life (or the indecisiveness that fails to change a life, the fear to step over the threshold).”37 The hallmark of the chronotope of threshold is the journey of the single individual, a person who does not feel he bears a burden of responsibility for his country, countrymen, or even family members. Instead, this is a journey of the self alone. The theme of the protagonist being put to the test is the organizing principle of the plot of Soothsayer, and provides the necessary framework for the integration of the chronotopes. Since this framework is modeled on the pattern of a detective story, the plot is furthered by a series of misdirections which Mazy and her police colleagues follow on their way to the “correct” conclusion. In the end, the counting of the days of the Omer, which they believed to be the key to solving the case, turns out to be a red herring. “I thought the ceremony was synchronized with the counting of the Omer. There are eleven days to Shavuot, 37 Ibid., 21. — 82 —

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when Heaven’s supposed to open, so why is it tomorrow?” wonders Mazy (286). The Athaliah explains that they are using the wrong calendar. They are basing their calculations on the solar calendar of 365 days, the duration of the revolution of the Earth around the sun, not on the lunar calendar used in ancient times, to which an extra month was periodically added, “seven times in every nineteen-year cycle, in order to reach the necessary balance” (286-287). This information points Mazy in the right direction. Furthermore (or more precisely, in parallel), Mazy is wrong in thinking she is fighting a war to wrest control of her life from her mother. She learns that she is actually meant to be fighting for the right of all women to be free: “In the world that I deem worth fighting for, someone has to try to rescue these women, at least some of them,” she says (305). That “someone” happens to be her, but to do that she has to change, and in order to change she has to set out on a new path and face the unknown. Although she undertakes the journey as part of her job as a detective, she experiences it in the metaphoric sense of striking out in a new direction, or the journey of a woman seeking her way in life. Like the knights in medieval chivalric romances, or the hero of classical Greek romances, Mazy must make the journey on her own. But there is one fundamental difference. In ancient or medieval narratives, the world and the individual remain unchanged, comparable to a static chronotope: “In this kind of time, nothing changes: the world remains as it was, the biographical life of the heroes does not change, their feelings do not change . . . [Adventure-time] leaves no traces anywhere, no indications of its passing.”38 In this Jewish fantasy, the opposite occurs: the trials of the journey point the way to growth and change. Stepping over the threshold, setting out on the journey, and changing places leads to the longed-for “historical inversion,”39 Mazy’s hidden potential is revealed, and her distinctive and compelling personality emerges: “How do we know what they’re looking for? When was the time that they knew the names?” asks Yariv, amazed by how Mazy has changed before his eyes, how “fate and circumstances had etched in her new, sharp, harsh lines.” At this point, she is listening to her inner voice and putting together the pieces of the puzzle to form a complete picture: “Mazy told him the story she heard from Rachel when she was a little girl, the 38 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 91. 39 Ibid., 147. — 83 —

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story that had prepared her for this moment on the hill. Royal jelly was coursing through her veins now, pulsating in her heart and coming out of her lips, almost against her will. Out of the chaos emerged order and night” (304). Under Mazy’s leadership, the correlates of the ancient myths of matriarchal society are replaced by new principles of freedom and equal opportunity for the independent woman, and a new feminine identity that is not subservient to the will and authority of dominant men (represented by the police, the prophet, and the Nephilim): “I think the solution is here, inside us, among us,” Izzy tells her colleagues in the Soothsayer unit (273). To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the answer is seven. “We are looking for a seven,” the team members realize (166), and the Athaliah explains to Mazy that “seven is always a stronger number. Our number and theirs” (271). Seven symbolizes the Apocalypse, but it is also the cosmic harmony in the kabbalist Tree of Life, or Sefirot.40 As Elisha explains, the Tree of Life is a symmetric arrangement of seven forms “as it is said, ‘in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them.’ These are the right and left thighs, the right and left hand, the torso and the head, that makes six, and the seventh is the wife,” and Izzy sums it up concisely: “So this tree represents Man, or God as it is manifested in man” (271). The “key of seven” is therefore the code that represents a state of balanced energy in the world, connecting opposite poles and creating harmony between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and the material. As Elijah prepares for the battle in which he will ultimately suffer defeat, he hovers in his fiery chariot near the hill of seven pillars (298), on which seven women are tethered to an altar (296), and sings two popular songs in which the number seven is a recurring motif. The first is by Leah Goldberg (music: Moni Amarilio): “In the country I love, the almond tree blooms/ In the country I love, we are waiting for a 40 The Tree of Life, or the Tree of Sefirot (literally “countings”), an example of which appears below, is a map depicting the emanations of God and the elements of inner wisdom. In the world of Jewish mysticism, it serves as a key to personal development, expansion of the consciousness, and self-fulfillment. The two primary kabbalist texts are the Zohar and Sefer Yitzirah, whose authors are unknown, although Sefer Yitzirah is generally attributed to Rabbi Akiva, who lived in the first century CE, and the Zohar to his disciple, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. See Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New York; Schocken [1965] 1966). See also the prophesy of apocalyptic desolation in the seventh millennium: “R. Kattina said: six thousand years shall the world exist, and one [thousand, the seventh], it shall be desolate, as it is written, And the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day” (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97a). http://apokalypso.com/Fig1.GIF — 84 —

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guest/ Seven maidens, seven mothers, seven brides at the gate,”41 and the second by Shaul Tchernikovsky (music: Naomi Shemer): “They say there is a land/ A land awash in sunlight/ Where is that land? Where is that sunlight? They say there is a land/ Whose pillars number seven/ And on every hilltop/ Seven stars shine brightly.”42 Elijah’s voice drips with venom and scorn, and he basks in the certainty of victory in a spectacular display of destructive power. But as the song goes on to promise, “the stars on that hilltop” join forces to restore cosmic harmony. At the end of the process she has undergone, Mazy “listen[s] to the voice” (340), identifies the focus of change, and fulfills her potential (272). Once she regains control over her own destiny, she receives her reward: her daughter utters her first word, “Mama…loud and clear” (341). The message conveyed by Soothsayer is equally loud and clear: the nation should stop feeling like a victim and start taking personal responsibility for its future without waiting for a miracle, whether predicted by religious faith or folkloric tradition. This message is phrased more eloquently in the motto at the beginning of chapter nine, the final chapter in the book, taken from a poem by David Avidan: “What justifies most of all/ the dream, the great despair,/ the knowledge that there is no justification/ and looking for it anew every moment,/ the excitement, the dread,/ what justifies most of all,/ what justifies the great despair/ is the simple cutting fact/ we have no place to go.”43

41

The song, performed by the Central Command Army Entertainment Troupe in 1974, can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve8zQubEdLY. 42 The song, performed by Shlomo Artzi in 1973, can be found at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SKMdUcDV0CA. 43 David Avidan, “Power of Attorney,” in Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry, trans. by Tsipi Keller (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 74. — 86 —

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Etgar Keret’s Fantastic Reality Orley K. Marron

“What if I told you that at night I turn into a heavy, hairy man, with no neck, with a gold ring on his pinkie, would you still love me?” And you tell her of course you would. What else can you say? That you wouldn’t? She’s trying to test you, to see whether you love her unconditionally (Fatso, 4). Etgar Keret is a fantastic writer. Not a writer that fits the narrow genre of fantasy Tzvetan Todorov defined, generating in the reader a state of uncertainty as to whether events in the story are truly unnatural or whether they can be explained logically,1 but rather, a writer of fantasy as Eric Rabkin classifies it: incorporating the strange, the unexpected and surprising within the context of the story, whether in a single sentence or as a unifying theme.2 Rabkin’s expanded definition includes surrealism, satire and even some forms of allegory, all of which are central to Keret’s oeuvre. As events unfold in Keret’s narratives, the readers do not need to ponder their feasibility or verification: Keret’s words simply reconstruct reality with a sharper, stranger focus, magnified and intensified. 1

2

Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973, trans. Richard Howard) focuses on the fantastic as a state of hesitation “experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). As long as the ambiguity is sustained, the state of “fantastic” remains: “The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.” Eric Rabkin’s approach looks at the fantastic as an affect, and locates its occurrence in many fictional contexts. Even within “realistic” texts there may be occurrences of the fantastic, and these may take place at the sentence, paragraph or full-text level. One of the key distinguishing marks of the fantastic is that the perspectives enforced by the ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted. The reconfiguration of meaning must make an exact flip flop, up to down, + to -.This is true even if the effect lasts only a moment, and is true whether the reversal occurs in a Fantasy [narrative] or not. (12) Thus when Alice become surprised that nothing unusual happens when she eats in Wonderland (having become used to strange events), this is a sentence-level local fantastic reversal. Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). — 87 —

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Keret has written several collections of short stories and story fragments. Each collection reveals some new ideas and reflects on critical current issues, and each reworks previously depicted problems. In many of these, Keret freely employs fantasy as a powerful language to express emotional and psychological truths, exploring “representationally hungry”3 problems and providing a unique perspective on the lives of individuals in Israel. Keret’s fantasy is not “escapist”; rather, it faces reality and explores it through fantastic means. Such use of fantasy to probe into complex and non-resolvable problems is echoed in many modern fantastic texts, some even dealing with the horrors of the Holocaust.4 What is particularly startling about the texts is the depiction of fantastical characters and situations in an earthy, direct, often crudely colorful language. The coupling of such realistic, concrete, and unembellished diction with remarkable themes reminds the reader of Kafka’s style in The Metamorphosis5 and Carroll’s nonsense poetry in The Hunting of the Snark. These present alternative realities without readily allowing for cognitive framing or naturalization of the fantastic situation.6 While some stories resemble the magical realism made famous 3

4

5

6

The term was used by cognitive philosopher Andy Clark to describe problems that are complex and “unruly,” or situations that don’t yield an easy reading and resolution, and require large amounts of representation (described or pictured). For example: how to reconcile a human body that is also a divine being, or a death in life experience. Ellen Spolsky analyzes how creative artists use visual and written art in attempt to answer representationally hungry problems. Andy Clark. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Ellen Spolsky. “Making ‘Quite Anew’: Brain Modularity and Creativity,” in Introduction to Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 84-95. Daniel Schwartz suggested in his lecture “Imagining the Holocaust” (December 29, 2009, Bar-Ilan University), that as readers become immune to certain genres, writers turn to the fantastic to explore and revive Holocaust concerns. Rather than escaping realities, they touch reality in many more ways through fantasy, overcoming reader resistance. Franz Kafka’s concrete and matter-of-fact descriptions of Gregor, the travelling saleman-turnedvermin in Metamorphosis, are unembellished and striking “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. . . . His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.” Lisa Zunshine points out in “Some Species of Nonsense” how Nonsense poetry with its concrete basis differs from fantasy framed as a dream or a plausible futuristic sci-fi universe. It “offers us little or no such framing. It thrusts the ‘flying millstones’ in our faces and blithely challenges us to deal with their strangeness as well as we can.” Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 133-165. — 88 —

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by Gabriel García Márquez, in that events in the plot are feasible and based in reality, with occasional unnatural / fantastical occurrences, many of Keret’s texts are fully structured around a fantastic idea or an imaginary world. And the texts reveal, sometimes brutally, the harshest experiences, and the smallest pains, of Israelis, of Jews and Arabs, of bus drivers and writers and people anywhere: Don’t drop reality on like garbage from a dump truck, that’s what we’re trying to get away from now. Use your imagination, bro, flow with it as far as you can (“Suddenly A Knock At the Door,” 10, personal translation).7 Keret’s literature deals with many themes through fantasy, probing the mosaic of Israeli characters’ life experiences from multiple angles. One central topic that appears repeatedly in Keret’s texts is suicide as a response to an unaccommodating reality, including the inflexible demands of Israeli military service. Another, often related, theme is the complex world of relationships between people, and the struggle of gentle individuals to survive in an ambitious and often aggressive society. Keret’s characters carry with them the burden of the Holocaust, the losses of wars, the endless search for love and meaning in life. When they interact with one another and the world, their responses often take the form of the fantastic. A subgroup of Keret’s stories explore through fantasy the world of the artist and the fragile subsistence of creativity. Keret’s narratives, like a kaleidoscope, give readers the whole—and fragmented—vision of Israeli life. Suicide “Two days after I killed myself I found a job here at some pizza joint. It’s called Kamikaze, and it’s part of a chain. . . ” (“Kneller’s Happy Campers”, 93)8

7 8

The story appears in the collection Suddenly A Knock at the Door (Or Yehuda: Zmora-Bitan, 2010). The English version appears in the collection The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God (New Milford: Toby Press, 2004). — 89 —

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In “Kneller’s Happy Campers” (in Hebrew, “Kneller’s Summer (Recreation) Camp”), a group of “first time suicides” inhabits an urban world strangely like Tel Aviv (or Frankfurt, perhaps). Uzi, a character who befriends the narrator, is a young man who lives with his family—unlike most of the other inhabitants, who have committed suicide alone. The reasoning behind taking one’s life varies: Uzi’s mother had been ill, and his parents had killed themselves so as not to part from each other. Uzi himself, “a little desperate, but not bitter” about girls, and too afraid to serve in the military, shot himself in the head, and his younger brother Ronny had just arrived in this Tel Aviv limbo—having shot himself in the middle of basic training. Ronny explains that, at a younger age, he had threatened to commit suicide and his idolized brother had slapped the notion out of him. “I don’t know exactly what he was trying to tell me when he slapped me like that,” laughs Ronny, “but whatever it was, it worked fine till the army.” The link between military experience, PTSD, and suicide appears in Israeli newspapers and psychiatric research9 and, repeatedly, in Keret’s narratives. Suicides occur occasionally in the Israeli military, as young soldiers feel overwhelmed by the physical and psychological pressure of the military framework (or use accessible weapons to end problems unrelated to their service). The trauma of loss of friends in battle or terror attacks, often resulting in suicide by survivors, is a subject common in Israeli art—music, film, and literature. “I’m going to dance with dead soldiers in my heart” sings popular Israeli artist Shlomo Artzi, telling of a soldier in a discotheque after his entire squad was killed in a catastrophic explosion. Keret’s literature echoes these realities. A close friend took his life when they were both on military duty, and the memory haunts Keret’s writing hours, his lectures and stories, “possessing” them as memories of trauma possess PTSD victims.10 “I’ve met many people who committed suicide,” Keret said in a special television interview. “My stories try to give an answer as to “why?” . . . It’s really affected 9

10

For example, see such research about special need soldiers at higher risk as Ehud Bodner, Ph.D., Iulian Iancu, M.D., Amiram Sarel, M.D. and Haim Einat, Ph.D., “Innovations: Accommodations: Efforts to Support Special-Needs Soldiers Serving in the Israeli Defense Forces.” Psychiatric Services http://www.ps.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/58/11/1396. Psychiatr Serv 58:1396-1398, November 2007 doi: 10.1176/appi.ps.58.11.1396 2007 Am.Psych.Ass. Psychiatrist Yoram Yovel has described treating Israeli military trauma patients in his book “Mind Storm.” Whether they were afflicted on the battlefield or in terror attacks, victims of violence find themselves unable to shake off traumatic memories. — 90 —

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who I am. . . . Had these things not happened, I wouldn’t have been the same person, perhaps I wouldn’t be writing.”11 Keret’s stories depict the subject of suicide by coupling concrete, realistic, factual language with fantastic events. In “The Nimrod Flipout,”12 the narrator and his friends are in the military—in a noncombat role, serving “in the same unit with a cushy office job” (14). They do guard duty together, staying weekends occasionally, and it is on one such weekend that the narrator, about to take his turn and replace Nimrod, hears that his friend (not yet nineteen) “had put a bullet in his head” (15). Several years later, Nimrod starts possessing the three living friends by rotation, each in a manner appropriate to his character: Uzi becomes an active megalomaniac businessman, Miron writes a book/biography that will replace the Bible, and the narrator, Ron, gets PTSD-like panic attacks in which he completely freezes, forgetting even his name. The possession by rotation is a haunting depiction of how memory of trauma overwhelms and possesses the surviving friends’ psyches. Thus while Keret describes to the reader realistically, in simple factual words, the decision to take one’s life and the concrete physical means, he uses fantasy to convey an emotional experience that is too wide, too immense, to describe directly. The shock waves that never end, the traumatic emotional responses the friends experience year after year, especially around the yearly memorial, and their unshakeable and debilitating depression over the loss, become a type of possession. “D-o-n-’t-l-e-a-v-e-m-e-a-l-on-e,” pleads the dead Nimrod in a séance the friends hold. Don’t forget me. Letting go of memories, even though they engender such a terrible and destructive madness, seems to the friends immoral and disloyal. Thus Keret points out one of the most difficult aspects of recovery from trauma: the process of healing itself is loaded with feelings of guilt, with a sense of betrayal of one’s closest friends. “Why was he killed while I survived? How can I continue to live?” are questions often raised at soldiers’ funerals. As the friends in “The Nimrod Flipout” visit the grave, the narrator ponders these questions, as do so many Israelis every year in the memorial day ceremonies:

11

24 Hours Interview with Rony Koban, Channel 8. http://hot.ynet.co.il/home/0,7340,L-8054-32951,00. html. 12 The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). — 91 —

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I looked at the dates on the grave and thought about how I was just about to turn thirty, and Nimrod wasn’t even nineteen yet. It was kind of weird, because somehow, whenever I thought about him he was sort of my age, when in fact I hardly had any hair left and he was not much more than a kid (17). While Miron and Ron remain bachelors, Uzi decides to marry and make a real change in his life, to overcome the strange possession, perhaps. As Uzi goes off on his honeymoon, Miron and Ron realize that Nimrod will no longer possess the married man: “even Nimrod knows it isn’t right to pick on someone who’s already married. . . . We’re screwed, Ron. There’s just me and you, one week each, like kitchen duty.” The friends move in together, each supporting the other during their “possession” week. How can people exist after they commit suicide? How can remaining friends keep a hold on them? Possession is one option, as in “The Nimrod Flipout.” But another option is meeting again in an alternative plane of existence, a suicides’ afterworld, such as the Tel-Aviv-like limbo in “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” where departed friends may someday meet again: And this place—I don’t know—whenever they used to sound off about life after death. . . . I’d always imagine these beeping sounds . . . and people floating around in space and stuff. But now that I’m here, I don’t know, mostly it reminds me of Tel Aviv. My roommate, the German, says this place could just as well be Frankfurt.13 In the suicide plane “nothing ever really happens,” and people repeatedly visit the same places and meet the same people. People are curious about how the others “offed” themselves, and falling in love is possible, as are working and eating meals. Rejection is possible as well, but perhaps it is less bitter, because the potential for finding a matching partner is much greater. Friends and lovers can expect to see each other again—if, that is, both parties took their lives on earth. Mordy, 13 From The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God. — 92 —

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the narrator, discovers more and more of his friends arriving, until the girl who was the cause for his suicide arrives as well. Ironically, he falls in love with a girl who actually came there by mistake, and who is allowed to return to life. Yet he waits optimistically—she told him she really liked him, and may yet return. . . . The casual way in which Keret speaks of suicide, playing with the theme, is not ironic or sarcastic. While it questions the logic of the decision (killing yourself because of a girl, when you can obviously fall in love with another one, may be too hasty a solution), the overall effect is one of consolation. It is as if those who have died actually have a second chance at life and happiness, but without the violence and pain of it. And those who survive, who are left behind by friends, also have a choice: they may at any time meet again. The existence of this fantastical world offers some sense of control over one’s destiny through death (similar, perhaps, to the Roman Stoics’ approach). In “Pipes,”14 the story Keret wrote after losing his friend, readers discover another fictional world—a type of heaven—for people who were “genuinely unable to be happy on earth.” It is a quiet sort of environment, where the demands and expectations of conventional society are put away. This place is reachable through many different types of “gateways” (a bit like Narnia)—usually ones related to the person’s work environment. Tired housewives may enter through a kitchen cabinet, mathematicians find “topological distortions in space” and squeeze through them to get there, while pilots arrive by “performing a loop at one precise point in the Bermuda Triangle” (89). This haven is not really for active suicides; while “people who kill themselves return to live their life all over again,” given a second chance at happiness, only the ones “who really don’t fit in the world” wind up here (89). The narrator, a young man who is a misfit in the modern world (having failed a variety of psychological aptitude tests in his youth), works in a welding factory. He eventually builds a complex structure of pipes, and tosses in marbles, which never come out the other end. This magical object presents a wonderful solution, a gateway to somewhere else: That was when I decided to make myself a bigger pipe, in the same shape, and to crawl into it until I disap14 Ibid. — 93 —

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peared. When the idea came to me, I was so happy that I started laughing out loud. I think it was the first time in my entire life that I laughed (88). Keret explains that he wrote this story during a lengthy period of guard duty in the military. “I was alone . . . and depressed . . . something happened, someone very close to me died . . . I started telling stories to my friends.”15 The fantastical pipes emerge as a quiet, nonviolent solution for misfits. As the narrator completes the structure, he enters it, painlessly becoming an angel with wings and joining the misfits in the heavenly world, all of whom are playing with the previously delivered marbles. Fantastic Relationships Keret is a second-generation Holocaust survivor. His mother was in the Warsaw Ghetto, and recalls that, as a child, she ran away with a group of people. They all carried various objects with them, and she noticed one man running in front who carried an enormous grandfather clock. By the time she reached him, he had slowed down to a near halt, unable to bear his burden. Property weighs you down, says Keret. Relationships and friends are important, but objects are not.16 When asked how his parents’ biography has affected him, Keret says that he is extremely sensitive to how fragile and unstable society is. At any minute, the present “normal” state can disappear, and an alternative world, harsh and violent, may replace the saner one. Each moment, things can suddenly collapse. When he meets people, he always asks himself: whom can I trust? Whom should I not trust? Keret uses different forms of fantasy genres, from fable to fantastic realism, to convey the instability of society and relationships at the edge of collapse. Holocaust shadows often creep into these tales. In “The Sad Story of the Anteater Family,”17 he presents in a fable-like allegorical form a perfectly peaceful and simple animal community that becomes violent and hateful once man, Alexander Mensch (“man,” in 15 24 Hours Interview, my translation. 16 24 Hours Interview. 17 In Missing Kissinger ( London: Vintage Books, 2008), 49. — 94 —

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Yiddish), comes into town and decides to establish culture and education (not unlike George Orwell’s Animal Farm). Soon enough, the stranger starts categorizing the members of the society, and declares the anteater family, up until now popular and much loved, as belonging to a lower form, that of animals that walk on all fours. Within minutes, society turns on the gentle anteater family, despising its members and abusing them violently. In “The Monkey’s Uncle,” society uses a child-like, sentient monkey for lab experiments (perhaps reminiscent of WWII lab experiments on children). Fantasy takes a relativistic angle as the affectionate Lukacz, covered with painful skin cancer sores, optimistically suggests to his favorite lab assistant that they travel together to his jungle home and visit his family, naïvely promising to get back to work: “As soon as I get back I’ll volunteer for the Alzheimer experiment, and that way we can still work together.” The weeping lab assistant, Irena, promises him the impossible as she continues to give him his experimental shots (Missing Kissinger 11, 61). In “Missing Kissinger,” a young man finds himself torn between loyalty to his mother and to his girlfriend. Fantasy takes the form of a metaphor as he dumps his lover’s heart on his mother’s kitchen table and demands to carve out his mother’s heart in return. Probably the most fantastic relationship in Keret’s narratives is found in “Fatso” (The Nimrod Flipout), in which the author uses the grotesque to take physical instability to such an extreme that it actually becomes emotionally stable and positive. In “Fatso,” the narrator’s girlfriend has a secret, a double identity: during the day she is a warm and sexy feminine woman, and at night, she turns into a heavy, hairy man, with no neck and a ring on his pinkie. The grotesque approach manifested here supersedes the more modern negative connotation of something disgusting and unpleasantly distorted, taking the fifteenthand sixteenth- century form that celebrates fantastical and magical combinations which cross ontological categories.18 The grotesque, suggests Ellen Spolsky, is a form that keys into “the normal human understanding of analogy.” It is a way to bridge disjointed, dissimilar parts or concepts into a whole. Grotesques are concrete, visual images, 18 Ellen Spolsky discusses the grotesque in Ellen Spolsky, Word vs. Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 118-151. — 95 —

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or such images described in words. “They depend on conventional categorizations familiar to their audiences, which they flout, more or less outrageously.”19 A grotesque is a novel and unruly blend, always startling until it is naturalized, that is, until it is provided with an abstract interpretation, according to the needs of the context.20 In “Fatso,” the very concrete and graphic image of the woman’s counterpart emphasizes the outrageous heterogeneity and clear crossing of male/female ontological categories. This is no effeminate male, but rather, a very stereotypical masculine figure. The relationship between the couple soon splits into two life & time streams, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde system, but without evil connotations: during the day, the narrator has a warm and loving intimate relationship with his lover as a woman, and at night, a masculine (nonsexual) friendship with her as a man. The narrator finds himself experiencing all the “male” things he never did: cursing, watching soccer, driving out at night for beer and steak (and whistling at girls). “And all that time you keep telling yourself it’s got to be a dream. A bizarre dream, yes, but definitely one that you’ll snap out of any minute” (5). The narrator gradually adjusts to this fantastic reality, learning to enjoy the incredible variety: Time goes by and you’re still together. The sex just gets better and better . . . and suddenly you find yourselves talking about a baby. And at night, you and fatso hit the town like you’ve never done it in your life. He takes you to restaurants and bars you didn’t even know existed, and you dance on the tables together, and break plates like there’s no tomorrow (5). . . . And so it goes: every night you fall asleep with him struggling to stay awake for the Argentinean finals, and in the morning there she is, the beautiful, forgiving woman who you love, too, till it hurts (6). While the reader may choose to accept the fantastic story as is, an 19 “The properties of proportion, perspective, and illusion as well as visual conventions governing social interaction such as facial expression, body posture, and dress, are mobilized and distorted for these dynamic mixes . . . ”(121). 20 “While other figures of speech also combine images in unusual or original ways, the word grotesque is reserved for forms that flaunt their heterogeneity, exaggerate it, and enjoy it” (121). — 96 —

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unstable and bewildering type of partnership, this “novel and unruly blend,” can be naturalized into the idea of an ideal relationship. A man need not limit his relationship with his wife to socially acceptable “feminine” conventions; she can become a friend as well, with whom to share more aggressive and liberated behaviors. As a man she doesn’t care about her figure, she enjoys good food and drink liberally, and feels free to express emotions and aggression (at least through sports). The grotesque and fantastic combination, all in all, grants the narrator a happier, more complete and satisfying human relationship. The Creative Artist That night, when the daemon came to take away his talent, he didn’t argue, whine, or put up a fuss. “What’s fair is fair,” he said, and offered the daemon a truffle and a glass of lemonade. (“One Last Story and that’s It,” The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, 75) Keret uses fantasy to explore a phenomenon that is particularly interesting and “representationally hungry”21 for people who engage with art: how artists come to create the things they do, and what happens when art, liberated from its creator, “comes to life.” Keret asks, as many have done before, about the source of inspiration and creative ideas, and what is the relationship between the artist, his environment, and his created pieces. In a series of stories that are meta-fictional and to an extent allegorical, fantasy once again serves as a focusing lens that provides a concrete rendering of the artist’s abstract experiences. While previous collections deal with the subject of talent and authorship, Keret’s latest book, Suddenly, a Knock at the Door, contains a particularly large number of narratives dealing with creativity and the lack thereof (perhaps not surprising, after several years of literary “silence”). In some texts, he asks whether an author can exist at all as a person without the ability to create, and what can he do once “talent” is stripped from his soul. In others he explores the boundaries of the artist’s raw materials: is the 21 See note 3. — 97 —

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artist as a creator limited to his own context and reality? Can he break free and imagine utterly non-existent worlds, or must his art be rooted in the real human experience? Keret questions the value of art that is not based on actual experiences: “Creating something from nothing is not worth a lot, and not so hard, either.” But creating something from something is difficult, and worth so much more—it’s “when you discover something that existed all along within you, but you suddenly realize it/reify it within [fiction], in an event that never happened before” (Suddenly . . ., 10, personal translation). Keret also looks at authorship as a form of generative lying: lies have the power to create new realities, and often rather unpleasant ones. Finally, creative lying can take what may be a sad or cruel experience, and transform it, for a while, into something acceptable. “One Last Story and That’s It”22 depicts the relationship between a rather helpless author and his nebulous talent provider. Talent is a commodity, an element that is given and taken away by higher (daemonic) forces, and resistance by artists to this procedure is (nearly) futile. “Talent” is—literally—a removable piece of the soul, a concrete object much like the slip of paper with animating words (the letters of the Holy Name) in the head of the Golem. It can be inserted and activated (enabling its current bearer to function), and it can then be easily withdrawn, excised from the artist. The talent-collecting daemon (working for some unknown bosses) is patterned on the stereotypical Israeli repossession agent, driving in his car from one house to the next to resolutely collect his dues, ignoring active resistance and piteous “tormented-artist look[s]”: “You get there, remove the soul, undo the Velcro, pull out the talent, and that’s that. The guy can kick and scream till the cows come home. You’re the daemon” (75). Once his talent is removed (and carefully placed in a cushioned box), perhaps drawing similarities to a lobotomy, the artist can no longer function creatively; he becomes a “normal” person who can spend more time with his friends, or go to the beach. Keret thus places the artist in a unique position: for a period of borrowed time he lives in grace—or 22 In the earlier The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God collection, 75. — 98 —

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perhaps demonic ecstasy (“I had a helluva time” says the artist, 76), and then he falls from grace in submissive helplessness, lacking any control over the events. It is interesting to note that from a religious perspective, the notion that “God giveth and God taketh away” is often an attempt at explanation or comfort in situations of great loss. It is God’s unquestionable privilege to take anything from his subjects at any time, and to grant grace at will.23 Yet in a modern sense, this fantastic depiction of a creator’s transitory ability is realistic and frightening: the artist may “lose his talent,” run into a writer’s block, a paralyzing depression, a sense of emptiness that seems to bear no hope for a reprieve. This can happen at any time; it is out of the author’s control. Is that not as if a daemon came and took one’s talent away? Keret himself experienced such artistic doldrums, and artists throughout the centuries similarly described the fear of losing their creative touch. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” for example, an inspired craftsman, much like Ovid’s Pygmalion, becomes a marvelous artist and creates the perfect piece of art—and then loses both the piece, and his talent, forever. Besides depicting the fears of the creative artist, Keret’s narrative may be questioning the modern expectations of the artist as a life-time originator, and the temporality of audience appreciation and critical response. Audiences and critics are bound by rigid conventions demanding that the artist constantly generate new and original art, better than (or as good as) what he created before. But if audiences know that the artist’s ability is a priori on loan, and that he is mechanically doomed to stop (or “fail to produce”) at some point, they may value whatever art he creates and respect his talent based on that prolific period of time. Rather than expressing expectations of the future that limit the artist’s freedom to create, they allow the artist to feel pride in his previous artistic accomplishment, and the freedom to continue while the gift lasts. The daemon in the story is himself a critic, capable of evaluating the author’s work and “making” or “breaking” the creator in one quick moment. Ironically, even a powerful critic, capable of lobotomizing artists, is subject to higher authority: he as well submits to superiors’ deci23 In Anne Bradstreet’s poems “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House” (1666) and her farewell poem to her baby granddaughter we see a similarly accepting, if sorrowful, attitude: “But plants new set to be eradicated, / And buds new blown to have so short a date, / It is His hand alone that guides nature and fate.” — 99 —

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sions, lacking a free will and accepting his distasteful task, “such a crock of shit” (77), as inevitable. In his latest book, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door,24 Keret seems to reflect the increase in violence and aggression in Israeli society, presenting a more bitter and violent world, in which individuals are often helplessly lost, dragged along by an unforgiving torrent of events. Normalcy is destroyed in seconds as assassins shoot innocent people and defenseless citizens get beaten up by thugs. “In this country,” states one of the characters, “the only way you can get anything is by force.” (7) Keret as a creative artist responds to this hostile environment not only with stories about violence, but also with stories that reflect on creativity and response. He describes an author who longs terribly to write stories again, and yet cannot do so. He can only generate new realities from existing ones, but the existing human situation, his source of inspiration, “is so bad now it isn’t worth a story . . .” (10). In “Choose a Color,” art is created in (and confined to) the artist’s world image, as a vicious cycle of brutality on earth reflects a similar brutal cycle in heaven. A black man, beaten to paralysis by his white neighbors, is left in a wheelchair but accepts his fate. When his wife is murdered, he and his minister finally raise their voices in protest to God. Insulted and hurt by their abuse, God decides to respond personally and appears in the church in a wheelchair. As a child, he reveals, he beat a weaker and smaller god, who then came back one day with friends and “trashed” God and his beloved Goddess. She remained mute and staring, unable to respond. To divert her as she sat immobile, God created mankind. But he created mankind in his own image—victims and aggressors—and his lover could only stare for hours at the people below, her eyes open wide, unable to shed a tear. Do you think I created you this way because that’s what I wanted? Do you think I’m some kind of pervert, a sadist or shit who enjoys all your suffering? I made you this way because this is all I know. It’s the best I can do (79, personal translation). 24 Knocking at the door from a literary point of view is often associated with evil omens—for example, Edgar Allen Poe’s ominous crow. In Israeli culture it is often associated with immediate catastrophe. Such a knock might mean officers bringing news of a son or daughter killed or collection agents awaiting payments, or serve to evoke Holocaust Nazi agents at the door. — 100 —

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The creator, it seems, cannot imagine any reality other than the one he experiences, he bases his art in reality, and his art reflects all its faults and pains. Perhaps this repeating theme indicates a frustration on the part of Keret: as a creator, he doesn’t want to invent something out of nothing, a wholly new idea; he wants to give a new perspective, a special attire, to existing reality. Yet when reality is so bitter, how can he be inspired, what can he imagine? In “Lie-land” (a pun on layla, night, dreamland), the question of the author’s responsibility for the art he invents takes a central role, and authorship is coupled with the notion of creative lying. The story depicts several casual liars whose words, like the Word of God, have the power to generate new realities. The authors are people of all ages momentarily caught in a tight situation, and they produce elaborate explanations to excuse their lateness for school or absence from the office. Since negative excuses (or sad stories) are more convincing (as the narrator explains), they casually give rise to terminally sick grandmothers, armless uncles hospitalized with heart attacks, and run-over semi-paralyzed dogs. The protagonist, Robbie, is just such an irresponsible author (and prolific liar) who gives life to many sorrowful creatures without even knowing it. At some point, after the death of his mother (to whom he lied persistently) he discovers the world he—and so many others—have created. The alternative world contains many warped, crippled, and problematic residents, but while they may not be particularly happy in their existences, they cherish existing at all. After Robbie locates a fellow author-in-crime, he brings her along and, burdened with a sense of responsibility and shame, they inevitably become attached to their creations (unlike God in other stories, perhaps). Although he continues lying, Robbie decides to change his world for the better: “it’ll be a happy lie, full of light, flowers, sunshine and—who knows—even some smiling babies!” (18, personal translation). Authorship (or deception) when it is self-aware and responsible, may produce a better alternative world. Thus Keret’s view of creation is not wholly pessimistic. The very fact that he uses fantasy (and fiction) allows him to change reality, to improve it through art for his audiences, and to give them a vision of something better. He recalls in his childhood how his parents, Holocaust survivors who found solace in each another, invented stories that — 101 —

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changed and reconstructed reality for their children. Keret continues to do so for his family and his readers. In the last story in Suddenly . . ., the character of a German interviewer playfully responds to Keret’s son’s question “What animal are you?” by telling him she is a monster who came from afar to eat pretty children like him. But the child doesn’t understand English or the cruel words, and Keret restructures reality naturally: “She says she is a red-feathered song bird who travelled here from a far away land.” Conclusion Keret’s fantastical narratives provide readers with a unique (and warped) perspective on Israeli society. While blatantly unrealistic and flagrantly weird, fictionally they are incredibly true—“true to the human heart,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne says of imaginary romance.25 Keret deals openly with many problematic issues, from suicide and trauma in young people to haunting memories of the Holocaust and their everrippling effects in members of later generations, like himself. He explores human relationships, unveiling brutality and sympathy, and understands readers’ awful need for something else, for flights of imagination that pull them away from the garbage in which they feel they are buried. Keret reflects, as well, on his own and perhaps others’ process of creation, and the difficulties an artist runs into when he tries to take a sad context and reshape it into art. But like his Holocaust survivor parents who reconstructed the world for him as a child through stories, Keret retells reality, and through his fictions enables us to contain it.

25 In his prelude to The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne differentiates between the [realistic] Novel and the Romance. The novel “is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience.” Romance, as a work of art, “must rigidly subject itself to laws,” among them never swerving “from the truth of the human heart,” but it “has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation” (263). The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Michael P. Kramer (New York: Toby Press, 2003), 267-568. — 102 —

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Postmodern Jewish Superstition in David Grossman’s To the End of the Land1 Ruby Newman

1. In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in the intersection of postmodern subjectivity and religious ways of knowing. Comparatively under-explored are the ways in which postmodern monotheistic epistemologies are at work in contemporary Jewish fiction. In this paper I examine Jewish modes of superstition as links between the postmodern and the religious through close analysis of David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land (Ishah borahat mi-besorah). I focus on the psychoanalytical category of magical thinking2 and enumerate the ways in which an irrational core remains at the heart of contemporary experience. References to red threads and other tokens of neo-Jewish superstition in Grossman’s novel provide the reader with a window into postmodern superstition. Although this eruption of the irrational within contemporary society might appear strange within the context of centuries of Jewish rationalism, the secular Israeli society represented in Grossman’s novel is, in many ways, a product of the contradictions and paradoxes of postmodern monotheism. Grossman explores issues of superstition in contemporary Israeli society through his female protagonist, the woman who, in the novel’s Hebrew title, is escaping or fleeing from news: Ishah borahat mi-besorah. The English title, To the End of the Land, describes how she effects her flight, by hiking the Israel Trail from her home in Jerusalem to the northern borders of the state. She decides to walk through the landscape in order to protect Ofer, the younger of her two sons, from the possibility of being wounded or killed in the Second Lebanon War, for 1 2

David Grossman, To the End of the Land, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). As described in Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, [1918] 1950). — 103 —

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which he volunteers only days after the conclusion of his compulsory three-year army service. Unwilling to forgo a “kickass operation” (65) with his buddies, Ofer phones his unit commander and signs up for another 28-day tour. Although his mother ferries him to the meeting place, hiring an Arab driver, she is extremely reluctant to send him yet again into harm’s way and resents his choice. Her ambivalence is palpable as she both deposits him at the meeting site and, fearing for his safety, abandons him by leaving her house and cell phone in Jerusalem. She refuses to listen to the news on the radio or to engage with any passersby who try to describe the most recent events on the battle front. The negotiations made by the characters in the novel in trying to save a young soldier from danger are most clearly manifested in the magical thinking that forms the basis of the narrative’s trajectory. The idea that if no one is home to open the door to the “notifiers” from the army then their horrific news cannot actually have happened dominates the protagonist’s thoughts and actions. In a terrifying scene, as the army officers attempt to deliver news to the soldier’s parents, it is noted: “It was becoming clear to them that something had gone wrong with the rules of this ritual, that their businesslike and professional desire, their essentially logical desire, to deliver the notification, to rid themselves of it, to vomit it out, and above all to embed it quickly into the person it belonged to by law and by destiny, . . . —this desire of theirs was now encountering a wholly unexpected yet equally powerful force” (111). That force, of course, is “Ora’s absolute unwillingness to receive the notification or accommodate it in any way, or even to acknowledge that it belonged to her at all” (145). Ora collects Avram, an old friend, who happens to be Ofer’s biological father, to accompany her in place of her son. Avram has been ticking off the three years of his son’s army service on a calendar in his apartment and knows exactly when Ofer’s discharge was due. As they hike through the Israeli landscape Ora, like Scheherezade, narrates for him Ofer’s entire life from her pregnancy until the present. Her storytelling is a way of protecting Ofer from harm and providing the father with memories of the son: Ora assures Avram that talking about Ofer is desirable. “‘No, it’s okay. You should know that when I talk about him with you, he’s all right, he’s protected.’ ‘How?’ ‘I don’t know. That’s what I feel. He’s preserved.’” (235) Through a comparable expression of magical — 104 —

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thinking, Grossman hoped “that the book I was writing would protect” his own son (Grossman Afterword). Tragically, no amount of magical thinking could save the life of Grossman’s younger son, Uri, who died on August 12, 2006: “In the final hours of the Second Lebanon War, Uri was killed in Southern Lebanon. His tank was hit by a rocket while trying to rescue soldiers from another tank” (Grossman Afterword). Although Ora, like the majority of Israeli society, is secular, she exhibits some traits common to religiously observant Israeli women. During her pregnancy with Ofer she visits a seer to learn the sex of the fetus, as many Israelis do, in hopes that she is carrying a girl. Ora compares her experience trying to magically determine the outcome to one that the biblical King Saul also undertook, although it was clear that consulting witches was anathema to the biblical God (I Samuel 28: 6-25). “You think I didn’t pray for a girl the whole pregnancy? That I didn’t go to a seer—like Saul, who came to the woman by night—in the Bukharian neighborhood, so she could give me a blessing for a girl?” “‘You did?’ ‘Of course I did.’ ‘But you were already pregnant! What could she have—’ ‘So what? You can always barter.’” (292-3) Her original attempt to save her unborn child by conceiving and delivering a girl, who would serve in the army but would not be in a combat unit, failed; her current barter is fleeing from the bad news in order to preclude the terrible event from occurring. Although Avram is damaged by the torture he suffered during his own army service, and despite his inability to meet his son, he too exhibits magical thinking in order to protect Ofer. Avram makes a “bargain” with fate not to eat meat during the young man’s tour of duty. “‘You think you’re the only one who can make them?’”(270) he asks Ora. In addition to “bartering” for the well-being or safety of her children, Ora wears a shiviti amulet, “an enamel pendant bearing the inscription ‘I have set the Lord always before me’” (101), on a thin silver chain around her neck during her hike in the Galilee. When her friend gave it to her she had said “‘everyone needs a little churchagogue’” (101). “Ora laughed and tried to reject the gift. But in the end she started wearing it every time [her husband] Ilan went overseas, and when her father was hospitalized, and in other can’t-do-any-harm situations—a superstitious belief in God, she explained to anyone who asked—and she kept wearing it throughout Adam’s army service, and then Ofer’s.” (101-102). The friend, Ariela, who gives her the present is a feminist who is a rather — 105 —

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unlikely ally in religious matters, but who paradoxically offers an alternative to her friend, who readily accepts and utilizes it in time of need. In addition to wearing an amulet to protect her family from harm, Ora also offers what amounts to a kapara akin to begging for forgiveness or atoning (a traditional kapara might include sacrificing a chicken or other animal to vicariously atone for one’s sins), through magical bartering for the safety of her loved ones. “Standing over the sink, Ora shuts her eyes for a stolen moment, concentrates, and says her usual prayer—not to an exalted God, but the opposite. A pagan at heart, she makes due with little gods, day-to-day icons, and small miracles: if she gets three green lights in a row, if she has time to bring the laundry in before it rains, if the dry cleaner doesn’t discover the hundred shekel note she left in her pocket, then . . . And of course there are her usual bargains with fate. Someone rear-ends her bumper? Excellent: Ofer just won immunity for a week! A patient refuses to pay a two-thousand shekel debt? Penance! Another two thousand credits for Ofer are recorded somewhere.” (537) Paradoxically Ora’s decision to “abandon” Ofer by becoming unavailable to him as she discards her cell phone and retreats from the bastion of her house, refusing to conform to the narrative that has been constructed for parents, especially mothers, of soldiers, she is desperately attempting to save his life. She cannot effect change in the larger context of Israeli militarism, but she can try to deconstruct the curiously ritualized frame that serves as the dominant narrative of the family during the military service of children. By refusing to follow the dominant narrative, she is cutting the umbilical cord that tethers her to her son while simultaneously attempting to protect him through superstitious bargains, amulets, and mind games. Her behavior shatters the illusion of maternal protection. In the novel there are two mothers: the state and Ora. Running away is both a passive and an active response, as is her refusal to answer—or even to hear—her son’s phone calls to her from the field. He must wonder about her well-being, a reversal of the dominant assignment of gender roles in the context of Israeli military culture. Although she refuses to answer his potential calls for comfort during his army service, by leaving the symbol of contemporary technological society behind, the ubiquitous cell phone, Ora creates an elaborate web of protection for her son through red threads and bartering with whatever powers might exist. “She would shut her eyes and thank whoever needed to be thanked—she was willing to reconcile even with — 106 —

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God—for bringing him home in one piece again. And she would sober up when he gave her three quick slaps on the back, as if she were just a friend, a male friend. With that thwack-thwack-thwack he would both embrace her and mark the boundaries” (524). These boundaries are psychological ones between mother and son, but they also evoke the limits of the state and the liminal position of the soldiers fighting on the northern border of the State of Israel. Ora and Avram are hiking in the direction of that border, “going up” towards the locus of the battle. Their “ascending” the landscape evokes the Zionist dream of aliyah to the land of Israel, but paradoxically their ascent towards the Lebanese border illustrates the conflicts inherent in the dream. The detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna are intrusions of that earlier Zionist impulse of the founding myths of the state; these myths also resonate with the experiences of the young soldiers who are still tied to their parents by their ever-present cell phones. 2. Having discussed some of the dominant themes, we can now move to a consideration of the meaning and function of the panoply of superstitions or apparently irrational activities that permeate the novel. These include red threads or strings, amulets, and bartering, as well as “ostrichism.” This is where we most clearly see the connection between postmodern subjectivity and the contradictions of modern monotheism. Ora exhibits ritualized behavior in a variety of ways, all in the interest of protecting her son from danger. The first of these actions is, of course, the fleeing from bad news. If no one is at home to greet the “notifiers,” then their tragic news cannot be real. The ritual of accepting the decree must be performed if the decree is to be valid. This concept is reminiscent of the Jewish law, which requires a man who has written a Jewish divorce to end his marriage to place the decree in his wife’s hand. She must also accept it willingly. Without her acceptance, the get (Jewish divorce) is not legally binding. Similarly, Ora assumes that if parents are unavailable to hear of their son’s death in the military then their child cannot be lost. The “ritual” quality of this recurrent horror is noted as Ora refuses to collude with the performance by absenting herself from her house. Her nightmare description of the feared ritual reifies — 107 —

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her wisdom in escaping. Although Ora absents herself from her home in Jerusalem specifically to foil the bearers of bad news, the home is empty because her ex-husband Ilan and older son Adam are on an extended trip abroad and are currently traveling somewhere in South America. Although they have not intentionally run away from the impending bad news that so often shatters Israeli psyches, they are unavailable. As a child, Adam manifests a variant of the kind of psychological response to stress later exhibited by his mother. When he reaches puberty he begins to perform ritualized behaviors characteristic of people with obsessive- compulsive disorder. His illness is a chilling reflection of the inability of the individual to assert control over his or her environment. The boy’s illness is a foreshadowing of his mother’s ritualized behavior (refusing to turn back on the trail; wearing amulets; telling endless stories; “bartering”) in the face of her powerlessness to protect her son. Walter Benjamin says that in modernity one is constantly assaulted by shocks and, drawing on Freud, says that a response is to constantly be preparing for shocks as a form of protection.3 The child with OCD, then, is responding to stressors with exaggerated attempts at control of his environment. Ora responds to the stressors in this moment of her life by what Lacan called “ostrichism” (autruicherie—literally “otherism,” which is also a pun—protection against the other.4 The desire to not know is an extremely strong motivating force in Ora’s life and is one of the defenses she has built up to cope with her fears for her son. Ora repeatedly buries her head in the sand. At the onset of the hike, we are told, “Ora lay down and buried her face in the gaping earth” (160). A few days later she buries her face in Ofer’s backpack (266). After an encounter with feral dogs along the trail, Ora “breathes deeply” into Avram’s body just as she had done days earlier in the pit she had dug in the earth. “Avram somehow senses that she is praying, but not to him, rather to someone inside him, asking him to open up and let her in” (319). Here the ostrichism exhibited by Ora is linked to prayer, but within a secular framework, to whom does one pray? Ora has always been willing to barter and plead with whatever forces exist in the world in order to protect Ofer, but in the absence of God, to whom does one 3 4

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968). Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977). — 108 —

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plead? This conundrum results in the manifestations of superstition such as ostrichism, ritualized behavior, amulets and particularly red threads, which have a long history in Jewish thought.5 Threads, especially red threads, are recurrent symbols throughout the novel. It is customary for a mother to tie a red string on her son’s right wrist either before he begins his military service or on her first visit to his military base. In some cases the ritual is performed by the soldier’s grandmother or grandfather.6 Ora’s incorporation of red threads and of weaving not only as a metaphor but as a postmodern intrusion of the irrational is of a piece with the “ritual” of affixing red threads on the wrists of soldiers. Ora reflects on the fact that she believed she could protect Ofer. Mothers of babies cling to this illusion, but mothers of soldiers know that it is a chimera and that they are powerless. Sometimes, when she held Ofer as a baby, “she always thought of the transparent threads, a web that tied Ofer to Avram [his biological father] wherever he was. She knew it made no sense, but she could not stop her hand from making that motion” (307). Red threads appear in Adam’s creative life as well as in his mother’s head. He wrote a hip-hop opera, Ora tells Avram, “‘something about exile, a kind of voyage of exiles, lots of exiles. . . . And there’s a woman in it. She walks along with a length of string, unraveling it behind her” (224). Avram and Ora discuss the significance of the string but are unable to interpret the symbolism. Avram later “thinks about the woman with the crimson thread walking all the way down the country. . . . When he was in Abbasiya Prison and thought Israel no longer existed, he saw the picture in detail. . . . But the woman walking with the crimson thread gives some comfort. You could imagine, for example, he thinks . . . that in every town and village and kibbutz there was someone stealthily tying his own thread to hers. And that way, secretly, a tapestry was being woven all over the country” (241). He later muses about the crimson thread as a kind of umbilical cord “that comes out of her and keeps going forever” (370), a wish fulfillment that he expands into a vision of a red 5

6

See Elly Teman, “The Red String: A Cultural History of a Jewish Folk Symbol,” in Jewishness: Expression, Identity, Representation, ed. Simon J. Bronner, Jewish Cultural Studies, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008); Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (New York: Atheneum Press, 1975); Rivka Ulmer, Evil Eye in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature (New York: Ktav, 1994). See Teman, “The Red String: A Cultural History of a Jewish Folk Symbol.” — 109 —

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tapestry spreading out over the entire country (370). Adam’s hip-hop opera and Avram’s vision mirror the issues raised in Smadar Amitai’s play Red Ribbons (1997), which was inspired by the playwright’s fears for her son, whose military service she was anticipating (Kaye 1997, cited in Teman). The red ribbon was a means of warding off the evil eye. Aliza Shenhar (2000, cited in Teman) posits that this kind of folkloric manifestation is a response to conditions of stress in Israeli society that are caused by the constant need for military preparedness. “‘She contends that this particular type of folklore has a healing effect on society by symbolically solving ‘the conflict between wish and reality’; it reduces tension, creates a state of greater calm and ease, and serves as an instrument for group mental stabilization” (Teman, citing Shenhar 2000:106). This seems a bit of a rosy explanation of the way the red threads operate. Grossman’s novel, however, reflects this desire for comfort and simultaneously undercuts it. Just as the novel is replete with thematic elements that speak to the strange connections between ancient superstitions and post-modern consciousness, so the form of the novel stages this encounter as well. Grossman employs postmodern techniques such as flashback, sudden shifts from present to past, and revelations about the protagonists that are out of chronological sequence. These narrative “jolts and dislocations . . . induce in the reader something of the disorientation that is experienced by the characters.”7 These narrative strategies create in the reader the same vertiginous panic that is experienced by the characters, and thus induces empathy for the magical thinking and the deployment of the fetishes, amulets, and strings. The postmodern agenda of troubling the certainties of the reader and inducing empathy is underscored by Grossman’s technical skill in presenting the tragic and chaotic events in a manner that draws the reader directly into the vortex of Israeli society. He uses the irrational strain of quasi-religious superstitious rituals and fetishes to illuminate the core irrationality of everyday life in the postmodern world. Grossman does not organize his narrative in the service of cleverness or empty innovation, but as a way of rendering reality legible to the reader and having the reader recognize postmodern Israeli society. This 7

Alan Mintz, “Love and War,” Jewish Review of Books (2010), www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/ publications/detail/love-and-war. — 110 —

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implies that there is no separation possible between secular rationality and religious superstition. The form of the novel disables any kind of binary thinking. The reader recognizes that many of the gestures that we continue to rely on in everyday postmodern reality contain at least some grain of superstitious thinking. Had Grossman written this story as a linear narrative, it would expose the weakness inherent in the strategy of the realistic novel as an attempt to organize the chaos of life. Grossman is not fragmenting, inverting or displacing for the sake of literary thrills but rather to render the reality of Israeli society in the only way open to him. Israeli society is a paradigmatic postmodern milieu, where the most ancient antagonisms play out against the most contemporary technological and sociopolitical forms. This is evident when you see the connectivity of people involved in the high tech fields (e.g., the creators of the camera developed in Karmiel that looks inside the esophagus) or pop music (Adam, with his hip-hop opera) side by side with peddlers of red threads at the western wall. The postmodern and the religious intersect constantly in Israel. The irrational is an ever-present condition for Ora as it is for other members of post-modern societies. Towards the end of the novel, as the foreshadowing of tragedy mounts, Ora’s fear manifests itself in her inability to find comfort in the trope of threads that bind and protect. “Ora thinks—and her anxiety for Ofer rouses in her, and she feels that she is not helping him now, that the thread she is tying around him is suddenly loosening” (302). The admittedly small, limited, comfort of superstition unravels. The dream of threads weaving a tapestry all around the country (241) was sustaining for a time, but then disappears. Weaving is most often associated with women; the fantasy of maternal protection disintegrates as the illusion of the protective threads is shattered.

— 111 —

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Dybbuk, Husband, Home: Shmuel Hasfari and the Fantastic Tradition in Israeli Theater Eitan Bar-Yosef1

Kiddush, written and directed by Shmuel Hasfari, was staged by the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv in 1985. It was an intense, one might say unforgettable, production. In a series of family vignettes, which became increasingly somber as the play went on, Hasfari recreated the religious Zionist middle-class of Israel in the 1960s and ‘70s, with all its anxieties and neuroses. The actors Edna Fliedel, Yossi Graber, and Dov Navon produced sterling performances, making the audience laugh out loud in the first act and then causing the smiles to slowly fade from their faces in the second. Hasfari’s jumping-off point was realistic: the story is rooted deep in the social and cultural reality in which he was raised. But the play also contains elements that are virtually surreal, including the unadulterated hatred that gradually develops between the father and mother, the schematic leap between Sabbath eves and kiddush blessings, and the definition of the space. The stage designer Eli Sinai created a standard apartment (a living room with generic furniture, a monastic bedroom, a hallway with a dial phone), but left the walls between the rooms merely implied by lines drawn on the stage itself. The actors were charged with the delicate task of moving between the rooms without stepping on the lines and thereby shattering the illusion of reality, and they did so with great skill. As a result, spectators almost missed a heartbeat in the final moments of the play when the mother, who had long since lost her sanity, suddenly walked straight across the stage, bringing down the invisible walls which until then had stood solidly in the consciousness of the actors, as well as in the minds of the audience members. Thus, with a single act, a simple theatrical device, the mother goes from being a 1

I would like to thank Dorit Yerushalmi and Chaim Hames for their helpful comments, as well as Shay Marcus and the staff of the Israeli Documentation Center for the Performing Arts at Tel Aviv University. — 112 —

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real person, a hysterical and protective flesh-and-blood human being, to being a ghost unbound by the laws of this world. The break-down of the family, symbolizing the decay of religious Zionism and the collapse of the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, reaches its climax with the implosion of the realistic mold and the move to the shadow world beyond, even if only by inference. This was not the first time, and certainly not the last, in which Hasfari incorporated supernatural foundations in his theater plays.2 As we shall see below, he is one of the few playwrights who have managed—or even attempted—to call into question the fixation with realism that has characterized Israeli theater for decades. To a large extent, it is his personal history, his religious education and familiarity with Jewish texts, that affords him the capability to elicit the potential for fantasy in what is ostensibly realistic Israeli drama. This ability opens him up to the pull of two opposite cultural forces. The first sends him back to Eastern Europe, to Hebrew theater of the early twentieth century and the elements of mysticism and legend at the core of Habima’s early productions.3 The second carries him forward and to the West, to contemporary America and its pop culture, rife with ghosts, angels, and aliens. The combination of these two forces has become a hallmark of Hasfari’s work. A close look at his plays will therefore enable us to learn about the place of fantasy in the annals of Hebrew theater, as well as its manifestations in contemporary Israeli drama. Between Two Worlds At the very end of The Rubber Merchants by Hanoch Levin (1978), Bela Barlow remembers the moment “twenty years ago, when the lights in the playhouse had gone down and the spotlight on the curtain had not yet gone up, and we sat in the dark and waited in silence, all our expectations, all our dreams concentrated on a single point in the blackness in front of us.” The breathless wait ends in letdown: “And then an old curtain opened with a squeak, a dull yellowish light shone onto the stage, and three wretched people stood on the boards up front with cardboard 2 3

For Shmuel Hasfari’s cinema work, as the screenwriter of The Intended and the director of Sh’Chor, see Shmulik Duvdevani in this volume, p. 141. Habima, one of the first Hebrew-language theaters, was founded in Moscow in 1905. In 1931 it relocated to Mandate Palestine, and in 1958 was officially declared the national theater of Israel. — 113 —

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and rags, and dissected our life for two whole hours, as if there was something there we didn’t know.”4 Bela’s disappointment, which stems from mimetic representation with its one-to-one correspondence to reality (“our life”), is an indication of the complex place of fantasy in theater, or more precisely, of theater as fantasy. The very capacity to create an alternative, non-realistic world, even if it be from “cardboard and rags,” has always been at the heart of the theatrical illusion for which the audience is willing to suspend disbelief, to believe that the actors (“wretched people”) are really imps or fairies, and to immerse themselves in the alternative, speculative, mythological, or legendary reality presented before them, whether we are talking about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Faust, Rumpelstiltskin, or Little Shop of Horrors. The emergence of the realistic tradition in Western theater in the mid-nineteenth century pushed aside the representation of imaginary worlds. Although popular theater continued to hold the audience rapt with a wealth of fantastic stories (the stage versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula, for example, appeared in London theaters shortly after their publications as novels in 1886 and 1897, respectively), “serious” theater devoted itself increasingly to naturalistic representation stripped bare of any magic. Obviously, just like fantasy theater, the new realistic theater demanded the suspension of disbelief and acceptance of certain conventions, since even realism uses actors, costumes, sets, and lighting to create an illusion.5 Yet, whereas fantasy seeks to create the illusion of an alternative reality with magical or supernatural elements, realism strives to imitate familiar reality as accurately as possible, to create on stage a middle-class home, not an enchanted forest. It was only at the turn of the century, with the growing interest in new artistic forms and elusive states of consciousness, that playwrights and directors began to return to the realms of fantasy. The First World War and the despair that followed in its wake heightened the attempt to challenge realism, to “stage the impossible” as Patrick Murphy puts it,6 in a variety of modes and styles: expressionism, surrealism, and later 4 5

6

Translated from Hanoch Levin, The Rubber Merchants and Other Plays (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah, 1988), 231 [Hebrew]. Theodore Shank, “The Shock of the Actual: Disrupting the Theatrical Illusion,” in Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama, ed. Patrick D. Murphy (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992), 169. Patrick D. Murphy, ed., Staging the Impossible. — 114 —

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epic theater (which often calls on mythic sources), and most conspicuously, the theater of the absurd. Although the absurd and the fantastic do not coincide precisely, they often overlap, as they do in Eugène Ionesco’s provincial French town in Rhinocéros, in which the inhabitants turn into rhinoceroses (1959). Although the theater of the absurd blossomed in the 1940s and ‘50s, its roots reach back to the early-twentieth-century tension between the dominant realistic tradition and the staging of alternative dramatic worlds. In effect, it was here on this fault line that Habima, the founding institution of Hebrew theater, was born. In plays like The Dybbuk by S. Ansky (1922) and The Golem by H. Leivick (1925), Habima introduced its audience to primal worlds of magic very remote from the bourgeois living rooms of Ibsen, or even the family madness of Strindberg. In this strange reality that moves “between two worlds” (the original title of The Dybbuk), the spirit of a dead religious student can possess the body of his intended bride, and a rabbi can breathe life into a clumsy creature made of clay in order wreak vengeance on barbarous Gentiles. The decision to go in the direction of fantasy is generally attributed to the director of The Dybbuk, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, one of the most outstanding figures in Russian theater. He directed the play in the spirit of “fantastic realism” or “imaginative realism,” an approach of his own invention that combined the “psychological realism” of Stanislavski with the stylized physical design of Meyerhold.7 Within a short time, the play became a cultural icon, with productions of The Dybbuk by Habima and other Jewish theaters in the 1920s and ‘30s serving as arenas for debate on the issue of modern Jewish identity.8 Thus, with hindsight it might be said that the choice of fantasy reflected the attempt of Jewish theater people to shape and define their national identity by turning away from the rationalism of the Haskalah and modernity and going back to the world of Jewish legend, Kabbalah, and mysticism. Ansky wrote The Dybbuk following a lengthy expedition to outlying Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, which he undertook with the aim of collecting and preserving their folklore. There was, of course, something detached 7 8

Julia Listengarten, Russian Tragifarce: Its Cultural and Political Roots (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press 2000), 92. Shelly Zar Zion, “Ha-dibuk: Le-kinuno shel semel tzioni” [“The Dybbuk”: The Creation of a Zionist Symbol], in “Do Not Chase Me Away”: New Studies on “The Dybbuk,” ed. Shimon Levy and Dorit Yerushalmi” (Tel Aviv: Safra, Publishing House of General Union of Writers in Israel) [Hebrew]. — 115 —

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and cerebral about this auto-ethnographic mission: it mirrored a deep ambivalence toward the fading Jewish traditions. Rather than express nostalgia for the past, then, The Dybbuk revealed its dark and grotesque sides. Indeed, it has repeatedly been claimed that the representations of Jews and Judaism in Habima’s productions were often blatantly antiSemitic.9 This paradox was typical of Habima in its early years: the theater served as a national laboratory for the restoration and conservation of the mythic and fantastic sources of Jewish culture (which to a large degree it also ridiculed and criticized),10 but at the same time, and despite its aura of progress, the Zionist project itself was often described with the aid of the very same concepts it sought to deride: an archaic world, a sleeping golem, slowly awakened. The company’s tour in Palestine in 1928 (three years before it resettled permanently in Tel Aviv for practical, and not necessarily Zionist, reasons), aroused enormous excitement and pride in the local Jewish community, along with a degree of unease. The performance of its signature production The Dybbuk revealed the tension between the old Jewish world and the Hebrew culture being resurrected in Palestine. The public trial of the play conducted by the Hebrew Writers’ Association (the judges decided against “exorcism”) demonstrated the difficulty of dealing with the ghosts of the past.11 The Dybbuk confronted viewers with the religious “otherness” of Diaspora culture, which seemed to threaten the consolidation of a modern secular Zionist identity. Not surprisingly, after Habima relocated to Palestine and internalized the pioneering ethos, the theater became swept up in the nation-building project and

9

Dan Urian, The Judaic Nature of Israeli Theatre: A Search for Identity (Amsterdam: Routledge Harwood, 2000). 10 A prime example was the production of The Treasure by Sholom Aleichem (1928), directed by Aleksei Dikiy. The actor Shimon Finkel related years later that the director had intended “to present the Diaspora Jew through the lens of the new reality, to show them the whip of contemporary criticism, to sharply highlight the grotesque in them.” It is not surprising that critics accused the theater of having “an anti-Semitic attitude toward the Jews of the Diaspora.” Cited in Dori Parnes, ed., 80 Habima Nights: 1918-1998 (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth & Habima National Theater, 1998), 26 [Hebrew]. 11 Batia Appelfeld, “Nilkhamim be-toch nafsham, mitlabtim be-toch atzman: Al mishpat agudat hasofrim and ha-sifrut ha-ivrit be-inyano shel ha-dibuk” (1926) [“A War in Their Souls, a Debate within Themselves: On the Trial of the Writers’ Association and Hebrew Literature in the Matter of ‘The Dybbuk’”], in “Do Not Chase Me Away”, ed. Shimon Levy and Dorit Yerushalmi. The trial was conducted in 1926 in the wake of a staging of “The Dybbuk” by the Theater of Eretz Israel, one of a long line of productions of the play in Europe and Israel. — 116 —

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gradually abandoned Jewish fantasy.12 Original plays were now judged by their ability to reflect, as faithfully as possible, the themes and aspirations associated with the national goals. The Dybbuk was replaced by realistic productions such as The Guards by Ever Hadani (1937), This Land by Aharon Ashman (1942), He Walked in the Fields by Moshe Shamir (1948), In the Wilderness of the Negev by Yigal Mosinsohn (1949), and The Street of Steps by Yehudit Handel (1958), all of which offered a near total, mimetic, correspondence between the fictional world on stage and the actual life of the nation outside the theater. “Reality was dressed in theatrical garb,” enthused the critic Haim Gamzu in February 1949 after attending the premiere of Mosinsohn’s play. “The material from which the play is forged is so alive, so vibrant, that it seems as if after the performance the characters will climb into their truck and return to the wilderness of the Negev to rebuild the ruins of the farm.”13 The growing dominance of Zionist theatrical realism, “so alive, so vibrant,” led to the virtual disappearance of supernatural elements from canonical Hebrew drama. The fact that The Dybbuk continued to feature prominently in Habima’s repertoire (it was performed continuously until the mid-1960s in the original Vakhtangov production, with the celebrated actress Hanna Rovina still in the lead) merely served to accentuate the gap between the fantastic roots of Hebrew theater and the daily fare of socially-committed realism. Nevertheless, different voices could be found on the margins of the establishment theater at that time, particularly in the work of poets who tried their hands at dramatic writing or in that of relatively minor playwrights. In The Lady of the Castle (1954), Leah Goldberg employed fantasy Gothic images to portray the horrors of World War II; in Children of the Shadows (1962), Ben-Zion Tomer used poetic realism and nightmarish scenes to deal with the encounter between Holocaust survivors and native Israelis; Nathan Alterman’s Ghosts’ Inn (1962) takes place in what appears to be a parallel universe, a haunted dream world inspired by Goethe’s Faust and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt; and Josef Mundy’s It 12 For the complexity of this process as reflected in the theater’s repertoire until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, see Dorit Yerushalmi, “Shnay kolot be-kfifa achat: Habima mi-ba’ad le-foalam shel Baruch Chemerinsky ve-Zvi Friedland” [Two Voices at Once: Habima through the Work of Baruch Chemerinsky and Zvi Friedland], Mikan, 7 (2006): 51-72 [Hebrew]. 13 Michael Handelsatz (ed.), Dr. Haim Gamzu: Theatre Criticism (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1999), 81-82 [Hebrew]. — 117 —

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Turns Around (1970) is an allegory with elements of fantasy in which two madmen believe they are Herzl and Kafka. In some of these plays and others like them, fantasy was a tool for implied criticism of the Zionist program, even though (or perhaps precisely because) they were often set in Europe or in pseudo-European surroundings, far from the scorching Israeli sun. But even these dramas did not construct an alternative reality. Rather, they presented a largely realistic world into which a measured dose of poetic, surrealist, or absurd images was injected. Nissim Aloni may be the most eminent playwright to incorporate fantastic elements in his work.14 Aloni demonstratively diverged from realistic drama in a long line of diverse and vibrant productions, starting with Most Cruel the King (1953), a historical play that is a development of the biblical tradition in Hebrew theater. According to Gamzu, “he fled from realism to foreign climes and the air of poetry . . . by bringing together elements that appear weird at first glance, but evolve until they are saturated with an atmosphere of Brechtian ‘alienation’ on the one hand, and fantasy and poetry on the other.”15 Works like Aunt Lisa (1969) and Gypsies of Jaffa (1971) may claim to take place in a city or town somewhere in Israel, but there is no substantial correspondence between the setting, either in the play or on the stage, and familiar Israeli reality.16 Aunt Lisa’s garden, filled with exotic flowers growing wild, is an unanchored magical place of the imagination, while Aloni’s Jaffa, bursting with nightclubs, magicians, and celebrities, is in fact a huge stage. Indeed, Aloni’s major means of representing identities on stage is the theater itself,17 an ars poetica feature that severely limits the degree of fantasy “otherness” in his work. For the reality on stage to appear supernatural, the audience must “forget” the dramatic device which created it in the first place, if only to allow the sudden shattering of this illu14 By way of comparison, Hanoch Levin brought grotesque characters and mythological worlds to the stage and often (as we shall see below) dealt with the living dead. Nevertheless, his plays cannot be said to actually occupy the sphere of fantasy. For an unusual exception, however, see his “Winter Funeral” (1978), whose characters make a rather amazing journey, somehow “leaping” from the Tel Aviv beach to the Himalayas in only ten minutes. 15 Michael Handelsatz, Dr. Haim Gamzu: Theatre Criticism, 272. 16 Corina Shoef, “‘Ivriyut’ mi-sug acher: Tipulo shel Nissim Aloni be-noseh toldot ha-yishuv” [A Different Type of ‘Hebrewness’: Nissim Aloni’s Treatment of the History of the Jewish Community in Israel], in On Actors, Kings, and Gypsies: The Theatre of Nissim Aloni, ed. Nurit Yaari (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute/Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2006) [Hebrew]. 17 Corina Shoef, “‘Ivriyut’ mi-sug acher,” 52. — 118 —

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sion in order to produce a fantastic moment (as in Hasfari’s Kiddush, for example, when the mother crosses the marks on the stage). However, Aloni constantly reminds his audience that the theatrical illusion is just that. He may have wished to distance himself from conventional Zionist realism, but the places he went to instead are not the sort of fantasy worlds we find in The Golem, for instance. Although his plays continued to conduct a dialogue with The Dybbuk (primarily by the casting choice of Hanna Rovina), it was not with the aim of embracing the possibility that the spirit of a dead man could indeed haunt a young woman and possess her body. Instead, Aloni took advantage of the iconic status of the earlier production in the Israeli collective memory in order to intensify the sense of theatricality and the dizzying whirl of identities. Canonical theater began to undergo a gradual change in the 1970s in response to several interrelated factors: the political upheavals in Israel after 1967, and particularly the founding of the Gush Emunim movement and the growth of messianism; the rediscovery of Judaism and increasing interest in mysticism and Kabbalah (the popular musical Once There Was a Hasid is one example of this religious trend);18 and the growing influence of post-modern theater outside Israel. The new approach placed the element of fantasy not in the world of Jewish revival or in undefined European settings, but in the Israeli context itself, in the same realistic space in which the country’s dramas were taking place. In the wake of the traumas of the Yom Kippur and Lebanon wars, the living dead, who had been given potent form in Nathan Alterman’s poetry collection Joy of the Poor (1941), became a stage icon.19 Schitz (1975), Hanoch Levin’s grotesque satirical play, ends with the groom Tcharchess, who was killed in the war, settling himself under the dining table of the bourgeois Israeli family. “I have dead people under my tables,” sings his father-in-law Fefechts in the final scene, “and a supply of dead people for next year.”20 Tcharchess, a sort of reverse image of Uri, the sabra hero of He Walked in the Fields, thus ridicules the necrophilia of the Israeli culture of bereavement, while at the same time remind18 Dan Urian, The Judaic Nature of Israeli Theatre. 19 In many of the productions at the Acre Fringe Theater Festival in 1985, for example, the living dead intruded into daily reality, a response to the military blunders in Lebanon and evidence of “mutual longing between the dead and the living.” See Shimon Levy, The Altar and the Stage (Tel Aviv: Or’Am, 1992), 170 [Hebrew]. 20 Translated from Hanoch Levin, Hefetz and Other Plays (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah, 1988), 367 [Hebrew]. — 119 —

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ing us of Hanan, the dead groom in The Dybbuk. His character thereby demonstrated the long road Hebrew theater had travelled, from the fantasy of Jewish folklore through the predominance of Zionist realism to the creation of a new local folklore that was a blend of Israeli realism and Jewish fantasy. This progression began on the margins, with many productions presented at the Acre Fringe Theater Festival (est. 1980) utilizing the elements of fantasy. Two of them, Black Wedding Canopy (1981) and Tashmad (1982) were written and directed by Shmuel Hasfari. As we shall see below, his rapid entrance into mainstream Israeli theater enabled him to further develop and hone his version of fantastic realism. Not in Heaven In order to understand how Hasfari managed to straddle two worlds so dexterously, we must turn to his biography. Born in Ramat Gan in 1954, he was raised in an observant home and sent to religious schools. As a young man, he belonged to extreme right-wing groups before making a sharp turn to the radical left. He studied Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then went to Tel Aviv University to study theater directing. (He never graduated; he and a group of friends dropped out to form the Simple Theater, whose stage productions included the two acclaimed entries in the Acre Festival that are mentioned above.) As Gad Kaynar points out, the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional environment that shaped Hasfari’s work was very different from that of the other leading playwrights of his generation, who were secular and liberal (e.g., Hillel Mittelpunkt, Motti Lerner, Edna Mazya, and even Joshua Sobol).21 “My theater is a substitute for the synagogue,” Hasfari explained in an interview. “I promise you, an hour and a half in the dark and you learn Torah, under a veneer of lighting and sets.”22 This unique combination of Jewish tradition and contemporary theater allows him to identify, or position, elements of fantasy in the heart of the Israeli experience. “I do not create naturalist theater,” he said on another occasion, “I start with reality and write 21 Gad Kaynar, “Between the Physical and the Metaphysical: Israeli Drama and Shmuel Hasfari,” Callboard: A Playgoers Guide, 1.2 (March 2007) (Laguna Beach, CA: The Laguna Playhouse), 8. 22 Sarit Fuchs, “Ha-teatron ve-ha-pilpul” [“Theater and Argumentation”], Maariv, Oct. 20, 1983 [Hebrew]. — 120 —

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about the bad possibilities. It’s like voodoo, only in reverse. I try to stick pins in reality in order to exorcise the bad demons.”23 The ability to identify supernatural motifs in quotidian life—to perform “reverse voodoo” on reality—not only characterizes Hasfari’s theater productions (he always directs his own plays), but in some cases also becomes part of the plot and the conflicts that drive it. Giving of the Torah at Six (1983), for example, one of his early plays, might be described as an anarchistic Purim shpiel focusing, inter alia, on the question of what would have happened if Moses (who, legend has it, was sent travelling forward in time when he received the Tablets of the Law) had accidentally found himself in modern-day Mea She’arim, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. The rabbis and their flocks, who take great pleasure in abusing the uninvited guest, reveal how far the ultra-religious have deviated from the spirit of the Torah.24 In order to illustrate this perversion, Hasfari presents a spirited adaptation of the Talmudic tale of “The Oven of Achnai,” the story of a bitter debate between Rabbi Eliezer and the other sages over how to understand an issue of religious law. To convince his colleagues that his interpretation is the right one, Rabbi Eliezer calls on a series of omens: a carob tree is uprooted and moves a hundred cubits on its own power; the water in the aqueduct flows upstream; the walls of the house of learning threaten to collapse; and a divine voice is heard, siding with Eliezer. Nevertheless, the sages reject his opinion. “It is not in heaven,” declares Rabbi Joshua, even after God himself has confirmed Eliezer’s interpretation of the law, and he is ultimately excommunicated.25 Various lessons can be drawn from this story. According to one version (that of the sages), Rabbi Eliezer represents an extreme conservative approach which refuses to acknowledge that the law must adapt itself to the spirit of the times. The miracles with which he seeks to prove that he is right belong to a different, mythical, reality, very far removed from the contemporary world of the sages. According to another interpretation, which most probably represents Hasfari’s subversive at23 Yehuda Koren, “Pachad Elohim” [Fear of God], Davar, Oct. 15, 1986 [Hebrew]. 24 Glenda Abramson, Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 127. 25 Babylonian Talmud, Baba Metzia, 59b. Rabbi Yehoshua’s words echo Deuteronomy 30:11-14: “For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven. . . . But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” — 121 —

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titude, Rabbi Eliezer is a victim of humiliation. The sages’ unwillingness to accept the miracles (“It is not in heaven,” that is, “do not attempt to bring us proof from God”) attests to their pettiness, their lack of vision or imagination. The play is critical not only of those who distort the original meaning of the divine commandments (as handed down to Moses, who watches the play-within-the-play in utter shock), but also of those who are incapable of recognizing that fantasy is an integral part of their reality. Giving of the Torah at Six is another militant phase in Hasfari’s ongoing battle against the ultra-Orthodox for claiming the exclusive right to speak in the name of God. At the same time, however, it could be said that the play is also an attack on the simplistic realism which dominated Israeli theater for generations, with its artists stubbornly denying the existence of fantastic layers. Like Rabbi Eliezer, Hasfari is not content with banal reality but calls on signs and miracles for support. When he brings to the stage wondrous creatures, such as angels or the living dead, he is actually issuing an appeal to restore Hebrew drama to its early twentieth-century roots and to reestablish the mutual bond between the mystical tradition and the project of national revival. Indeed, it may be that Hasfari’s ambivalence toward hegemonic religious practice—or on a different level, the ever-present dialectics of the sacred and the mundane in his work—is a post-Zionist Israeli version of the dilemma confronting the founders of Hebrew theater when they were compelled to decide between traditionalism and modernism. It goes without saying that the Jewish theater in which Hasfari is active operates in a very different context from the much broader sociocultural debate in which Habima found itself. Israeli productions are presented to a secular audience that is unfamiliar with traditional Jewish texts and therefore has difficulty understanding or appreciating their dramatic adaptations.26 As the critic Sarit Fuchs wrote in her review of Giving of the Torah at Six, “We sit in Shmulik Hasfari’s theater like beggars on the doorstep. He wants to pull us into a Jewish-theatrical mythology which does not yet exist. He is trying to create it in an infuriatingly Jewish theater before our ignorant eyes, with no consideration, 26 Even before hosting the production of Giving of the Torah at Six, the Khan Theater in Jerusalem had established a tradition of alternative theater on Jewish themes with plays like Seven Beggars by Yossi Yizrael, adapted from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1979), and The Wars of the Jews by Joshua Sobol and Ilan Ronen (1981). However, there can be no doubt that Hasfari’s theater work was aimed most conspicuously at an audience familiar with Jewish sources and tradition. — 122 —

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reproachfully.”27 In a brilliant critical maneuver, Fuchs defined Hasfari’s work as part of the Gnostic tradition, thereby creating an intriguing parallel between the perception of man in Gnostic thought and the manner in which the playwright represents the secular theatergoer: Gnosticism is the story of the cosmic drama of mankind lost in the material world into which it was created and to which it has inevitably become addicted. Only deep inside is there any remnant of the world of primordial light which is all spirit. . . . Mankind has lost contact with that remnant. It is ignorant of its existence. It has forgotten its initial holiness which lies dormant, in a coma, in this world of darkness. In Gnosticism, mankind’s original state is not sin, but ignorance. Absence of knowledge of its source. Salvation will come with knowledge, which is the essence of Gnostic redemption. Knowledge will be brought by a messenger from the world of light, a messenger who for the purposes of his mission will immerse himself in the material, alien world and become lost in it, a willing exile. Once he has instilled knowledge in mankind, he will be awakened from his sleep and will fly together with the souls of mortals back to the world of light, his natural home, his homeland. Shmulik is like that messenger. There is a degree of arrogance in that, but also profound despair.28 Arrogance and despair notwithstanding, it is difficult to ignore the carnivalesque optimism in which Hasfari’s cultural mission is embedded. His work turns its back on the sacred, concentrating on the earthly, contemporary meaning of the divine commandments. In Fuchs’s words, “his theater of argumentation is looking for God who isn’t in heaven.”29 In order to awaken from their stupor those bodies sunk in “this world of darkness” (human beings in Gnostic thought, but the secular theatergo27 Sarit Fuchs, “Shmuel Hasfari: Machazai she-hevi et ha-gemara le-vamat ha-teatron” [“Shmuel Hasfari: A Playwright who Brought Gemara to the Theater Stage”], Maariv, October 24, 1983 [Hebrew]. 28 Ibid. 29 Sarit Fuchs, “Ha-teatron ve-ha-pilpul.” — 123 —

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ers as well), Hasfari transports the sublime miracles from the mythological sphere to the dusty dull present. Toward the end of Giving of the Torah at Six, for example, we learn that the voice of God, which supposedly responded to Rabbi Eliezer’s call (but for some reason declined to support him), was actually provided by the head of the yeshiva, Rabbi Joelish, who used a hidden microphone because “people have to hear a voice from on high, but there is no voice on high; it comes from here.”30 Hasfari’s ironic reading of the verse “it is not in heaven” (ironic because this particular “heavenly” voice does not, in fact, come from heaven) transforms the divine miracle into a theatrical miracle, a cheap stunt that lampoons the supernatural element while simultaneously maintaining and intensifying it. Hasfari’s profound identification with Rabbi Eliezer, who remains true to himself and his beliefs, exists side by side with the playwright’s close connection to Rabbi Joelish, who creates a fantasy illusion out of nothing. Hasfari may concur with Rabbi Joshua that “it is not in heaven,” but his work demonstrates that supernatural wonders “under a veneer of lighting and sets,” are very much alive and kicking in the theater. The Eternal Jew-boy The most significant fantastic element in Hasfari’s early writing is the apocalyptic scenario. Tashmad (composed in 1982; the title bears the double meaning of the year 1984—the Jewish year 5744—and the word “destruction”) takes place on the eve of Tisha B’Av, a fast day in the Jewish calendar that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Under the weight of international pressure, the Israeli government has been forced to evacuate settlements in the occupied territories. Holed up in an underground bomb shelter in the center of Samaria, and threatening to blow themselves up if the evacuation is not halted, are four people (together with an infant): a cowardly yeshiva student yearning for the Messiah; a secular ex-paratrooper, a nationalist and salt-of-the-earth type fellow from a moshav, representing the ass on which the Messiah is expected to arrive; an excitable young religiousZionist girl with a strong libido; and Jacob, a newly religious man who 30 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Giving of the Torah at Six (Tel Aviv: Israeli Documentation Center for the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University, 1983), 52 [Hebrew]. — 124 —

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at first appears to be a simpleminded giant until he is discovered to be the Messiah himself. Jacob, made up to look like a demon, is wrapped in a prayer shawl as red as blood. Provoking, inciting, and destroying, he is a monstrous cross between the false messiah (whose story was the initial inspiration for the play) and one of Hasfari’s later characters, the Tartuffe-like Rabbi Kamea. “Everyone gets the Messiah they deserve,” Jacob snickers as he burns the book of Gemara.31 What appears to be a minor episode in a shelter ultimately turns out to be a catastrophe of cosmic proportions. Like other plays which came later, such as Pangs of the Messiah (1987) by Motti Lerner and Atom (2001) by Matti Golan, Hasfari presents a concrete, political, apocalyptic scenario that views the combination of ultra-Orthodox messianism and Gush Emunim fundamentalism as the end of Jewish history. But unlike Lerner and Golan, who wrote in a journalistic, pseudo-documentary style, Hasfari offers a poetic play in which realism gradually falls away in favor of a dark, dream-like quality reminiscent of works like Faust. Although the cast of characters includes a television crew who bang on the doors of the shelter, the sense of terror is not imposed from without but rather emerges from within, as does Jacob’s deranged transformation. Hasfari generates an apocalypse by employing those mystical ingredients with which he is so familiar. It might be said that in his own blunt style Hasfari is continuing the fantasy tradition that began with David Pinsky’s The Eternal Jew (1919), Habima’s second production, which is based on the ancient legend of the Messiah being born on the day of the destruction of the Temple. Even in a satiric cabaret like The Last Secular Jew (1986), depicting a dystopia in which a single secular man is left in an ultra-Orthodox State of Israel, Hasfari conducts a dialogue, whether consciously or otherwise, with the wide-reaching legacy of this dramatic tradition. The grotesque portrayal of the ultra-Orthodox in this play aroused a storm of public protest. Yet as we have seen, Habima’s fantasy plays also contained anti-Semitic representations of Diaspora Jews. The make-up used in The Eternal Jew, under the direction of Mchedelov, accentuated the prophet’s hooked nose, an anti-Semitic stereotype which, like the beggars’ dance in The Dybbuk,

31

Sarit Fuchs, “Tamoot nafshi im mishichim” [“Let Me Die with the Messiahs”], Maariv, October 14, 1982 [Hebrew]. — 125 —

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became a central image in Habima’s visual language.32 While Hasfari was not the only Israeli playwright to present the ultra-Orthodox world in this manner in the 1980s and 1990s (as evidenced by plays such as Yigal Even-Or’s Fleischer, 1993), he alone would seem to have resurrected the tensions and contradictions typical of early Hebrew theater, doing so in his own highly idiosyncratic manner. That being said, it is important to note that despite his diabolical character, Jacob is presented sympathetically in Tashmad as one of the scorned outcasts (“the Jew-boys”) on the fringes of the religious society in which Hasfari grew up in the 1960s. There is no doubt that in Hasfari’s world view, burning the Gemara and utterly denying Halakha signify not only nihilism but also a release from generations of bondage (a subject developed a year later in Giving of the Torah at Six). The playwright’s personal involvement in this apocalypse came to the fore during rehearsals for Tashmad, which he described in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth using ancient terms that blurred the distinction between the theme and its artistic representation: We had to duplicate the habits and practices of the Frankists, like, for example, worshipping the feces of Jacob Frank. People were sick to their stomach. We reached an impasse. After all, we had not taken a vow to present the affair of Frank and his followers even if it meant self-ruination. On top of that . . . we had been warned by mystics: “The curse of Frank will hunt you down and destroy you.” We had a serious dilemma. In the end, Hasfari was able to reshape his play thanks to a moment of epiphany. Not surprisingly, this moment is also described in quintessentially fantastic terms: Do you believe in the supernatural? . . . ..Well, something strange happened to me. Suddenly I envisioned Tashmad from beginning to end. Situation, dialogue, everything. I waited a day, thinking maybe I had imagined some non32 Gad Kaynar, “National Theatre as Colonized Theatre: The Paradox of Habima,” Theatre Journal 50, 1 (1998): 11. — 126 —

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sense and it would go away. Then I sat down and wrote. Two hours, then another two hours, then another hour. I wrote in a frenzy—monologues, dialogues. . . . Within two and a half weeks, the play was ready.33 Angels in Israel Angels in Jewish mythology, Hagai Dagan explains, “were heavenly creatures, semi-divine, who occupied the upper worlds. They had various functions, performed a variety of missions for God, and were delegated different types of divine authority.”34 Angels first appeared on the Hebrew stage in Jacob’s Dream by Richard Beer-Hoffman, staged by Habima in 1925 as part of a series of biblical plays through which the theater sought to define its Jewish identity.35 In later years, angels continued to descend upon the theater in dramatic adaptations of biblical stories, such as Shulamit Lapid’s Hired Womb (1990), which reenvisions the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar against the backdrop of Mandatory Palestine, and includes three angelic characters: Gabriel Cherubi, Michael Angel, and Serafim Doctorov. Three angels dressed in rags (a happy cherub, a comical cherub, and a sad cherub) also appear in Hanoch Levin’s Funeral (1999), which, although based on three short stories by Chekhov, goes from realism to poesy. Hasfari’s angels, however, do not operate in a mythological biblical world (or any version of it), nor do they occupy a dream-like realm. Instead, they exist in the contemporary urban reality. As such, they join dozens of other angels who hovered in the skies over Western civilization in the 1990s. The film Wings of Desire (1987), directed by Wim Wenders, and the play Angels in America (1990) by Tony Kushner, made angels the ultimate hallmark of a “high” post-modern opus (inspired to a large degree by Walter Benjamin’s discussion of “the angel of history,” written in the wake of Paul Klee’s famous painting Angelus Novus). Similar angels also showed up in a wide range of popular creations in the 1990s, from the television series Touched by an Angel to video clips 33 Emanuel Bar Kedma, ”Ha-tefilot hayu le-marshim” [“The Prayers Became Marches”], Yedioth Ahronoth, October 22, 1982 [Hebrew]. 34 Hagai Dagan, Ha-mitologia ha-yehudit [Jewish Mythology] (Tel Aviv: Mapa, 2003), 46 [Hebrew]. 35 Freddie Rokem, “Hebrew Theater from 1889 to 1948,” in Theater in Israel, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 70-72. — 127 —

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and pop songs (the Israeli rock band Mashina, for instance, sang: “I see an angel and he tells me, take the 1990s”). According to Brian McHale, these popular representations of angels are particularly intriguing since they embrace the canonical tendency to view angels as symbols of a sublime heavenly “otherness.” In contrast, folk traditions that emerged in the eighteenth century (as well as in Emanuel Swedenborg’s doctrine of the next world), regarded angels as incarnations of dead souls, human beings who have simply moved on to a higher existential sphere. As McHale has noted, the conventional, familial Swedenborgian angel (whose former earthliness cannot be erased even by a cloak, halo, and wings) was replaced in the popular culture of the 1990s by a new image: an exalted, majestic angel, a remnant of the orthodox Judeo-Christian hierarchy, not a glorified version of ourselves but something different in the extreme.36 Having directed Angels in America at the Cameri Theater in 1993, Hasfari was undoubtedly aware of the huge creative potential of the figure of the angel, and perhaps of its trendiness as well. It is therefore fascinating to see how he adapted angels for his own purposes in order to incorporate them into the improbable blend of Israeli middle-class realism and Jewish fantasy. Below, for example, is the opening of Hametz: Dark stage. Music ending with the grating screech of an object crossing through the air and landing softly. Light comes up slowly on a naked human body lying curled up on stage, his back to the audience. Two black butterfly wings sprout from his shoulders. He stretches his arms and legs, examines his body, touches it as if experiencing it for the first time, and then notices the wings. He tries to shake them, turns his head in an effort to get a look at them. He touches the area of his loins, surprised to find nothing there. Exit.37 Where a senior, white-winged, heralding angel descended to the stage in Angels in America, in Hametz the angel is black and unimpres36 Brian McHale, “What Was Postmodernism? or The Last of the Angels,” in The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities, ed. Silke Horstkotte and Esther Peeren (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 46-47. 37 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Hametz (Tel Aviv: Or-Am, 2002), 7 [Hebrew]. — 128 —

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sive, a vulnerable object of scorn lacking in any of the noble qualities of the 1990s angels.38 As he complains in one of his monologues, he is “stuck with wings like in Biblical paintings of that idiot, what’s his name, wandering the world like a plastic raven, dropping feathers on the carpet. And if I’ve already got wings, why can’t they be an angel’s? Why a butterfly’s?”39 Thus, unlike the trend McHale describes, in this play Hasfari seeks to obscure the distance between the earthly and the sublime, the holy and the profane, tragedy and comedy (and perhaps also between high art and popular culture). The fact that the play centers around a family named “Angel,” and that the father, Nehemia, worked in the Mossad for many years fighting “gangs of thousands of vile mercenary angels highly organized into scheming networks of evil,”40 also undermines the distinction between good and evil, physical and metaphysical, the mythology of the angel and the middle-class realism of the Angels. Traveling from place to place throughout Israel (on a motorbike), the angel persuades the hero of the play, Arik, to set out on a vengeful spree against the symbols of the Zionist state (which includes setting fire to the Museum of Illegal Immigration, vandalizing the building commemorating fallen soldiers, and extinguishing the Eternal Light at Yad Vashem). The time of the events, Passover eve, is of course highly significant. The haggadah read at the seder states explicitly that God alone is responsible for the miracle of the Exodus from Egypt, which symbolizes the start of national rebirth (“I, not an angel . . . I, not a seraph”). In Hasfari’s subversive version, however, the plot is driven by an insignificant, pathetic—one might say, Jewish—mercenary angel who goes out to avenge Arik, the Diaspora Jew trampled underfoot by the Israeli establishment. Remaining faithful to the ironic reading of “it is not in heaven,” Hasfari wrests authority from God and transfers it to a different, earthbound, player. 38 Hasfari, then artistic director of the Cameri theater, received Kushner’s play when he was just starting to write Hametz. He claimed he felt “envious that the playwright had written the words before me. . . . The angel appears in the first scene of ‘Hametz’ when people are getting ready for the Passover Seder. The angel goes around with one of the characters and sheds black feathers. Later the man commits suicide and the angel takes his place at the table. I wrote scenes in a style strongly influenced by cinema. It was a shock to discover that the style I was thinking of developing had already been written by someone else, with the same layers and the same universal Jewish associations, exactly like my outline for ‘Hametz’.” See Dorit Hakim, “Al pnei ha-adama” [On the Surface of the Earth], Hadashot, March 5, 1993 [Hebrew]. 39 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Hametz, 25. 40 Ibid., 56. — 129 —

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The use of the word “player” here is not arbitrary. Much like in Wenders’s influential film, in which the character played by Peter Falk is a fallen angel, the grotesque angel in Hametz offers Hasfari another opportunity to paint the Jewish fantasy in typical theatrical colors, that is, to display the similarity between the supernatural and the theatrical illusion.41 The angel comes and goes as he pleases, turns the volume on the radio up or down, recites the Four Questions in the seder ritual, and slowly reveals himself to some of the characters on stage. Starting out as something like a stagehand and gradually evolving into a prompter, then a playwright plotting the story, and finally an actual character in it, the angel gradually closes the gap between the fantasy tale and realistic drama. This process reaches its climax at the very end of the play, when the audience discovers that the angel is, in fact, Michael, the child who was murdered by his father Arik. In his final form on stage as a shy toddler in pajamas, he confesses that he has now completed his mission, to get revenge on his father and take his life. Hasfari thus returns to the Christian Swedenborg tradition (the angel as a member of the family). However, the playwright gives it a dark reading that reflects profound pessimism as to the capability of the state, society, family, or home to provide the required spiritual redemption. Angels also appear in later plays by Hasfari. Although the Jewish context of Passover eve may be absent, in all these works the presence of the angels is associated with the tension between a specific family drama and more general sociopolitical issues. Accordions (2001), for example, deals with the desperate attempt of a wealthy woman, Mira, to atone for a terrible injustice she committed twenty years earlier when she accused a promising young man, Matanyahu, of raping her seven-year-old daughter. Now dying of cancer, she conducts a relentless dialogue with a minor angel sent to bring her to heaven. The plot shifts between shoddy Tel Aviv below and the seat of judgment above, an amazing place that resembles a brassiere factory (Matanyahu’s father was the owner of just such a factory before he lost his fortune in mysterious circumstances). Atypically, in this play Hasfari makes little direct reference to the role of faith in the routine of Israeli life; nor is he expressly critical of the 41 Freddie Rokem, “Lefa’amim gam al yadei malach o shaliach” [“Sometimes Also by an Angel or Messenger], program notes for Hametz (Tel Aviv: Beit Lessin, 1995) [Hebrew]. — 130 —

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Zionist state. Rather, he prefers to develop a universal melodramatic theme, and so it is not surprising that the heavenly court looks as if it came straight out of an old Frank Capra movie. On the other hand, the play reinforces his mythological framework of Jewish texts. Mira asks her daughter to read her a passage (attributed in the program to the medieval homiletic source Hibbut Hakever) describing how a monumental angel, “his length from one end of the world to the other and covered with eyes from head to toe, his garment fire, his mantle fire, all of him fire,” sprays a bitter drop on the mouth of the dead, and if he sinned “his soul is plucked from his body as nettles are plucked from wool.”42 Like Hametz, Accordions creates a parodic parallel between the divine world represented by the monumental angel in the text and the pitiful minor angel on stage (a “four-eyes” whose glasses are held together with a rubber band). When Mira asks, “Where is the angel with the sword?,” the angel Gabriel tells her: “He doesn’t work here any more. Canned. They use different methods today. Psychology.”43 But it is not only Jewish mythology that disintegrates here. The accordion is identified in the play with the decline of secular, joyful, optimistic Israeliness.44 The victim, Matanyahu, a talented musician in his youth who almost made it into an army entertainment troupe, earns a living repairing broken accordions, which fill the basement of his home, turning it into a musical mausoleum, a testament to everything that went wrong in both his personal and the collective dream. Hasfari fits the angels in the play with wings made from two stretched accordions. We might say that in this play, the Jewish angel from Hametz becomes an Israeli angel, carrying the burden of the sabra myth on his shoulders. The angel in Milano (2004), the second part of a trilogy depicting the Ben-Ephraim family against the backdrop of the second intifada, combines these two aspects, the Jewish and the Israeli. Naftali Greuder, an insurance agent who is going to Cyprus to watch a soccer match between Hapoel Tel Aviv and A.C. Milan, is selling travel insurance to the other people on the flight. He is described in the stage directions 42 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Accordions, Cameri Theater Archives, 2001, 16 [Hebrew]. 43 Ibid., 27. 44 The accordion was “the most sabra instrument possible,” Hasfari explains in the program notes. “A one-man band. Like a magician, a young man takes the instrument out of its case and immediately all Israel is dancing around him.” See Rivka Meshulach, “Ha-yecholet la’asot tikkun: Sikha im hamakhazai Shmuel Hasfari” [“The Ability to Make Redemption: Conversation with the Playwright Shmuel Hasfari], program notes for Accordions (Tel Aviv: Cameri Theater, 2001), 7 [Hebrew]. — 131 —

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as “a scrawny fan wearing a knitted yarmulke [identifying him as Modern Orthodox] and a business suit. He is jittery and can’t sit still for a minute. He carries a cage-like container with a dove inside.”45 It is only at the end of the play, in a dialogue between Naftali and Ro’i (a young man who has just committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the airport terminal), that we discover that the aggravating insurance agent is actually the Angel of Death. But as the following lines indicate, he is portrayed here in a watered-down version, very different from the familiar figure of the Grim Reaper found, for instance, in films by Ingmar Bergman. Ro’i (to Naftali): I never would have imagined that a geek like you could be the Angel of Death. Naftali: I’m not really the Angel of Death. I’m a delivery guy. There are clerks, department heads, agents—I’m a delivery guy. Ro’i: On a motorbike? Naftali: Why, are you a pizza? Ro’i: And the dove in the cage? Naftali: It’s like a metaphor for your soul. A private joke. Never mind.46 The role of Naftali was given to Dov Navon, the actor who had previously played the angel in Hametz (where, it will be remembered, he does ride a motorbike), underscoring the similarity between the two eccentric angels, and again highlighting the earthiness and marginality of Hasfari’s angel. These qualities are expressed here in Naftali’s yarmulke and non-sabra-like behavior, making him a fresher version of the religious Ramat Gan eccentric of the 1960s (and thus a successor to Jacob in Tashmad).47 Nonetheless, it is difficult to find in Milano the same elements that appeared in Hasfari’s earlier Jewish theater. 45

Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Milano (Tel Aviv: Hanoch Levin Institute of Israeli Drama, 2005), 18 [Hebrew]. 46 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Milano, 86-87. 47 Marvin Carlson claims that the actor’s earlier roles continue to “haunt” him in a process he calls “ghosting.” See Marvin Carlson, “Invisible presences: Performance intertextuality,” Theatre Research International, 19, 2  (1994): 111-117. It goes without saying that this supernatural reference has particular significance in the present context. It is also worth noting that Navon previously played the son in Kiddush as well. — 132 —

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On the contrary, although Naftali is depicted as a typical Israeli “fixer,” the bureaucracy of the heavenly hierarchy (in Accordions, too, the next world is structured “like a health fund . . . levels, clerks, procedures, bureaucracy, forms”)48 clearly pays homage to the images of the afterlife in popular American culture, in such movies as Heaven Can Wait or Beetlejuice. As I will demonstrate in the next section, this influence can also be traced in the characters of the living dead in Hasfari’s plays. The most direct reference to American pop culture, however, would seem to be in Netanya (written in 1997, but staged for the first time in 2005), which is set in a nursing home for the elderly and relates to the crisis of privatization and the collapse of the Zionist dream. M.M. (Menachem Mendel), the pious son of the home’s owner, spends most of his time on the roof fiddling with a light organ and amplifiers in an attempt to attract UFOs to the Netanya beach. He is joined by Genya, an elderly woman originally from a kibbutz who longs for a spaceship to carry her away from the home. This longing, framed throughout the play much like a grotesque version of the Chekhovian yearning for someplace else, is fulfilled in the last scene, as detailed in the stage directions: Sirens sound and blinking lights appear in the distance. ... The noise gets louder, the sirens become more insistent, and a dazzling white light, blinding in its intensity, slowly descends outside the glass window. The people turn to the light. Their facial features become blurred and they look like silhouettes against the great light coming from outside. The noise level drops suddenly, leaving only a buzzing sound. The old people move toward the light, vanish, and then: The loud noise resumes and the light slowly ascends. . . . When the noise from outside dies down, we suddenly hear through M.M.’s walkie-talkie the voices of the departing people—they are singing “Peace unto you, angels of peace, angels of the Most High” [from a liturgical poem sung to greet the Sabbath]. Genya’s rasping voice 48 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Accordions, 25. — 133 —

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can be heard, and they are accompanied by a strange accordion. The sound of the carefree chatter of the departing is heard until it fades out.49 One can easily detect the influence of Hollywood blockbusters such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., or Cocoon (which deals specifically with an interaction between elderly characters and aliens). While Netanya is based on a true story—a UFO frenzy that gripped the city in September, 1996, a year before the play was written—it is reasonable to assume that the rash of sightings itself drew inspiration from cinematic representations of extraterrestrials. The fact that Hasfari chose the Sabbath song to accompany the ascent of the UFO is a reminder that aliens in popular culture often borrow from traditional images of angels: in both cases they are creatures from on high who populate worlds in the heavens.50 Nevertheless, Hasfari seems uncomfortable in this new territory, and indeed, the scene depicting the landing of the spaceship was deleted from the final version of the play used for the Cameri Theater production. In contrast to Milano, for example, which ends with confirmation of the fantastic element (embodied by the figure of the Angel of Death), Netanya concludes with the discovery that M.M.’s UFO fever was an illconceived attempt to delude the citizens of Netanya. “All the UFOs, the spaceships, the lights in the sky, all the hullabaloo on the beach—he did it with a kite and flashlights,” we are told by Mahmud, a caretaker at the nursing home. “[M.M.] doesn’t believe in anything. He tricked everyone, including me.”51 Netanya suffered more than any other of Hasfari’s productions from a series of mishaps and setbacks. Still, it is hard to determine what led to the deletion of the fantasy ending—logistical problems, financial demands made by the Cameri Theater management, or the laborious work on the production which exhausted Hasfari (and probably diminished his faith in miracles). Even the statement “it is not in heaven” seems to have become irrelevant here. Apparently, flashlights 49 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Netanya (Tel Aviv: Hanoch Levin Institute of Israeli Drama, 2006), 61-62 [Hebrew]. 50 This similarity is illustrated by the title of Keith Thompson’s book Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991). See also Brian McHale, “What was Postmodernism?” 51 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Netanya, 46. — 134 —

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and kites, the props used to perform theatrical magic, were no longer enough to create a convincing illusion. The Living and the Dead The shimmering light of the spaceship demonstrate how difficult it is to create fantasy sci-fi worlds on stage, especially when these require the representation of advanced technology.52 But whereas some of Hasfari’s plays demand special sets, stunts, and props (such as the angels’ wings in Hametz and Accordions), others operate in the directly opposite manner, evoking the fantasy world not by means of theatrical effects, but by their very absence. In other words, the supernatural reveals itself only when, or rather because, the fragility of the theatrical illusion is expressed. The most interesting example of this device appears in Woman, Husband, Home (2003), the first play in the Ben-Ephraim trilogy. The plot revolves around the growing conflict between Yoel, a columnist for a local Tel Aviv paper who is enchanted by the architectural legacy of the “White City,” and his wife Nava, an attorney determined to renovate their old Bauhaus apartment. Several scenes in Act I contain conversations between Yoel and their son, Yuval. When they talk about Nava’s radical renovation plans, for instance, Yuval says, “I’ll be sorry to see it, but I’m just a kid. Who pays any attention to me?” and reminds his father that “it’s your house too.”53 Only toward the end of Act II (in which Yuval does not appear) does the audience discover that Yuval was killed in a terror attack on Dizengoff St. five years earlier. With this new information, the viewers realize that Yoel is the only one who can see his dead son. This explains why Nava does not say goodbye to Yuval when he leaves the house riding on his father’s back, and why she complains that her husband “talks out loud to himself” at night.54 In hindsight, we suddenly comprehend Nava’s attitude toward the child’s bedroom that has been turned into Yoel’s office (“It was Yuval’s room. . . . He doesn’t like me to go in there”), as well as her remark to her sister-in-law, Naomi, 52 Joseph Krupnik, “‘Infinity in a Cigar Box’: The Problem of Science Fiction on the Stage,” in Staging the Impossible, ed. Patrick D. Murphy , 197-220. 53 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Woman, Husband, Home (Tel Aviv: Levin Institute of Israeli Drama, 2006), 37-38 [Hebrew]. 54 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Woman, Husband, Home , 30, 34. — 135 —

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that Yoel “hasn’t gotten over the grief, the loss.”55 Because of Yuval’s physical presence on stage in Act I, these statements have no coherent meaning until we are actually told that he is dead. Indeed, Hasfari deliberately nurtures the illusion of his existence, purposely misdirecting the audience, or at least making it difficult for them to understand what is happening on stage. When Yoel explains to Kaddosh the contractor that the office used to be “the kid’s room,” Kaddosh assumes that Yuval has grown up and is now in the army. When the father says “he’s not in the army . . . he didn’t enlist,” Kaddosh takes it to mean that Yuval is a draft dodger and immediately starts talking about his problems with his own son, who refuses to serve in the army. It is only several scenes later, when Kaddosh asks Yoel’s mother if she is not upset by her grandson dodging military service, that the truth is revealed. “Did they tell you they had a son?” the grandmother asks. “Not in so many words,” Kaddosh replies, “Maybe I got it wrong.” He thus mirrors the confusion of the audience, who thought they were watching an utterly realistic play but are now being asked to brook the existence of ghosts.56 Tzvetan Todorov defines the “fantastic” as an ambiguous state that obliges readers or viewers “to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described.”57 Throughout Woman, Husband, Home, the character of Yuval is clouded in this sort of uncertainty, with only the unexpected revelation at the end of the play voiding the “natural” explanation and casting the story explicitly in a supernatural light. It is important to note here that according to Todorov, the viewers cannot be allowed to interpret the reality on stage as allegorical or poetic. And indeed, though it may be clear that Yuval reflects Yoel’s desires and dilemmas, the realistic foundation of the story (the play deals, among other things, with the architectural embodiment of time-honored Zionist realism) makes it impossible to interpret it as a psychological allegory. In fact, the very use of the conventions of Israeli realism enable Hasfari to expose the fragility of these conventions. Like the end of Kiddush, when the mother walks through the imaginary walls declar-

55 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Woman, Husband, Home , 33, 34. 56 Ibid., 45, 57. 57 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), 33. — 136 —

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ing with a giggle, “I’m going now. And there’s no telephone there,”58 the fantasy element at the end of Woman, Husband, Home coincides with the creation (and consequently with the shattering as well) of a theatrical illusion. Indeed, Hasfari draws a deliberate parallel between this play and Kiddush. It is no accident that in one of the most significant scenes in Woman, Husband, Home, the grandfather pulls down the walls of Yuval’s former bedroom, which are described in the stage directions as “imaginary walls.” The directions indicate that “the sounds of demolition and the walls’ collapse are heard in the darkness.”59 The similarity to Kiddush suggests that while the theatrical device of presenting ghosts that appear to be real people may be reminiscent of movies such as The Sixth Sense (1999), Hasfari’s affinity for the living dead also derives from his own life, personality, and upbringing. As he explained in an interview: “A playwright always writes realism, period. It’s how I see reality, and in my reality the dead don’t die and the living live in doubt, and death isn’t such a big deal because the dead can come back or simply remain there on stage. That’s how my consciousness in my private life is constructed too: my dead didn’t die. They continue to be important to me, sometimes more than the living people around me.”60 This outlook comes to the fore most particularly in Shiva (1996), the third play in Hasfari’s earlier trilogy, which began with Kiddush and Hametz.61 When the curtain goes up, the father, Tuvia, is entering his apartment. “Afternoon, a house in Tel Aviv,” the narrator tells the audience. “The door opens and a man around the age of sixty comes in.”62 A while goes by until the audience realizes that he is actually dead, that is, that the man walking around the apartment is the deceased for whom the family is sitting shiva. Tuvia appears in several additional scenes, and although some of them are expressly defined as the dreams of other characters, his presence on stage alongside the rest of the cast creates the hesitation Todorov describes. In contrast to the angels who show up in our world having come from a different, fundamentally mythological, 58 59 60 61

Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Kiddush (Tel Aviv: Or Am, 1990), 68 [Hebrew]. Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Woman, Husband, Home, 58. Etti Abramov, “Ha-metim sheli lo metu” [“My Dead Didn’t Die”], Shishi, April 7, 1995 [Hebrew]. For a discussion of the trilogy, see Nurit Nathanel, “Ha-hevra ha-israelit: Kera’im she-ainam mitztarfim le-shalem; Iyun be-trilogia shel Shmuel Hasfari” [“Israeli Society: Parts That Do Not Equal a Whole; A Discussion of the Trilogy by Shmuel Hasfari”], Bama 170 (2004): 41-59 [Hebrew]. 62 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Shiva (Tel Aviv: Or Am, 2002), 7 [Hebrew]. — 137 —

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reality, the living dead continue to occupy this world after death, thereby stretching theatrical realism, as well as the ability to accept supernatural foundations, to the limit. This ambiguous state of existence is revealed at the end of Milano, which revisits the storyline of Woman, Husband, Home, looking at it from a different perspective. Since Hasfari assumes that at least some of the viewers are already familiar with the first part of the Ben-Ephraim trilogy, we are told at the very beginning of Milano that although Yuval is dead, he continues to shadow his father, Yoel, throughout the play. Having been made aware of the supernatural dimension from the start, we are thus not taken completely off guard by the revelation that Naftali is the Angel of Death. When Yuval joins Naftali and Ro’i, the new living dead, he explains how his “life” works: Yuval: Most of the time, you do what you want—play music, play soccer, read, watch what’s going on below— and when he calls you, you go and talk to him and spend some time with him, and then you’re free to go back to doing your own thing. As time goes by, the less they call you. It depends on how guilty they feel. For instance, after the game, Yoel, my father, didn’t even notice I wasn’t there any more. He’s starting to get better. It might take longer for your father. …. Naftali: Come on, you have to sign for your equipment. Yuval: If we’re late, we won’t get any supper.63 Milano further develops the theme of the bureaucracy of the next world, this time with the help of the metaphor of an army base. The final scene demonstrates the fine line connecting and dividing the two worlds, the complex relationship between reality and theatrical representation, and most importantly the constant tension between an actor’s actual physical existence and the role he or she is playing on stage. This tension is naturally heightened when the character is dead. According to Dorit Yerushalmi, in such a situation “the contrast between life

63 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Milano, 87. — 138 —

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and death is seemingly done away with, but in fact, it is reemphasized.”64 Hasfari himself indirectly relates to this theme in the second scene of Woman, Husband, Home. Yoel’s brother, Motti, recalls that as children they used to spy on Hanna Rovina, who lived nearby, and creates an explicit analogy between Nava’s eagerness to renovate the apartment and the mythology of The Dybbuk: When a woman is possessed by an obsession to renovate, it’s a force of nature, a typhoon. You can’t even beat it out of her. “Renovation be gone!—I won’t be gone!” Remember, Yoel, how Dad used to do an impression of Hanna Rovina? “Dybbuk, be gone—I will not be gone!” She lived right here, Naomi, did I tell you? . . . A few houses down, at the end of the block. (Looks through the window) We were kids. We used to stand on the balcony and watch who went up to see her and then run to get their autograph. The poor fools didn’t want anyone to know they’d been there, so they’d go through the back yards to avoid us. Let her be healthy, what a queen she was, may she rest in peace.65 This anecdote hints at the plot twist at the end of the play when we realize, to our surprise, that it is actually Yoel who is possessed by a “dybbuk” (the ghost of his son, Yuval, let him be healthy, may he rest in peace). But the story is also constructed on the distinction (or from a different perspective, the similarity) between Rovina’s mythic roles as an actress and her physical presence as a flesh and blood human being. In Hasfari’s theater, this tension between the actor and the role (or in the case of Woman, Husband, Home, between the physical stage representation and the metaphysical notion of the living dead), becomes the most prominent marker of the supernatural dimension. The allusion to Rovina’s ghost brings us back to the complex function of fantasy in the annals of Hebrew theater, and to Shmuel Hasfari’s 64 Dorit Yerushalmi, “Teatron ha-mavet ve-hamchashat he-he’ader: Al dfusei ha-bimui shel Hanoch Levin” [“Theater of Death and the Realization of Absence: On the Directing Modes of Hanoch Levin”], in Hanoch Levin: The Man with the Myth in the Middle, ed. Nurit Yaari and Shimon Levy (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2004), 237 [Hebrew]. 65 Translated from Shmuel Hasfari, Woman, Husband, Home, 14. — 139 —

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place in this history. More than any other fantastic component of his work, his obsession with the living dead conducts a dialogue with the venerable tradition of Hebrew culture. Hasfari’s compelling contribution to this legacy lies in his capacity to position the living dead as the focal point of a realistic theatrical project. Woman, Husband, Home is not a play in the style of the theater of the absurd, as is Nissim Aloni’s The Wild Deceased (1980), in which a dead man comes back to life. Nor is it a poetic satire such as Hanoch Levin’s The Suitcase Packers (1983), in which Henya and her dead husband Zvi appear to their son Elhanan.66 And unlike the living dead in the fringe theater of the 1980s,67 the ghosts in Woman, Husband, Home and Milano are not relegated to the margins of the theater world (where Hasfari, too, began his career), but occupy center stage in repertory theaters. Three decades after he started in the theater, Hasfari is still seeking out the supernatural—not in heaven, but under the veneer of the lighting and sets of realistic stage productions. This quest sets him apart not only from most of the Israeli playwrights of his generation, but also from the living dead of Milano. While they gradually depart from the world of their loved ones until they vanish entirely, Hasfari’s dybbuk continues to relish haunting the middle-class realism of Israeli theater. Hasfari be gone! I will not be gone!

66 For Hanoch Levin’s use of the living dead, see Dorit Yerushalmi, “Teatron ha-mavet.” 67 Shimon Levy, The Altar and the Stage, 170-180. — 140 —

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Magical Realism in Israeli Cinema Shmulik Duvdevani

Fantasy, at least of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings variety, has never taken hold as a legitimate style in Israeli cinema. If there is any fantasy at all, it is the sort that depicts a utopian society in the reclaimed Land of Israel. Indeed, from the beginning, Hebrew films have followed the birth of the “new Jew” (a fantastical construct in and of itself, and equally artificial) in the modern Land of Israel, and have taken pains to promote the central Zionist ideals: return to the homeland, ingathering of the exiles, and the Sabra persona. These myths were intended not only to deny the legitimacy of Jewish existence in the Diaspora, but also to eradicate the identity and legacy that evolved there. The societies portrayed in the works of Y.L. Gordon, Hayim Nahman Bialik, and Mendele Mocher Sforim were described in Israeli schools as examples of “unenlightened religious fanaticism or assimilation resulting in the loss of Jewish identity.”1 Diaspora Jews themselves were depicted in these texts as “lowly cowards in contemptible trades who are wretched and impoverished.”2 In the service of the same ideology, Zionist cinema conveyed nationalist messages, telling stories of heroes and the blooming of the desert through the efforts of the newly arrived pioneers.3 At the same time, it was influenced, ideologically and aesthetically, by the social realism of the cinema in Stalin’s Soviet Union, as well as by the glorification of the physique of the athlete and laborer in the fascist propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi Germany. I contend here that the relative popularity of magical realism in contemporary Israeli cinema reflects the move from a monolithic unicultural society to a diverse multicultural one. The ideal of a “melting pot,” which requires unifying national myths to help in creating cohe1

Anita Shapiro, “Le’an halcha ‘shlilat ha-galut’” [“Where Did ‘Negation of the Diaspora’ Go”] Alpayim 25 (2003): 13 [Hebrew]. 2 Ibid. 3 For example: Sabra (Alexander Ford, 1933); This is the Land (Baruch Agadati, 1935); The Great Promise (Joseph Leitz, 1947). — 141 —

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sion in an emerging society, has been replaced by rejection of the notion of a single hegemonic tradition and a questioning of supposedly “axiomatic” identity concepts such as “Israeliness” and “Sabra character,” along with a desire to expose the ideological mechanisms that produced them. Before we proceed, it is necessary to understand the distinction between fantasy and magical realism. Whereas “pure” fantasy is almost totally absent from Israeli cinema (with the single exception of David Perlov’s The Pill, 1972), there are numerous examples of magical realism, particularly starting in the mid-1990s. In essence, magical realism contains characters and events that “we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe as they have been formulated in Western empirically based discourse.”4 The old man with the huge wings in Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is one example of an inexplicable cinematic situation. It is important to stress that such characters and events are part of the phenomenological world with which we are familiar, that is, they belong to a fictional world with a mimetic function. In contrast, fantasy creates a totally different world from the one in which we live, a world with its own laws (talking plants and animals, enchanted places, wizards, demons, etc.). Another feature of magical realism, suggested by Tzvetan Todorov, is a constant wavering between belief and disbelief in the extraordinary events portrayed on the screen.5 The genre relies on vacillation between a natural and supernatural explanation of the fictitious occurrences. For example, witchcraft functions as a totally realistic phenomenon in Shmuel Hasfari’s Sh’Hur [Black], 1994, an autobiographical film based on the memories of the screenwriter and actress Hana Azoulay-Hasfari, which tells the story of a family of Moroccan descent in a development town in Israel in the 1970s. The limitless ability of Moroccan women to make use of supernatural powers is a unique expression of the power of women in the society of Mizrachi immigrants (those who came from Arabic-speaking countries in Asia and North Africa), in which traditional patriarchalism (represented by the father) has become impotent (he is blind). The lighting of lights with a mere nod of the head and the sudden gust of wind that upsets the tables at a wedding are merely two 4 5

Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 7. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). — 142 —

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of the many scenes in the movie that mark it as magical realism. As noted above, the source of the magical realism in Israeli cinema in the past two decades can be found in the sociocultural changes that have led to the country’s redefinition as “multicultural.” The transition from cultural monolithism to diversity not only brought to the fore the heterogeneous nature of Israeli society, but also enabled groups who had previously been regarded as marginal, and could not find a place in the historical Zionist narrative, to tell their stories. The term “magical realism” is associated most closely with the works of the writers Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Julio Cortázar. It thus sprang from the hybrid culture of Latin America, a mix of the influences of Iberian settlers, African slaves, and local tribes, such as the Maya, in territories that were previously European colonies. Faris6 identifies magical realism in literature with the figure of Caliban, the wild man in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who learns his master’s language and uses it to curse him. Similarly, the modern genre of magical realism makes use of realistic European discourse to describe wondrous and preposterous events that contravene the principles of Western empiricism.7 This explains why it flourished in the literature of Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and Africa, former colonies of the West. Nevertheless, it gradually made its way into the mainstream, appearing in the works of Western authors such as Günter Grass (The Tin Drum) and John Updike (The Witches of Eastwick). Yet while it may be argued, as Faris claims, that postcolonial magical realism is ontological, deriving from a context of culture and myth, in Europe its roots lie in the literary experiments of modernism and postmodernism.8 Moreover, the presence of magical realism in European literature demonstrates how the fringes “seep into” the mainstream, blurring the distinction between the center and the periphery, between the master and his former subject. Israeli cinema, as a reflection of the changes and tensions in local society and culture, also strives to eliminate the distinction between the center and the periphery, or rather, to create a multiplicity of centers. This multiplicity calls into question the definition of concepts such as time, place, history, and identity, a feature demonstrated very clearly in 6 Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 28. 7 The term “magical realism” was coined in 1925 by the art historian Franz Roh to describe the return of European painting to realism following the expressionist period. 8 Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 30. — 143 —

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Sh’Hur. The Ashkenazi Zionist center is represented in the film by the television set carried with great ceremony into the home of the family in the periphery. It symbolizes the fictitious presence of the central Zionist hegemony, a substitute for something that does not exist in reality. In addition, the integration of the protagonist, Cheli, into the dominant narrative (represented symbolically by her changing her name from Rachel to Cheli in order to erase her Mizrachi roots) is depicted dramatically through her appearance on the small screen as the moderator of a popular talk show. Once again, television, a system of images, represents the dominant narrative which is, in effect, absent.9 The connection between the absence of the Zionist center and the absence of place names in the movie is also allied with the questioning of identity. Cheli represents the fragility of Israeli identity in an age of multiculturalism. It is an artificial construct, an element reified by the empty spaces in which it exists in the film’s present, washed in cold alienated tones of blue, just as the Ashkenazi Israeli identity in which Cheli clads herself is invented. In other words, “Western” Cheli is not exactly a model of success. She has given up her Mizrachi identity, cut herself off from a past she is unable to comprehend, which is symbolized by the “crazy sister” Pnina, but has not actually found her place in the framework of her new identity. She does not smile, nor can she communicate either with her disabled daughter or with the black powers, that is, with the women in her family. She is therefore an indistinct identity existing in some undefined space, detached from her roots, an identity that hovers between the rational world and the magical world (where the “black” functions as a totally realistic phenomenon), between Ashkenazi (Western) and Mizrachi (Eastern), and between times—the past and the present. The possibility of reconciling these times is represented by her daughter, the third generation immigrant, who, we discover, is also endowed with black powers and communicates suggestively, non-verbally, with Pnina, who represents the past. Equating magical realism in Sh’Hur with the world of North African immigrants (especially the narrative of the women) might suggest a 9

In this context, Lubin notes the lack of names in the journey made to the father’s funeral in the film’s present by Cheli, her autistic daughter, and her insane sister. The journey, she argues, is through a “deserted entity,” and the relationship between the women and the space in which they travel is not based on familiarity with or recognition of the places along the way; Orly Lubin, Isha koret isha [Women Reading Women] (Haifa: University of Haifa Press, 2003), 253-262 [Hebrew]. — 144 —

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Western outlook which assumes that the fantastical and irrational belong to native rather than European civilizations, and that the rational, enlightened, and scientific belong to Western civilizations, where they are tools for revealing the “truth.” From this perspective, the way to integrate successfully into modern Israeli society is to rid oneself of “primitive” beliefs. This view, however, is based on the assumption that realistic representation of the national/Zionist narrative, which demands integration, the eradication of differences, and the exclusion of the “other” (whether that other is the Diaspora Jew, the woman, or the Palestinian), is superior to any alternative forms for representing repressed narratives. The poetics of magical realism therefore serve in the film as a fundamental alternative framework predicated on the lack of ability to acquire a new, utopian (Ashkenazi Zionist) identity and discard the identity born in the Diaspora. In Sh’Hur, magical realism is the result of accepting supernatural elements as an integral part of everyday life. On the one hand, the black powers enable the Mizrachi woman to control the reality (national, Zionist, patriarchal) that has relegated her to the fringes of society, and on the other it operates within a narrative context from which the Ashkenazi and national are absent. In other words, the Zionist center does not exist here. On the contrary, it is represented entirely by absence, by what Rachel lost when she became Cheli: the black power, Mizrachi identity, communication with her daughter, and authentic family ties (shown in the past, filmed in warm colors in an aesthetic reminiscent of the representation of Mizrachi society in popular Israeli ethnic comedies from the 1970s).10 Mizrachi identity and the magical realism of black powers do not exist in the film as an alternative perspective to the European Ashkenazi one, as the latter is utterly absent. Unlike the earlier popular movies, which offered an “Ashkenazic Mizrachi” option, nurturing the utopian ideal of the Mizrachi to become integrated in the Ashkenazi collective (in effect, demonstrating its hegemonic status), Sh’Hur refuses to define “Mizrachi” in terms of “Ashkenazi.” This is not to say that there is no Ashkenazi hegemony. As we have seen, it is represented in the movie by television (where Cheli’s program reflects her integration in the Ashkenazi Zionist mainstream), as well as by the 10 For analysis of the popular cinema’s aspects in Sh’Hur, see Yosefa Loshitzky, “Authenticity in Crisis: Shur and New Israeli Forms of Ethnicity,” Media Culture and Society 18 (1996): 87-103. — 145 —

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teacher in the boarding school she attended as a young girl. Lubin contends that “only when the ‘other’ ignores these relationships with the center [defining the center by what it is not], can he be ‘himself,’ not the ‘self’ reflected in the mirror placed before him by the center to serve its own purposes.”11 Magical realism is the aesthetic/poetic expression of this refusal, signifying the narrative of ‘otherness’.” Thus, by means of magical realism Sh’Hur creates a mechanism of decolonialization that rejects the hegemonic reading of Mizrachi identity as the manifestation of a primitive, alien mentality. The absence of the Ashkenazi in the film is, in essence, the absence of the “mirror,” of the definition of Mizrachi identity in respect to the hegemonic culture. Thus the viewer is asked to look at reality from a different angle, not through the hegemonic lens. Sh’Hur is by no means the sole example of magical realism in contemporary Israeli cinema. Indeed, films such as August Snow (Hagai Levi, 1993), Passover Fever (Shemi Zarchin, 1995), Total Love (Gur Bentwich, 2000), Buzz (Yigal Burstein, 2000), The Gospel According to God (Assi Dayan, 2004), Forgiveness (Udi Aloni, 2006), Jellyfish (Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen, 2007), Nuzhat al-Fuad (Judd Ne’eman, 2007) and My Lovely Sister (Marco Carmel, 2011) all represent this genre. In interpreting the films produced since Sh’Hur, I will attempt to show how the source of their magical realism can be found in a moment of cultural diversity, and how the questioning and blurring of the concept of “Israeli identity” that derive from this diversity has brought Israeli cinema to where it is today. Magical realism here is the product of an identity in transition from a national to an ethnic and gender identity which undermines the legitimacy of the earlier narratives. The magical realism in Jellyfish, for example, is associated with the depiction of the experience of femininity. Nonetheless, the genre denies neither politics nor history. On the contrary, it bears the scars of history, a past of exile and uprooting, as well as the marks of a displaced and divided identity. It deals with wounds, not with healing, representing the consciousness of an immigrant society that hovers between despair and hope in a state of constant change: changing identity, changing language, and political borders yet to be drawn decisively. Discussion of instances of magical realism in Israeli cinema will therefore necessitate reference to its connection to three historical, cultural, 11 Lubin, Women Reading Women, 256. — 146 —

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and social situations that are perceived to threaten the homogeneity of Israeli identity. The first is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after the outbreak of the first intifada, the second is the rise of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sector as a dominant political force, and the third is mass immigration, particularly from the former Soviet Union (especially Russia), which dramatically altered the sociocultural character of Israel. Since the 1990s, all of these have been whittling away at the series of “no’s” which lay at the foundation of the national/Jewish culture of the country for decades: “no to Arab culture, no to the Diaspora, no to Eastern culture, no to women, and no to religion.”12 These developments are a reflection of the “multicultural condition,” that is, “a situation in which otherness and diversity are enjoying increasing legitimacy.”13 The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Rami Naaman’s The Flying Camel (1994) traces the journey of the Jewish scrap collector Bauman and the Palestinian garbage man Phares as they seek to realize their shared dream, the reconstruction of the Flying Camel statue, the symbol of the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. The statue was designed by the architect Arieh El-Hanani at the request of Alexander Evserov, one of the three initiators of the fair, which was permanently installed on approximately 25 acres on the bank of the Yarkon River. The 1980s saw numerous films on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including Silver Platter (Judd Ne’eman, 1983), Beyond the Walls (Uri Barabash, 1984), On a Narrow Bridge (Nissim Dayan, 1985), Avanti Popolo (Rafi Bukai, 1986), The Dreamers (Uri Barabash, 1987), Fictitious Marriage (Haim Buzaglo, 1988), Green Fields (Yitzhak Zepel Yeshurun, 1989), and Cup Final (Eran Riklis, 1991). As Ne’eman explains, these films represented the Arab-Jewish conflict in a more realistic manner than their predecessors, adopting a subversive historiography.14 According to Gertz, another feature they share is the narrative and ideological bridge they build between the Jewish protagonist and the Arab, 12 Yonah Yossi & Yehouda Shenhav, What is Multiculturalism? On the Politics of Identity in Israel (Tel Aviv: Bavel, 2005), 53 [Hebrew]. 13 Ibid. 14 Judd Ne’eman, “The Empty Tomb in the Postmodern Pyramid: Israeli Cinema in the 1980s and 1990s,” in Charles Berlin (ed.), Documenting Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1995), 122. — 147 —

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and the solidarity that evolves between them against the background of the “magical realms of imagination and legend . . . which are home to the alien and the different, and in which genuine bonds are created between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’.”15 She offers the example of Avanti Popolo, which takes place at the end of the Six Day War. Here, a world of fiction, song, and theater lead to the breaching of national borders and the forging of bonds between Egyptian and Israeli soldiers wandering in a surrealist desert reality, where the distinctions between borders and identities have already broken down. Gertz contends that “this soaring [to the imagination] fills these movies with a sense of compassion and consolation . . . but they are ironic compassion and consolation. They are achieved in death [The Smile of the Lamb] . . . are mere illusion [The Dreamers], and are brutally crushed by reality [Avanti Popolo].”16 The statue in The Flying Camel represents the Zionist-Jewish fantasy of becoming part of the geographical and cultural space. Not only does the winged camel arouse associations with the tales in the Arabian Nights as well as with the mythological flying horse Pegasus, the son of Medusa and the sea god Poseidon, but the Levant Fair it symbolized sought to bring together industrialists from Europe and the Middle East, thereby building a cultural bridge. Thus, Bauman and Phares’s obsession with reconstructing it is an expression of solidarity between Jew and Arab, a solidarity that, as Gertz indicates, comes into being in a fantasy world. Bauman and Phares meet by chance when Phares happens to recognize the junk-filled yard in which Bauman lives as the land on which his family orchard stood prior to 1948. Mistakenly believing the yard to be unoccupied (Bauman is hospitalized at the time), Phares takes up residence in Bauman’s shack. When the Jew returns home, he attacks the intruder and chases him out of the house. The ensuing fight between them is, to quote Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” On the allegorical level, the contention between Phares and Bauman could be read as a symbol of the ongoing debate concerning the Palestinian “right of return.” Phares longs to replant the orchard that once stood in the junk-filled yard, and thus to establish his historical 15 Nurit Gertz, Motion Fiction: Literature and Cinema (Tel Aviv: The Open University, 1993), 231-232 [Hebrew]. 16 Ibid., 234-235. — 148 —

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belonging to the site. Bauman, it turns out, has a miniature model of the site as it looked before it was purchased by his father, but he keeps it hidden. Dressed in a safari suit and attempting to teach Phares to play chess instead of backgammon, Bauman could be seen to represent the Zionist colonialism that “occupied” the land and concealed the “signs of desertion” left behind by the former inhabitants. The junk-filled yard therefore becomes the territory of magical realism, physically cut off from its surroundings. It bears the memory of the past, both personal and collective, brings together nationalities, identities, and religions, and is the site of utopian collaboration between Jew and Arab.17 But the bond between Bauman, a professor of art history, and Phares, who describes himself as “almost an engineer,” is grounded not only in a “magical territory” but also in a shared narrative of exile, as both represent those rejected by official Zionist discourse. The historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin claims that this connection between the Diaspora Jew and the Palestinian refugee grew out of the repressive aspect of “negation of the Diaspora,” which is at the foundation of Zionist ideology.18 Just as the Zionist ethos sought to repress the pain of the Diaspora and ordeals of immigration to the Land of Israel, and later the humiliation and extermination of the Jews of Europe, so too the trauma of Palestinian displacement was relegated to the darkest corners of the collective Zionist consciousness. The principle of “negation of the Diaspora” thus denied both the past of the Jews in exile and the past of the Palestinians in the Land of Israel. One day, Bauman and Phares find a trailer parked in the yard with a young woman asleep inside. Its appearance “out of nowhere,” the motif of the “sleeping beauty” drawn from popular fairy tales (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”), and their incorporation into the historical reality supply the magical effect. This intrusion into the real world is sudden and unexpected, and like the good fairy of legend, the woman—whom they later discover to be a Christian missionary nun—grants the two men their wish, a pair of wings which 17 Magical realism is generally identified with a specific location: the house at 124 Bluestone Road in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or the town of Macondo in Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, where it has rained for four years, 11 months and two days. 18 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Galut be-toch ribonut: le-vikoret ‘shlilat ha-galut’ be-tarbut ha-yisraelit” [“Exile within Sovereignty: Criticism of ‘Negation of the Diaspora’ in Israeli culture”], Teoria u-vikoret 4 (Jerusalem, Van Leer Institute, 1993), 23-56 [Hebrew]. — 149 —

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she found in a Galilean monastery for the statue they are building. As a result, utopian collaboration between the three religions—the Jew, the Arab Muslim, and the Christian—is realized and symbolized by the restoration of a mythological creature and creation. But an ominous cloud threatens this collaboration. It seems the camel’s original wings now fly over a family-owned restaurant by the name of “Angel,” where they are part of the statue of an angel installed there. The efforts of Bauman, Phares, and the nun to persuade the owner to sell them the wings are all in vain, leaving them no choice but to concoct a plan to steal them. But the owner and his sons manage to trace the stolen wings to the junk-filled yard and demand their return as they gaze in wonder at the flying camel. The refusal of Bauman and Phares leads to a physical altercation in which the statue is set on fire. And then, all of a sudden, the stone camel spreads its wings and flies away, to the amazement of all those in the yard below. On the surface, the story might seem to convey a disgraceful racial message. The casting of Gabi Amrani as the restaurant owner whose stubbornness leads to the conflagration (in every sense of the word), along with the name “Angel,” both of which are identifiably Mizrachi, might create the impression that Jewish-Palestinian harmony is jeopardized by the Mizrachi Jew, whose lack of understanding and tolerance leads to violent consequences. A deeper reading of the situation, however, reveals that his confrontation with Bauman and Phares contains sharp criticism of Israeli society. Indeed, the restaurant owner’s first name is “Israel.” By concentrating on his ethnicity (and by the way, there is no direct reference to it in the movie), we are liable to miss the truly subversive message: Israel itself is the obstacle to the utopian collaboration that grows up here around the reinstatement of a symbol (the camel) from before the establishment of the State. It is not the Mizrachi sector that is the threat, but the very existence of the State of Israel. Only by recognizing the Palestinian “right of return” can a foundation for reconciliation and harmony be laid. This aspect of the film is allied with another battle Bauman is waging on his own against the destruction of historical Tel Aviv: the demolition of the Bauhaus buildings, some of which were designed by his engineer father, at least in the reality of the movie. He climbs onto a roof, where he plants himself on a railing, refusing to come down even when the mayor appeals to him. But it is all to no avail. Later Bauman watches as bulldozers demolish the structure. The motif of the razing of a build— 150 —

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ing is linked to the idea of erasing history by destroying the site that represents it. Just as the orchard which represented Palestinian belonging to the land was uprooted by Bauman’s Zionist father (although he does not deny that past, as evidenced by the model hidden on a shelf in his home), so the history of Tel Aviv is erased by the demolition of the building the father designed. Thus, another analogy is drawn between Bauman and Phares: both of them have experienced the loss of a home, and both are attempting to deal with the sense of loss by reconstructing and resurrecting the statue of the flying camel. On another level, the destruction of Bauman’s “father’s house” is visually related to the destruction of Arab houses in the first intifada, again arousing an associative link between the Diaspora Jew and the Palestinian. When the camel flies in the penultimate scene in the movie, it represents not only hesitation “between two contradictory understandings of events,”19 which is characteristic of magical realism, but also the colliding of two cultures. One draws on local folklore and tales from the Arabian Nights, while the other, Western culture, tends to interpret the inexplicable by means of the rational tools of dream and vision. The fact that the scene does not support this reading—it is not presented as a dream or vision—is a form of decolonialization of rational Western thinking in favor of alternative belief and knowledge systems. Thus, magical realism underlines the foreignness, rather than the superiority, of Zionist thinking and culture in the context of the Middle East. The narrative power is thereby “transferred” from the colonialist to the subject. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism The year 1966 saw the release of 2 Kuni Lemel. Based on a Jewish operetta by Abraham Goldfaden, the film was directed by Israel Becker and starred Mike Burstyn. According to Meir Schnitzer, this was “the first time Israeli cinema [dared] to refer to Jewish existence outside the borders of Israel.”20 It was followed by Tevye and His Seven Daughters (Menahem Golan, 1968) and A Miracle in Our Town (Leo Filler, 1968), loosely based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem, which made use of 19 Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 17. 20 Meir Schnitzer, Israeli Cinema (Tel Aviv: Kinneret, 1994), 77 [Hebrew]. — 151 —

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the sets left behind from Golan’s prestigious production. In 1976, the laughable figure of lame, stuttering Kuni Lemel returned to the screen in the musical Kuni Lemel in Tel Aviv, directed by Joel Silberg (following the success of this film and the signing of the peace agreement with Egypt, Silberg also made Kuni Lemel in Cairo in 1983), but in many ways, this was not your usual sequel. The Jewish shtetl of pre-war Europe was now replaced by modern-day Israel, with the protagonist seemingly a representative of the provincial Diaspora Jew who had somehow survived the crematoria and gas chambers and made his way to the Jewish homeland. Although the movie offered a logical explanation for his presence in Israel—this Kuni Lemel was the grandson of the previous one—he nevertheless appeared to represent the ghost of the Diaspora Jew, with his long black coat and side locks, who had come back to haunt the new Jew, the Sabra, who had sought for decades to cast him out. The identification of religion with the Diaspora, the antithesis of the world of the secular Zionists with their typical resistance to the Orthodox establishment, turned the Kuni Lemel of the later films into a bridge between the “old” and the “new” Jew. The Jews who had died in the Holocaust now lived among the Sabras, reminding them of their guilt in “negating the Diaspora.” Ne’eman contends that the essence of this repressed collective guilt lies in the desire of the Zionist movement to “eliminate” the Jewish Diaspora by turning the Jews of Europe, who constituted the primary source of Zionist manpower, into pioneers in Palestine.21 And then along came the Nazis and exterminated Europe’s Jews, fulfilling Zionist ideology in the most appallingly literal manner possible. Consequently, the Zionists harbored a sense of guilt not only because of the passivity and ambivalence of the Jewish community in Palestine during the Holocaust, but also because of the associative link between the Zionists’ attempt to “eliminate” the Diaspora and the Nazis’ “final solution.”22 Guilt over the Holocaust remained repressed in the collective Zionist consciousness until the Eichmann trial in 1961, which “exposed the Jewish public in Israel to the testimony of Holocaust survivors, which had not been heard before.”23 This led to a drastic 21 Judd Ne’eman, “The Empty Tomb.” 22 Ibid., 133. 23 Yael Zerubavel, “Mot ha-zikharon ve-zikharon ha-mavet: Metzada ve-ha-shoa ke-metaforot historiot” [The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors], Alpayim 10 (1994): 61 [Hebrew]. — 152 —

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change in the attitude toward survivors, bringing the Sabras’ sense of guilt into the light of day. It is against this background that Daniel Wachsmann’s The Intended (1990) stands out for dealing with religion, but not in the context of the Holocaust. Its subject is the belief in tzadikim (the righteous ones), religious figures believed to be miracle workers, which is associated with North African Jews and the town of Netivot. The plot bears similarities to the history of one such famous tzadik, Baba Sali, and his son Baba Baruch, who declared himself heir to his father upon the older man’s death. The movie relates the story of the son of a rabbi who turned his back on religion and became a traveling performer in the Galilee. When his father is nearing his death, he sends three of his followers to bring home the prodigal son so that he can install him as his heir. At this time, the son is finding himself irresistibly drawn to a mysterious temptress, who is, in fact, an incarnation of the demon Lilith, the mythological first wife of Adam. But The Intended does not succeed in separating religious faith from mysticism. In the movie, the illusions performed by the protagonist, Shmaya Ben David, in the clubs in which he appears are juxtaposed with the supernatural powers of the woman, who can ignite a fire with her eyes, a talent which becomes part of the act. Thus, for the first time, magical realism appears in Israeli cinema in connection with the themes of mysticism and religious devotion. Nevertheless, even here it is relegated to the fringes of society, to the periphery: the movie is set in the Galilee in the north of the country, and contains no reference whatsoever to the hegemonic, secular, and rational center. At this stage, magical realism therefore still serves as an aesthetic expression of a multicultural perspective. It will only become a central element in social, cultural, and political discourse in Israel in the years to come. Moreover, the connection in the film between religion and mysticism reflects the fear instilled in the secular Zionist center by the strengthening of the religious sector and its growing political power. The Shas party, which first stood in the municipal elections in Jerusalem in 1984 and won 4 seats in the Knesset, represented the rise of a Mizrachi ultraOrthodox political force which could be viewed as a threat to the Ashkenazi Zionist hegemony. The association drawn in the movie between religion and Mizrachi society on the one hand, and magical powers on the other, thus represents the fear of the awakening of a Mizrachi — 153 —

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religious identity.24 One symbolic expression of this awakening can be found in the scene in which Shmaya leaves the mikve (ritual bath) after acceding to the pleas of his father’s agents and agreeing to take over as leader of the community. Naked, he walks toward the door, which is cast in a strong bright light, forging an image of rebirth. The motif of the reawakening of North African religious identity is also presented through the portrayal of the relationship between Shmaya and his manager, who is called Weiss (white), the name attesting to his Ashkenazi extraction. Weiss, who accompanies Shmaya on the road, is in charge of finances. In other words, Shmaya is the Mizrachi who left behind religion and tradition and turned his back on his identity and roots, while Weiss is the secular Ashkenazi who makes his living off of him (and he is indeed depicted as rather sleazy and greedy). Later, dressed in the garb of the ultra-Orthodox, Weiss shows up where Shmaya is receiving supplicants and becomes part of the business of “selling blessings.” As in Sh’Hur discussed above, the Mizrachi tradition and return to religion “replace” the ideological Ashkenazi Zionist narrative, constituting an authentic alternative. It is only after he returns to his roots that Shmaya goes from being an illusionist to having a genuine identity in the postcolonial discourse in which he knowingly defines himself as the “other.” This process occurs parallel to his ridding himself of the exploitative and corrupting presence of Weiss. The magical realism in the film combines Jewish mysticism with Christian symbolism. The use of Christian motifs might be explained by “the relatively impoverished tradition of Jewish faith in general, and total lack of a tradition of the transcendental, in contrast to the wealth of artistic images and styles outside the Jewish world.”25 I would argue, however, that the combination of the two traditions does not derive solely, or primarily, from the “aesthetic poverty” of Judaism, but rather from the perception of Christianity as a legitimate aspect of the local identity. Not only does the movie take place in the Galilee, the birthplace of both the Kabbalah (developed in the early modern era by Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed) and Christianity, but the character of Shmaya contains 24 This fear is also represented by the menacing expressionist aesthetics of the film: shadows, dark corners, and numerous scenes shot at night. 25 Roni Parciack, “Mi-ever la-gader: Ha-regesh ha-dati be-kolnoa ha-yisraeli” [“Beyond the Fence: Religious Feeling in Israeli Cinema”], in Mabatim fictivi’im [Fictitious Gazes], ed. Nurit Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman, (Tel Aviv: The Open University, 1998), 332 [Hebrew]. — 154 —

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elements of Jewish and Christian identity alike. Shmaya Ben David is the son of David Ben Joseph the Galilean, and of course Jesus’ father was Joseph Ben David. It is because of this lineage that Christians believe Jesus to be the Messiah, who is to come from the line of King David, as did Joseph, Mary’s husband. On the other hand, Shmaya was the name of the president of the Sanhedrin who was serving when it was disbanded with the destruction of the Second Temple. That Shmaya then wandered from place to place, particularly among the villages in the Galilee, until finally settling in Tiberias. The symbolism in the movie also combines magical images from Judaism and Christianity. Fire, one of the dominant motifs in the film (a burning tree in the opening scene, a burning chair in the magic act, a log that catches fire, to the amazement of a group of pilgrims, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and a synagogue on fire in the closing scene) is reminiscent of the burning bush in the Bible, while the miracle Shmaya works in the hotel, returning the voice of a mute infant, conjures up the miracle worked by Jesus in bringing Lazarus back to life (insofar as the sound of a crying baby symbolizes life and birth). In this context, it is interesting to compare Jesus’ hesitation to grant the plea of Miriam and Martha that he heal their brother Lazarus (“When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was. Then after that saith he to his disciples, Let us go into Judaea again”; John 11:6-7) and Shmaya’s refusal to grant the family’s request that he drive the infant to the hospital. Only after Lazarus’ death does Jesus arrive in the village of Bethany and perform the miracle of resurrection, after which Lazarus comes out of the burial cave “bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin” (John 11:44). So, too, Shmaya encounters the family once again in a hotel in Safed, and this time he agrees to bless the baby (the family now realizes who he is), after which the infant miraculously begins to cry. A close-up of the astounded expression on Shmaya’s face reveals that he has suddenly recognized his powers and his destiny, an epiphany accompanied by the image of the family crowding around him in their eagerness to touch him. In Yossi Somer’s Forbidden Love (originally entitled The Dybbuk of the Holy Apple Field) from 1997, based on “The Dybbuk” by the Yiddish playwright S. Ansky, which was first staged in 1920, a young secular man by the name of Hanan arrives in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem — 155 —

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neighborhood of Mea She’arim to meet his father’s ex-business partner, the wealthy owner of a slaughterhouse. Let us ignore for the moment the manner in which the protagonist makes his way into the religious world through the sides of beef hanging in the slaughterhouse, and the anti-Semitic connotations of this metaphor. Nor do I wish to discuss here the other representations of religious Judaism in the movie that promote these connotations, such as the extortionist in a wheelchair, or Leah’s greedy father, who wants to marry her to a groom who is ugly but well-connected. It goes without saying that he prefers him to the handsome secular Hanan, with whom she is in love. In contrast to the dark cruel world of the ultra-Orthodox, the secular world, as represented by Hanan, is depicted as bearing a message of enlightenment and progress, or as he puts it, “a world in which you’re allowed to do whatever you want.” Leah falls in love with Hanan at first sight, and through him the lovely young religious woman discovers feminism. Hanan’s parents were, in his words, “Orthodox, religious, fanatics” (after all, his father and Leah’s father were partners), but he is simply passing through Mea She’arim on his way to India, with the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood seeming to provide the secular young man with the same sort of exotic fantasy experience as India will. When Hanan and Leah were born, they were pledged to each other, but the oath was broken by Leah’s father when Hanan’s parents were killed in an accident and Hanan himself disappeared. At the beginning of the movie, Hanan has a vision: he sees the accident that took his parents’ lives as if it were happening right before his eyes. The accident is a symbol of the Holocaust which annihilated Diaspora Jewry and out of which a “new Jew” was born—the secular Sabra, epitomized by Hanan. When Hanan and Leah unexpectedly fall in love, it does not merely signify the inevitability of fate, which will not permit the pledge to be broken, but also the need of the new Jews to come to terms with their repressed past. As we have seen, Zionist ideology denied the legitimacy of Jewish existence outside the Land of Israel. This “negation of the Diaspora” led to denial of the Jewish exilic past and created the perception that the new Jew seemingly arose out of thin air. These new Jews supposedly had nothing whatsoever in common with the Diaspora Jews exterminated in Europe, who are represented in secular Israel by

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the ultra-Orthodox.26 The framing of Hanan and Leah as soul mates, an image strengthened by the final scene in the movie, in which their souls are portrayed as two white doves rising into the sky, is an expression of the hidden link (which the Zionist ethos sought to repress) between the “new” Jew and the “old” Jew, and the reconciliation between them. It was, of course, no random decision to transfer the setting of Forbidden Love from a pre-war Jewish town to modern-day Jerusalem. With the rise in the power of ultra-Orthodox political parties in the 1990s, and the sense that they were subverting the secular Sabra character of Israel, this sector of the population came to be regarded as a real threat. The representations of the community which are referred to above, with connotations that are problematic, to say the least, reflect this attitude, as do the expressionist shots of the alleys of Mea She’arim at night. At the same time, the return to Diaspora culture and its images is a function of a multicultural era that questions the concept of nationalism and its correlation of cultural homogeneity. Thus, the presence of the Diaspora and religion in the narrative and iconography of Forbidden Love stands out sharply in view of the central principles of the hegemonic national culture, which negate these two elements. As noted above, the traditions of Ashkenazi Jewish culture are identified with the European Jewish world that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Yet in the film, the return to the Diaspora and religion—to the pre-Zionist world, as it were—is associated with characters and motifs drawn from the poetics of magical realism. Immigration In the final scene of Orna Ben Dor’s New Land (1994; screenplay by Kobi Niv), two young Holocaust survivors, a brother and sister, are carried into the night sky by a teddy bear to some unknown destination: New land. This was the first Israeli film that dared to deal with the failure of the Zionist vision of mass immigration and the melting pot. Jan and his little sister Anna arrive in an immigrant absorption camp in Israel in the 1950s, where they mostly find scenes of human suffering and exploitation. Jan seemingly becomes integrated in the life of the nearby 26 For a discussion of this issue, see Judd Ne’eman, “Ha-ze’ev she-taraf et Rabin” [“The Wolf that Devoured Rabin”], Plastika 3 (1999): 82-87 [Hebrew]. — 157 —

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kibbutz (he dons new clothes and changes his name to Dan, symbolically replacing his Diaspora identity with that of a Sabra), while Anna (whose name is now Ilana) remains lonely and miserable. When she comes to the kibbutz, the woman in charge of the children takes away her teddy bear on the grounds that it is “smelly,” and as Anna watches, she throws it into the garbage in a blatant display of insensitivity. In its place, she hands her a new doll (symbolizing the Zionist attempt to instill a “new” culture in the immigrants). Anna throws the doll on the floor. On Anna-Ilana’s first night in the kibbutz, Jan-Dan sneaks into her room to get her. Together they run to the garbage dump onto which the bear and their old clothes have been tossed and dress themselves in their “Diaspora” garments. Anna finds her bear and pleads with him, “Teddy, take us to a new land.” Then, in one of the most unexpected scenes in the history of Israeli cinema, the bear rises into the sky, taking the two children with him. The frame freezes as their shadow crosses the moon, an image that appears to have come straight out of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982). The scene represents the state of the immigrants. They can not return to their roots in Europe after the Holocaust, nor are they willing to strip off their former identities and submit to the crude efforts to “Sabrasize” them by force, as if identity were nothing more than a shirt one can take off or put on. Thus, the children’s departure is seemingly a symbolic negation of “negation of the Diaspora.” But Jan and Anna do not return to the Diaspora, nor do they wish to do so, unlike the protagonist in Daniel Wachsmann’s Transit (1980), who feels alien and isolated in Israel, to which he has immigrated from Germany. The understanding that there is no place for Jan and Anna in either Europe or Israel, and their consequent desire for some abstract “New land,” is a reflection of the “nihilistic phase” in Israeli films from the 1990s, which revolve around experiences of death, apocalypse, and the loss of local identity.27 The “nihilistic phase” is represented either by the 27

Judd Ne’eman discusses the term “nihilistic cinema” in respect to Israeli films, relating it to movies made in the ‘70s and ‘80s that are critical of the “death ethos” in the national/heroic cinema of the ‘50s and ‘60s. In reference to films from the ‘90s, he uses the term “apocalyptic.” He claims that this trend in Israeli cinema stems, inter alia, from the decadence of the Zionist utopia and the rise of Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism which threatened the secular state. The apocalyptic sense was expressed in deep collective anxieties, the destruction of the Israeli collective by the army (as in Life According to Agfa), and the replacement of Hebrew by a jumble of foreign languages (Judd Ne’eman, “The Empty Tomb,” 120). — 158 —

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narrative of destruction, as in Assi Dayan’s Life According to Agfa (1992), which takes place “a year from today,” or by the postmodern perception of Tel Aviv in films like Crows (Ayelet Menahemi, 1986), Shuru (Savi Gavison, 1990), Amazing Grace (Amos Guttman, 1992), A Night without Na’ama (Moshe Zimmerman, 1992), Eddie King (Gidi Dar, 192), and the television series “Florentine” (Eytan Fox, 1997). All of these depict a society that has lost its local character. The loss of identity is expressed primarily through a nighttime urban iconography and the creation of a sort of “bubble” that exists outside the concrete historical moment (with no reference, for example, to the first intifada, which broke out in 1987). As I see it, this bubble and the apocalyptic narrative are two symptoms of the same condition: the turmoil and confusion sparked in Israeli filmmakers by scenes of the intifada that showed Palestinian children with stones and slingshots facing off against armed Israeli soldiers. While they could not side with the Israeli camp putting down what they regarded as the legitimate national aspirations of an occupied people, identifying fully with the Palestinians would be an act of anti-Zionism. This dramatic switch in the collective consciousness, the transition from the historical self-perception of the Jew/Zionist as a victim to the acknowledgement that they were creating victims, led to an increase in the number of Israeli films that avoided contending directly with political issues. Some blurred the Zionist-Israeli identity, presenting places, people, and stories with no local identity and protagonists with no commitment to any ideology, while others turned to apocalyptic cinema, using allegorical means to depict the collapse of Israeli society. In other words, Shuru (whose nihilist protagonist writes a popular manual for idiots, as the antithesis of the Zionist narrative of the realization of the national dream) and Life According to Agfa are cinematic symptoms of the same distress. And in both movies, Tel Aviv serves as the signifier of Zionist-Israeli identity. To return to New Land, the motif of death, which I believe to be associated with the “nihilistic phase,” emerges from the solution to the children’s painful condition, which can be found neither “here” (Zionism) nor “there” (the Diaspora). In effect, the magical resolution represents a lack of solution, a state of limbo which, according to Catholic doctrine, is the abode of those who have not yet been baptized, but who have not yet sinned either. Unbaptized, they are not entitled to enter heaven, as only — 159 —

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the act of baptism, symbolizing rebirth, can cleanse them of original sin. By the same token, Jan and Anna are not reborn as “new Jews,” and thus have not been cleansed of the original sin of the Diaspora (Zionism itself uses the religious term “redemption” to describe the realization of its program in the Land of Israel). This explains why the film ends with the freeze frame of Jan and Anna against the full moon. Freezing the image perpetuates the moment, making it an ongoing present, a state of limbo. In cinematic mythology, the technique indicates the moment of transition from life to death. Thus, in Joseph Milo’s He Walked Through the Fields (1968), based on the novel by Moshe Shamir, the face of the Palmach soldier Uri is frozen to represent the instant when he leaves this life and becomes a myth: the dead man continues to live on in the collective memory. In New Land, as in Sh’Hur, magical realism is linked to the theme of immigration, the move from the home in exile to the homeland that is exile. But it is also a poetic expression of the marginal state of the newly-arrived immigrant who lives on the fringes of society. Saint Clara, directed by Ari Folman and Ori Sivan, is another example of the connection between magical realism and the theme of immigration in Israeli cinema. Released in 1995, it is based on a novel by the Czech author Pavel Kohout entitled The Ideas of Saint Clara. The movie takes place in 1999, on the verge of the new millennium, in a development town which is home to young Clara, whose family immigrated to Israel from Crimea. Clara’s supernatural powers arouse amazement in the residents of the town, her teachers, the eccentric school principal, and her friends, and create chaos. In this atmosphere of imminent apocalypse (underlined by the year of the events), Clara experiences her first taste of love. The utter absence of the “center” and the collapse of the overriding Zionist narrative are represented by the dysfunctional fathers in the families of Clara and her classmate Tikel, as well as by the authority figures personified by her math teacher and the principal, who struggle in vain to control the situation. In this vacuum, power devolves into the hands of the alien and the immigrant. But Clara is a young girl, and relatively new in the country, so that she is not an option in terms of authority, and in fact can’t even control her own powers. In the absence of hegemonic (the Zionist center) or patriarchal authority, the rebellious youngsters are in charge, and there is a sense of being on the eve of revolution. The main symbol of the failed Zionist narrative is the school, named — 160 —

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for Golda Meir. The opening shot of the film shows a sculpture of the former prime minister, and then the camera dollies back to reveal its “abandonment,” as if it has been forgotten at the end of a long corridor. Near the conclusion of the shot we see Tikel and Rosenthal, another of Clara’s classmates, running and shouting in the hallway, in a representation of the nihilistic spirit that has replaced authority. The loss of authority of the adults, who are stunned by the paranormal powers of Clara—who knows in advance the questions on the math test which the whole class then aces—signifies the nihilism in Israeli society after the foundational Zionist myths were shattered. An earlier expression of the same nihilism can be found in Life According to Agfa, which ends with an apocalyptic scene in which Israeli soldiers massacre the patrons of a Tel Aviv pub that is a microcosm of Israeli society. In Saint Clara, nihilism is represented aesthetically by magical realism, the antithesis of the lost rationalism and purpose of Zionism. Advance knowledge of the math questions, anticipation of a devastating earthquake, Golda Meir’s sculpture catching fire, and a stork crashing into the classroom are all omens of the imminent apocalypse. The only signifier of “old-time” Zionism is the marsh just outside town that now serves as the sole symbol of the realization of the Zionist program in the Land of Israel (neither the town itself nor its industrial surroundings are identified in the film). The youngsters hang out on a couch half-sunken in the marsh, as if these nihilists were the contemporary counterparts of the pioneers who drained the marshes in the early days of the country, young people rebelling against the bourgeois society from which they came in the hope of creating a new society. The rebellious class, whose violent conduct appears to be a scaleddown version of the adult world (Tikel’s father is a veteran torturer of prisoners), is an allegory of Israeli society, which is similarly lacking the authority of a father figure. It is interesting that a movie produced before Rabin’s assassination expresses this sense of symbolic orphanhood, melancholy, and yearning for a father figure, feelings that became prevalent in Israel after the assassination of the prime minister. In the absence of authority, of a narrative on the organizing principle of Zionism, it is Clara, the strange immigrant child, who becomes the source of redemption. This status is attested to by her definition as a “saint,” not in the Jewish sense of someone who has given their life to uphold their faith, but in the Christian sense of a miracle-worker. Thus, as in — 161 —

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New Land and The Intended, here too magical realism operates through Christian terminology and iconography. Conclusion Magical realism first appeared in Israeli cinema together with the aesthetic and ideological quest for the essence of contemporary Zionist identity and the appropriate manner in which to represent the traumas and dilemmas that plague it. It is in this context that Udi Aloni’s Forgiveness (the story of a young Jewish-American man in a state of shock after shooting a Palestinian girl in the course of his army service in the territories) and Judd Ne’eman’s Nuzhat al-Fuad (Arabic for “journey of the heart”: the film is an interweaving of the stories of a soap opera writer and actress and the heroine of a tale in the Arabian Nights) manifest total deconstruction and obfuscation of identity, culture, reality and fiction, politics, and family. In these cinematic texts, magical realism is associated with father figures, both real and symbolic, that are split and intertwined in order to provoke discussion of the Zionist sense of guilt and the manner of its representation (Forgiveness), and the divided national identity of the land and its culture (Nuzhat al-Fuad). In this sense, the two films, both groundbreaking in aesthetic terms at least, reflect an authentic desire to become part of the physical and cultural space of the Middle Eastern-Arab surroundings (Nuzhat al-Fuad), or to achieve a state of coexistence and reconciliation with the past by means of a plea for absolution (Forgiveness). In view of the “nihilistic phase” and apocalyptic experience in the movies discussed above, these two films appear to represent a sane and optimistic option for life in this place and time, an opportunity to reinvent ourselves in the here and now.

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The Grand High Witch of Dreams Noa Manheim

No witchcraft is more ancient, more beloved, more enthralling than “once upon a time in a land far, far away.” This magic spell was undoubtedly uttered in hushed tones way back at the dawn of time, probably around a glowing fire that cast the shadows of legend on the walls of a dark cave. With the frugal brandishing of just a few words, we are carried across time and space to a reality in which anything can, and does, happen. “Once upon a time” is a movie caption that ensures us that no little piggies were hurt in the course of the filming. Its companion, “in a land far far away,” is the warning on the cigarette pack of legend. Studies show that there, in that faraway land, live wily wolves and terrible giants, and eating apples can shorten your life expectancy. The stock opening phrase has a crucial function: to calm the nerves and create distance. It exists in one form or another in every language in which stories have been told around a fire from time immemorial. In some versions it suggests “maybe it happened and maybe it didn’t” (Armenia), and in others it speaks of “many many many years ago when there was a king in Galway” (Ireland), or even “once there was, once there was not, in days gone by on a haystack” (Turkey). The equivalent Hebrew phrase, “hayo haya,” comes to us originally from the man who gave us the first description of—as well as the name for—electricity, in a perfect marriage between fantasy and science fiction: the prophet Ezekiel, son of Buzi the priest, who lived in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar. Once upon a time, God spoke to Ezekiel, not to tell him of the distant past but of the future to come, revealing a series of chilling visions filled with wondrous creatures intricately described; dry bones that sprout tendons and flesh; hailstones; and an apocalyptic war. Among the first to use the phrase in its modern sense was S. Y. Agnon, who in 1913 in “Leilot” (Nights), one of his earliest stories, which is suffused with the perfume of ancient fairy tales, wrote: “Once upon a time there was a king, and the king wished for a queen.” The Hebrew version is a reduplicated phrase, a pattern that exists — 163 —

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in the language to describe dramatic actions, and is sometimes intensified by the addition of the word “pa’am” (once), resulting in three—a magic number in so many legends—measures of safe distance from the here and now. The here and now are the natural enemies of legend and the epic fantasy that grew out of it, the sort that Tolkien and his heirs produced. Such stories invariably take place in the same primal timeless territory, and are characterized most distinctly by a plethora of phallic objects of the piercing variety. Even the portal fantasy,1 the “there and back” literature in which childhood in our world is transposed into a fictional world, fiercely guards its borders, and like a conscientious air hostess points out the emergency exits in the event of a tornado in Kansas: the wardrobe on your left, the rabbit hole on your right (genital symbols, wouldn’t you say?). It was only with the appearance of the genre known as “urban fantasy” that this natural order was irreparably overturned and the creatures of legends were allowed to invade our safe space: the “other” was afforded entry into the familiar world. Through this revolving door, fantasy took its first steps into the here and now, dragging behind it the darkness and terror that accompany any overturning of the natural order. Between the glass panels of that revolving door swings Nurit Zarchi, one of the most talented witches Hebrew children’s literature has ever known. She has written over a hundred books, most of them for children, her books have been translated to 10 languages, and she has won numerous prizes, including the Prime Minister’s Prize and the Hans Christian Andersen Honor. Zarchi, who was born in Jerusalem in 1941 and grew up on Kibbutz2 Geva, did not need to resort to the definition of urban fantasy in order to see the reflection of the “other” in our world. She was the “other,” a woman who went beyond the boundaries of the collective reality into which she had been placed. An outsider. Her books are filled with characters who have something different about them, maybe even a hidden flaw, characters whose “otherness” enables them to see what no one else can see, the points of contact between our world and the world beyond. Their otherness challenges reality, makes a 1 2

“Portal Fantasy” is a term that was firstly used in Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetoric of Fantasy (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 3. An Israeli adaptation of the “commune”—a utopian collective settlement, usually agricultural. Until the 1990s those settlements employed an educational method called communal lodging, in which toddlers were removed from their parents and raised with others their age. — 164 —

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mockery of it, and sometimes even nullifies it. It is a weapon as well as a shield, allowing the characters to see the wondrous and the magical, but also throwing up a wall between them and what is normative and accepted. When her gifted witch Thanina3 (meaning “she-alligator”) wants to understand how other people behave, she goes out to “spy” on them in order to find out what makes them normal. Her familiar, Korkavan (“Bellybutton”) the cat, suggests she go to the supermarket. “How come I didn’t think of that? Eating what regular people eat means putting into yourself the ingredients of regularness,” she says excitedly. But after an abortive attempt to carry out this plan, she realizes that first she has to put on “the uniform of the regulars” and only then can she “find the inside of the outside.” As a woman for whom the natural order was overturned at the age of five with the death of her father and her delivery into the strict hands of the kibbutz, Zarchi creates an alternative world in her books, populating them with creatures of imagination, myth, and legend who reside side by side in a communal, virtually egalitarian, space. She conjures up witches and their familiars, crocodiles and crows, bears and wolves. She invites in the unicorn and the white deer, the king and the mermaid, drawing them all into the here and now with enchanted cords. The strong sense of place she creates in her books plants the figments of imagination firmly in the Israeli earth, with all its flora and fauna, aromas, and landscapes. She surrounds them with pine needles, not with the forests of Europe or the gardens of the Hesperides. When, long before Harry Potter, one of her characters, Amalya Kotz (her last name meaning “thorn”),4 is sent to the Adraba Magic School (a clever play on the traditional “abracadabra” and the Hebrew for “on the contrary”), it is situated not in an ancient castle, but somewhere on the road to Haifa: “a field, a few hills, a row of cypress trees.” Within the school grounds are “date and other fruitbearing palms, bougainvillea, thick bushes, old olive trees, vines, and figs.” The heady combination the writer creates between the here and there defies containment by borderlines and definitions. It is a magic potion that is hers alone, brewed from a mixture of the familiar and the strange, and a single sip sends the reader into a dream world whose poetics are drawn from surrealism and poetry. 3 4

Mi yatzil et Tanina? [Who Will Save Thanina?] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1986) [Hebrew]. Khoveshet keter ha-niyar [The Bearer of the Paper Crown] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1981) [Hebrew]. — 165 —

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Zarchi seeks to bring into our world the “other side,” in the most literal sense, and anchor it in the familiar. In one of her first books, The Blue Stone in the Ring,5 an artful homage to the legends of King Solomon as told by Bialik, Israel’s national poet, she describes the slide by which God’s creatures reach the Earth, “and since the foot of the huge slide is in the main square in Petach Tikva, the citizens of that city are immortal. As for the citizens of other cities, I have to confess: although I have wanted to for a long time, I have not been to any of them yet.” That smooth, almost offhanded, glide from the world in the heavens to reality on the ground is a hallmark of Zarchi’s work. The “other side” is a frightening place, and the “other” itself is even more frightening. Through the doors between the two worlds, dark things can slither into our homes, and they are eager to do so whenever they get the chance. Since its beginnings, urban fantasy has maintained a close relationship with fear, taking inspiration from masters of horror fiction such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. The reification and introduction into our personal space of chilling archetypes and other vile products of the collective subconscious result in a maze of psychological nightmares. These creatures become even more terrifying not when we get close to them, but when they get close to us, for we are not creeping in darkness toward the entrance to the monster’s cave, full of peerless courage and armed with rusty swords. It is the monster who is creeping up to our doorstep at night, still full from the last heart it devoured and armed with sharp claws. In general, the magic depicted in urban fantasy is arbitrary, random, and cruel rather than ancient, mysterious, and imposing. It is meant to shatter our preconceptions of the nature of the creatures who populate the other world. They can no longer be divided into angels and demons, heroes and monsters, fairies and trolls. Instead, that world is home to lethal angels and funny demons, vilified heroes and acclaimed monsters, both fairies and trolls with fangs. Nothing is black and white any more; there are no more borders and no more defenses. This world is second nature to Zarchi. She delineates borders for the sole purpose of crossing them, in her books black and white are confined to the illustrations alone, and the only means of defense she provides to her readers are pleasure and humor. She does not hesitate to deal with 5

Ha-even ha-chalaka ba-taba’at [The Blue Stone in the Ring] (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1972) [Hebrew]. — 166 —

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the less amiable creatures of the fantasy world, and indeed, she has a particular fondness for witches. Some of them, like Thanina, are young girls with green tongues, while others are old women with bony fingers, like Kvarnagasty (a name that can be translated as “JustBitHim”), the witch with the repulsive name who founded a flourishing witchery in Israel, and who took her crow with the cropped wing out to hunt new prey, “flying with her arms spread out and her mouth open wide, drinking in the night.”6 But the more profound horror that rises out of the depths of Zarchi’s talent derives from the very fact that she overturns the natural order and opens the doors, arousing ontological fear in each of her books by blurring the border between here and there and thus depriving us of the comforting shield of the magic spell “once upon a time.” When the floor shakes and the roof flies away, no one is safe. In some cases, this fear is already ignited by the title of the book. Is there really no lion there?7 Or maybe there is, and he is lying in wait for us in the shadows. In other cases it is generated by the gradual incursion of the other world into this one, as in the water that slowly fills the apartment of Mr. Whatwilltheysay after a mermaid named Sandgrain intrudes on the safe life he lives within the clamshell of his home.8 A talented poet, Zarchi uses language as an agent of the chaos within which she moves with delightful agility. She makes words her own, employing them in a way that endows them with the magic power of literal meaning. When Transparentia becomes transparent as a result of her grief over the death of her beloved pet dog, the doctor tells her, “You must find the right size of things, the true proportions. If you measure and measure day and night and learn to grieve in the exact proportion suitable for one small dog, you will find the right size for yourself too and then you won’t be transparent any more.” And then he writes her a prescription for a large ruler.9 Another of her witches, Amory, also a student at the magic school, is asked by her teacher, “Do you remember that we learned what the world needs? Something liable, something flyable, something sellable,

6 7 8 9

Yoni ve-ha-sus [Yoni and the Horse] (Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 1975) [Hebrew]. Eyn sham arieh [There is No Lion There] (Tel Aviv: Davir, 1992) [Hebrew]. Ambatyam [Bathnymph] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001) [Hebrew]. Yoni ve-ha-sus. — 167 —

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something buyable.”10 And thus, with the wave of a rhyme, capitalism becomes a magic spell. In this fluid world, in which words are potent and thought has the power to change existence, a power which is not always controllable, many of Zarchi’s characters struggle to draw a line in the quicksand of uncertain reality. These children do not open forbidden doors, and are wary of jumping into rabbit holes. They are hungry for order and logic in the strange reversed mirror world of adults. The Bambumblims, for instance, who go about disordering reality in an orderly and consistent fashion, have an unusual child. Surrounded by the liberating wonders of his parents’ world, he turns his back on them and says angrily: “All these annoying things . . . flowers that talk and cakes that chatter. I don’t ever get to hear a whole story in peace.”11 But Zarchi has a wealth of recipes for witches. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, another master of unrestrained fantasy, Zarchi has both first sight and second thought. And so, alongside the children who attempt to discipline the untamed space, there are those who use the freedom for their own purposes. Some do so in order to survive in a brutal society of children, like Shira, who learns from her talking dogs how to get the better of her best friend when she starts pushing her around,12 or Alma, who wants to bring her invisible pony to school despite the teacher’s insistence that “anyone you can’t see doesn’t belong, and anyone who doesn’t belong can’t come in.”13 Zarchi’s protective and poetic humor runs like a comforting thread through all her books, even the most somber. Its power derives from the exact same sources that arouse anxiety: it relies on her emphatic, sophisticated, and indomitable language, and operates through the aid of the absurd in surrealism. Her worlds move in a constant exciting and amusing dance where nothing is predictable. Thanina can adopt a baby and call him by the playful name Gurgles,14 Arbalon can send a fleet of paper boats into the air,15 people can imagine that the pears Eviatar drew are flying saucers and call “the police, the navy, the coast

10 Amory asig atusa [Amory Catches Up and Flies] (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1992) [Hebrew]. 11 Gan ha-bambumbalim [The Bambumblim’s Garden] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978) [Hebrew]. 12 Paz ve-ani [Paz and Me] (Kiryat Gat: Korim, 2007) [Hebrew]. 13 Alma o ha-yom ha-shishi [Alma or the Sixth Day] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003) [Hebrew]. 14 Mi yatzil et tanina. 15 Arbelon mi-beit havrosh [Arbelon of the Cypress Tree House] (Tel Aviv, Massada, 1986) [Hebrew]. — 168 —

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guard,”16 and Amalya’s magic forest can break out in a dance: “Nuts and figs and apricots and crabapples—they all gave fruit; little brooks burst forth and showed their happy faces; wild rabbits danced a minuet to the music of the neem tree harmonicas; hedgehogs and other small animals stamped their feet.”17 Amalya’s dance springs from Edgar Allan Poe’s famous “nevermore” in “The Raven,” which in Zarchi’s book becomes a magic charm that transports the young witch to the realm of dusk hiding in the kibbutz fields. The allusion to Poe illustrates another important feature of the landscape of Zarchi’s borderless territory: the lofty peaks of cultural citations. She is not afraid to offer her readers allusions, intellectual references, or discussions of the manner, place, and nature of works of literature or poetry. She makes no assumptions or allowances. Her exuberant writing overflows with associations, containing within it cultural codes asking to be deciphered, hidden challenges presented in her own special gift wrapping. She is not deterred even for a moment by the warning signs proclaiming “for ages 3-4” or the shelves labeled “children and young readers,” nor does she make herself smaller or bigger in order to pass through doors of different sizes. Rather, she storms through them with writing that soars to the skies. It is ageless, timeless, evermore, because Zarchi does not write for children or for adults. She writes for dreamers, whatever their age.

16 Shlosha agasim ve-chad-keren [Three Pears and a Unicorn] (Tel Aviv: Graff, 2008) [Hebrew]. 17 Khoveshet keter ha-niyar. — 169 —

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The Man from the Yellow Star Elana Gomel

Israelis do not read science fiction and fantasy. Like any generalization, this one has many exceptions: a small but dedicated community of fans; youngsters hooked on Harry Potter; and computer geeks with their Dungeons and Dragons and Spore games, to name some. But as a generalization, it is true: the average Israeli reader disdains fantasy and prefers solid, old-fashioned realism. Many an enthusiastic new publisher, hoping to bring the latest in cyberpunk and urban fantasy to the Hebrew-speaking public, has found this out hard way. If only the publisher had known that there’s a huge market for all sorts of fantastic literature in Israel, a market that consumes books at stunning speed, always eager for more! But this knowledge would not have saved him from bankruptcy, because the market in question has no need of expensive Hebrew translations. It is buying science fiction and fantasy in its own shops and in its own language, Russian. Among the many divides between the Hebrew-speaking majority and the huge Russian-speaking minority, this one is seldom referred to by the media. But the fact that Israelis, or rather Sabras, dislike fantasy and Russians adore it is profoundly significant. It is a reflection of the different histories and different mindsets of the two communities, and unless we understand the roots and implications of this difference, communication between the Sabras and the Russians is likely to be as hard as a conversation between humans and space aliens. Like and Unlike “Anti-Semitism is the dislike of the unlike.” Every Russian Jew can identify with this statement on a profoundly visceral level. We have lost our religion, they feel, our distinct Jewish language (Yiddish), and much of our history. So what is left to make us Jewish? The fact that we are “unlike” others. — 170 —

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Of course, Russian Jews are not alone in facing this void of identity. Ivan Kalmar paints a portrait of the Jewish subject he calls “the eji”—the Embarrassed Jewish Individual. The ejis are those who have left behind Orthodox Judaism, lost touch with the traditional Jewish community, and yet continue to regard themselves—and be regarded by others—as Jews1. Kalmar argues that that the edginess, the discomfort, the “beingout-of-place” paradoxically enables the “non-Jewish Jews” to come to prominence in arts and sciences. “The ‘unaffiliated,’ the ‘assimilated,’ the ‘secular’ have been, if not the majority, certainly the creative element, the motor of Jewish cultural life.”2 But “secular” is too mild a term to describe Russian Jewry. I grew up in a family in which the word “Jew” was never mentioned. The extent of our observance of the Jewish tradition was eating matzo together with bread somewhere in April, roughly in time for Passover. I believed that matzo was a sort of seasonal cracker, and the idea that it had some spiritual significance was altogether beyond my ken. The first time I went to a Passover seder in Israel, I found the experience as exotic as snake-handling. Christianity, on the other hand, was very familiar. Since it is impossible to understand classic English and Russian literature without knowledge of Christian doctrine, such knowledge was available in scholarly volumes and special editions. By the time I was twelve, I had a decent grasp of the notions of the Trinity, transubstantiation, and atonement. At this age I also read the entire Bible, including the New Testament, and thought the latter pretty neat, especially as compared to Leviticus. For a short while I fancied Catholicism, but then became permanently converted to atheism by Darwin. Many prominent Russian-Jewish intellectuals, however, such as the poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda, had succumbed to the honeyed lure of Christianity while continuing to regard themselves—and being regarded by others—as Jews. My upbringing was not unique. Larissa Remennick lists all the aspects of a Jewish identity absent among the Russian Jews: “Knowledge of the Jewish history and holidays, keeping some household and cook1 2

Ivan Kalmar, The Trotskys, Freuds and Woody Allens: Portraits of a Culture (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 13. Ibid., 23. — 171 —

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ing traditions, the imperative to marry other Jews, religious rites of passage and Jewish education for the children, knowledge of the Jewish languages, and identification with Israel.”3 So what is left? In trying to describe the essence of the secular Jewish identity, many writers resort to negatives: this is not what it is. Kalmar argues that while “Jewishness is not a matter of nationality, it is . . . definitely not only a matter or religion.”4 He quotes Freud’s discussion of his Jewish identity in the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo, in which the founder of psychoanalysis describes himself as one “who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as any other religion—and [one] who cannot take a share in nationalistic ideals, but who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew.”5 In her recent book Ambiguous Selves: New Jewish Identities, Canadian Melanie Fogell writes that her sense of being Jewish in the safe, multicultural Canada was of not “quite fit[ting] in,” “of not belonging.”6 And Saul Friedlander poignantly describes the situation of a secular Jew in the Holocaust: “My father was hunted down for what he had refused to remain: a Jew. What he wanted to become, a man like others, had been taken away from him, leaving him no possible recourse. He was being refused the right to live and no longer even knew what to die for.”7 The original goal of Zionism was to make the Jews into a nation like any other nation. And that has meant a gradual but inexorable uncoupling of the Jewish/Israeli identity from Judaism. In the 1950s, David Ben-Gurion said that anybody who was crazy enough to call him/herself a Jew was a Jew. And in June 2006, the Israeli government passed a new law regularizing the naturalization of the children of legal foreign workers who grew up in Israel. The requirements for citizenship include knowledge of Hebrew, identification with Israeli culture, and army service. They do not include conversion to Judaism. The entire country melted when the picture of a cute Senegalese girl wearing a Purim costume was published in the Yediot Achronot. The girl might have 3

Larissa Remennick, Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration and Conflict (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 2-7; 24. 4 Kalmar, The Trotskys, Freuds and Woody Allens, 75. 5 Ibid., 91. 6 Melanie Fogell, Ambiguous Selves: New Jewish Identities (Calgary, Alberta: Detselig Enterprises Ltd, 2006), 10. 7 Saul Friedlander, When Memory Comes, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1979), 56. — 172 —

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been Christian, Muslim, or animist, but by participating in a communal ritual, she has become one of us. Israeliness, in other words, is the outcome of being “like”: anybody who is “like us,” who speaks our language (Hebrew), reads our newspapers, plays our games, eats our foods, and fights in our wars can become an authentic Israeli. But this sharply contrasts with the Jewish sense of being “unlike,” of being special, separate, and different; of not belonging anywhere. George Steiner made this “nomadism” into a defining feature of the Jewish intellectual. In the eyes of such an intellectual, Israel can easily appear to be the antithesis of true Jewishness. American Jewish scholar Jerold S. Auerbach in his book Are We One? Asks, “What is Jewish, after all, about the MacDonald’s, Pizza Huts, and Tower Records that now dot the Israeli landscape? Or the discos blasting pop music on Friday nights, even in Jerusalem?”8 Many Russians in Israel would subscribe to this statement without being in the least inclined to keep Shabbat or give up pork. What they miss is in Israel is not belonging but alienation. Isaac Asimov is Armenian Isaac Asimov (1919-1992), one of the great twentieth-century masters of science fiction, was not only Jewish but Russian-Jewish. Born in a shtetl near the city of Smolensk, he grew up in America but remained fluent in Yiddish until the end of his life. Even though the Soviet editions of his novels omitted to mention this fact, his name should have been a dead giveaway. Nevertheless, among my school-mates, all of whom were sci-fi fans and many of whom were Jewish, it was an article of faith that Isaac Asimov was Armenian. The reason why we were reluctant to acknowledge that Asimov, Robert Sheckley, and many other beloved American science fiction writers were Jewish was not because we wanted to be like everybody else. Rather, we wanted to be like everybody who is unlike everybody else. The Soviet Jews did not try to blend in with the Russian majority. Instead, they created an imaginary community of mavericks, rebels, outcasts, and heretics, where they could feel at home without confessing their Jewishness. An 8

Jerold S. Auerbach, Are We One? Jewish Identity in the United States and Israel, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 12. — 173 —

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Armenian was strange and exotic, and therefore we could identify with him. We loved all aliens because we were aliens ourselves. The full history of Soviet Jews’ love affair with science fiction is waiting to be written. Here I am only going to use some of its highlights to elucidate the conundrum of being “unlike” in the country of the “like” and to trace the gradual Jewish disillusionment with the Soviet utopia, which culminated in one of the most fantastic events of modern times: the exodus of Jews from the planet USSR. Escape Attempt Asimov was fun, Armenian or not, but the true speakers of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia for several generations were two Soviet science-fiction writers working as a team. The Jewish brothers Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky (1925-1991) and Boris Natanovich Strugatsky (b. 1933) were—and still are—more than just bestselling authors. They are the voice of a culture. There have been better writers of fantasy and science fiction, but none more influential. The sequence of the Strugatskys’ novels is the bible of Russian Jewry, starting in the Eden of Communism, continuing with the terrible Fall of the Holocaust and Stalin’s Terror, and culminating in the Exodus of the rejected and the disillusioned. The brothers’ first novels were bland utopias, very much in the spirit of the 1960s, when the post-Stalin “thaw” created the illusion that the Terror was just a mistake and that true Communism, ardently embraced by many Jews in the 1920s and 30s, was still a real possibility. But historical memory would not be silenced, and the Strugatskys registered its stirrings in their first mature work, Escape Attempt (Popytka begstva, 1962), in which the nightmare of history catches up with a utopian day-dream. In the Communist future of the novel, two friends, Vadim and Anton, are approached by a man who calls himself Saul and asks them to find an uninhabited planet for him. They comply, but the planet turns out to be inhabited with a vengeance. It is a vividly portrayed concentrationcamp hell, in which naked political prisoners are being tortured by the emissaries of a supreme ruler who is absurdly titled “The Great and Mighty Cliff; the Shining Battle with One Foot in the Sky.”9 It is hard 9

Arkady and Boris Strugatskie. Popytka begstva. Trudno byt’ bogom, Khishchnye veshchi veka. Sobranie — 174 —

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not to think of another ruler who was addressed by his sycophants as “Father of Nations” and “Slayer of the Fascist Hydra.” It is equally hard not to think of the freezing inferno of the Kolyma Gulags when reading a description like this: “Vadim saw dozens of distorted bodies pressed closely against each other; a tangle of naked skeletal legs with giant protruding feet; skull-like faces crisscrossed by sharp shadows; black gaping mouths. The people slept on the bare earth and on each other. They seemed to be packed in rows and piles like wood, and they were shivering in their sleep” (62). Vadim and Anton attempt to help everybody, with the predictable result of provoking the incomprehension and hostility of guards and the inmates alike. Saul is savvier, telling them: “You are trying to change the natural course of history! Do you know what history is? It is humanity itself. You cannot break history’s backbone without breaking the backbone of humanity!” (84). Saul should know. The ending of the novel reveals him to be a Russian POW in a Nazi camp who inexplicably managed to escape into the future. Shaken by his experiences on the hellish planet, he goes back into his own time and dies a hero’s death. Escape Attempt ends with an image of the “oily smoke” rising from the stacks of a Nazi camp, conflating the Holocaust and Stalin’s Terror in a trans-historical allegory of freedom and compassion versus slavery and cruelty. But in doing so, it denies the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust. And the character of Saul confirms this denial. “Saul” sounds unmistakably Jewish in the Russian text; his physical description—“a thin, very dark face with protruding brown ears”—is a stereotypical Jewish physiognomy (13). But from the epilogue we find out that his real name is Savel Petrovich Repnin, an impeccably Russian cognomen. A seeming Jew is a Russian hero; Auschwitz is the same as the Gulag. Denying the Jewish uniqueness of the Holocaust is not denying the Holocaust. It took moral courage to deal with the sensitive issue of concentration camps in 1962. But the Strugatskys’ allegory dissolves the victimization of the Jews in the larger victimization of the intelligentsia, “people who want strange things,” as the novel puts it. It was fashionable in the thaw years to interpret the Terror as a war of the rabble against the intelligentsia, overlooking the starved Ukrainian peasants on the one hand and the well-fed intellectuals of Stalin on the other. sochinenii, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Text, 1992), 81. — 175 —

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This way the Strugatskys’ Jewish readers, urban intellectuals, whitecollar professionals, and successful techies, could confront the history of their victimization without confronting it as Jewish history. We have been persecuted because we are unlike the rest of you. There is no need to ask the uncomfortable question, what are the unlike like? Pearls before Swine As the 60s progressed, Khrushchev’s thaw was caught by a new frost. Instead of rejuvenating itself, the country was sliding into senility. For more than three decades, Soviet culture had fed on the bloody exaltation of the march into the Promised Land that had demanded innumerable sacrifices but promised the Communist millennium. And suddenly, after Stalin’s death, the promise sounded hollow, the glow of the future dimmed, and people were left in the lurch, struggling against the disintegrating economy and pervasive boredom. The utopian intoxication was over, often supplanted by its alcoholic twin. And at the same time, the so-called anti-Zionist campaign was getting underway, to persist throughout the remaining years of Soviet Russia as a spiteful, demeaning, backbiting form of anti-Semitism, without the tragic enormity of the Holocaust or even the demented grandeur of the Doctors’ Plot. In 1963, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences published a volume called Judaism Without Embellishments10 graced by a Der Sturmer-like caricature of a Jew wearing a prayer shawl on the cover. Many such volumes floated in the murky soup of official propaganda, seemingly irrelevant since few took them seriously, and yet at the same time as inescapable as a bad odor. Jews were not slaughtered or expelled, but they were on a daily basis humiliated, and made the butt of obscene jokes, whispered comments, and routine discrimination. There was no officially declared policy of Jewish quotas for higher education, as there had been in Tsarist Russia, but everybody knew that these quotas existed. Bright Jewish boys and girls who grew up in Kiev or Moscow, both capital cities, and wanted to study nuclear physics or Russian literature, went to second-rate colleges in provincial towns and prayed for a miracle that would allow them to transfer back. Certain departments, notably in the humanities, were practically closed to Jews because of 10 Kichko T. K., Iudaizm bez prikras (Kiev: Izdatel’stvo AN USSR), 1963. — 176 —

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the widely-held belief that their “inauthentic” rationality would poison the pure springs of Russian or Ukrainian culture. The Jews had been the exalted heroes of the Revolution and the tragic victims of Nazism. Now they became dupes of the “fifth rubric” (“piataia grapha”). The Jews were considered an ethnicity, not a religion (there are two separate words in Russian to designate an ethnic Jew and a person who subscribes to Judaism as a religion). Every Soviet citizen had an internal passport, and every passport, along with the rubrics of sex, birthplace and so on, had the fifth one, the rubric of ethnicity. And so every “pure” Jew found him- or herself saddled with a verbal equivalent of the yellow star. Fortunately, there was a loophole: a person of mixed ethnicity could choose to be registered in the ethnicity of either of his parents. The intermarriage rates of Russian Jews skyrocketed shortly after the Revolution and have remained very high until today. Consequently, there were many Jewish children who at the age of sixteen, when the time came to go to the nearest police precinct and receive their passports, could choose to be Russians, Ukrainian, Georgian, or of some other ethnicity. There was no end of jokes directed at these crypto-Jews: “The teacher addresses her class: you, Feinstein, Rubinstein, and Ivanov on maternal side! Tomorrow you don’t come to school; we are hosting an Arab delegation!” It would be easy to compare the victims of the fifth rubric with the Spanish Marranos, the Jews forcefully converted by the Spanish Inquisition who continued to practice their religion in secret. But the Marranos knew what they were suffering for: their God. What positive identity could Soviet Jews salvage from the malicious baiting by the system? “Jew” did not designate religion, or even race as it did in Nazi Germany. The word was a meaningless obscenity, an invitation to petty malice. A persecuted people can thrive if they know the reason for their persecution, but absurdity wears them down as surely as it wore down Josef K., the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s Trial, whose last, most burning regret is not that he is being murdered but that he is being murdered senselessly and humiliatingly, “like a dog”. A dog’s lot is hard; how much harder it is to be treated like a dog if you used to be a god! The Revolution’s Jews, Stalin’s Jews, felt themselves to — 177 —

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be immeasurably superior to the dull, sluggish Russian masses, which they tried to set aflame with their messianic rhetoric. There were hardhitting, ruthless, arrogant Jewish commissars whose ascetic cruelty was redeemed, in their own eyes, by their total dedication to the cause. They took pity on no one, least of all themselves. Like the Jewish protagonist of the poem “February” (1933-1934) by Jewish poet Eduard Bagritsky, who rapes a Gentile prostitute, the object of his former puppy love, they were in revolt against the fearful gray world of the shtetl and the imbecility of the Russian masses. And now Soviet Jews were dragged back into that gray world, forced to swallow the insults and drunken mockery hurled at them by the children of the peasants they had tried to “raise” into Communism. Can there be greater humiliation? The Strugatsky brothers gave their embittered readers a flattering mirror, in which they could still discern their own trampled-down divinity. Hard to Be . . . Hard to Be a God (1964) has been published in English, like most of the Strugatskys’ novels, and like most of them, it has failed utterly at crossing the barrier of cultural translation. Within the context of the AngloAmerican literary tradition, the novel is an average sword-and-sorcery fantasy, marred by plot incongruities and boring philosophical digressions. However, within the context of the history of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, it is a gospel. The novel describes the trials and tribulations of an agent of the future communist society sent to help the inhabitants of a planet mired in a strange combination of medieval savagery and fascism. If Escape Attempt dealt with the residue of the Holocaust and the Terror, Hard to Be a God addresses their causes. According to the book, the mass violence of the twentieth century is the revenge of the rabble upon the idealistic (Jewish) light-bringers. Don Rumata (Anton) is a “Progressionist” whose task it is to speed up the historical development of the planet, just as it was the self-appointed task of the Jewish agents of the Revolution to speed up the historical development of Russia. Unlike many of the agents, he is a humane and sensitive man. He is striving to protect the “book-readers,” the local intellectuals who are persecuted by the philistines, without using deadly — 178 —

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force. Nevertheless, the end of the novel depicts Rumata taking up arms against the black Order that has seized power in the pseudo-medieval kingdom of Arkanar. The color symbolism in the novel is highly significant, conveying its coded political message, which is the connection between the “gray terror” of everyday life and the “black terror” of political repression. The gray terror is “meschanstvo,” an untranslatable Russian word that describes a combination of materialism, self-interest, ignorance, and bad taste. “Meschanstvo” is the stifling world of the self-satisfied rabble, which the Jews of the Revolution had tried so assiduously to eradicate by unleashing the Red Terror. But now, in the dusk of utopian disillusionment, the Terror is re-evaluated. Instead of the intelligentsia’s attack upon “meschanstvo,” it is represented as an attack of “meschanstvo” upon the intelligentsia. “When the gray is triumphant, the black comes to power,” says Rumata, summing up his theory of totalitarianism, which conflates Nazism and Stalinism in the common narrative of the revolt of “meschantsvo” against the intelligentsia. When his fellow double agent protests this conflation, pointing out that each historical event is special and unique, Rumata cuts him short: “There is no theory here, but simply the fascist practice; here beasts kill human beings every day.” Who the beasts are is clear: fat, dull plebes, happy to serve any tyrant who promises bread and circuses. And human beings? They are like a book-reader saved by Rumata, “a real intellectual, true humanist, indifferent to possession; his only property is a bag full of books.” Once upon a time this was the image of a yeshiva student, “talmid hacham,” mocked by communism and secular Zionism alike and opposed to the “new man, facing a radiant destiny,” whether this new man was a commissar or a Sabra.11 But now, shorn of his ritual side-locks, the “talmid hacham” is resurrected as the prey of the gray and black beasts of repression, a misunderstood messiah of culture and learning. Rumata sentimentally identifies with the meek, stooping book-readers, calling them “flesh of my flesh.” Not so long ago, it was Jewish Rumatas who regarded a dusty shtetl yeshiva as “a leper colony.”12 But now, having tasted the dim-witted ingratitude 11 Friedlander, When Memory Comes, 59. 12 J. Hoberman, The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 71. — 179 —

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of the Russian masses, Jewish intellectuals are beginning to rediscover the lost Jewish world. Not, however, in the mass graves of the former Pale of Settlement where “the black” had taken care of the remnant of Yiddishkeit, but in other galaxies—and increasingly upon other shores. Exodus I do not remember when the notion of emigration was first broached at home. I do remember that it appeared to me extremely frightening. It was not because I identified with Russian culture or language—I did not. Nor was I so attached to my friends that I could not imagine leaving them behind. But there was something final about the idea of moving outside the boundaries of the USSR. I felt like an astronaut about to be launched into another galaxy. Stalin’s idea of building socialism in a single country, vocally opposed by the internationalist Trotsky, had triumphed in unpredictable ways: the USSR had cut itself off from the rest of the world. We were, of course, fed the daily diet of propaganda pabulum about the iniquities of American capitalism and Zionism, but somehow these angry articles and news clips did not seem to relate to actual places or actual people. In a classic of Soviet humor, The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf and Evgenii Petrov, a confidence man who dreams of living a good life in Rio de Janeiro says wistfully, “There is nothing beyond the border. The world ends here.” Even the countries of the Eastern bloc were almost beyond reach; as for Western Europe or the US, they were practically an afterlife. Scientists, athletes, and actors who were grudgingly allowed to leave the country defected in increasing numbers, despite the omnipresent KGB agents that accompanied every delegation abroad. Defectors became “socially dead,” unspoken of, obliterated by what Istvan Rev calls extinguishing of the name.13 Alexander Kaletskii’s dissident novel Metro, set in the 1970s, depicts a delegation of Soviet actors traveling to Canada and the US. Most of its members are plotting a defection, yet finding themselves in Montreal and New York cannot quite believe that these cities are real. Rather like the protagonist of Matrix, they feel part of a clever simulation. 13

Istvan Rev, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005), 64. — 180 —

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But just as the cinematic Matrix succumbed to the determination of Neo, the Soviet virtual reality was shattered by the determination of the Jews. Their love for science fiction apparently served them well. Of all the inhabitants of the planet USSR, the Jews were the only ones who managed to build a spaceship and take off. On May 15 1970, a group of sixteen people, all but two of them Jewish, tried to hijack an aircraft and fly to Sweden. The leaders of the group were Eduard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshitz. The attempt failed; the sixteen were arrested and sentenced to long imprisonment (Kuznetsov and Dymshitz, in fact, were initially sentenced to death for treason but won an appeal). Most of them were released early, due to international pressure. Only the two non-Jews, Yuri Fedorov and Aleksei Murzhenko, served their full terms. The failed hijacking, known in Russian as “the Leningrad affair,” was not really about Zionism. It was about the breaking down of the mental Berlin Wall that separated the Soviet Union from the rest of the world. It was about reconnection. The paths of the two Jewish utopias, Communism and Zionism, were about to cross again. Between 1960 and 1970, only about 4,000 Jews emigrated from the USSR, most of them to Israel. In the following decade, this number rose to 250,000. The great exodus had begun. The Ugly Supermen The Strugatsky’s novel The Ugly Swans (Gadkie lebedi, written in 1967; published in 1972; revised by Boris Strugatsky in 1993) is a literary symbol of this exodus. It is a novel about escape, and it is also a novel that escaped. Too provocative to see light in the USSR, it was published abroad, despite the considerable risk to the writers such a step entailed. The novel takes place in an unnamed totalitarian country whose deified president once led a successful war against the Nazis but has now become a brutal dictator. The protagonist, a war-hero-turned-writer, contemplates with revulsion “portraits in all newspapers, in all textbooks, plastered on every wall—the face that once seemed admirable and full of significance and now became flaccid and dumb, like a pig’s snout with a giant, fanged, drooling maw.” It is easy to supply the missing name, Stalin. The names that are present in the text, however, are more of a puzzle. — 181 —

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The protagonist is called Viktor Banev, a good Russian name. Other characters’ cognomens, however, are foreign-sounding, with a clear Jewish tilt. Prominent among them is Dr. Golem, who presides over a leprosarium where the victims of the “spectacles” disease are kept. The lepers are feared and despised by the rabble, but it turns out that they are spiritual and intellectual supermen (the name of their condition is a pun on the Russian equivalent of “egghead”). Surrounded by the drunkenness, filth, and stupidity of a provincial town, the lepers (also called “wetties” because of their ability to cause cleansing rains), reach out to the town’s children. Led by the ugly supermen, the children leave their parents’ suffocating world behind. In the last pages of the novel, the stinking town melts away: brothels, barracks, and banks become “porous, transparent, turn into drifts of dirt, and disappear.” The opposition of the rabble and the intelligentsia is here brought to the point of a civil war. There are no redeeming features in ordinary lives, which are soaked in cruelty, boredom, drunkenness, and lust. When the disembodied Voice addresses the distraught townspeople, it explains that the superhuman children are contemptuous of their alltoo-human parents: “They do not want to grow up alcoholics and rakes, small-minded people, slaves, conformists; they do not want to be made into criminals; they do not want your families and your state.” Where Rumata tried to “elevate” and “enlighten” the masses, the new supermen just want to be left alone, to pursue their own dream, to build their own utopia. Let my people go! But who are “my people”? The name of Dr. Golem seems a giveaway, and there are other scattered hints that invite the reader to interpret the allegory as pertaining to the Jews. Banev remembers the traditional stereotypes of the “wetties” as cringing and obsequious creatures who are nevertheless hated and feared because of their mysterious powers. He is pressured into writing an article about the leprosarium, in which the lepers and their doctors would be denounced as “vampires and child abusers under the mask of healers,” a rhetoric familiar to the Soviet readers from the time of the Doctors’ Plot. But in fact the supermen both are and are not the Jews. Like Rumata and his “book-readers,” they are an idealized self- image of the intelligentsia: people who literally starve without books; who “live in the future . . . who are smart; stunningly smart . . . and talented. . . . They — 182 —

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have strange desires; and they completely lack ordinary wants”. This is the traditional Russian image of the intellectual, going back to the nineteenth-century novels of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. “We are all Jews now.” This has been said in various contexts: by defiant defenders of the West, perceived by radical Islam as an AmericanZionist entity; by noveau riches of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s era identifying with the supposed Jewish money; by non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecutions. But this phrase had a particular meaning at the beginning of the great exodus from Russia: we are not all Jews, but we would like to be. Suddenly, the Jews were metamorphosing from helpless victims into the Chosen People once again. No matter with what hardships, but they, alone of all the Soviet nations, were allowed to leave planet USSR. Ludmilla Alekseeva, Russian human-rights activist, dryly notes that the “Let My People Go” movement, supported by the starry-eyed American Jews who imagined thousands of fiddlers on the roof exiting through the Iron Curtain, might just as well have been called the “Let My People Go Anywhere but the USSR” movement.14 Had they been allowed to look for an “historical motherland” elsewhere, millions of Chechens, Georgians, Ukrainians, and Russians would gladly have followed the Jews out of Russia. Indeed, the high percentage of ethnic Russians in the aliyah was due not only to intermarriage but to fake marriages and outright falsification of documents. Even in the late 60s and 70s there was a brisk trade in Jewish wives and husbands, despite the dangers of KGB harassment. The relationship between the Russian and Jewish components of the intelligentsia, always complex and problematic, was strained almost to a breaking point by the mixture of identification, envy, and resentment provoked by the exodus. And the Strugatskys, the spokesmen of the intelligentsia, faithfully reflected this strain. The Ugly Swans performs the same sleight-of-hand with regard to the exodus as Escape Attempt did with regard to the Holocaust: Jewish history is subsumed in the history of the “unlike.” The lepers are the intelligentsia who, disillusioned with the world they have helped to build, are setting their eyes on a new utopia. But the protagonist does not join them. Banev is watching from the sidelines, by turns hopeful and skeptical, frightened and enthralled. In one scene, he believes he is turning 14 Alekseeva L.M. Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR. Noveishii period. Vilnius, Moscow: Vest’, 1992. Quoted from http://memo.ru/history/diss/books/alexeewa/. — 183 —

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into a leper and panics, only to be reassured that he is merely suffering from a food allergy. With his defiantly Russian name in the company of the Golems and the Zurzmansors, Banev is left behind, while the ugly supermen lead an exodus out of the failed millennium, now finally and irrevocably turned gray. Refuseniks In 1972 the Soviet government adopted a so-called “diploma tax,” to penalize those would-be Jewish emigrants who had received higher education “at the expense of the state.” The tax was soon revoked, but a whole array of arbitrary measures snipped away at the Jewish pride of being the most educated ethnic minority in the Soviet Union. The Strugatskys’ conflation of Jewishness and intellectualism was a commonplace, taken for granted by Jews and anti-Semites alike. “Perhaps the pinnacle of the perceived Russian-Jewish identity was (and still is) the ambition for excellence and achievement, in any given sphere of activity, with the corollary high valuation of education, hard effort, and intellectualism.”15 Over half of all Russian Jews received post-secondary education, while in some places this percentage reached 75%; in the capital cities, 90% of employed Jews were working in white-collar occupations.16 And now the government was making this cherished accomplishment into an Achilles heel of the exodus: any Jewish scientist, engineer, technician, or doctor could be arbitrarily slapped with the verdict of having had access to “state secrets” and denied an exit visa to Israel. “Refuseniks,” as they soon became known, were suspended in a limbo, herded through a maze of incomprehensible bureaucratic obstacles with no exit in sight. “Refusal” (“otkaz” in Russian) was not for a set period of time: it was a punishment of infinite duration that could be revoked at any moment or could go on forever. Even before seriously considering taking part in the exodus myself, I became acquainted with several Kiev refuseniks. They all had something in common: a restless, hungry, searching look, as if looking for something precious they had lost without quite remembering what it was. They were ex-engineers whose nights were spent guarding some decrepit 15 Remennick, Russian Jews on Three Continents, 25. 16 Ibid., 17. — 184 —

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building site and whose days were busy with petitions, demonstrations, private seminars, and Hebrew lessons. They took their dissident activities as seriously as they had taken their physics and math. The foundation for their legal and paralegal actions, which included endless petitions to various Party organizations, open letters, and peaceful demonstrations, were the recently signed Helsinki Accords (1975), in which the Soviet Union agreed to respect “human rights” in exchange for the West respecting “territorial boundaries.” No doubt the Soviet leaders felt they had gained Western concessions in Eastern Europe for the price of empty words. There had been, after all, eloquent promises of democracy in Stalin’s Constitution. But times were a-changing; Big Brother was dead; and the efficacy of the Soviet Newspeak has been whittled to nothing through overuse. The intelligentsia rediscovered the power of literal meaning. In 1976 the Moscow Helsinki Group, a still-extant human rights watchdog, was founded, and it insisted that the Soviet government should mean what it says and say what it means. If the Helsinki Accords promised family reunification, then the government must explain why “Ivanov on maternal side” was not allowed to reunify with his beloved Aunt Perla in Tel-Aviv. The government blinked its piggish eyes and slowly simmered in indignation at those pesky bespectacled kikes who dared to turn the regime’s bureaucratic Juggernaut against itself. Jews plunged with enthusiasm into trying to force the Soviet language to make sense. While the first refuseniks had relied on hunger strikes, the post-Helsinki generation invested its formidable energy, talent, and education into legal baiting of the regime. An unequal tugof-war soon developed: the powers-that-be tried to strip the Jews of their intellectualism; the Jews retaliated by demonstrating the sheer stupidity of their masters. I kept my distance from my mother’s refuseniks friends; their obsessive involvement with the Soviet bureaucracy struck me as dangerous. Having been a Young Pioneer, I knew that expecting rationality from the system was futile. The regime was insane, driven mad by the utopian hangover and senility, and this insanity was contagious. Whoever speaks the language of Hell, George Steiner once said, cannot expect to unlearn it and speak the language of Paradise. The Soviet discourse was the language of an inane Limbo, and whoever spoke it ran the risk of being infected by its petty viciousness. — 185 —

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And then there were the real, physical dangers. Refuseniks were constantly harassed by the KGB: sometimes interrogated for hours; sometimes roughed up; and sometimes put on trial and sent to the Gulag. In 1973 in Kiev, Alexander Feldman was tried on a trumped-up charge of “hooliganism,” and each of several following years there was a similar trial of a Jewish activist: one in Vinita, one in Odessa, then one in Leningrad, another in Moscow. . . . In 1977, Ida Nudel, a frail but indomitable woman who much later showed the same spirit in the political fracases of Israel, was sent to Siberia. Also in 1977, Anatoli (Natan) Shcharansky was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in jail. He would eventually become the “poster boy” for the refusenik movement. But no matter how wary and undecided I was, I was beginning to feel suffocated by the familiar streets, familiar sights, and familiar slogans all around me. Without any Jewish epiphany, I was being inexorably brought to the point of realizing I did not belong in the country of my birth. The final straw was my participation in the Babi Yar demonstration. Babi Yar was the site of the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Kiev, when more than 30,000 people were murdered over the course of three days. A handful of Jewish activists would show up on each anniversary of the massacre, perhaps bringing a wreath with a Hebrew inscription or reading a prayer. I attended on this occasion with great trepidation, standing aside, keeping my head down. There were insolent KGB agents walking around our tiny group, snapping pictures. Eventually, several people were arrested. It was a beautiful fall day, the honeyed sunlight glinting on the memorial, which showed a woman in a Ukrainian ethnic dress histrionically throwing her arms around a couple of drooping kids. The inscription said something about “Soviet citizens killed by the Nazi invaders.” There was no mention that these “citizens” were Jews. And then I knew I had to get out before I too started speaking the language of lies and evasions, the language of the Limbo. I had discovered, finally, that I was “unlike,” and could no longer fit in. The Beetles and the Ants The Strugatskys’ Beetle in the Anthill (Zhuk v muraveinike, 1980) takes up the theme of the Wanderers, a non-humanoid super-civilization — 186 —

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that had been sporadically referred to in their previous works (including Escape Attempt, in which the Wanderers had created the mysterious machinery misused by the camp guards to torture and kill the inmates). Such super-civilizations are common in science fiction; the Wanderers provided the welcome allure of the alien in a fictional universe that sometimes seemed altogether too human and familiar. Nothing was known about them except for the fact that they had no home planet and avoided any contact with other civilizations. But in Beetle in the Anthill the Wanderers are suddenly brought into the thick of human affairs. The novel’s protagonist, Lev Abalkin, discovers that he is one of thirteen “changelings,” children grown from the fertilized human ova left by the Wanderers on a distant planet thousands of years ago. Desperate to solve the mystery of his origin, he breaks into a museum where the alien incubators are stored. There he is killed by a Secret Service Agent, fearful of the “unknown dangerous program” that Abalkin may be carrying, unbeknownst to himself, in the depth of his unconscious. The setting of the novel is the Communist society of Escape Attempt and Hard to Be a God, but now it has turned chaotic and ominous. The shot at the end of the novel brings down the curtain upon the already tattered utopian dream, breaking the violence taboo of Soviet science fiction. But even more disturbing than the overt paranoia of the killing is the covert and senseless paranoia that envelopes Abalkin’s quest for his origin, expressed in stupidity, lies, evasions, and sheer bureaucratic muddle. Thwarted at every step, Abalkin is determined to salvage some logic from this miasma of absurdities. He wants to “find out, once and for all, why he is prevented from doing the work he loves; who—personally—has been interfering with his life; who he could hold responsible for the debacle of his cherished plans for the future; for his bitter incomprehension of the events of his life; for the fifteen years wasted in slogging at a hard and unwanted job”. Any refusenik could identify with this list of demands; any refusenik knew the frustration of butting his head against the wall of institutional paranoia. And there are scattered details facilitating this identification: there are thirteen changelings, as there are thirteen tribes of Israel; Abalkin is marked with a mysterious birthmark in the shape of the Russian letter “Zh,” which is the first letter of the word “Zhid,” “kike.” . . . But like the Soviet Limbo itself, the novel promises an explanation and then — 187 —

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snatches it away at the last moment. The mystery of the Wanderers is never solved; neither Abalkin himself nor the reader finds out what the Wanderers intended, whether the genetic “program” even existed, or whether the “changelings” were hidden supermen, evil “pod people,” or mere confused victims. At the beginning of the last century, Otto Weininger, a Jew and an anti-Semite, wrote in his infamous book Sex and Character, “The Jew is nothing.” The Jew is a shape-shifter, with no definite national character, no backbone, adapting to every situation, taking on the coloration of every culture he penetrates, and yet at the same time retaining his own malevolent essence. Capable of mimicking the common (Russian) humanity, the Jew, as Dostoyevsky wrote, still retains some “far deeper mysteries of their law and their makeup.” The Jews of anti-Semitism, Sander Gilman points out, are a chameleonic race, alien body snatchers who are just like everybody else, and yet, deep inside, different. From the light-bringers of utopia, to the gods of Culture, to the departing supermen, Russian Jews had been admiring their own reflection in the magic mirror of the Strugatskys’ fiction. And this is what it all came down to: the perpetual enigma of unearned victimization; the insoluble mystery of the alienated self; the identity that is the absence of identity. They do not want us because we are different, but what does this difference mean? We do not know and they do not care. Lev Abalkin is simply another incarnation of Josef K.: dying like a dog, victim of a universal conspiracy that may not even exist. In 1984, the Strugatskys ended the Wanderers saga with the novel Waves Still the Wind (Volny gasyat veter; translated as Time Wanderers). The solution is predictable: the Wanderers are not non-humanoid aliens at all but a race of supermen who originated within humanity and eventually transcended and abandoned it. The protagonist, Toivo Glumov, hates and fears the hidden super-humans, calling them “traitors . . . parasites. Like those wasps that lay eggs in living caterpillars.” And of course, he eventually finds out that he is one of them. His is a dilemma that would be familiar to Daniel Deronda, the protagonist of George Eliot’s 1876 eponymous novel: an English aristocrat who discovers his Jewish origin. Deronda’s proto-Zionist solution is to move to Palestine and try to establish a Jewish state there. Glumov’s solution is to disappear into interstellar space. However, by the time the novel was published, in 1986, I was no longer interested in the Man from the — 188 —

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Yellow Star, except in an academic sense. I was in Israel. I had no time for Jewish metaphysics; I had taxes to pay. Today in Israel “Israelis and science fiction?” a Russian friend of mine tells me. “They just don’t get it.” The mystique of the “unlike” is lost on Sabras. I came to Israel because I believed that this was the only country in the world where I did not have to feel Jewish, where I did not have to spend my life wrestling with the enigma of my identity. In Israel, “you’re not different. You can be ‘just like everybody else’ even out in the street. That, more than anything else, was the goal of those who, in the smoky cafes of Vienna or Odessa, first dreamed up the Return to the ancestral home” (Kalmar 212). And so Sabras read Asimov with as little interest in his ethnicity as if he indeed were Armenian. They watch Star Wars and do not see a hidden meaning in Luke Skywalker’s mysterious and complicated identity. They do not read the Strugatskys. Science fiction and fantasy seem irrelevant to those who have left the alienation of the Diaspora behind. But this “rootedness” is yet another delusion, a phantom of another Jewish utopia. Within Israel, we may be “not different,” but Israel itself is not “just like everybody else.” It is a Jewish state, heir to the mysterious convolutions of Jewish history and Jewish identity. Russian Jews have learned their lesson: no matter how you try to fit in, while you may end up as a god or a dog you will never be one of the crowd. A Wanderer always remains a Wanderer, even when he tries to settle down. It is now up to Sabras to face the profound fantasy of our existence.

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Why Doesn’t It Rain Fish Here? Ioram Melcer

Every month of May, in one of the counties in the center of the country, as soon as the first rains of the season would start, there would be a rain of fish. No one tried to explain this, and no one doubted it. Everyone knew this is the way of the world: in May fish come down from the sky. The newspapers would report it, but the nature of these news was meteorological more than magical. This was reality, the reality I knew in Latin America. Nearly forty years later, after I had moved to Israel, a producer of Galei Tzahal, the IDF radio station, called and asked me, “Do you know stories about places in the world where there is a rain of fish?” As it turned out, she had read reports from various places in the world which told of a rain of fish. The young producer said she had come across the subject for the first time in a National Geographic movie, which had described the phenomenon and tried to find scientific explanations for it. I told her right away, “I need no explanations. All my life I have known about fish raining.” A rain of fish “exists” both in the world I knew as a child in Latin America and in the world of the IDF radio producer. For me, for the child I was some forty years ago, a rain of fish was part of the cycle of time, a familiar phenomenon. It was indeed a local and special phenomenon of the “here and now,” but undoubtedly as solid a reality as heavy rain, or a big odorous mango. For the young girl from the radio station, a rain of fish was something people reported, a phenomenon from weird, far away places, something that would undoubtedly vanish from the screen of her attention as soon as it received a proper explanation, based on solid scientific facts. In other words, in both the culture I knew in Latin America in the late 1960s and the culture of IDF radio producers at the beginning of the twenty first century, one could talk about a rain of fish, and most certainly write a story about it, or describe it in a novel. But what would constitute reality and what would be delegated to the reader’s imagina— 190 —

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tion? What would be considered a satirical exaggeration and what would become a wild fantasy? The answers to these questions depend on the world of the reader, his experience, his sensations, and the categories imbued in him and characteristic of his culture. A Latin American reader who reads about the Israeli Navy navigating vessels through the flooded streets of Tel Aviv (as occurs in the novel Human Parts by Orly Castel-Bloom)1 may find that he is faced with a strengthened and aggrandized expression of reality itself. After all, I myself witnessed, a few years ago, how the Argentinian army refused to assist civilians during massive floods because the army is supposed to “defend the Homeland from external enemies.” The civilians were reduced to navigating the streets of their cities aboard wooden doors they had taken off their hinges. One of these civilians, a young man, swam as he pushed in front of him a door carrying his frightened dog, sitting next to its owner’s computer. An Argentinian reader who reading Orly Castel-Bloom’s descriptions in Human Parts may feel she has expressed his reality quite accurately. An Israeli reader may also react in more than one way. “Navy ships in the streets of the first Hebrew city? Pure fantasy!” the reader might say to himself. Yet a short while after Human Parts was published, neighbourhoods in the South of Tel Aviv were flooded yet again during a winter that resembled the one described in the novel. This time the authorities had readied themselves in advance: the Navy’s plastic boats floated in the south of the city, and members of a more or less secret unit were busy helping the civilians. They are the soldiers about whom the well-known song says,, “frog-men, people of silence, no one saw them, no one heard.”2 They were seen, and heard, and they traveled the streets. When Orly Castel-Bloom wrote Human Parts, the choice to float Navy ships in the streets of Tel Aviv, was an artistic one. The author’s aim was to create a grotesque reality that would reflect the Israeli existence exaggeratedly, in a ridiculous and shocking way. This is the way the grotesque functions: presenting the the ridiculous, the bizarre, the distorted, and the unnatural. Comic and exaggerated satirical modes are the direct descendants of the grotesque in art, and in literature in 1 2

Orly Castel-Bloom, Human Parts (Or Yehuda: Kinneret, 2002 [Hebrew]). Orna and Moshe Datz, “People of the Rain” (1985). — 191 —

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particular. The Navy has ships, certain areas of Tel Aviv tend to suffer from floods—these are facts that are well-known to every Isreali reader. Exaggeration, ridicule, and an unusual combination of realistic elements create a bitter-funny satirical grotesque. In this case at least, reality did not surpass its imagination, it merely caught up with it. The grotesque became realism, and this just happened to it. Similarly, an invasion of hundreds of thousands of insects in a certain season of the year is a well-known phenomenon. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez releases group after group of yellow butterflies. In the novel, the yellow butterflies are connected to the love-pain of a pathetic musician by the name of Mauricio Babilonia.3 An Israeli reader might read and say to himself that indeed there is here a combination of familiar components. A great abundance of insects that appear all at once may bring to mind images of destructive locusts; or perhaps—if the reader is a resident of Haifa like I am—images of the wonderful clusters of lady bugs that cover the sidewalk in the spring, red carpets of bugs, linked to each other in copulation as they move up the road. In Castel-Bloom’s floating ships in Tel Aviv, as well as in the yellow butterflies that fill García Márquez’ town of Macondo, there are clear elements of reality which are merged into an essence that deviates from reality. In the streets of Tel Aviv there were “only” rubber rowboats, and the issue of butterflies in Macondo is an exaggeration relying on a reality that is well known to people from many places around the world. When one talks of “magical realism,” one refers to a mixture or combination of the outer world (the factual, realistic world) and the internal world (the world of sentiment, thoughts, imagination, and various modes of internal representation). In other words, this designation lies between the physical world and the psychological world. When García Márquez wishes to convey to us, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, that the beautiful Remedios cannot exist in this world, because she does not understand it and it is incapable of comprehending her, he brings matters to the point that one day, as she folds laundry outside of the house, she flies in a storm to the skies and disappears. When he wants to discuss Rebecca, whose parents have died and express to what extent they were her whole world, he describes her as a child carrying a bag which emits “cluck-cluck” sounds—the noise produced by the clicking 3

Gabriel García Márquez, “Cien Años de Soledad.” — 192 —

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of her parents’ bones, which she carries everywhere. When he wants to describe grandparents who would do anything to maintain their image as rich and distinguished, he describes how they send presents year after year that reflect their superiority and refinement, until a the crate of presents arrives in the last year containing their bodies, for they had nothing more to give and had no other way to maintain an appearance that was so important to them. In the same way, when Márquez wants to describe the deep relationship between José Arcadio Buendía and Prudencio Agilar, whom Arcadio murders with a spear he sticks in his neck, he allows murderer and murdered to maintain a relationship over many years, beyond the screen that divides between life and death, and lets them become soul-mates with a shared destiny. Isn’t this is a thrilling way to express the effect of the murder upon reality as well as upon the souls of those involved in it? To a great extent, this is the function of magical realism: to combine physical reality with psychological reality in a described reality, on one plane, one level of reality, and by doing so to strengthen the specific expression. Indeed, when Orly Castel-Bloom sends her literary world a severe plague of flu from Saudi Arabia and floods the streets of Tel Aviv and floats Navy ship in them, she is going down the same path. The alienation and solitude of the individual in the Israeli reality, the fact that he is at the mercy of fate and the confused and mystified agencies of government—these receive an enhanced description thanks to the combination between a known reality and elements of satirical-grotesque exaggeration. Yet to the eyes of an Israeli reader it seems that García Márquez has “gone farther.” His willingness to rip off metaphysical screens and cross borders between levels of reality and consciousness delineates a work of art that the Israeli reader tends to consider as consisting more of the “magical” or the “fantastic” than the “realistic.” What is considered realistic and what is considered magical or fantastic? Each culture has a different answer for this, an answer which distinguish it from other cultures. Latin-American literature turned to what is known as “magical realism” in a brave effort to widen its scope of relevance and succeed in describing the reality it deals with. First and foremost in this movement was the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. In his classic novel The Kingdom of this Earth,4 Carpentier describes tumul4

Alejo Carpentier, “El Reino de Este Mundo.” — 193 —

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tuous episodes in the heroic struggle the black slaves waged against their white oppressors in Haiti, a struggle that ended in the slaves‘ victory and the establishment of a state under their rule. Carpentier traveled to Haiti in 1943 and discovered a different reality there. He called this reality the “the marvelous real” (lo real maravilloso). It occurs to the Cuban writer that the same “marvelous real” is typical of the entire American continent, from nature to history, from the many mythologies to the belief in a magical essence as a fundamental ingredient that can reach the masses. Alejo Carpentier dedicates several pages to an introduction to The Kingdom of this Earth in order to draw a line between French surrealism and the wondrous reality he finds himself surrounded by on the American continent. He considers the great effort European artists (first painters and later poets and novelists) make in order to produce the wonderful to be nothing more than “clever finger tricks, combining objects which have nothing to do with each other: the old and wasteful story about the pointless meeting between an umbrella and a sewing machine on top of the table in the morgue.” The revelation came to him in Haiti: “It became particularly clear to me during my stay in Haiti, when I found myself in daily touch with something we could call the ‘marvelous reality.’ My feet stood on a land in which thousands of people craving freedom believed in the power of Makandal [a slave and freedom fighter—I.M.] to become a wolf, until this collective belief brought about a miracle on the day in which he was executed. . . . .”5 Carpentier ends his introduction with the famous sentence, “For what is the history of America if not a chronicle of the ‘marvelous reality’?” In view of these comments, it is odd that the present Israeli literature barely engages magical realism at all in order to express the reality it deals with. Our generation’s Israeli literature adheres to the framework of the Israeli reality and barely exceeds it. Israeli time, Israeli man, Israeli sociology, Israeli problematics, the ideological partition in Israel—or, in other words, the Israeli existence and essence—are the main referential framework of the greater part of Hebrew literature written in Israel. Still, would it not be true to say about Israeli history, not to speak of Jewish history, exactly what Carpentier has said about 5

The translation is mine, from the original Spanish. — 194 —

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the reality and history of the American continent? The inventory of current Hebrew literature forces us to ask a difficult question: why does it make so little use of the options provided by magical realism? The question is a hard one, since any question formulated as “why isn’t there . . . ” forces the asker into the realm of suppositions, to which he can only add shadows of evidence. If we wish to look for a “chronicle of magical realism,” we will find something of it in Hebrew dystopia literature. This literature is not vast, but it exists, and it imagines the future of the state of Israel and the future of its Jews or even of the entire Jewish people. An imaginary future, often far graver than reality and even catastrophic, is found for example in Benyamin Tammuz’s Jeremia’s Inn,6 in Eli Shreiber’s novels,7 and in Amos Keinan’s writing.8 These are literary frameworks in which the writers freely express the way they grasp the Israeli mode of existence and especially the dangers hovering over it (such as nationalistic radicalism, religious extremism and a nihilistic loss of direction). In other words, if one relies on Carpentier, this imaginary-future-reality is a chronicle of a negative magical realism, wherein the “magical” is the evil about to take place, according to what the novels describe or depict for us. The future is imagined based on an interpretation of the present. The magical lies in the wonder and amazement which are supposed to awaken the reader in view of the ensuing conclusions as he reads the chronicle of the future rendered in the present. The Hebrew dystopia is the rule that attests to its own exception. It certainly does not provide an answer to the question we raised regarding the lack of the use of magical realism in Israeli literature. To my mind, certain indications that could answer this question should be sought in the basic definitions of “Israeliness” in the gist of Israeli self-perception. For the sake of our our present argument, one ought to consider two elements which have been operative in Israel previous to its establishment and continue today. The first is the ambition to build a “normal” human existence in the state of Israel, and the second is the negation of the diaspora. These two elements are closely interconnected, and both have an influence on the avenues Israeli literature still continues to choose. 6 7 8

Benyamin Tammuz, Jeremia’s Inn (Jerusalem: Keter, 1984) [Hebrew]. Elie Schreiber, Switzerland (Dalia Peled, 1982); Sour (Proza, 1985); Good Morning Eliahu (Gvanim, 2004)) [In Hebrew]. Amos Keinan, The Road to Ein Harod (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1984) [Hebrew]. — 195 —

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In Haiti, Alejo Carpentier encountered a bursting nature and people whose bubbling imaginations created a physical reality of upheaval, chaos, and change. These were the raw materials of the revolution, the sentimental and ideological substances that advanced the wheels of reality. The coming together of the changes that are taking place—this is the essence of “magical realism.” This is the “matter” that is entirely different, made of blood and fire and smoke, mountains exploding, and flesh brushed with iron combs. The attempt to bring European ideals to the new world, a new world of both heaven and hell, God’s creation, and man’s creation. The Kingdom of this Earth is the story of past events that reveal a general reality, beyond the time (the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century) and place (the island of Hispaniola, which will later become Haiti) in which it is set. The awakening of such an outlook toward reality in the continent of America allowed the possibility of activating it and applying it to additional times and places on the continent. On the other hand, the “normalcy” of Zionist-Israeli teaching is related to a logical and instrumental apprehension, certainly following Ben Gurion and Mapai’s way. Since the practical solution to what was referred to as the “Jewish problem” was to bring the Jews to the land of Israel and turn the Jewish people into a “normal” people, it necessarily led to the creation of a society, an economy, a politic, and a person according to defined molds and for a very clear purpose. The transformation from “many people” to “a people” was neither a return to a primal, maybe tribal condition nor an exodus from Egypt. Fundamentally, socialist Zionism was the revolution of an existing and defined people, a revolution with very pragmatic aims: to bring the people to Israel and also to put the people on practical tracks: utilitarian, productive, and fertile. This was the initial instruction and the basis for the image of a “normal” Israeliness. Israel would have its language and its economy, it would have an army and a government, a transportation system and health care, social services and education, and it would also have culture. In its initial phases, Israeli culture would be more or less in the service of an ideology and later on much less so; the culture would exist as part of a normal reality, as a perpetual testimony of that reality, a reflection that would be critical or oppositional but always a part of reality. To a great extent, the adherence to reality is one side of the same — 196 —

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coin whose other side is the denial of the diaspora. Choosing the Bible, and particularly those parts that pertain to the land and its physicality, to the existence of the people in the historical land and to its historical and political upheavals, in addition to the biblical literature that could serve as a justification and an instruction for the “normalizing Zionistic revolution” also meant abandoning the Talmud, the oral literary tradition, the realm of legend, wonder, and secrecy in the Jewish cannon. Together with the bathwater of the diaspora and the oral literary tradition, the baby of Jewish magical realism was thrown out. The dictatorship of the rationalization of Jewish history and th equest for messages that must be found in Jewish texts sterilized Israeli literature and prevented it from using the good old magical realism which exists in almost any other text of the Jewish canon. The ability of magic realism is to combine physical reality and psychological reality into a described reality.To this one must add the difficulty which lies in trying to “get out” of Jewish history in order to be able to see both the tangible reality and the fantastic, both the events and their mirroring of sentimental contents, our imagination and dreams as they are expressed in the events and their various representations. The difficulty is quite clear: Jewish history is broad, burdened, and burdening, stifled and stifling, and worse yet, it is a history which also insists on being part and parcel of our daily political reality. As Jews and Israelis, it is difficult for us to live our lives within history and at the same time contemplate ourselves living it. Everything is loaded, complex, embroiled in and bearing immediate implications that influence eternity as well. Carpentier writes about the American continent and notes that it is the only place in the world in which one can experience at one and the same time the twentieth century as the beginning of the modern era, a medieval reality, and an almost timeless ancient reality. The famous Cuban writer lived many years, but traveled little. He did not visit Israel and Jerusalem, and did not become acquainted with the multitude of epochs or with the various realities and world interpretations that have coexisted there since the dawn of time. Despite this, his words in the preface to The Kingdom of this Earth were completely adequate with regards to the land of Israel, the state of Israel, the Jewish people, its past history, and it present existence. Jorge Luis Borges captured this well in his poem Israel, when he wrote: “. . . A prosecutor or a dentist/ who conversed with God on top of — 197 —

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a mountain. . . .”9 Borges, who knew how to artistically combine an objective reality with a sentimental-imaginary reality and create one distinct literary magic, captured the basic timelessness of Jewish existence, a timelessness that continues from generation to generation, along the time line: a real and fantastic reality. Most of the Israeli literature written in our time is not interested in this wonder. Apparently, it grasps tangible reality with both hands and believes it is thus dealing with it. Yet without the wonder and the magic, only contrived normalcy is left, quite devoid of sentiment. That is why escapism prevails, as does the disregard for the difficulties of reality. Israeli literature has distanced itself from what could and should distinguish it from literature written in other places. One cannot look at the Israeli reality without seeing the wider context (the Jewish context, the social, the historical, the revolutionary-Zionist). As soon as one contemplates the wider context and all its components, one realizes the appropriateness of Carpentier’s words to the Hebrew Revival: “For what is the history of America if not a chronicle of the magical reality?” Such is our history—in the twentieth century, in the two thousand years that preceded it, and probably beforehand too—and such are our lives here and now: realistic and magical to the point that one cannot describe reality without magic. What is necessary is a fresh, open look, one that might see the fish falling from the sky and say, “Here it is raining fish,” as a probable and understandable phenomenon, for such is reality.

9

My translation from the original in Spanish, published in the volume Elogio de la Sombra in 1969. — 198 —

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Kosher Vampires: Jews, Vampires, and Prejudice Sahara Blau1

1. I remember the moment very clearly. The repulsive figure of Count Orlok the vampire appeared on the screen, played by Max Schreck. The camera zoomed in on the hunched form with the hideous face and beak-like nose, focusing on the look in his beady black eyes as they glared greedily at a pale young woman. “Hit ‘pause’!” I shouted at my friend, who was holding the remote control. We stared at the frozen image. Had I not known that I was looking at a frame from Nosferatu, the first vampire movie, which was made by the German director Friedrich Murnau in 1922, I might have thought the picture came straight out of the Nazi propaganda organ Der Stürmer. The figure of the vampire was a carbon copy of the stereotype of a Jew in anti-Semitic caricatures of that period. I later found that Julius Streicher, editor-in-chief of Der Stürmer (which was launched a year after the release of Nosferatu) was apparently influenced by the film. Orlok symbolized for him the ultimate “other”: the anti-German, the contaminator of the pure blood, the carrier of plagues—in other words, the Jew. 2. I have often wondered when I first became enthralled by the world of vampires, with all the allure and deception of its immanent darkness. I think I was in my teens. I imagine the appeal of the vampire world stemmed from the dark place in my soul, the same darkness that led me to volunteer as a secretary for the burial society, and later to devote a large part of my adult life to studying the subject of the Holocaust. In essence, it allowed me to step lightly, irresponsibly, and seemingly securely 1

I offer my gratitude to Haim Bresheeth, whose “Marking the Social Other by Blood: The Vampire Genre” inspired this essay. — 199 —

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around the edges of death. And let’s be honest: who offers death in more elegant and alluring wrappings than vampires? But this was before I saw Murnau’s repugnant stereotypically Jew-like vampire. The vampire of my childhood fantasies was a handsome man with a pale complexion, dark eyes, a soft voice—and he wore a flowing velvet cape, to complete the picture. He lived in an old castle, took his afternoon nap in a coffin, and was so powerfully erotic that no woman—certainly not a giddy, impressionable teenager like me—could resist his charms. I hate to admit it, but there were times when I wished I was a vampire myself. I now find it embarrassing to recall how captivated I was by my coy flirtation with death, a flirtation that made me feel “dark” and complex, and not simply like a helpless (adolescent) mortal. I presume it was also closely linked to my hesitantly burgeoning sexuality at the time. With a vampire, it wasn’t “the real thing”: there was no risky penetration, no heavy breathing, no stepping over daunting lines. It was all purely romantic, hazy, enveloped in kitschy lace. And we can’t ignore the most important part: blood would flow only from my neck, and not from that other intimidating part of the body. So here I am, charming vampire! Come bite my neck! 3. And then suddenly there was a film like Nosferatu. Although it was made in 1922, I only saw it after I had been entranced by seductive figures like Bela Lugosi, Gary Oldman, and the other genteel and less Jewishlooking Hollywood vampires. It may be possible that Murnau did not deliberately fashion his vampire after the stereotype of a Jew. All he wanted to do was to create a film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but when Stoker’s wife adamantly refused to grant him permission, he decided to make a few changes. He called his vampire Orlok instead of Dracula and moved the setting of the story to Germany. The widow was incensed, but despite her best efforts was unable to confiscate all the copies of the film. In “Marking the Social Other by Blood: The Vampire Genre,” Haim Bresheeth demonstrates how the novel Dracula and the movies made in its wake present the tale of the vampire as the story of the infiltra-

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tion of Eastern Jews into Western Europe.2 He notes that when Stoker wrote the book in 1897, the number of Jewish immigrants in London was growing rapidly, and these new arrivals were seen as a threat to English culture and society. This situation, he maintains, led to the creation of the racist stereotypes that depicted them as sinister, alien, and blood-sucking creatures. (And let us not forget the ancient connection between Jews and blood that had been perpetuated for centuries in a host of blood libels.) These stereotypes were then honed and elaborated upon by the Nazis until they reached their familiar height: the Jews as rodents secretly plotting against society, pests to be exterminated. Add to Bresheeth’s theories the fact that both Stoker’s Dracula and Murnau’s Nosferatu depict rats streaming from a coffin and spreading the plague. According to the prevailing European narrative, who is it who carries disease and spreads the plague? The Jews, of course. These sequences bring to mind the use of rats in a later propaganda film, The Eternal Jew, in which the parallel between the rat leaping menacingly toward the camera and the Jew who spreads disease is even clearer and more explicitly spelled out. 4. With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. . . . The end is not only the end of the freedom of the people oppressed by the Jew, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations. After the death of his victim, the vampire sooner or later dies too. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf I have no way of knowing if the young Hitler ever saw Nosferatu or read Dracula, but he had no trouble linking their dark protagonist to the figure of the Jew and describing the latter as a blood-sucking vampire. 2

H. Bresheeth, “The Development of the Vampire Genre: Representation of the Social Other,” in Cinema and Memory: Dangerous Liaisons, ed. H. Bresheeth, H. Zand, and M. Zimmerman (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Centre, 2004), 153-168 [Hebrew]. — 201 —

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As I have said, Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer, was strongly influenced by the film. Due to this, it became routine in Nazi Germany to publish anti-Semitic caricatures in which the Jew was depicted as a vampire, with no effort whatsoever made to obscure the analogy. 5. The racial laws enacted in Nazi Germany in 1935 were called as a group the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.” Haim Bresheeth describes blood as a mark of social otherness and the major signifier of a Jew. And how is the “vampire disease” spread if not by blood, symbolizing sexual intercourse? According to anti-Semitic stereotypes, the Jews are not only consumed by a hunger for sex, but by a hunger for blood as well, as demonstrated by the blood libels common throughout Europe, which accused Jews of drinking the blood of Christians despite Judaism’s explicit ban on ingesting blood of any sort since an animal’s “soul is in its blood.” According to popular lore, the race of vampires reproduces by means of blood contamination transferred through sexual intercourse. Hence, vampires are generally portrayed as possessing irresistible seductive powers, a sexual magnetism that enables them to contaminate the blood of the women with whom they come into contact. This inevitably raises the specter of one of the more despicable “scientific facts” promoted by the Nazis, that an Aryan woman who has sex with a Jew, even once, is ruined for life, because sperm is a protein that is absorbed by the body and alters the woman’s biological make-up. Thus, even if she later gives birth to children from a pure Aryan father, they will carry within them a lingering trace of the “Asian deserts.” Impure blood is a source of danger and degeneration, and irreparably changes and distorts the healthy body. He will defile your blood, Aryan maiden, Hitler warns in Mein Kampf. Beware of this beguiling vampire; he will be the cause of your undoing! 6. Over eighty years have elapsed since the period of Nosferatu and the Der Stürmer caricatures, and during that time the image of the vampire has undergone a metamorphosis. It is hard to see a connection between — 202 —

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Louis, the photogenic, rather leonine, tormented vampire in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire (played by the contemporary heartthrob Brad Pitt) and the rat-like Count Orlok. The change took place gradually. In 1976, Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire overhauled the image of the vampire. No longer a sinister blood-sucking monster, he was now a figure who agonized over his moral dilemma in an effort to keep himself from doing harm to human beings. The growing neo-Gothic culture embraced Rice and her book, and the vampire genre was transformed, soon becoming a darkly romantic scene filled with dim castles, pale gentlemen, and sweet ladies swooning with rapture. Although the vampire was still perceived as the “other,” he was now titillating instead of chilling and repulsive. Racial otherness was replaced by sexual or social otherness. The vampire gradually became an object of identification, and his facial features changed accordingly. Away with you, Max Schreck! Brad Pitt is reading the screenplay; Semitic features are no longer one of the role requirements. 7. Experts in vampirology and connoisseurs of the genre might turn up their noses, but I cannot easily forget the impression made on me by Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, released in 1992. Seventy years after Nosferatu (inspired by the same book), Coppola appeared at the forefront of the vampire world and brought Dracula into the mainstream. His cosmopolitan Dracula was played by Gary Oldman, an actor with extraordinary talent and, of course, no hint of any Jewish traits whatsoever, in either appearance or behavior. For let us not forget that we are now speaking of the “new” vampire, an object of identification and adulation. The focus of the conflict has moved to the world of emotions, with the old fears seemingly irrelevant. At this stage, the vampire is a mysterious figure who is almost loved and is undoubtedly admired, and so he no longer fits the stereotype of the Jew. 8. Later, the more their creators (some of them the same rejected adolescents who grew up on low-budget vampire films and as adults became leading legitimate artists who rescued the vampire from his fringe niche) — 203 —

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drew closer to the mainstream, the more various vampires appeared on the scene as television material, that is, appropriate content, arousing even greater identification and adoration. You want examples? Be my guest: Angel, the troubled vampire in the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Edward Cullen, the youthful vampire in the Twilight series; and Bill Compton, the southern vampire who is the hero of the brilliant series True Blood all spring to mind. All of them have lost their foreign accents, Semitic features, and racial otherness. Although they are still “others,” it is a clean, American, synthetic otherness of the variety that looks good on camera. And in any case, the current generation embraces any kind of otherness. Being “other” means you are different, that is, special, and who could be more special than the handsome modern vampire? True Blood is an exception to this rule. The series displays a degree of daring, presenting a vampire otherness based on hatred of blacks and homosexuals. But even these are still American conflicts. 9. Perhaps there is another explanation for the changes the vampire underwent in becoming the “new vampire,” the one who functions in society and has lost the features that enable him to be recognized at a single glance. With the secularization of Europe in the nineteenth century, the hallmarks identifying Jews as a separate group also became less distinct. The Eastern European Jew with a long beard and sidelocks curling on his cheeks was replaced in many cases by the secular assimilated Jew who turned his back on Judaism and saw himself as thoroughly German, British, or French. However, this rapid integration into society did not bring about the expected decline in anti-Semitism. On the contrary, antiSemitism became more intense, along with an increasing desire to expose the “other” who was pretending to be something he was not. Similarly, the new vampire, who no longer looks like what he really is but rather like an innocent high school student (Edward Cullen in the Twilight series) or southern gentleman (Bill Comptom in True Blood), is still hiding his fangs and blood lust under his upright exterior. And this deception makes him even more dangerous, because in his presence people let down their guard, thereby weakening their ability to defend themselves. “He only looks human with a human face,” states a Nazi guidebook — 204 —

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warning against the Jews, “but his spirit is lower than that of beasts, and his soul roils with the dark passions of a monster, a sub-human.” In other words, the book cautions explicitly against the guise of normalcy, decency, and humanity. Do not allow the handsome vampires walking among you to lead you down the garden path! 10. The intelligent reader might be feeling a bit ill at ease at the moment, feeling that I have again raised the customary accusations of anti-Semitism of the sort that claim, “You see, it’s all a matter of anti-Semitism again: again everyone hates us, again they’re blaming the Jews, and this time they’re using one of the symbols of popular culture!” So allow me to give you something to think about: We Jews are not entirely free of prejudices that are translated into myths either. One of the canonical Jewish myths is the story of the golem, which faithfully presents the stereotypical figure of the Gentile “other.” Unlike the vampire, an immortal un-dead, the golem represents the un-living. The most familiar golem narrative was told in the nineteenth century and is attributed to the Maharal, Yehuda Loew, chief rabbi of Prague in the sixteenth century. However, in Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions, Moshe Idel claims that Rabbi Loew never heard of this myth.3 His association with the story is apparently a legend that grew up in the nineteenth century and was spread by word of mouth, probably because the rabbi was summoned to a private meeting with the emperor and no one knew why. He was not his personal doctor, nor was the emperor in the habit of consulting with him on any subject whatsoever. The ruler was, however, attracted to the mystical, giving rise to the rumor that he wished to learn from the rabbi how to build a golem. Rosenberg’s famous book Wonders of the Maharal: The Golem of Prague, purporting to be a translation of a sixteenth-century text, is thought to have established the myth as accepted fact.4 Nonetheless, the story of the Golem of Prague is not unique. As early as the Talmudic period, the sages dealt with various possibilities for 3 4

Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (New York: SUNY Press, 1990). Yudel Rosenberg, Niflaos Maharal: Ha Golem Al Prague [Wonders of the Maharal: The Golem of Prague] (Warsaw: 1909). — 205 —

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creating life by unnatural means. The golems in these tales all shared certain characteristics: they all resembled the stereotype of the Gentile. Although the figure of the vampire is grounded in his being an evil creature of the dark and the golem is supposedly a positive character (the whole purpose of his creation was to protect the Jews from blood libels, and he therefore occupies a place of honor in Jewish tradition), it is interesting to see that we chose to give the golem, our only “superhero,” the stereotypical form of the “other,” the aggressive, doltish bully. That is, the golem is the perfect stereotype of the perception of the non-Jew. What is he, in essence? A mindless primeval lump whose brain is not fully developed and who is utterly controlled and manipulated by a Jew (i.e., the Maharal). The golem of folklore is a violent, irrational creature of brute force who exists solely to serve his master. And what is this creature if not a replication of the stereotypical Gentile, the uneducated fool or potbellied landowner who features in Jewish folk tales? 11. What can we understand from the creation of the un-living (the golem) and the un-dead (the vampire), with the golem being given the form of the stereotypical Gentile thug and the vampire that of the stereotypical Jewish parasite and contaminator of blood? To my mind, the obvious conclusion is that we choose to create our myths in the image of the ultimate “other,” the one who embodies our deepest fears and darkest thoughts. But as always, when people try to depict the “other,” the result says much more about them and their prejudices, as if to say, “I can learn more about you if you tell me who you hate than if you tell me who you love.” At the end of the day, the vampire (the Jew) and the golem (the Gentile) teach us a great deal about the perceptions and prejudices that are deeply rooted in the cultures that gave rise to them. And this makes me wonder. The figure of the vampire has developed and changed until it has lost its former essence. But what about the golem? Jews, you have a lot of work ahead of you.

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Travel Literature: The Itinerary of an Armchair Traveler’s Journey to Eretz Israel in a Seventeenth-Century Yiddish Story Anat Aderet

‫משם לדמשק משם לשלוניא חצי חלק מנשה שמה ראיתי חיות‬... ‫ד' אמות גבהם מנומרים חברברות כל מיני צבעונים ושלשה עינים‬ )‫ עמ' ל"ב‬,‫ (אגרת הקודש‬.‫ ומינים זבובים כיונים‬.‫להם‬ ‫ פ'ון‬.‫אונ' פ'ון דארטן בין איך גצוגן ביז אן דער שטאט ד מ ש ק‬ ‫ אונ' דארטן‬.‫דארטן ביז צודער שטאט ס ל ו נ י א חצי חלק מנשה‬ ‫הב איך גזעהן גרושי חיות פ'יר אילן הויך אונ' הבן דרייא אויגן‬ ‫גיפ'לעקילט מיט‬ ‫) גלילות ארץ‬.‫ אונ' אין מין פ'ליגן אז איין טויב‬.‫)אלירלייא פ'ארבן‬ ‫ עמ' ס"ה‬,‫ישראל‬ [From there to Damascus, from there to Slonia in the land belonging to half of the Tribe of Menashe. There I saw huge beasts, four cubits tall, with three multicolored spotted eyes, and flies as large as pigeons. (Igeret HaKodesh [Sacred Epistles], p. 32)] Un fun dorten bin ich getzoygen biz in der Shtot Damesek, fun dorten biz tzu der Shtot Slonia khatzi helek Menashe. Un dorten hob ich gezehn groyse chayes fir eyln hoych un hobn Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el drai oygen gifleklt mit alerlei farben. Un eyn min flign az ayn toib. (Regions of Eretz Israel, p. 65) Yiddish language itineraries1 about journey to Eretz Israel during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries differ from those written in Hebrew or other languages during that time or during other periods. 1.

The English terms for sifrut masa are: itinerary; travelogue; travel literature. — 207 —

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These itineraries were not written as daily travelogue entries during the course of the journey, nor as historic chronicles; they were recorded retrospectively, after the journey. They reflect a complex process in which the original travelogue, the very same story which incorporated the traveler’s hopes and expectations from his first encounter with Eretz Israel as the Holy Land, was processed after the fact, and as a result of the disappointment of seeing the real Eretz Israel in that period. These emended stories provide insight into the religious-emotional experience the authors underwent during the encounter with a destination—Eretz Israel—which failed to live up to their religious-spiritual expectations. In these Yiddish-language travel stories, the authors, all Torah scholars whose faith remained unshaken by this experience, portray the gap between their and their Diaspora readers’ expectations of Eretz Israel and the reality that existed there. In essence, the Yiddish travelogue developed distinct literary characteristics in form and content.2 According to J.A. Cuddon’s perception of travel literature, “The genre subsumes works of exploration and adventure as well as guides and accounts of sojourns in foreign lands.”3 A literary genre, “travel literature” includes many types of travel books which can be divided into additional sub-genres, including “documentary travel literature” and “fictional travel literature.”4 While “documentary travel literature” includes texts whose authors purport to present a “realistic” picture of their journey based on a “real” trip and encounter with their destinations, “fictional travel literature” creates a picture that is not based on an actual journey. “Fictional travel literature” is researched according to mimetic representation, while “documentary travel literature” is studied in certain disciplines as historical records, similar to chronicles. Paul Fussel defines systematically-written travel records as travelogues. Fussel contrasts a “guide book,” intended for those preparing for a real journey, with a “travel book,” which he maintains is meant for those who 2.

3. 4.

Anat Aderet, Itinerariah beYiddish: Rishmei Masa’ot leEretz Hakodesh beMei’ot Ha 17-18 (Itineraries in Yiddish: Travelogues to the Holy Land in the 17th and 18th Centuries), PhD dissertation (BarIlan University, 2006), 1 [Hebrew]. J.A. Cuddon, “Travel Book,” in Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Fourth Edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 937. Yaffa Berlowitz, “Sippurei Masa’ot BaAliyah HaRishonah: Hivatzruto shel Genre Eretzyisra’eli” in E’evrah Na BaAretz, Masa’ot beEretz-Yisra’el shel Anshei HaAliyah HaRishonah (“First Aliya Travel Stories: The Creation of an Israeli Genre,” in Let Me Pass Through the Land: First Aliya Travels in Eretz Israel) (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense Press, 1992), 344 [Hebrew]. — 208 —

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do not plan a trip. Moshe Pelli believes that travel literature includes various types of travel stories, e.g., documentary and fictional stories, as well as stories composed of lies and falsehoods; the latter are called pseudo-itineraries.5 “Fictional travel literature” comprises travel stories that contain lies and falsehoods and creates a picture that is not based on true travel experiences. This was an acceptable genre in its time, even earning its authors the popular designation “Armchair Traveler.” This special literary style is the main focus of this article.6 The concept of the “Armchair Traveler” appears in Harro Segeberg’s article “Die Literarisierte Reise Im Späten 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag Zur Gattungs-Typologie” (The Typology of the Literary Journey in the Late Eighteenth Century). In the article, Segeberg characterizes different types of itineraries in late eighteenth-century German literature7 in particular and European literature in general, dividing them according to different types: the romantic school, the enlightened school, and pseudoitinerary literature. Segeberg asserts that technological developments of the period resulted in uneducated people traveling and projecting their prejudices on the sites they visited. They did not cope with the “alien,” but created, rather, a “light-minded” image.8 Concern, therefore, arose among the enlightened class that readers would no longer be in need of their studies and that they would be less valued. Another phenomenon refers to “travelers” who never left their homes: “An educated person who travels in his study,” “an armchair traveler.”9 This type of narrator tried to convey the “experience of a trip” to the reader, despite never having left home. The descriptions in these pseudo-itineraries were taken mostly from previous travel books and the author’s imagination. Segeberg proceeds to describe the enlightened school, which converts 5.

Moshe Pelli, “Sifrut HaMasa’ot keSugah Sifrutit beHaskalah haIvrit ‘Masa baArav’ leShmuel Romanelli” (“The Literary Genre of the Travelogue in Hebrew Haskalah Literature: Shmuel Romanelli’s Masa Ba’Rav”), in Migvan: Mehkarim beSifrut haIvrit u-ve-Giluyehah haAmerikani’im (Migvan: Studies in Hebrew Literature) (Lod: Haberman Institute for Literary Research, 1988), 299 [Hebrew]. See also Moshe Pelli, Sugot veSugiyot beSifrut haHaskalah haIvrit (Genres and Issues in Hebrew Haskalah Literature) (Israel: Hakibbutz Hame’uhad, 1999) [Hebrew]. 6. Anat Aderet, Itinerariah beYiddish, 1. 7. Harro Segeberg, “Die Literarisierte Reise Im Späten 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag Zur GattungsTypologie,” in Reise Und Soziale Realität Am Ende Des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Jäger (Heidelberg: Carl Winter University, 1983), 14-31. 8. Ibid., S. 17f. 9 . Ibid., S. 18f. — 209 —

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trip accounts into literary compositions. The traveler-author feels open to discover the world without preconceived notions.10 He wants to preserve the boundaries of thought and emotion—he reorganizes the senses under the power of judgment and criticism.11 Wanting to awaken in the reader, who remains at home, the desire to make the journey, the writer develops a dialogue with the reader, allowing him to participate in the learned discourse.12 Knowingly fluctuating between levels of objectivity and subjectivity, the author tries to balance realistic, empirical facts with his personal, “enthusiastic” subjectivity.13 Fictional itineraries comprise their own literary genre,14 describing a journey which, for the most part, was not actually conducted, but from the start was written as fiction. This literature can be based on reality or on fantasy.15 The following examples do not belong to the itinerary genre, but do include geographic-historic descriptions of sites related to Judaism. These books were written in Yiddish and published during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tela’ot Moshe (The Trials and Tribulations of Moshe), a geography book written in Yiddish in 1711, is essentially a copy and adaptation of previous Jewish and non-Jewish texts. The book describes the Ten Tribes and the Sambatyon, the world and Eretz Israel in that period. From the start, the author informs the reader that he did not conduct the journey, and cites his sources.16 Yerushalayim baZman haZeh, a Yiddish history book written in 1719 that describes the city of Jerusalem at that time, was also based on copies and adaptations of Jewish and non-Jewish sources rather than on a real journey.17 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Ibid., S. 20f. Ibid., S. 24f. Ibid., S. 26f. Ibid., S. 31f. Percy Adams differentiates between fictional itineraries and the pseudo-itineraries that are the subject of his book: “This is not a book about imaginary or extraordinary voyages.” Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars 1660-1800 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1962), Preface, vii. 15. For example, see Leah Goldberg, Michtavim mi-Nesi’ah Medumah (Letters from an Imaginary Journey) (Tel Aviv: Sifri’at Po’alim, 1982. The title of the book testifies specifically that the journey is fictional. 16. Israel Bartal, Khone Shmeruk, “‘Tela’ot Moshe’: Sefer haGeographi haRishon beYiddish beTi’ur EretzYisrael shel R’ Mosheh be-R’ Avraham haGer” (“The Trials and Tribulations of Moshe: The First Yiddish Geography Book and the Description of Eretz-Israel by R’ Moshe ben R’ Abraham the Proselyte”), Cathedra 40 (Tammuz 5786 [1986]): 121-137. 17. Israel Bartal and Khone Shmeruk, “Yerushalayim baZman haZeh leR’ Alexandere ben Moshe Ethoizen” (Contemporary Jerusalem by R. Alexandere ben Moshe Ethausen), Shalem 4 (5744 [1984]): 445-458. — 210 —

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The Yiddish travel book Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el [Regions of Eretz Israel] and its Hebrew parallel Igeret HaKodesh [Sacred Epistle] were written by R’ Gershon Ben Eliezer SG”L and, according to Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, published in Lublin in 1635. In it, SG”L describes the journey he took to Eretz Israel at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The book is divided into three sections: The first discusses the trip to Eretz Israel; the second describes Eretz Israel; and the third relates an encounter with the Ten Tribes across the Sambatyon River. The book differs from other travel diaries written in Hebrew and in other languages during that period. It was not written as a daily log during the course of the journey, but afterwards, in retrospect. Therefore, it should not be read as an authentic historical narrative but as part of a complex process in which the travel story is adapted after the fact. Although it is very impressive and conveys the impact experienced by the author when encountering the object of his journey—Eretz Israel—those who know to read between the lines can see clearly that the encounter described did not fulfill the religiousspiritual expectations of the traveler. It is important to note that as far as one can tell, the author, a Torah scholar, did not lose his faith as a result of his experience. Nevertheless, it is obvious that his visit created an almost unbridgeable gap between what he witnessed and what his Diaspora readers expected of the Holy Land, as it existed in their collective spiritual consciousness. Furthermore, the author reconstructed the tale of his journey and adapted it using spoken Yiddish, a folk language with a discernable literary uniqueness in both form and content. In terms of form, the Yiddish account of the trip interrupts the continuity of the description that characterizes travel stories, and divides the journey into chapters that discuss different topics. Regarding content, the Yiddish travel story describes Eretz Israel and the journey to it in a more idealized style than that of other travel stories. In contrast to travels recorded in Hebrew for Torah scholars and learned individuals, Yiddish travelogues address an audience of uneducated men, women, the elderly, and children, and, therefore, were more widely distributed and accepted among all strata of society. The author of Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el weaves both fictional and fantastical motifs into his descriptions of Eretz Israel. His descriptions have several purposes, which we will outline here.

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A Description of the “Dangerous Space” on the Trip to Eretz Israel The journey to Eretz Israel is described as taking place in a sacred space, whose destination is the Holy Land (as this space is called by the researcher of religions Mircea Eliade18). SG”L, therefore, highlighted sites along his trip, such as cemeteries and synagogues, where Jews experienced past miracles. Positioned in contrast to the sacred space was the dangerous space. Thus, the author of Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el relates that in then-contemporary Nineveh, the mosquitoes were as large as pigeons, and bats (in the original, the author says they are called schvalben) were the size of turtledoves and possessed human faces:

‫ אונ’ דארטן האב‬... ‫בין איך גקומן אין דער שטאט נ י י א נ י נ ו ה‬... ‫איך גזעהן איין מין מוקן אז איין יונגי טויב אונ’ שוואלבן אז איין‬ 19 .‫גרושי טויב האבן צין גלייך איין מענש‬ . . . Bin ich gekummen in der shtot nayeh Ninveh . . . und dorten hob ich gessen eyn min moken as eyn yunge toyb und schvalben az eyn groshe toyb hobn tzeyn glaich eyn mensch. [I came to the city of New Nineveh ... and there I saw big mosquitoes (moken) as big as pigeons , and bats (schvalben) as big as doves with human teeth.] These exaggerated descriptions of the dangerous space were primarily designed to illustrate to the reader the great perils of the trip to the Holy Land. In addition, they were intended to discourage readers from attempting to undertake such a journey, for while it was fraught with danger and hardship, it was, above all, disappointing. In this way, SG”L “protects” his readers using frightening accounts of vicious animals along the way. In his book Travelers and Travel Liars, Percy Adams 18.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. by W.R. Trask (Harvest/HBJ Publishers, 1957). 19. See Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el, 85. — 212 —

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outlines the boundaries of the pseudo-itineraries of the seventeentheighteenth centuries:20 This is not a book about imaginary or extraordinary voyages (. . .) Dog-birds, flights to the moon, people with tails (. . .) they belong to the realm of the incredible, and readers of the eighteenth century were usually able to recognize that fact. The Wonders and Miracles of Eretz Israel The author of Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el describes the pillar of salt that was all that remained of Lot’s wife. He states that he saw it near the Kidron stream. The pillar of salt stands whole at midnight, but by two hours before dawn only a tiny amount of it remains. When the author asked local residents to explain this, they said that several hundred goats from the villages of Hurbeh and Zohar come after midnight and lick the pillar. Thus, every night it grows back. (Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el, 43-44. Yiddish, 79). The story of the pillar of salt (Lot’s wife) that is consumed is based on midrashim (Talmudic legends) from Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, where it is related as fellows:21 The pity of Edith the wife of Lot was stirred for her daughters, who were married in Sodom, and she looked back behind her to see if they were coming after her or not. And she saw behind the Shekhinah, and she became a pillar of salt. And she stands even now. All day the oxen lick it and it decreases up to her feet, and in the morning (the pillar of salt) grows afresh, as it is said: “And his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” With the ruins of seventeenth-century Eretz Israel as a backdrop, 20.

Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars 1660-1800 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1962), vii. 21. Eliezer ben Horkanus, Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, 25:46.. — 213 —

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SG”L needed the “Hand of God” to prove to his Diaspora Yiddish readers that miracles do occur in Eretz Israel and that the Divine Presence dwells there permanently, so that he could reinforce their hope for a speedy redemption. The Ten Tribes The fiction and fantasy in this seventeenth-century Yiddish travel book about the journey to Eretz Israel was not meant as entertainment but as a means of coping with the unbearable reality of poverty-stricken, persecuted Diaspora Jews, whose dream of reaching the Holy Land could not be realized. The most obvious manifestation of this is seen in the third section, in which the author interrupts his description of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple with a long account of his meeting the Ten Tribes. As is typical of his time, SG”L builds an entire fantastical world. According to his description, he arrives with a caravan of Ishmaelite iron merchants at the place where the Ten Tribes live. The Sambatyon River roars all week long, preventing passage, but calms down two hours before Shabbat and remains quiet throughout the Shabbat. The author later reports that he did not reveal that he was a Jew. He crosses the Sambatyon and negotiates with the inhabitants, the Jews of the Ten Tribes, the sale of iron. He relates that they described their country’s flourishing agriculture and their prosperity, describes the bravery of the twenty-four Israelite kings who rule there, and expands on the enormous courage of King Eliezer and the great righteousness of King Daniel. The author recounts how the non-Jews—including King Pristian, who reigns over the “Pristian” states—pay taxes to the Jews and how the Jews rule them. The Jews of the Ten Tribes are depicted as observing Jewish law, following the commandments, and acting decently towards one another. Later, the author relates his encounter with four desert-dwelling tribes, Dan, Naftali, Zevulun, and Asher, and of his meeting with mountaindwelling Japhetic converts.22 SG”L relates that he was taken captive prior to his encounter with the Ten Tribes: 22. This may be compared to the original story: Yitzhak Akarish, Kol Mevaser, A Study of the Ten Tribes (Jerusalem: Yerid HaSefarim, 5760 [2000]), 85-106. — 214 —

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‫ אין דער‬23‫“שנת שפ”ד בין איך גפ’אנגן גוועזן אין לאנד פ’ון טאטערין‬ “24.‫שטאט קרימונה‬ Shnas 5384 bin ich gefangen gevesen in land fun Tatern in der shtot Krimona. [In 1624, I was held captive (in the state of Shmerin) in the city of Krimnos.] The motif of captivity and redemption repeats itself in the stories about the encounter with the Ten Tribes.25 The topic of captivity provides the author with mobility in the space, while stating that a supreme power (Divine) transported him from his original place to another, thus allowing him to meet the Ten Tribes. The author cannot, however, reconstruct the route taken to arrive at the lands of the Ten Tribes for the Diaspora Jews. The dramatic and thematic structure of this story is similar to that of Joseph’s captivity in the pit after the incident with Potiphar’s wife, to “Agadat R’ Meshulam” (The Tale of R’ Meshulam),26 and to “Agadat 23. Tatern is translated into Hebrew as Ohalei Kedar. 24. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el, 57. 25. Eldad haDani, who lived in the ninth century, claimed to belong to the Tribe of Dan. He related how he was taken captive with a Jew from the Tribe of Asher by some cannibals, who ate his friend and allowed him to live. He maintained that he was saved and redeemed by a Jew from the Tribe of Issachar and tells about the ten lost tribes. See Akarish, Kol Mevaser, 1-26, esp. 19-20. Yitzhak Akarish quotes the story by Moshe HaCohen Ashkenazi, who on 16 Adar 5243 (1483) was taken captive and sold to Christians, thus reaching the Sambatyon in a camel caravan of iron merchants. (The author of Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el describes his trip to the Sambatyon with a caravan of iron merchants.) Yitzhak Akarish, Kol Mevaser, 85-113. See especially 101. As stated above, Sarah Zfatman-Biller maintains that the descriptions by the author of Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el were taken from an earlier book: Kol Mevaser. See Sarah Zfatman-Biller, “Igeret beYiddish miSof haMei’ah haShesh Esrei beInyan Aseret haShevatim” (“A Letter in Yiddish from the Late Sixteenth Century about the Ten Tribes”), in Kovetz Al Yad, Sidrah Hadashah Book 10 (20) (Jerusalem: Mekitzei Nirdamim Publishers, 5742 [1982]), 221 [Hebrew]. Compare with the original story: Yitzhak Akarish, Kol Mevaser, 85-106. 26. Sarah Zfatman, Bein Ashkenaz LeSefarad: LeToldot HaSippur HaYehudi BeYemei HaBeinayim (The Jewish Tale in the Middle Ages: Between Ashkenaz and Sepharad) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 5753 [1993]), 81-86. [Hebrew] The tenth-century story describes how R’ Kalonymus of Mayence dreamed that his son Meshulam, aged 14, would be taken from him. Merchants in the market grabbed the boy and took him to Babylonia, where they asked the Babylonian president if he wanted to purchase a Jew. He agreed and bought him. The president was the head of a yeshiva and R’ Meshulam was discovered to be a Torah genius and returned to his father’s home in Mayence in — 215 —

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Arba’at haShevuyim” (The Tale of the Four Captives).27 The story before us is linked in several ways to these legends and biblical tales: captivity and redemption provide a means of mobility in the space. Furthermore, the topic of captivity introduces an element of coercion by a supreme power, which intervenes during the natural course of the journey. Similarly, captivity and redemption serve as a stage in the transition between two cultures: the Christian west and the Moslem east. In our story, the passage from Sofia to Istanbul represents the passage from Europe to Asia, from the culture of the west to that of the east. The captivity of the author of Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el in the house of the king’s minister plays the same role as the similar story does in the story of Joseph. Joseph is held captive by Ishmaelite merchants who bring him to the Egyptian minister, Potiphar, where he remains imprisoned. Joseph also traveled a long distance with a merchant caravan—from Canaan to Egypt (to exile). Moreover, Joseph’s transition from his “favorite son” status to Egyptian ruler takes place in captivity. In “Agadat Arba’at haShevuyim,” the four prisoners symbolize four exiles and four Torah centers, wherein one culture functions within neighboring and hostile cultures. The tale exemplifies the component of cultural mobility using the theme of captivity; the Jewish nation is in its vast Diaspora yet clings to its faith and values. It is conceivable that here, too, the author utilizes this element in his story of wanderings within wide geographic expanses, but preserves the religious background he brought with him. As stated, “Agadat Arba’at haShevuyim” symbolizes, above all, the survival of the Jewish nation under the difficult conditions of the Diaspora. The story conveys a sense of the “phoenix” rising from the ashes, of religious-spiritual growth, of “Divine guidance.”28 The story order to request his permission to marry the daughter of the yeshiva head. Ultimately, however, he remained in Mayence and married a relative. His son, R’ Tordos became the head of a yeshiva. This legend focuses on the downfall of the Babylonian center of Torah and the growth of the Ashkenazi rabbinate that replaced it. Zfatman, Bein Ashkenaz LeSefarad, 100. 27. Regarding “Agadat Arba’at haShevuyim”, see Sarah Zfatman, Bein Ashkenaz LeSefarad, 81-158. See also Eli Yassif, Sippur HaAm HaIvri (The Hebrew Folktale) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 5754 [1994]) [Hebrew]. Regarding the tale of Kalonymus, see 338-339. The theme of the captive child, p. 427. The story of R’ Avraham ben Ezra, 498-499. Tales of Jewish saints, regarding captivity and redemption in Jewish wars, see: 514-515. See also Joseph Dan, HaSippur HaIvri BeYemei HaBeinayim, Iyunim beToldotav (The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages, Studies in its History) (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1974), 156-158. 28. As in “Agadat Arba’at haShevuyim”, so in the story of R’ Yohanan ben Zakkai, who was captured after the fall of Jerusalem and asked the Roman Vespasian for a new location: “Give me Yavneh and its scholars,” in order to reestablish a Torah center there during the crisis. Here, too, we see a — 216 —

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encapsulates the idea of Divine providence, and the author conveys to his readers the belief in the Divine presence, which guides him on his journey to the Holy Land. Perhaps the main reason that the author does not discuss his fears during captivity is to give his readers the sense of “above all, do not be afraid,” directing them to total faith in the Creator. It is possible that the author of Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el hints that he was captured by an important minister to reference Joseph the Righteous, who went from humble beginnings to Viceroy of Egypt, saving Egypt as well as his father and brothers from famine. The author also implies that he was the fourth captive, one of the Torah scholars who established Jewish centers of learning in the Diaspora, in order to impart intrinsic value to himself and his story. The author apparently wants to portray himself as a “Bearer of Tidings,” a person chosen by God as the one who helps strengthen Judaism in the Diaspora, on one hand, and the sanctity of Eretz Israel, on the other. He also reports on the existence and location of the Ten Tribes, providing encouragement and hope to his Diaspora brethren amid the difficult conditions of their reality. The references to time in the story relate to the encounter with the Ten Tribes, and one can, therefore, hypothesize that these references appear in this context. The author wanted to lend historical authenticity to his story and, thus, cited the years in which events occurred. However, he only provided the years, not the specific months or days. The description of this dramatic event, which was accompanied by life-threatening danger, is presented in only three laconic sentences, something which is very puzzling. In contrast to his descriptions of other places and less dramatic events in the book, the author does not relate additional facts, which are necessary in this case of capture and release. Why was he singled out for capture? How was he captured? Under what conditions was he held? How long was he captive and how did he maintain his Judaism while in captivity? How did the Jews of Constantinople know that he was Jewish? How did they learn of him? How did they obtain the money for his release? Where and how were the negotiations conducted? Who represented the Jewish community— rabbis or community activists? And who were the representatives of the religious leader who moves to another place to build a religious-spiritual center. In this same vein, it seems, the author of Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el wished to present himself and his journey. — 217 —

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non-Jews? Were they Moslems, and were they religious or government figures? Was the amount paid for his release, 500 thalers, considered high or low? Was it high or low compared to the redemption of other captives at that time? How did he thank the Jews? Did he recite the Blessing of Thanksgiving? Did the captors steal his property? Did the event influence him in any way? Many more questions exist as well. If this event indeed transpired in reality and happened to the author himself, the account of it is very lacking. This is in contrast to his lengthy descriptions of holy sites, miraculous incidents, and the encounter with the Ten Tribes. The following time references appear only in the third section of the book—the encounter with the Ten Tribes:

‫שנת שפ”ד בין איך גפ’אנגן גוועזן אין לאנד פ’ון טאטערין אין דער‬ 29 .‫שטאט קרימונה‬ Shnas 5384 bin ich gefangen geveisen in land fun Taterin in der shtot Krimona. [In 1624, I was held in captivity (in the state of Shmerin) in the city of Krimnos.] )‫שנת ש”ץ לפ”ק בין איך גוועזן צו (אלכסנדריאה של מצרים‬ Shnas 5390 – liprat katan – bin ich gevesen tzu (Alexandria shel Mitzrayim).30 [In 1630, I was in Alexandria, Egypt.] ‫אונ’ דער זעלביגר מלך היישט אלעזר איז מלך גיוועזן בשנת שצ”א‬ .‫לפ”ק‬ Und der zelbiger meylech heyst Elazar is meylech gevesen be-shnas 5391 liprat katan. 31 [And this king was named Elazar; he reigned in 1631.] ‫בשנת ש”ץ לפ”ק האבן דיא קינדר וועלן מיט דעם מלך אין דר‬ .‫מלחמה ציהן‬ Be-shnas 5390 liprat katan – hoben die kinder vellen mit dem meylech in der milchome zihen. 32 29. 30. 31. 32.

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el, 57. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 88. — 218 —

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[In 1630, the king’s children asked to accompany him to war.] In all, there are four concrete time references in the whole book, indicating that such references are not critical to the author, who does not assign them a significant role. Moreover, had he cited full dates at the important junctures of his journey, he would first have cited the date of his departure; the date of his arrival in Eretz Israel; the date he set out on his return trip; and the full date of his safe arrival at home. The author notes that he came home on the Ninth of Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Holy Temple, but does not cite the year.33 It seems that the author of Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el wanted to attach dates to the encounter with the Ten Tribes in order to lend authenticity to his description. SG”L creates a utopian world that contrasts with the povertystricken and degrading exile on the one hand, and with the ruins of Eretz Israel, which has none of the sanctity that his readers hope for, on the other. It seems that the description of the independent lives of the Ten Tribes, who live in their own protected territory and lead autonomous material and spiritual lives, meets the collective characteristics of the “locus amoenus” (the “beloved place”) and allows the reader to envision in his mind’s eye a perfect, contented life. This is, therefore, a kind of Jewish utopia, a place of physical and spiritual perfection that fulfills the requirements of Jewish law, presents an image that contrasts to that of the exile, and prevents false messianic demands from those eager to expedite the Salvation. Diaspora Jews loved SG”L’s book. His exciting descriptions of the Holy Land, which they would never visit, strengthened their spirit in the unbearably difficult Diaspora. These depictions, partly based on a fantasy unachievable by Diaspora Jews, gave them the strength to cope with the hardships of their daily reality and to wait patiently for the anticipated Redemption—to return to Eretz Israel.

33. Ibid., 91. — 219 —

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Ghost Stories in Medieval Hebrew Folktales: The Case of Sefer Hasidim and Sippurei Ha-Ari1 Ido Peretz



“I said to him: Are you of the living? He said: Of the dead.”

A Canadian folktale tells of a mother who has lost her daughter. She falls asleep in a church and is awoken by the steeple bells at midnight. A strange vision appears before her: a priest, dead some twenty years, is praying at the altar. Standing around the altar are children who had died not long earlier, each of them carrying a full cup. The woman sees her daughter, the last in line, staggering under the weight of two full buckets. Barely able to move, she lags behind the other children. At the sight of her child’s suffering, the mother faints away. When she awakes in the morning, she goes to the bishop. He explains that each of the dead children is carrying a cup filled with the tears of the people who grieve for them. But a cup was not big enough to hold all the tears she had shed for her daughter. They had already filled two buckets. If the mother did not cease to mourn, the child would be forced to carry a third bucket as well.2 Without a doubt, the “third bucket of tears” is one of the main reasons for the return of the deceased to the world of the living. Every civilization, religion, and era has brought the dead back to “life.” This is both part of the mourning process and a way to envisage one’s own fate, whether it be wished for or feared. Consequently, consideration of the dead, and what awaits people after death, are vital parts of religious and popular beliefs in every culture and society. While these beliefs take diverse forms, they all share certain essential principles: a next world, reincarnation, and life after death. One of the most common features of 1.

2.

This discussion is a chapter from a dissertation written under the supervision of Prof. Eli Yassif of Tel Aviv University. I would like to thank him for his guidance and for introducing me to the study of folktales. That being said, I take sole responsibility for everything contained herein. Yom-Tov Levinsky, “Night Prayers by the Dead,” Folklore Research Center Studies 3 (1972): 149-157 [Hebrew]. — 220 —

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such beliefs is the appearance of ghosts in the world of the living or in dreams. Such apparitions can also be found in Jewish folktales from the Middle Ages.3 The writings of Rabbi Judah ben Samuel he-Hasid (“the Pious,” died 1217), and particularly Sefer Hasidim,4 are among the major sources for medieval Jewish tales of the dead, and were written at a time when Christian tales of the dead were flourishing. A later source, especially for tales from the end of the Middle Ages, is Sippurei Ha-Ari, the stories of Rabbi Isaac Luria, the most famous of the kabbalists in Safed in the sixteenth century.5 3.

4.

5.

In contrast to canonical stories, folktales are told by the people to the people, that is, by cultural agents who tell the story orally over and over again, while introducing changes along the way. The cultural agents may be mothers or teachers telling the story to children. In Judaism, they may also be rabbis who use the tales in their homilies. When the stories are written down, it is on the basis of the oral tales. Moreover, the act of writing them down does not put an end to their being related orally, or to the changes that are inevitably introduced as a result. Consequently, there tend to be different written versions of the same tale. Given this process, in this essay I use the terms “reader” and “listener” interchangeably. For more on the Jewish folktale, see Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). Three sources are included under the title The Writings of Rabbi Judah he-Hasid. The first, and most noted, is Sefer Hasidim, and the two others the Oxford 1567 and Ginsburg 82 manuscripts, which Joseph Dar also attributes to Judah he-Hasid. Sefer Hasidim is an ethical work written in the late twelfth century in Germany in order to propound the world view of the rabbi and the community of Hasidei Ashkenaz, the new religious movement he headed. The book presents the ideological/theological tenets of Hasidei Ashkenaz in stories, aphorisms, homilies, etc., which deal with all aspects of daily life, including religious laws, kashrut, married life, intimate relations, divorce, leadership issues, community leaders, and so on. In addition to its religious significance, Sefer Hasidim is a primary historical source for the way of life of the Jews in Europe at the turn of the thirteenth century. It is divided into sections, termed “marks” (siman) rather than “chapters,” which are numbered by Hebrew letters. The current remarks are based on Sefer Hasidim, Parma Manuscript, comments, emendations, explanations and references by Judah Hacohen Wistinetzky, with introduction and keys by Jacob Freimann (Poznan, 1924), and the Oxford 1567 and Ginsburg 82 manuscripts from Joseph Dan, “Demonological stories from the writings of R. Judah the Pious,” in Joseph Dan, Iyunim bi-sifrut chasidut Ashkenaz [Studies in the Literature of Hasidut Ashkenaz] (Ramat Gan: Masada, 1975), 9-25 Hebrew. For more on Sefer Hasidim, see Tamar Alexander, “Darkhei shiluv ha-sipoor be-Sefer Hasidim” [“Integration of the Story in Sefer Hasidim”], Yeda Am 45-46 (1979): 5-15 [Hebrew]; Tamar Alexander, “’Shakhen began eden’: Sipoor amami be-hekshero ha-iyuni” [“‘Neighbor in the Garden of Eden’: Folktale in the Theoretical Context”], Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore 1 (1981): 61-81 [Hebrew]; Yitzhak Baer, “Ha-megama ha-datit/chevratit shel Sefer Hasidim” [“The Religious/Social Trend of Sefer Hasidim”], Zion 3 (1937): 1-50 [Hebrew]; Joseph Dan, Chasidut Ashkenaz be-toldot ha-machshava ha-yehudit [Hasidut Ashkenaz in the History of Jewish Thought] (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1990-1991). Rabbi Isaac Luria introduced a new school of thought known as Lurianic Kabbalah, which focuses on the subjects of exile and the Redemption. He is known as Ha-Ari (Hebrew for “lion”), an anagram of the Hebrew phrase “the Holy Rabbi Isaac.” Born in Jerusalem, he moved to Egypt after the death of his father. In 1570 he returned to the Land of Israel and settled in Safed, which at that — 221 —

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It is important to note here the large number of Christian ghost stories from the Middle Ages, and their narrative wealth, as opposed to the scarcity and narrative poverty of such tales in Jewish sources from this period. Collections of well-developed Jewish ghost stories only appeared in writing in later eras. We can merely speculate about the reasons for this distinction. One possibility is the fact that Christianity consecrated its dead and their places of burial by means of days of the dead in the liturgical calendar and the location of graveyards beside, or even inside, churches. Judaism, conversely, never introduced the liturgy of death into the religious canon, and kept its cemeteries at a distance from the town in order to prevent a cult of the dead.6 In addition, seeing apparitions of the dead, or the dead themselves, is integral to Christianity and references to it can be found in the New Testament itself, with Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene after his death. In contrast, in Judaism Saul’s summoning of the ghost of Samuel is not only an extraordinary event, but regarded as a serious transgression. In both the Old Testament and later commentaries, it is counted among Saul’s failings. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that in the wake of the close proximity of the Jewish communities in Europe to Christian culture during and following the Middle Ages, popular traditions and beliefs about the appearance of ghosts in the world of the living found their way into Jewish folktales as well, and even enriched them. The story “The Tanna and the Restless Dead” can help us define the genre of ghost stories or stories of the dead. Told from the third century to the modern age, the tale exists in forty-two known versions. The following, from the Cairo Genizah, is the earliest version we know of.7

6.

7.

time was a spiritual and cultural center. There he joined the kabbalist circles and formulated his new method, which became the most popular approach to Kabbalah. Rabbi Luria lived in Safed for around two and a half years until his death before the age of forty. Although he himself never wrote his philosophy down, he taught it to his disciples, who recorded his words and published them. Sipurei Ha-Ari [Stories of Ha-Ari] is the title of a collection of three anthologies: Toldot Ha-Ari [The History of Ha-Ari], Shivhei Ha-Ari [In Praise of Ha-Ari], and Hanhagot Ha-Ari [The Thoughts of Ha-Ari]. Meir Benayahu, Toldot Ha-Ari (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1967) [Hebrew]. For stories “in praise of” in general, and Shivhei Ha-Ari in particular, see Tamar Alexander, “Dmuto shel Ha-Ari be-sipoor ha-sefaradi-yehudi” [“The Figure of Ha-Ari in the Sephardic Jewish Story”], Pe’amim 26 (1986): 87-107 [Hebrew]. For cemeteries in Jewish society in this context, see Avriel Bar-Levav, “Another place: The Cemetery in Jewish Culture,” Pe’amim 98-99 (2003): 5-37 [Hebrew]; Aliza Shenhar, “Olam ha-metim ve-harafa’im be-sipoor ha-amami” [“The World of the Dead and Ghosts in Folktales], Ma’agalei Kri’a 15-16 (May, 1987): 113-127 [Hebrew]. Meron Bialik Lerner, “Ma’aseh ha-tanna ve-ha-met: Gilgulav ha-sifruti’im ve-ha-hilkhati’im” [“The — 222 —

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Said R. Jochanan ben Zakkai: Once I was walking on the road. I encountered a man gathering wood. I greeted him and he did not greet me in return. I said to him: Are you of the living? He said: Of the dead. I said to him: If you are of the dead, why is it that you are gathering wood? He said to me: Hear this one thing from me, when I was in the world I and my friend were sinners. We were condemned to burning. When I gather wood I am burned and when he gathers wood he is burned. I said to him: How long is your sentence? He said to me: Rabbi, when I came there I left a pregnant wife, and now I do not know if she gave birth to a boy or a girl. Please, rabbi, watch out for him . . . you must lead him to the synagogue and teach him the prayers and the Shema and teach him the three verses, and he must read from the Torah and the congregation must respond “Blessed be He the Blessed Lord” and I will be released from this sentence instantly. R. Johanan did so. After that R. Johanan went out and met the same man in the same place that he encountered him. He said to him: May your soul be at peace as you have put me and my soul at peace. I have been released from my sentence. Thereupon R. Johanan exclaimed: Blessed is the Ever Present Lord. (Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection 2, fol 144 c-d) Three elements of this legend make it a typical ghost story and demonstrate the features of the genre. The first relates to the dead man: His consciousness, that is, his memory, character, and psychological traits, are all exactly as they were when he was alive. In addition, he is aware that he is dead. In this story, his outward appearance is similar, although not identical, to that of his former, living, self, but such similarity is not required as long as his consciousness is the same. The Story of the Tanna and the Dead Man: Literary and Halakhic Versions”], Asufot 2 (1988): 29-70 [Hebrew]. For more on this story see: Rella Kushelevsky, “’The Tanna and the Restless Dead’: A Jewish or Non-Jewish Legend?,” Criticism and Interpretation 30 (1994): 41-63 [Hebrew]. — 223 —

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second element relates to the living: At an early stage in the encounter between the living and the dead in a ghost story, sometimes at the very start of the dialogue or even before it begins, the living individual realizes that he is talking to a dead person. The third element concerns the place of the encounter: The living and the dead meet in the world of the living or in a state of consciousness that enables the dead to appear in that world, such as a dream. During their encounter, each side retains their existential state. In other words, the living do not die, nor do the dead return to life. Ghost Stories as a Didactic Tool “They said to her: What is in that world? She said to them: “I am judged by lofty judgments.” One of the most common motivations for tales of “raising of the dead” in the Middle Ages was to teach proper moral and religious conduct. Nearly all the stories in Sefer Hasidim, including those that do not deal with the dead, have a single purpose: to instill in the readers or listeners the moral behavior required by the tenets of Hasidei Ashkenaz. Each of the tales presents an ideology or moral principle in a narrative manner, teaching the reader how to behave by means of the narrative device of reward and punishment. A story with this aim and structure is known as an exemplum.8 In the course of such a tale, the audience experiences, together with the protagonist, the reward or punishment received as a result of obeying or disobeying the moral code. In this manner, the reader/listener learns to internalize the behavioral code of the community. Exempla that are also stories of the dead employ a unique device: while the reward or punishment in other exempla is handed down in this world, in ghost stories the results of conduct in this world are felt in the next. This is a highly effective didactic tool, as demonstrated in the two following stories from Sefer Hasidim. 8.

From the Latin for “example,” the term refers to a moral anecdote of didactic value which is used to illustrate a point. For the significance of the numerous exempla in Sefer Hasidim, see Eli Yassif, “The Exemplum in Sefer Hasidim,” Tarbiz 57 (1988): 217-257 [Hebrew]. — 224 —

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The story of an old woman who hastened her prayers and did good deeds. After she died she appeared in a dream to the righteous. They said to her: What is in that world? She said to them: I am judged by lofty judgments. While the other righteous men and women are happy and at peace, I am expelled from among them. She said: When I was alive I would leave the synagogue during seder kedusha [the final prayer] and not wait until the time to leave the synagogue. (Sefer Hasidim, 464) In a certain town the women would prepare for the Sabbath on the eve of the Sabbath, except for one who worked in flax, and after her death a man saw in a dream that her hands and eyes were being burnt with the chaff of flax, and said to them [those burning her]: Why are you doing that? They said: She worked in flax on the eve of the Sabbath and did not prepare for the Sabbath. (Sefer Hasidim, 591) Such exempla are particularly daunting for two reasons. First, the punishment handed down in the next world is not only harsh, but eternal, with no possibility of reprieve. The same unending fate is unfeasible when the punishment is delivered in this world. What is more, in the world of the living there is always the opportunity to repent. Secondly, in these stories one quality or habit is enough to determine a person’s fate in the next world, as illustrated by the woman who was condemned because she left the synagogue early, even though she “did good deeds.” The sense of eternity and the significance of a single behavior also hold true in respect to reward,9 as in the following story. R. Judah Hasid of Blessed Memory said that he knew a Jew from Warmsen whose name was R. Binum and he was an old man and buried the dead. And I actually and truly heard that once that man went early to the synagogue and he saw a man sitting in front of him in 9.

Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale. — 225 —

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the synagogue and on his head was a crown of grass that is called [myrtle]. And he was frightened because he thought he was a demon. He called to him and said: Come here to me and do not be afraid. And R. Binum went to him and said to him: Are you not the same man who died and I buried you? And he said to him: Yes. And he said to him: And how is it in that world? And he said to him: Very good. And he said to him what virtue do you have, for you were an ordinary man? And he said: Only the virtue that I chanted the blessings in a pleasant voice in the synagogue. That virtue brought me to Paradise and it is honored. And here is a sign that it is I who am speaking to you, for you can see the sleeve of my robe is torn because you tore it when you wrapped me in shrouds. And he asked him: What is that on your head? And he replied: Grasses from Paradise that I put on my head to remove the bad odor of this world. (Sefer Hasidim, at the side of 427) The listener learns from this that one exemplary habit or good deed, even an act as simple as chanting the prayers in a fine voice, can lead to a life of eternal happiness in the next world. Just as the punishment for a single transgression is severe and eternal, so the opposite is also true: the reward for a single virtue is superb and eternal. The most significant narrative device in these stories is the granting of voices and presence to the deceased, enabling them to describe their fates after death in the first person. In a manner typical of folktales, the stories persuade the listeners by means of a concrete portrayal of the next world and a simple system of reward and punishment, perceived by ordinary people to be more true to life and valid than any religious, philosophical, or rational argument. By giving the dead a voice, the protagonists of the story can speak directly to the audience from beyond this world, without the need for any intermediary. This naïve device adds tension and drama to a narrative in which one of the characters is dead. Furthermore, it generates identification with the protagonist, and hence internalization of the moral message the story wishes to convey. — 226 —

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The simple system of reward and punishment is reflected in one of the guiding principles in Sefer Hasidim. In the words of Judah heHasid himself, “measure for measure not cancelled.”10 In other words, every transgression incurs direct and congruous punishment, and every good deed direct and congruous reward, until the two virtually coincide. The listener does not need to make any intellectual effort to draw the connection between the transgression and the punishment. The similarity, or rather near identity, between them affords a sense of causality, which is proof enough for the listener. This principle is vividly expressed in the stories of the dead, as illustrated by the following tale. A Gentile noblewoman died. When they put her in the grave, she stood up and said: I was in another world and I saw bishops lost in Hell, and those that were still living too, she said, at the time they died and came to Hell, and I saw Jews in Paradise, and she knew a Jewish woman and she said she saw her sleeve was stained with wax and she said to her: Why are you different from the other women? She said: Once I lit a Sabbath candle [and my sleeve was stained with wax] and therefore I was made to bear the shame of having my sleeve stained with wax. (Sefer Hasidim, 619. The story also appears in mark 272 with minor alterations.) The dead woman’s sleeve will forever be stained because she lit the Sabbath candles with a dirty sleeve when she was alive. The same principle of “measure for measure” appears in other stories as well. The old woman who did good deeds but left the synagogue before the end of the prayers receives a parallel punishment. Just as during her life she occupied herself with routine matters while others were immersed in prayer, so in the next world her torments continue while others are resting from their punishment. Similarly, the woman who spun flax instead of preparing for the Sabbath is condemned to having her hands and eyes burned with flax in the next world. The story below was written in Safed some 300 years after Sefer Hasidim. 10. Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale. — 227 —

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One evening during studies, a large goat came in and opened the door and went to the rabbi and whispered in his ear before the eyes of his companions. And the rabbi replied: Go in peace. I will do as you have said. And the goat went away. The rabbi said to Rabbi Chaim Vital: Get up and purchase this goat for whatever is asked of you and bring him to me. . . . And he got up and went into the town to the herd of goats. . . . And he gave it [the payment] to him [the owner of the goat] and brought the goat back with him. And the rabbi sent for the ritual slaughterers to come to him and they came. He said to them, hone all your knives. And they did so and the rabbi took a knife from them and examined it, and so with all of them. . . . And he told Rabbi Supino to slaughter him and he asked him to examine the lung. The rabbi said that there was no need because the goat told him that he was kosher and clean inside. And then the rabbi ordered them not to discard anything of him save for the blood and excretions. His skin would be used for the covers of Torah books and phylacteries and his horns for shofars and all his meat was to be brought to him. . . . And when he was done his companions asked the rabbi what is this thing. He said to them: he was a certain ritual slaughterer and one day the Gentiles made him slaughter quickly and his knife had the tiniest flaw and he did not see it and it was not kosher and so he caused Israel to eat unclean meat. He came and asked me to rectify him and that he be slaughtered and they take care with the knife because if the knife is flawed he will return to his fate. And so I rectified him. And all his companions were in fear. And at night he came to the rabbi in a dream and said to him: Your soul will be at peace in the next world as you have put me at peace. (Shivhei Ha-Ari, 12) This tale appears in Shivhei Ha-Ari, a collection of legends whose official purpose is to relate the history, deeds, and distinction of Rabbi Isaac Luria, known as Ha-Ari. According to Lurianic philosophy, the — 228 —

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souls of sinners are not allowed to enter the next world, which is all good, but must wander through this world as ghosts. However, the Redemption will not come until there are no more sinners in the world. Thus, the explicit aim of the stories of the dead in Sippurei Ha-Ari, most of which are tales of transmigration, is to demonstrate Rabbi Luria’s ability to recognize the dead souls in the world, to rectify them, that is, to atone for their sins, and thereby to bring the Redemption closer.11 This unusual talent is illustrated in the following stories as well. The Rabbi [Rabbi Luria] once passed by the Great Synagogue in Tiberias and showed his companions a stone in the wall and said: in this stone there is a transmigrated soul and it asked me to pray for it, because that is the meaning of the verse “For the stone shall cry out of the wall” (Habakkuk, 2:11). Toldot Ha-Ari, 25, second story: The Rabbi was once sitting with his companions. He said to them: Did you know so-and-so. They told him that he was a very evil man and an informant. He said to them: Because of his sin he was transmigrated in a mouse. Then the Rabbi ordered them and they built a mouse trap. Right away a mouse entered it and the Rabbi spoke to it before the eyes of his companions and said to it: Villain, did you think when you were in this world that there would be no punishment in Heaven for informing on the wretched of Israel? It replied and said: I sinned, sir. Take pity on me and pray to the Lord to release me from my confinement and I will enter Hell and there I will receive my punishment and not here, for I am miserable. The Rabbi said to it: You are not yet worthy to enter Hell for you stole from the people. The Rabbi ordered them to open the box and the mouse went out from it and entered its hole. (Toldot Ha-Ari, 30) 11. In tales of reincarnation, the soul of the deceased transmigrates into an animal or inanimate object. — 229 —

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These stories also display features of exempla. Similar to the tales in Sefer Hasidim, they relate to reward and punishment in the next world for acts committed in this. Moreover, more attention is given to the description of the sin and its consequences than to the deeds of Rabbi Luria, which often consist mainly of refusing to rectify a soul because the person’s sin was too heavy. In addition, one quality again determines an individual’s fate in the next world. The principle of “measure for measure” is even applied in the story of the ritual slaughterer, by means of the three elements of the plot: the sin (unkosher slaughter); the punishment (transmigration into a kosher animal); and the rectification (kosher slaughter and the subsequent kosher food and coverings for religious objects derived from the goat). Finally, in the stories of Rabbi Luria as well, the effectiveness of the punishment stems from its being of longer duration than a human lifetime. Nevertheless, there are three main differences between the exempla in Sipporei Ha-Ari and those in Sefer Hasidim, written three centuries earlier. The first is the presence of a hero, the venerated Rabbi Luria, who responds to the words of the ghost and hands down a moral ruling that appears as part of the story. In contrast, in most of the tales in Sefer Hasidim, the human characters are simple folk. Thus, the moral message is not spelled out for the listeners; it is left to them to understand it for themselves. The second difference between the two sets of exempla lies in the physical appearance of the dead. In Sefer Hasidim, they retain their former external shape, appearing as human beings who are readily recognizable by those who knew them, simple people like themselves. This is consistent with the aim of Sefer Hasidim: to instill moral precepts in the public at large. In Sippurei Ha-Ari, however, the reincarnated souls appear in a variety of shapes, such as those of animals or stones, or as invisible ghosts, so that they cannot be recognized by ordinary people. This is in line with the different purpose of the book, which is to honor and acclaim Rabbi Luria. The very fact that he can see the ghosts and identify the incarnations as wandering souls is reason enough to revere him, believe in him, and tell the story. The third difference is also related to the disparate objectives of the two volumes. Sefer Hasidim seeks to instill morals, and therefore the protagonists learn the moral lesson first-hand and their fate is sealed for all eternity. Sippurei Ha-Ari, on the — 230 —

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other hand, is based on the perception of a world in which rectification is possible, and one can always repent and thereby hasten the Redemption. As the function of Rabbi Luria is to bring the Redemption closer, the stories invariably leave room to atone for one’s sins and aid him in fulfilling his mission.12 Ghost Stories as a Psychological Mechanism “The dead man came to his mother in a dream and said . . . ” Stories of the dead, like other tales, were also incorporated into homilies delivered in public forums in order to teach the audience a moral lesson. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the speaker added certain details in order to amuse the listeners and hold their interest. This casts the spotlight on the teller of the tale, the one who invented it. That is to say, it is the living who put words into the mouths of the dead and bring them to life for their own purposes. The dead may be “summoned” for a variety of reasons, with the didactic aim of the exempla being only one. Another motivation is illustrated by the following tale. The story of a rabbi and a young man who performed a marriage ceremony one Sabbath. That week the young man died. The dead man came to his mother in a dream and said: It was not my time to die, it was the rabbi’s time to die. The Holy One Blessed be He said to the Angel of Death: Bring me one of the men in the marriage ceremony, and of the rabbi He was speaking, but the Angel of Death made a mistake. The groom was walking alone in the street and he was taken and hurt, for as the Sages said a groom must guard himself. And he killed the young man. And all the years he had to live were given to the rabbi. Because he was not ill-tempered and did not cause others unhappiness and forgave all their anger and listened to their ignominy and did not reply and was 12. For transmigration and atonement, see Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1954). — 231 —

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generous and friendly. (Sefer Hasidim, 375) Like most of the stories in Sefer Hasidim, this is an exemplum designed to teach that the behavior of the rabbi is preferable to that of the young man, who was negligent by not “guarding” himself sufficiently during the week of his wedding. But the major element in the story is the mother’s dream. For the analysis of this and the following dream tales, I will rely on two basic assumptions: 1. Some of the stories in Sefer Hasidim are based on what members of the community told Rabbi Judah he-Hasid, so they were most likely derived from real dreams.13 2. A person can’t dream of something that is not part of his inner world, whether consciously or subconsciously. Thus, anything seen in a dream is a product of this world, the results of things the person has done, heard, seen, thought, or felt in the course of his life. It is only natural for a mother coping with the loss of her son to see him when she is asleep. In her dream, he provides the sort of logical explanation that any grieving mother needs. Death at a young age would seem to be a horrible mistake for which only the powers above can be responsible. Now that her son is in contact with those powers, he alone can supply the explanation, and she therefore places it in his mouth. As a simple woman living in the Middle Ages, she regards his appearance in her dream not as the product of her imagination, but as a true appearance of her son, who has come from the next world to tell his mother why he died. It is her grief, her mental state, that has brought him back to the world of the living. It is likely that at some later time, a rabbi used the story, casting himself in the role of narrator and changing the reason for the young man’s death in order to reframe the anecdote as a “cautionary tale (exemplum).” Evidence of this sort of narrative revision can be found here in the mistake made by the Angel of Death, which would appear to be redundant given the alternative explanation of the transgression for which the groom was punished. The mistake might therefore be a remnant of the original version, which would not 13. For dreams among Hasidei Ashkenaz, see Joseph Dan, “Le-torat he-chalom shel chasidut Ashkenaz” [“On the Principle of the Dream in Hasidut Ashkenaz”], Sinai 68 (1971): 289-293. — 232 —

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have displayed the didactic features of an exemplum. Two explanations might be offered for the existence, or persistence, of this earlier theme. The first is religious/theological. Denying the possibility of a mistake having been made accentuates the fact that God and the Angel of Death are never in error. This is indicated by the narrator’s account of the groom’s sin and the long life of the rabbi. The second explanation is literary/rhetorical. The teller could not forget the grieving mother who told him how her son came to her in a dream. Moreover, the supposed mistake adds drama to the tale, helping to engrave it on the listener’s memory along with the moral principle it is meant to instill. A different emotion is behind the encounter between a son and his deceased father in the following story. The story of a religious scholar who saw in a dream a figure taller than the house with the face of a man. He said to him: Come and I will show you your father’s grave. The tall man led him to the gravesite of his forbearers and raised the grave. He said, speak with your father. He saw that his father was angry and did not wish to speak with him. The big tall man said: He does not wish to reply because his grave is surrounded by stones and the Gentiles took two stones and you did not put others in their place. And he saw that two stones were missing. After that he said to him: Your father is still angry because he owed two zakukim [coins] to a certain man and he only repaid one before his death. Why did you not repay the other for him? When he awoke he said to his mother: Did my father repay his debt? She said: Yes. He said he wanted to fill the graves with soil and stones, to fill his father’s grave. She said to him: Do not do it, it is too dangerous, do not do it. After many days he saw Gentiles removing dirt from their houses. He said since you are removing dirt from your houses bring it to the graves and I will pay for it. Recalling the beginning of his dream he filled his father’s grave and where the two stones were missing he placed others. And other graves that had collapsed he filled with dirt. And he wished to do the same for each and every grave but the Gentiles did not want to bring — 233 —

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more dirt, and his son and his daughter died. And some in the community said: Because he began to do a good deed and did not complete it, like Judah whose sons Er and Onan died. (Sefer Hasidim, 322) The mother’s warning to her son not to visit his father’s grave, and the fact that the giant in the dream helps him find it, indicate that he has never before been at the gravesite, or even in the Jewish cemetery. The danger involved in going to the cemetery might stem from its being far from the Jewish quarter, or perhaps in an area to which Jews were forbidden entry at the time. When the son is racked by guilt for not visiting the father’s grave and tending to its upkeep, he is reminded of his father and sees him in a dream. In the dream, the son’s anger at himself is projected onto the father. The patriarch’s silence is analogous to the son’s neglect of his father’s grave. The matter of the debt is unusual here. According to the conventions in Sefer Hasidim, the dead are never mistaken and dreams never reveal anything that is not true. Admittedly, the debt is of little importance in the story as compared to the disrepair of the grave. Nevertheless, the fact that the son did not know whether or not his father had repaid the debt can also be seen as part of the psychological tenor of the tale and the son’s pangs of guilt. Not knowing might suggest a rift between the two men even before the father died. The dream indicates that the son feels guilty about this as well: they can only communicate through the giant, and do not speak directly with each other. Indeed, this is the only story in Sefer Hasidim in which the dead communicate with the living through an intermediary. The tale ends with the death of the man’s children. It may even have come into being after their death, as a retrospective explanation for the tragedy. Such a possibility gives added meaning to the motif of guilt and family, making the story the product of the protagonist’s agonized reexamination of himself as father, son, and Jew. The sense of guilt at not visiting a father’s grave might also have been the underlying motive for the following story. The story of a man who swallowed a persimmon and died, and years later he appeared in a dream to his sons [telling them] to dig him up and learn why he is in — 234 —

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distress. They thought he had been stripped bare and he was naked. They dug him up and found him as whole as on the day he was buried. They touched the garment in which he was buried that was wrapped around him to see where the body was. When they touched his garment, the body and the garment fell away and nothing was left, for he had died several years before and turned into dust. Why did he come [to them] in a dream? Because he was judged whole, and therefore unworthy, he came in a dream so that he would fall away because his body was whole. (Sefer Hasidim, 321) This could be seen as an exemplum. The story teaches that it is impossible to escape the system of reward and punishment in the next world. Apparently, the father deliberately ate a persimmon, which has preservative properties, so that his body would not decay in the grave and he would be able to elude his punishment in the world to come. But his attempt to escape his fate did not prevent his torment. On the contrary, it made it even worse.14 A psychological reading of the story, however, reveals a further level. The sons may dream of their father as a result of their grief or guilt at not visiting his grave. Like everyone in this period, they see their father in the dream not as a figment of their imagination, but as the actual person who has come from the next world to speak with them. The sense of guilt at not visiting their father’s grave is so great that they open his grave on the pretext of fearing his shroud may have been stolen. The story below also evidences the connection between death and a family’s sense of guilt. They said to a man: Tell so-and-so, I saw your late wife. And I prayed that when she falls she will be saved. Tell her husband to pray for her not to be hurt, and I 14. Belief in the ability of persimmons to preserve the body after death is illustrated in the stories preceding this one in Sefer Hasidim, marks 319 and 320. 319: “I heard that a person who swallows a persimmon when he is called his weight is like three halves when he dies instantly.” 320: “The story of a man who swallowed [a persimmon]. Right away he ran to his house and made a will and died and his bowels were punctured. The pleasure on his face will forever be like the time when he ate and smiled. And if he was in his youth when he smiled, he will have that expression on his face for all eternity.” — 235 —

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will pray that she be saved. Her husband already had another wife. And the husband had gone away from that place and he received a letter that his young daughter had fallen into a deep hole, and the Jews went down and found her sitting in a corner unharmed. For the spirits of the dead pray for the living. But the living can pray for the dead to remove their sentence. (Oxford manuscript, 1567, 172b) The beginning of this story is rather incoherent and difficult to understand, a problem which may not have existed in the oral version before it was recorded in writing. Nevertheless, the gist of the tale is this: a deceased woman asks her husband, who has already taken a second wife, to look out for the well-being of their children. There is no need to spell out here the guilt that might plague a widowed father when he remarries, especially if there is physical distance between him and his children, as in this case. The simplest way to express awareness of these feelings is to put them in the mouth of the dead wife. Moreover, this device enables him to explain to his second wife that he needs to care for the children of his first marriage because he was commanded to do so by a supreme power, and thus avoid incurring her wrath. The psychological interpretation of these tales does not preclude their most spontaneous and straightforward reading as exempla. The stories of the giant and the son and the father who ate a persimmon relate to the norms of burial, the sanctity of the grave, and the demand that burial sites be properly maintained. The story of the daughter who fell can be seen to demonstrate Hasidei Ashkenaz’s theological principle of “reminders of His wonders,” that is, the signs of a “different reality” which were sought out constantly in the Middle Ages in order to “prove” the existence of a divine presence in this world. The following excerpt introduces a series of stories in Sefer Hasidim that deal with a different theme: the saintly act of sacrificing oneself for one’s religious beliefs and the need to commemorate the martyrs. The nature of the references to martyrdom reveal the importance attributed to it by Hasidei Ashkenaz. In a certain place many Jews were martyred in the name of the Lord, and some who did not sacrifice themselves — 236 —

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were forced to be baptized. At night the dead were brought on carts to the cemetery, for it was far from the place where they lived. And a woman fell from the cart and was not noticed. And they buried the victims in large wide graves with a single sheet between one and the other. And the woman who had fallen from the cart came to a man in a dream and she was angry and said that she too had sacrificed herself in the name of the Lord. And he investigated and pledged a large reward to anyone who found her. And a herdsman came and showed him where the woman who had fallen from the cart was, and she was buried with the dead. And she said to him that night: Because you pledged a reward for me until I was found and buried with the martyrs, I will tell you to go to a certain place for I have hidden gold worth fifteen zekukim. And he found it there. And there were two who slit themselves but they could not kill themselves. The Gentiles believed they were dead, but they were not dead. Years later they died. And a certain Jew dreamed of the martyrs who died and they said: You shall not enter into our company because you did not kill yourselves in the name of the Lord as we did. And they showed them that their neck was slit. And they said: You did not die. And an old man came and said: Because you slit yourselves in order to die, and because you were not baptized, you are deserving to be among us. And he brought them into their company. (Sefer Hasidim, 1130) These stories are both historical documents and a means of conveying the commandment to remember the martyrs and the reason for their death. The second tale lauds those who intended to sacrifice themselves but were unable to do so. It is reasonable to assume that this issue was addressed in the story in response to a debate in the community over the social, and perhaps also religious/Halakhic, question of their status in Jewish society. Furthermore, like the majority of stories in Sefer Hasidim, the first tale also has a didactic purpose: it demonstrates the importance, and indeed sanctity, of Jewish burial. The immediate financial reward received by the man who ensured the woman’s burial — 237 —

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would undoubtedly have served as a strong incentive for the simple folk in the community, encouraging them to fulfill their duty to bury the dead. It is unclear to whom the woman asking to be buried is speaking, whether to a forced convert who buried the other martyrs or to a Jew, which would make him a new character in the story.15 However, the fact that the beginning of the story implies that the burial was performed by a convert suggests the existence of another issue that may have been difficult to speak of openly and was therefore incorporated into a story: the guilt suffered by the converts themselves, and the community’s mixed feelings toward them. This brings us back to the option of psychological interpretation. The converts in the story, and probably in reality as well, are motivated by guilt to bury the martyrs. Guilt may also be involved if the woman appeared to one of these converts. Different scenarios might explain such a dream. We may assume that when converts buried martyrs, they did so in haste and in secret, perhaps even at night, so as not to be caught in the act by Christians. The dreamer might have heard something fall from his cart, and might even have realized it was probably a body, but did not stop to check because of his fear and his desire to complete his mission as quickly as possible. The idea that he might not have given all the martyrs a proper burial gnawed at his conscience at night and caused him to dream of the woman whose body he may have dropped. It is important to recall that the convert was initially a Jew, and we have already noted the sanctity of Jewish burial. This scenario would also account for the pledge of a monetary reward for finding the body and ensuring its interment. The tale ends with the discovery of a treasure of gold, which serves on the didactic level as a reward for fulfilling a commandment. As such, it was most likely added to the story by one of the tellers. If, however, we assume that there is a kernel of truth in this occurrence, it is not inconceivable that the anecdote was invented in order to explain the reason for someone’s sudden wealth. It may have been meant to cover up the theft of property by a convert who was feeling guilty about what he had done, or as a means of persuading himself that the property he 15.

Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, Perakim be-toldot ha-yehudim bi-yamei ha-benayim [Chapters in the History of the Jews in the Middle Ages] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1968) [Hebrew]. — 238 —

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stole was payment to which he was entitled for burying the martyrs. If this was the case, it is hard to imagine that Rabbi Judah he-Hasid was aware of the fact when he chose to use the story as an exemplum. Both scenarios raise intriguing possibilities. Nonetheless, it goes without saying that they are mere speculations that are impossible to prove one way or the other. Ghost Stories as an Ideological Device “The soul of Rabbi Moses Cordovero is sitting in that chair and hears your words.” Once Rabbi Luria was teaching his companions at night and among them was a disciple of Rabbi Moses Cordovero, and he responded and said to the rabbi in regard to the matter he was teaching that it was not the opinion of his rabbi, Rabbi Moses Cordovero of Blessed Memory. The Rabbi of Blessed Memory turned to one side and was silent. And the disciple said: Why is the master silent? He said to him: Know this, the soul of Moses Cordovero sits in that chair and hears your words and says to you: You lie! The disciple said to him: How can you prove it? The Rabbi of Blessed Memory said to him: Wait. He turned again to the side and spoke with him and turned back and said to the disciple: This is what he said to me, that you must go to his wife and tell her to give you a certain book and open to a certain lesson on a certain page and you will find his opinion written there in support of my words. And he did so and it was written as the words of the Rabbi of Everlasting Memory. (Toldot Ha-Ari, 21) In order to comprehend this story, we must first understand its context. Rabbi Luria and Rabbi Moses Cordovero (known by the acronym the Ramak), who came before him, both interpreted the Zohar, and based their differing philosophies on these interpretations. According to the Kabbalah, as well as to Rabbi Luria himself, he did not change or dispute — 239 —

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the words of his predecessor, but only developed and commented on them and the Zohar.16 Nevertheless, Rabbi Luria’s interpretations of the Zohar are radically different from those of Rabbi Cordovero. This story demonstrates Rabbi Luria’s use of the popular belief that the dead are present in the world of the living in order to build a non-existent bridge, a spurious continuity, between his kabbalist approach and that of Rabbi Cordovero. As in all of the stories of Rabbi Luria, he is the only one to see the truth. He utilizes this “capacity” to claim that his opinions can be found in the words of his predecessor. In addition, he contends that Rabbi Moses Cordovero himself is in the room, hears what is said in real time, and agrees with Rabbi Luria. Here the deceased is “summoned” to promote certain didactic, social, and one might even say political goals in the kabbalist community. The tale is an extreme example of putting words in the mouths of the dead. The teller calls on the religious authority of Rabbi Moses Cordovero, placing the words of Rabbi Luria in his mouth in order to validate them and mask their innovative nature. How Do the Dead Explain Their Return to the World of the Living? “He said to him: But you are dead, he said to him: True, but . . .” In most Christian ghost stories, the dead appear to living relatives in order to ask for redemption. The living can release the dead from their punishment in the next world by praying, offering masses in their names, giving alms to the poor or donations to the church, repaying a debt the dead people owe, or returning property they stole. Thus, as a general rule, the dead return to the world of the living in order to improve their own lot. Two such Christian tales appear in Sefer Hasidim. They are, in fact, two versions of the same story, with the second, presented below, concluding with the words, “that is how it is among the Gentiles,” thereby explicitly identifying it as a Christian source.17 16. Joseph Dan, “Kabalat Ha-Ari ben mitos le-mada” [“The Lurianic Kabbalah: Between Myth and Science”], Lecture presented at the Fourth International Conference for the Study of the History of Jewish Mysticism, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 10 (1992): 8-36 [Hebrew]. 17. For Christian ghost stories, including parallels to the stories in Sefer Hasidim, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, trans. by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For a comparison between the patterns of Christian and Jewish stories, see Eli Yassif, “Shvarim giluchei zakan: Ha-ma’avak al ha-mitos shel tzfat be-yamim ha-hem bi-zman — 240 —

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There once was a man who was out walking and lost his way in the woods. At night in the moonlight a man came and he knew that man was dead. He wanted to flee. He said to him: Do not run away from me for I will not harm you. I am so-and-so. He said to him: But you died several years ago. He said to him: Yes, but because of a certain field I stole I cannot rest, and I am sent to the woods because of something I stole from a certain man. And I similarly heard that a certain Gentile died and after a few days his servant went out and found him at night. He said to him: Do not run away. I will not harm you. He said to him: But you are dead. He said to him: True, but I am sent here because I took the land of a certain man against his will, and now tell my wife to return it. His servant said to him: They will not believe me. He said to him: Tell them to go the next day to a certain place and they will see me there. The servant went and said to everyone in the town: This is what was said to me by so-and-so, who died several days ago. They said to him: Did he tell you of any sign? He said: You will see him tomorrow on the same tree and then you will believe me. They all went and saw him on the tree and looked and did not find him in the grave. He said: Return the land to the man I stole it from—and then he would rest. That is how it is among the Gentiles. (Sefer Hasidim, 35). In Jewish folktales, however, we find that in certain periods ghosts appear to ask for personal redemption, but not in others. In most of the stories in Sefer Hasidim, the dead do not have a selfish motive for showing themselves to the living. In the few cases in which they do have such a motive, it is not to ask for redemption. Thus the woman who did good deeds but left the synagogue early (Sefer Hasidim, 591) and the dead man in “The Tanna and the Restless Dead” both indicate how they can be spared from their fates, but do not beg for reprieve. Why do they ha-ze” [“Clean-shaven Bulls: The Fight for the Myth of Safed in the Past, in the Present”], Mikan 4 (2005): 42-79 [Hebrew]. — 241 —

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take the trouble to come all the way back to the world of the living if not to help themselves? The same question can be asked in regard to the dead man who appeared before Rabbi Binum. Why did he come from Paradise, where he was held in high regard, to the world of the living, whose odor he cannot tolerate? One story in Sefer Hasidim is an exception to the rule: that of the father who ate the persimmon (mark 321). It is worth noting, however, that even this man does not ask to be released from his suffering in the next world, because he has not yet arrived there. Rather, he begs to be released from the temporary torment he is experiencing because his body is whole, making him unentitled to enter the next world. On the other hand, in all the stories in Sippurei Ha-Ari, told three centuries later, the dead ask Rabbi Luria to rescue them from the pangs of misery. So it is with the ritual slaughterer transmigrated into a goat, the informer who is now a mouse, and the soul in the form of a stone. So, too, in the following tale: The disciples of Rabbi Luria of Blessed Memory reported of their Holy Rabbi of Blessed Memory that he would tell them he knew that the space of the world and the vacuum of the world were filled with rejected souls that could not yet find peace. Once he went with his disciples to study Torah in the field, and he alone saw that all the trees were filled with souls sitting upon them in countless numbers. And they filled the surface of the river there and covered the water. And Rabbi Luria of Blessed Memory asked them why they were here. And they replied that they had been expelled out of the Holy Dwelling for not repenting their transgressions and were transmigrated into humans and there too it was of no help because they did not repent. And so they were condemned to wander restlessly and suffered great sorrow. Now they had heard it announced in all the worlds that there was a righteous man Rabbi Luria of Blessed Memory who had the power to rectify the rejected souls. And so they had gathered here to ask him to have mercy on them and rectify them so they could come to their place of rest and no longer suffer this great sorrow. He vowed to them the Holy — 242 —

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Hasid of Blessed Memory to do everything he could for their sake. (Shivhei Ha-Ari, 14) This story is unusual in that the souls/ghosts have no physical form. On the other hand, there is no description of precisely what appeared before Rabbi Luria’s eyes when he “saw” the souls. Do the dead have their wishes granted? In this tale, Rabbi Luria promises to do what he can to redeem the souls wandering aimlessly through the world of the living. In the story of the ritual slaughterer transmigrated into a goat, the rectification he performs for the sake of the man’s soul is actually part of the plot line. But these are striking exceptions. In all the other stories, the rabbi adamantly refuses to redeem the souls on the grounds that their sin was too heinous and that they must therefore continue to suffer torments in the next world before they can be rectified. Here is a typical example. Once the Rabbi went with his companions to Ein Zeitun to pray at the grave of Rabbi Yehuda Bar Ilai. When they reached the olive trees and fig trees near that place, a crow came and alit on the branch of a tree in front of the Rabbi, and cawed several times. The Rabbi said to me: You knew a man who collected taxes in Safed, may it rise and be built in our time, and his name was Shabtai. I said to him: I knew him, he was an evil man and cruel to the poor. The Rabbi said to me: Here is his soul transmigrated into this crow, and now he tells me that he is so-and-so and because of his cruelty toward the poor when he collected taxes and took the clothes off of them and their homes from out of their hands, because of that he is punished with the sorrow of being transmigrated into a crow and he asks me to pray for him. Right away the Rabbi rebuked him and said to him: Evil one, go away. Instantly he flew off and went away. (Toldot Ha-Ari, 25, first story) The absence of requests for redemption in Sefer Hasidim (save for mark 321), in contrast to their frequency in Sippurei Ha-Ari, is linked to the overriding context in which the tales in the two volumes are told. — 243 —

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As we have seen, Sefer Hasidim is primarily an anthology of exempla meant to teach the listeners to conduct themselves according to the community’s moral and religious tenets. To achieve that purpose, there is no need to redeem the dead, and indeed, such a possibility might even weaken the didactic message. On the other hand, in Sippurei Ha-Ari the release of the dead from their agony, that is, the rectification of their souls, is a means of bringing the Redemption. Rectification, or “tikkun,” is a central concept in Lurianic Kabbalah. It refers to a return of the cosmos to its original perfect state as intended in the divine plan for Creation, which was disrupted by the sin of Adam. The Redemption will come when the process of rectification, that is, the perfection of the world, is complete. Fantasy or Reality? “A world filled with souls.” Stories of the dead in folklore afford a glimpse into the societal perception of death in the periods in which they were told and written down. The ghost stories discussed here enable us to understand what simple folk in the Middle Ages thought about death, how they conceived of it, what aspects aroused their fear, how they sought to control it, and how they coped with death and loss. All this is revealed by these Hebrew tales, over and above their social function as exempla or tributes. In contrast to canonical texts, the folktales predicate no clear distinction in the next world between body and soul. Thus, the dead appear in a form recognizable by the living, and function more or less as they did when they were alive. Some of them occupy this world, while others reside in Paradise or Hell. Indeed, there is a sense that the dead have not ceased to live, and may not even have passed to “another world,” but have merely relocated to a different dimension of this one. In certain stories, death appears to be no more than the altered consciousness of the deceased and those around them, as if it were another stage in life. Perceiving it in this manner makes it easier to cope with the fear of death in two ways: it consoles the living by depicting a reality in which the dead have not abandoned their loved ones, and it diminishes the fear of death by framing it as the — 244 —

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continuation of a familiar state of being. I would like to conclude with the opening statement in one of the most important research volumes on Christian ghost stories: “The dead have no existence other than that which the living imagine for them.”18 This conceptualization frames ghost stories as products of the imagination, fictions with no link whatsoever to reality, making it possible to analyze the tales with the help of formalist and comparative research tools, as I have done here. However, this approach reflects a materialist perception of death, defining it is a total cessation of life after which nothing remains of the living human being. Such a perception is in sharp contrast to that of the medieval populace, whose stories are presented here. They believed in life after death. While there may be a difference between life before death in this world, and life after death in the next, both are forms of “life,” and they are intimately connected. That is to say, these stories were viewed as actual reality by the tellers and listeners. All of the people who populated dreams (such as the young man in his mother’s dream) or appeared to the living (such as the man with the lovely voice who appeared to Rabbi Binum, or the goat in Rabbi Luria’s study hall) were considered real when the stories were told, and were documented as such when they were written down. Had this not been the case, they would not have been included in the books in which they appear and could not have served as exempla. In the eyes of the tellers, and especially the listeners, their didactic function was only secondary to their validity as true stories. Although the appearance of the dead may have aroused terror, and was undoubtedly regarded as an unnatural event, their presence and utterances in this world were perceived as reality, not fiction. The materialist perception of death is prevalent in modern Western society, and most particularly in the medical world. Here the soul is not believed to part from the body after death, and the body itself is seen to decay in the grave. Thus, nothing remains of people after death save the artifacts they leave behind and their images in the memories of their loved ones. While this approach is prevalent, it does not predominate, as evidenced by the existence of mediums, New Age theories, movies such as Ghost, and the following article, which appeared in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on 18 September 2006. I offer it here in its entirety. 18.Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 1. — 245 —

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Rabbi Nachman Dubinky, of Botei Natan in Mea She’arim, died last Saturday at the age of 96. Considered one of the tzaddikim [righteous] of Jerusalem, he lived in an impoverished one-room apartment and devoted all his time to Torah and moral teachings. Yesterday morning, his family, who is still sitting shivah, was awoken by the sound of a dog barking at the entrance to the house. As the ultra-Orthodox are not accustomed to keeping dogs, it is rare to see one in Mea She’arim. When the family opened the door, they found a white dog crouching under the sink in the courtyard. He refused to move despite their attempts to chase him away. The dog lay in a corner wailing, and at some point actually entered the apartment. The situation seemed odd, and it did not take long until a reason was found for the unexpected visit: rumor had it that it was not just any dog, but a soul seeking tikkun that had transmigrated into a dog. A neighbor claimed that it was the soul of one of the late rabbi’s sons, who left the religious life and died several years ago. It was said that his soul had been transmigrated into the dog, and that he had come to ask for forgiveness from his father after his death. As the rumor spread, thousands of members of the ultra-Orthodox community streamed to the site to see the marvel. “It’s a call from Heaven to repent in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. It’s a sign from the Holy One Blessed be He,” one woman explained emotionally. Yesterday afternoon, leading rabbis arrived at the house, among them the kabbalist Rabbi David Batzri and Rabbi Meir Brandsdorfer, a member of the rabbinical court of the Eida Haredit [an extreme ultra-Orthodox sect], to seek tikkun for the wretched soul. Subsequently, last night hundreds of people visited the grave of the tzadik Rabbi Dubinky on the Mount of Olives to ask him to absolve his son. According to members of the rabbi’s family, immediately after the prayer, the dog left their — 246 —

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home. Residents of Mea She’arim reported that “the deceased forgave his son and his soul can now rest in Paradise.” Thus ended the affair of the dog possessed by a dybbuk.

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A Terrible Fable and Enchanting Fiction: The Story of Joseph De-La Reina and Its Reflections in Two Novels of Yehoshua Bar Yosef Bilhah Rubinstein

Rabbi Joseph De-La Reina lived in Spain (or North Africa) in the fifteenth century, a period of messianic fervor. He was a practitioner of “practical Kabbalah” (i.e., the use of magic), and his failed attempt to hasten the Redemption impacted not only his own society, but also generations to come. The story was passed down by word of mouth in Jewish communities in the Diaspora, as well as in the Land of Israel, until it was given written form by Rabbi Abraham ben Eliezer ha-Levi in The Epistle of the Mystery of Redemption (Jerusalem, 1519). The “Epistle” presents a brief version of the story intended to explain why the Redemption was delayed from 1508 to 1548 (a difference of the typological forty years), and to caution against the irresponsible invoking of magic. The kabbalists in Safed were sharply critical of De-La Reina’s mystical exploit, regarding it as a risky act, a crossing of the line that would lead to national tragedy and personal depravity. Rabbi Moses Cordovero claimed that “because of all the troubles the eyes of the wise have been blinded and the hearts have shrunk . . . , and Joseph De-La Reina and the like are destroying the house of our Lord and multiplying our digressions” (Pardes Rimonim, Pratei Hashemot, 21, Chapter 1). Shortly afterward, a more graphic condemnation was formulated by Lurianic kabbalist circles based on the testimony of Rabbi Chaim Vital, a disciple of Rabbi Isaac Luria, who recorded the words of his mentor. Vital reported that Rabbi Luria “saw Rabbi Joseph De-La Reina reincarnated as a black dog for using practical Kabbalah and worshipping idols” (Sefer Ha-Gilgulim, Chapter 46, p. 809a. See also Sefer Ha-Heziyonot, 1511).1 From this point on, the tale grew to huge proportions, while at the 1.

References to Sefer Ha-Gilgulim are taken from Torat ha-gilgul be-kitvei Ha-ari ve-mefarshav [The theory of reincarnation in the writings of Rabbi Isaac Luria and his commentators], Part 1 (Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 1982) [Hebrew]; references to Sefer Ha-Heziyonot are taken from the Eshkoli Edition (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1953) [Hebrew]. — 248 —

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same time moving farther away from the core of historical fact.2 The first signs of this development can be found in the version written by Solomon Navarro, who lived in Jerusalem some two generations after the death of Rabbi Isaac Luria.3 Entitled A Terrible Fable of Rabbi Joseph De-La Reina, it endows the tale with dramatic qualities and the character of a mystically driven fantasy. This was the version read by my father, the novelist Yehoshua Bar-Yosef, and I will therefore present its main themes as the starting point for the discussion that follows. At the beginning and end of the story, the author declares that he himself did not write the Terrible Fable, but that it is the work of a disciple of the errant kabbalist. The disciple was an active participant in the events, and indeed, the only one to survive them. Making his way back to Safed, he wrote down what he had seen. The manuscript was stored in the “archives in Safed,” where Navarro claims to have found it and decided to bring it to the attention of the public, citing the name of the writer: Judah Meir. He thus purports to credit the original author, a fiction meant to enhance the credibility of the wondrous events. After all, who can doubt the reliability of written first-hand testimony, carefully preserved for so many years, and published now so that people would know it was forbidden for “a strange man to bring the Redemption”? From the first lines of the manuscript, it is clear that Navarro does not put much stock in historical facts. On the other hand, he draws on early sources for the style of the writing. Accordingly, the story begins with the statement that the protagonist lives in Safed, where he is known as “a great and wise man well-versed in practical Kabbalah,” and the text is studded with literary allusions. The chain of events starts with the protagonist’s decision “to bring the Redemption and rid the world of the rule of evil.” His five disciples enthusiastically accept his invitation to join him on a mystical journey. The first stage of the dangerous journey demands purification, with the rabbi’s instructions reminiscent of the revelation on Mount Sinai: “Purify yourselves and change your garments and be prepared to touch no woman for three days.” On the third day, the disciples find 2.

3.

For the transition of the Joseph De-La Reina story from the realm of historical fact to the mythical-symbolic sphere, see Gershom Scholem, Od devar [Another Thing] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1989), 249-262 [Hebrew]. For more about the story of Rabbi Joseph De-La Reina, see Joseph Dan, Ha-sipoor ha-ivri be-yamei ha-beinayim [The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), 222-237 [Hebrew]. — 249 —

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their mentor “alone in his Synagogue immersed in great devotion and purification and abstinence, solitary, with his head between his knees.” He greets them with words that reveal his piety: “May it be God’s will that the Divine Spirit inspires the work of our hands and that the Holy One be with us and aid us to honor His name.” The six men set off. The first stop on their journey to hasten the Redemption is at the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai on Mount Meron. After a night-long vigil, the rabbi dozes off at dawn and has a vision. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son Rabbi Eliezer appear before him and admonish him: “Why do you undertake a heavy burden which you cannot perform, although your intention is worthy if you succeed? So beware and proceed very carefully.” Ignoring the warning issued to Rabbi Joseph in the dream, the party moves on to Tiberias, where the men make camp in a field and perform a magic ritual to call on the Prophet Elijah. They fast, pray, and “perform the amalgams of the names of the Holy One and the holy formulas they know with deep piety and awe.” Each morning they immerse themselves in the Sea of Galilee and pray at length, making vows to all the archangels and adding the Holy Name of God of 42 letters. Joseph De-La Reina appeals to the prophet to “come to him at once when he is awake and speak to him and tell him what he must do to fulfill his mission.” And indeed, Elijah “comes at once” and says, “See, I have come, and what can I do for you and what is your wish?” The men bow down, and Rabbi Joseph says: “Welcome our master, my father, father of the chariot of Israel and its riders. . . . May it not be evil in your eyes that I have entreated you to come to me . . . may you answer our plea and show us the way for me to subdue Satan and magnify holiness.” Elijah replies: “Know this, what you are planning to do is weightier than you and you will not succeed. . . . But know this, your intention is worthy. If you carry out your plan, you will be happy and blessed. But my advice is to cease lest you fall victim to Samael [Satan] and his servants.” Undeterred, Rabbi Joseph beseeches the prophet: “Sir, please do not discourage me, but give me strength and courage, for I have sworn an oath . . . and I am ready and willing to give my life and soul for the Holy One, Blessed be He and His Divine Spirit.” The prophet is persuaded, and gives the kabbalist detailed instructions: “You and your disciples shall sit in a field remote from the — 250 —

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town . . . for 21 days you shall neither eat nor drink, only from night to night, and your food shall be only bread and water, and you shall not be sated. Each night you shall eat less . . . until your bodies are pure and clean, and you can bear the sight of the archangels. . . . And you shall immerse yourselves each day 21 times as the numerical value of the Holy Name, and at the end of 21 days you shall cease and fast for three days straight, night and day . . . and on the third day after the afternoon prayer you shall utter the Great Name, the name of 42 letters that is known to you with its amalgams and meanings . . . and when you do so you shall wrap yourselves in the prayer shawl and phylacteries and cover your faces and invoke the holy names of the archangel Sandalphon . . . and beg him to strengthen you and give you the power to do the deed. And he will tell you what you must do, for he is the guardian of the way and the path.” They now begin to retreat from the earthly realm in preparation for their encounter with the angels: “They did not think of worldly matters, only of revelations and the secrets of Creation, until they were almost stripped of their material form.” When the magic ritual is complete, the men rise “in great awe and fear”: “And [they] wrapped themselves in prayer shawl and phylacteries and covered their heads and recited the afternoon prayer with deep devotion . . . and recited the prayer confessing their sins . . . and then cried out in a loud voice . . . and appealed to the angel Sandalphon to reveal himself to them now.” The angel appears in all his glory and strikes them with terror: “And here a chariot of fire and horses of fire, a large army and flames filling all the land with clamor.” Rabbi Joseph and his disciples fall on the ground in fear. Taking a whiff of the frankincense they are holding, they recover a bit, but are still struck dumb. Sandalphon is furious: “What is it you want, human, maggot and worm? How . . . do you not see your lowly worth? Return to your homes, lest my soldiers assail you and burn you with the breath of their mouths.” Rabbi Joseph replies “in a quiet voice breaking with frailty and terror . . . : Master, Holy Angel, how can your servant speak to you . . . , great fear and trembling have fallen upon me, . . . and I can not reply to my master.” Mollified by the rabbi’s humility, the archangel permits him to speak. In an apologetic tone, Rabbi Joseph voices his petition: “I beg you, give me strength and courage and aid me to fulfill my will . . . for I do it only in honor of the living God, the King of Kings, the only king. — 251 —

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Now, may Your Holiness and your holy soldiers . . . show me the path I must take to rid the world of the reign of wickedness and how and with what means I may topple Samael from his dwelling place and raise the holy hosts and armies . . . that ruled in the days of old.” The angel replies: “Your words are good and true and may the Lord hear them and be with you, for all the glorious holy hosts . . . are waiting in anticipation to avenge the Lord. . . . But know this, human, that all you have done thus far is naught, and if you knew where Samael and his servants reach, you would not begin this undertaking, for who can prevail against him but the Holy One Blessed be He Himself alone when His words come to pass.” The angel’s final statement contains the first indication of the inevitable failure of the kabbalist who took it upon himself to do what only God can do at the time He deems proper. Had the rabbi picked up on the covert message, he might have abandoned his presumptuous plan. But he is consumed by passion for his purpose and by his arrogant vanity and does not grasp the warning that accompanies the instruction to appeal to the higher-order angels Akatriel and Metatron: “It is they who know and can say. . . . But who can stand before these mighty angels? . . . If you were frightened of me, how will you bear to stand before them and remain alive?” Rabbi Joseph’s response illustrates the tragic condition of a man who is aware of his limitations but is nevertheless unwilling to turn back. He is ready to give his life to bring the Redemption, convinced that God will come to his aid. And so he asks Sandalphon to tell him what to do in order to call on the two high angels. Sandalphon delivers his instructions in harsh language, advising him to retreat while at the same time encouraging him to go on: “All that you have done thus far, the immersions and fasting and cleansing of the mind, you shall do for 40 days . . . and after 40 days you shall pronounce the Great Name of God of 72 letters with all its meanings and forms and sources that are known to you and invoke the two great and mighty angels. And before you summon them you shall pray and appeal to the Lord to give you the strength to withstand the tremendous fear and the great fire so that you will not die. Then you shall appeal to the angels . . . and they will tell you the ways of Samael and how you may topple him, and may you be strong for our nation.” The meeting ends in a majestic scene that underlines the lowliness of the human in comparison to the exalted heavenly being: “And the angel of God rose to heaven in a tempest, and the disciples — 252 —

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remained prostrate on the ground in fear and terror.” The third stage on the journey is an indeterminate place on the border between reality and fantasy. Walking “through the desert on a mountain near Meron,” the rabbi and his disciples arrive at a cave. There they stay (as did Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his followers) for forty days “in holiness and purification, as they were commanded.” Forming a magic circle meant to protect them, they call on the angels Akatriel and Metatron: “And when they pronounced the Great Name, the land trembled and roared, and there were noises and lightning and the sky opened and the angels came down with all their hosts ready to assail Rabbi Joseph and his disciples. . . . And they said: Who is this and which is he who dared to use the royal scepter, and how did you dare to do so, you who are flesh and blood, a stinking droplet, a maggot and worm!?” The appearance of the angels is accompanied by thunderous noise and flames: “Riders of fire and horses of fire, angels and seraphim and their soldiers filled the land.” Rabbi Joseph and his disciples are terrified. The kabbalist asks permission to speak, “for I am like a stone and my spirit and soul have flown.” Taking pity on him, Akatriel allows him to speak. Rabbi Joseph explains himself and asks the angels to show him “what is the power of Samael and his subjects and how can I bring him down.” In their response, the angels again refer to the prohibition against crossing the line and attempting to hasten the Redemption. The kabbalist is offered the choice of continuing or abandoning his mission: “The time has not yet come. . . . Know this, you can not prevail over Samael, so do not go where you should not be. . . . But if you wish to persist with the aid of the Great Name, we will tell you what you must do.” Rabbi Joseph remains determined: “My heart is hot within me when I see the glory of the Divine Presence debased . . . and you, Heavenly Angels must strengthen me . . . and I will not digress to the right or the left, and I will trust in His Great Name.” The angels accede to his request, describing in detail the barriers he must overcome on the way to Samael and Lilith and the means he can use to capture and subdue them. The kabbalist and his disciples must climb “a wall of iron from the earth to the sky,” cross “an ocean whose waves reach the heavens,” and move “a huge mountain of snow whose head is in the sky.” After clearing those hurdles, they will be able to climb Mount Sa’ir—the realm of Satan. There they will be met by packs — 253 —

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of black dogs, Samael’s troops. They will have to elude the dogs, and only then can they break through a large wall “of iron from the earth to the sky” and reach the ruined place where Samael and Lilith are hiding in the form of “two black dogs, male and female.” The angels encourage the rabbi and direct him as to how to bind Samael and Lilith and lead them to their deaths. However, they also caution him not to give in to their pleas and not to provide them with “anything to eat or drink.” The amazing vision ends with the ascent of “the two Holy Angels to the heavens in a tempest.” The men do as they have been instructed, and succeed in capturing Samael and Lilith. Seeing that “the worst has befallen them,” the demons attempt to escape by employing the tactic of confounding the enemy: they transform themselves from dogs into winged human figures “covered with eyes like burning flames.” Alongside this menacing apparition, they offer a show of surrender and supplication. Rabbi Joseph and his disciples do not give in. They continue on their way, “pleased and happy with their faces glowing,” while Samael and Lilith “walk on weeping.” The men rejoice: “Who would have believed it, for they said we would not succeed.” The comical contrast accentuates the enormity of the disaster that will follow on the heels of this swagger and arrogance, the hubris that will turn the tide. Assured in his victory, Rabbi Joseph takes “a bit of frankincense to smell.” Samael, the wily primordial snake, asks for a piece. Basking in self-satisfaction, the rabbi hands it to him. He thereby unwittingly instigates an act of idol worship, defeating the very purpose of the mystical ordeals he and his disciples have undergone. The writer offers a dramatic description of the terrible upheaval: “And Samael blew a spark of fire from his mouth and burned the frankincense . . . and removed the bindings and ropes . . . and attacked the disciples. Two of them died at once from the thunderous sound of Samael’s roar and two others were stricken with madness, and Rabbi Joseph remained alone with one disciple and he was weary, exhausted, and astounded.” A voice is heard, saying: “Woe to you, Joseph, and woe to your soul that you did not take care to do as you were commanded and you practiced idolatry and burnt incense to Samael, and now he pursues you to expel you from this world and the next.” This scene clearly reveals the underlying link between the tale and the Talmudic story of “Four Who Entered the Orchard” (Chagigah 14b) — 254 —

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and its moral.4 Joseph De-La Reina sinks into evil. He goes to Sidon “and there he settled and followed evil ways. . . . And he made a covenant with Lilith and gave himself to her and she became his wife.” But Lilith is not enough for him. Just as in the past there was no limit to his ambition to hasten the Redemption, so now there is no limit to his depravity. He “indulged in every unclean thing . . . and every night he would conjure spirits and devils to fetch him his heart’s desire. And he continued in this way for many days.” Of all women, he most coveted “the queen of Greece,5 and had her brought to him almost every night and in the morning he would give orders to return her.” After a while, the queen has had enough of the sexual adventures forced upon her and tells her husband what is happening to her every night. The king summons his magicians, who unravel the mystery. Sending a messenger with gifts for the governor of Sidon, he asks that the lustful man be turned over to him so that he can wreak vengeance on him “in harsh torment.” Realizing what awaits him, Joseph drowns himself in the sea. The wondrous events that occur in a reality which moves from the natural to the supernatural stamp the Terrible Fable of Rabbi Joseph DeLa Reina with the hallmarks of fantasy6 that follow the typical pattern of a folk legend. The dramatic power and intense sensations that accompany the events underline the enigmatic element of the core of the story. It is a complex mystery which examines the limits of human ability to take part in the struggle against evil. This metaphysical issue is presented in a graphic manner that allows the imagination to run wild, while at the same time reining it in by means of repetitive phrasings and literary allusions. The mystery of the surface text is solved by revelation 4.

5. 6.

This is not the place for a detailed interpretative comparison. For our purposes, the narrative parallel will suffice. In the story of De-La Reina, two men died (like Ben Azzai in the Talmud), two others went mad (like Ben Zoma), and two survived: Rabbi Joseph, as a flawed image of Elisha ben Abuya (referred to as “Acher”—another—in the Talmud), and the disciple who remained alive to warn others against the sin, as a pale reflection of Rabbi Akiva who “departed unhurt.” Most likely Helen, the paradigm of seduce and ruinous feminine beauty. The term “fantasy” does not lend itself to a definition as a specific genre. Although scholars have catalogued its features, with some lists longer than others, questions invariably remain. Perhaps it is for this reason “fantasy” is so “fantastic.” Theoretical aspects of fantasy are addressed in the introduction to Bilhah Rubinstein, Yesodot fantasti’im be-siporet [Elements of Fantasy in Literature] (Tel Aviv: Ma’alot, 1989), 5-17 [Hebrew] and in Ortzion Bartana, Ha-fantasia be-siporet dor ha-medina [Fantasy in the Literature of the Generation of State Building] (Tel Aviv: Papyrus, 1989), 31-30 [Hebrew], and Danielle Gurevitch, “What is Fantasy?” in this volume. — 255 —

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of human weakness and limitations. But this solution leads to a deeper mystery associated with the myth of ruin and redemption. This may explain why the story has had such a strong impact for generations, and has stimulated the imagination of so many writers. Yehoshua Bar-Yosef was drawn to the myth of ruin and redemption in the early years of the State of Israel.7 It is not surprising, therefore, that the story of Joseph De-La Reina caught his interest and found its way into the novels Enchanted Town [Ir Ksuma] (1949-1952) and Tabernacle of Peace [Sukat Shalom](1958).8 The two books relate to an extended period of time: running from the sixteenth century (Tabernacle of Peace unfolds against the backdrop of the generation of Rabbi Isaac Luria) to the twentieth (Enchanted Town begins at the time of the earthquake in Safed in 1837 and continues to 1918, when the author was a child). Spanning this lengthy period makes it possible to present the theme of De-La Reina from different perspectives while maintaining a central kernel that remains unaltered by changing circumstances. As I explain below, I consider this is a major literary achievement. Bar-Yosef reconstructed the legend of the failed kabbalist, deviating from the original in his development of the story and placing the protagonist on the border between reality and fantasy. In Enchanted Town the tale appears as a narrative digression.9 The hero is depicted in relation to the inner world of the characters in the novel, whose presence determines the unusual nature of the social fabric it portrays. They include the mad religious student, the penitent, Sarah (the widow of the Rabbi from Avrutz), and Chaim Katz. In Tabernacle of Peace, Joseph de-La Reina represents the outward embodiment of the dark side of the soul of Rabbi Chaim Vital, the disciple of Rabbi Isaac Luria. Bar-Yosef was very familiar with Navarro’s account of the story,10 basing his reconstruction of the tale on this version. But he diverged 7.

See Yehoshua Bar-Yosef, “Al kishrei ha-mitos ha-chaserim lanu” [On the Mythical Connections We are Lacking”], Davar (19 April 1957) [Hebrew]. 8. Later, it was the basis of his story “Stripy Tunic,” in Tales of Safed, Tales of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Keter, 1984) [Hebrew]. 9.In Chuliya ve-shalshelet [Link and Chain] (Bnei Brak: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1990) [Hebrew], Malka Shaked dubs the story a “legendary digression” which is linked to the novel by “broadreaching essential metonymic connections” (p. 201). While I concur with this definition, here I wish to discuss the art of Bar-Yosef’s description and narrative in order to show its lyrical nature and the considerable depth he adds to the fantasy. 10. I have in my possession the actual book my late father used. It bears the inscription “Jerusalem” with no date. — 256 —

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from the traditional source, striking out on a new path that branched off into many directions of emotion and meaning. The legend in Enchanted Town starts with a descriptive exposition that sets the lyrical development of the plot in a contrast between the movement of evening shadows, dancing across Sarah’s room, and the white cloth on the table. The white speck hovering in the fading light of dusk prompts the child to wonder about the ears of the black dog and ask “Aunt Sarah”11 to tell him the story of Joseph De-La Reina again. The writer presents the story from the combined perspective of the teller and the listening child. As Sarah speaks in a lilting voice, the boy sees, “with appalling clarity,” the play of contrasts between black and white in the figure of Rabbi Joseph. The rest of the tale emerges from the depths of the child’s soul. With an inner ear, he hears “the slow clanging of the chains,” and sees the manacled Messiah standing before him, his head “adorned with golden fire,” his eyes “blazing like stars,” and his hair “like curling clouds”—a vision born out of the Galilee landscape at sunset. He also sees “the man sitting alone in the large shadows of the house of learning.” Wrapped in a white mantle, the man goes out into the black expanse to release the Messiah from his chains. Through the mental prism of the child, the confrontation between “black” and “white” is cast as a struggle between the forces of good and evil. The man “with a black beard and white mantle” is attacked by a “black dog” whose “eyes are like green wheels of sun and his teeth like sharp stones of red-purple fire . . . and a huge golden candelabrum of fire leaps down on his head . . . and from its eight branches eight black flames rise and lick at and swallow the sparks of light around it.” The man in the white mantle looks to the heavens and sees a thrilling vision: “White-golden angels are descending and hovering about his head . . . and as they hover they whisper incantations in his ears.”Decisively, the man “strides confidently toward the black dog,” mouthing “the names of the Holy Angels and the name of the Great and Awesome Presence.” The black dog loses his terrifying demonic powers and becomes “an ordinary wretched dog,” begging for his life. The angels warn “the man in the white mantle” not to give the dog anything, instructing him to throw 11. This and the following quotations from Magic City are translated from the Kibbutz Hameuhad edition (Bnei Brak, 1979), 221-229. The book was originally published by Twersky in three parts between 1949 and 1952. It has not appeared in English. — 257 —

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the villain “into the black abyss” beyond the hills of darkness so that the black creature will be consumed by the gloom and be gone forever. Only then can the man return to Safed, purify himself, and unchain the Messiah. The dog weeps bitterly, its tear-filled eyes resembling “two pools of boiling green pity.” But the man in the mantle remains unmoved. The dog’s pleas are in vain: in another minute it will be thrown into “the lower regions of hell.” But just before the mission is complete, the man inhales a bit of snuff and secretly senses “something like self-satisfaction that the Lord in Heaven chose him to bring redemption to the people of Israel.” The dog takes advantage of that sense of pride, appealing to him with a gentle smile and arousing “a feeling of mercy and vanity.” The man gives in to the seductive power of the innocent-looking smile and offers the dog the box of snuff. Instantly, everything is turned upsidedown. The dog resumes his former shape, the man forgets the amalgams of holy names that could protect him from Satan, and the dog pounces on him and devours him. Nothing is left “but the white mantle that falls torn and shredded into the black abyss.” Clearly, the story in Enchanted Town offers a different type of fantasy than the original version of the tale. In the novel, there are no disciples or magic rituals, the series of encounters with holy beings has disappeared, and no allusions are made to earlier sources. The dramatic intensity has been replaced by emotional lyric, and the formulaic dialogues give place to a rich fabric of images and euphonious metaphors. Moreover, if the traditional version constitutes a religious warning against crossing the line by attempting to hasten the coming of the Messiah, the story in Enchanted Town gives a personal emotional flavor to the yearning for redemption evidenced by the quality of the language and the fact that the tale is presented from the point of view of the child and the woman telling it—two unique characters who live in a world of imagination and fantasy. As mentioned above, in Tabernacle of Peace12 Joseph De-La Reina is the personification of the dark side of the soul of Rabbi Isaac Luria’s disciple, Chaim Vital, the man who spread his mentor’s kabbalist philosophy. The illusory figure is portrayed as an actual person with a 12. First published by Am Oved in 1958, and reissued by Sifriat Maariv in 1988. The quotations are translated from the later edition. The book has not appeared in English. — 258 —

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real presence, introducing elements of fantasy into the air of mysticism that suffuses the reality depicted in the novel. The close connection between the fabled kabbalist who transgressed and the inner world of the revered kabbalist from Safed draws on Vital’s Sefer Ha-Heziyonot, which reveals its author’s propensity for fantasy and the conflicting forces in his soul. These polar instincts are represented in Tabernacle of Peace by a series of fantastical confrontations between the holy figure of Rabbi Luria and the desecration associated with Joseph De-La Reina, a symbol of rationalist heresy and hedonist ideology. De-La Reina first appears at Rabbi Luria’s funeral, dressed in a “broad black mantle flapping in the breeze, although there was no breeze; and on his head a tall black pointed hat with a narrow brim.” A very brief narrative digression links the strange man with the ancient legend that had a strong impact on Vital as a child, filling him with inexplicable dread. Although he now attempts to ignore the spectral figure, he sees “the tiny smile flickering on the face sporting a long pointed gray beard,” and hears the “thoughts” of the mysterious person. They reveal the hidden thirst for power of the disciple who wishes to assume his teacher’s place, and warn him not to fall into Satan’s trap. Wondering “how Satan could be warning him against his own machinations,” Vital cries out to the deceased rabbi, asking, “When will redemption come?” (61-65). “The man with the pointed hat” continues to appear in Vital’s dreams. In the mystical reality of the novel, dreams are not a psychological phenomenon, but rather supernatural revelations with the validity of truth:13 “If the Blessed Creator . . . shows a person in his imagination trees blooming in the air and birds planted in the ground . . . it means they exist.” In one vision, the dreamer asks the rabbi to disclose the identity of the terrifying man who appears to him and tell him how to get rid of him. But a terrible transformation exposes the inner divide in his soul: the blue eyes of Rabbi Luria turn into “the eyes of Joseph della Reina,” although his beard remains as red as it always was (126-128). Chaim Vital aspires to take over from Rabbi Luria as the leader of the community, an ambition accompanied by a series of fantasy encounters with Joseph De-La Reina. These occasions betray the weaknesses and flaws in the protagonist’s soul: self-doubt and guilt (135-138), 13. For the connection between the mystical and the psychological, see Micah Ankori, Ze ha-ya’ar ein lo sof [Wood Without End] (Tel Aviv: Ramot, 1989), 14-15, 66-71 [Hebrew]. — 259 —

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unrestrained presumptuousness and hedonism (197-208), opportunism in the guise of messianic ideology (227-228), crafty suspiciousness, and heretical thoughts (292-298). The profoundly significant interaction with the fantasy figure is portrayed with reference to the pattern of the original story. It begins with a dream showing the moment De-La Reina dedicates himself to his mission, similar to the laconic opening of Navarro’s version, in which Rabbi Joseph decides “to bring the Redemption and rid the world of the rule of evil.” The dream at the end of the novel is a striking inverted reflection of the conclusion of the original story, which condemns the kabbalist for defiling himself with “every unclean thing” in the wake of his failure. The description of De-La Reina’s dedication to the mission of hastening the Redemption is transferred into the world of fantasy by lyrical language replete with kabbalist symbols and mystical phrasings (197-208). The vivid dream shows Vital “seated on a throne as bright as a fire studded with the jewels in the breastplate of the High Priest, colored blue and red and white as pure marble, glittering with the light contained within them. . . . And each gem is the name of the Supreme Being in a different amalgam, and angels as blue as sapphires are flying to and fro, each angel espying a gem and whispering the words inscribed upon it. . . . And a scent rises from each angel as it flies . . . the incense of Heavanly Temple . . . And between the alluring music and the alluring scent is eternal silence, and the silence feels like music and fragrance . . . and it is not the ear that hears but the mind. . . . And a voice says: A man is seated on a royal throne and he knows the great and dreadful name of the Lord . . . and he will bring the Messiah . . . and throw the black dog into the abyss, and the black dog is scampering with a whimper of inequity, and the black candelabrum with seven branches and candles burning with black fire falls and shatters.” The dream depicts Vital as a man who believes he is worthy of bringing the Messiah. In this sense, he follows in the footsteps of Joseph De-La Reina. However, unlike the failed kabbalist, the protagonist in Tabernacle of Peace is aware of his duty to wait until “it is the will of the Holy One Blessed be He to bring the Redemption . . . and woe to the man who does not acknowledge that time and hastens or delays the act of Redemption.” Nonetheless, in recurring dreams he sees “the amalgams of the letters of the Holy Name of God,” and concludes that “Heaven was hinting to him that he had — 260 —

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been given the key that would open the locked gates never before seen by a man. . . . He is the one who will bring the Redemption in the year 1593.” Vital celebrates the revelation “with joyous pride . . . reveling in the secret he held.” At the same time, he is aware of Satan’s tricks and decides to be cautious lest he “end up like Joseph De-La Reina.” At the mention of his name, De-La Reina instantly appears. This narrative device facilitates the transition to the inverted image of the conclusion of the original story. The man with the pointed hat shows himself to be a weak, pitiful figure, envious of the person who will succeed where he failed. But this is a deceit; it soon becomes clear that the delusive figure seeks to tempt Vital into doing as he did and indulging in the sensual delights De-La Reina enjoyed in Sidon. Bar-Yosef goes beyond the boundaries of the original version, providing an expansive hedonistic fantasy. De-La Reina magically transforms the simple room into an extravagant chamber washed in “aromatic pale blue light.” He himself stands “in the middle of the hall . . . a silk mantle of deep red like fine wine over his shoulders, and his beard gleaming like silver, and his eyes glowing with the anticipation of delight.” He conjures himself a feast fit for kings, an ironic parallel to the feast awaiting the righteous in Heaven. Around the table are “nine golden chairs” to complete the “minyan,” the group of ten men required to perform a communal prayer service. In his dream, Vital recognizes the saintly guests seated at the table, including he himself, although “at the time he was standing and watching from the side.” De-La Reina offers a celebration of physical indulgence, complementing the relishing of the meal with erotic gratification: “Seven dancing maidens appeared in the chamber. They were dressed in wispy silk scarves the color of skin. . . . Through the thin scarf the organs of their naked bodies could be seen moving in dance. . . . From time to time one of the maidens danced close to Joseph della Reina and gazed at him. The eyes of the maiden were as wide and deep as pools, and those pools seemed to reflect the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon in the sky and the stars glittering in a darkness of velvet and the glow emerging from the depths and rising in a clear pool.” In contrast to the Navarro version, in which female eroticism is presented as the embodiment of a demonic being, the description in Tabernacle of Peace, with its exquisite sensuality, is a paean to feminine beauty and the raptures of love: “Seventy-seven flavors in each touch of warmth and — 261 —

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caress and each perfume of breath and kiss, and seventy-seven delights contained in each delectation like the myriad trees hidden in the core of a single seed . . . one world and infinite number of worlds.” Was Chaim Vital seduced by De-La Reina’s tantalizing picture? The conclusion of the novel does not provide a clear answer. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Bar-Yosef’s captivating language in the two books discussed here endows the early fantasy with new lyrical qualities and multi-layered meaning.

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The Borders of Messianic Imagination in Jewish Thinking Dov Schwartz

Theology has centuries of practice in debating speculative issues with no concrete basis in the real world or the present time. The very foundation of theology, the nature of the godhead, is a totally theoretical subject. Indeed, by its very definition, the godhead belongs to a different reality, creating a gap that cannot be bridged by means of any human conceptualizations. Theology therefore makes use of various avenues to enable discussion of the divine, such as linguistics (analyzing the validity or invalidity of statements about the godhead), analogous reasoning, and so on. By the same token, the messianic idea in the Jewish religious world is a theological issue per se, with very little concrete connection to the world in which we live. It focuses primarily on a future dream world, and consequently messianic discourse is in many ways based on fantasy, guesswork, and hypotheses. Jewish sources have devoted considerable effort to revealing the basic elements and nature of the future messianic world. And although numerous leading Jewish figures have denounced obsessive immersion in this imaginary realm, they have largely been ignored. The fantasy has occupied the minds of a large number of Jewish thinkers. Below I will trace several developments of the fantasy inherent in the messianic idea. Fantasy and Reality Over the years, messianic fantasy revealed itself to be a strong, salient motivating force in Jewish history and thinking, influencing activities in the nation in the past and continuing to do so today. The fantasy of the wonders of the future messianic world is no less a driving force than is hope. Examples of activism motivated by the messianic fantasy include: — 263 —

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1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

the immigration of groups of Jews to the Land of Israel with the explicit intent of hastening the day of the Redemption (the coming of the Messiah); active efforts to bring lapsed Jews back into the fold of religion on the assumption that this will lead to redemption for the nation (“a whole worthy generation”); actions taken against heresy in order to bring the Redemption; theosophical activity in which mystics attempts to bring the Redemption closer; acts of magic employing a variety of techniques said to influence the coming of the Redemption; numerical calculations and estimates aimed at divining the time of the start of the Redemption and its various stages.1

These activities were all motivated by unconstrained fantasizing about the messianic era. This fantasy is therefore an extremely powerful and active force which, according to many scholars, has shaped Jewish history throughout its different periods. Gershom Scholem, for example, propounded the controversial theory that the messianic idea created the large movements that molded Jewish history in the modern era (the Lurianic Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, the Enlightenment, and perhaps even Zionism).2 Below I will describe several forms of the messianic fantasy in Jewish thinking, relating to three fantasies in particular: 1. 2. 3.

1.

2.

replacement of the natural order by a new order; alteration of the nature of the human body; alteration of the nature of animals.

See Moshe Idel, “Dfusim shel pe’ilut goelet bi-yemei ha-beinayim” [Patterns of Redemptive Activity in the Middle Ages], in Meshikhiyut ve-eskatologia [Messianism and Eschatology], ed. Z. Baras (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1983) [Hebrew]. Eliezer Schweid, “Mistika ve-yahadut lefi Gershom Scholem” [Mysticism and Judaism According to Gershom Scholem], Jerusalem in Jewish Thought (1983) [Hebrew]. — 264 —

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In the course of the discussion, I will offer examples from Jewish scholars in different eras which demonstrate the crucial role of fantasy in shaping the messianic idea. Fantasy 1: A New Cosmic Order Throughout the history of Jewish thinking there have been two opposite poles of messianism, with numerous approaches falling somewhere in between. The first pole can be called apocalyptic. According to this approach, messianic events will occur at the end of the current period. The dramatic end will be accompanied by a series of cataclysmic events that will annihilate some portion of humanity and lead to the destruction of the cosmos. Apocalyptics despair of redeeming the world in its present condition, claiming that a new messianic world will rise from its ashes and will be all good, with no pain or suffering, and will offer eternal life for the body and soul. In other words, the apocalyptic messianic world will bring with it a new world order. Thus, according to the apocalyptic approach, the messianic age can only begin with the end of the current world. Just like points on a graph which can’t move from the negative quadrant to the positive quadrant without passing through the horizontal axis, that is, the value of zero (at least in most functions), it is impossible to move from this world to the messianic world without first collapsing and disintegrating into nothingness. This approach therefore posits the catastrophic end of all humanity (the war of Gog and Magog) before the revelation of the new world. In effect, the apocalyptic perception feeds off the imagination of the person envisioning it. In the religious world, this approach relates indirectly to the apocalyptic visions of the prophets and the Aggadah dealing with the end of the world as we know it. It gives literal interpretation to the prophesies of the End of Days and the homilies of the Redemption. That is, descriptions of the great and awe-filled Day of the Lord with “new skies and a new land,” for example, are to be read as written. In the messianic era there will be a different world on this earth. The opposite pole is the naturalist approach, whereby the coming of the Messiah will not include the collapse of history, but will occur within history. In other words, the messianic world is the current world, and there is no reason to look for any other, fantasy, world. — 265 —

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How will we know it is the messianic world? The answer is simple: the time when the social order is properly aligned, when there are no wars, when every nation has its own land where it lives in peace—that will be the messianic era. This approach is nurtured mostly by rational realistic interpretations of the visions of the End of Days, adopting an allegorical method that takes the apocalyptic prophesies beyond their literal meanings. The new world is no more than this world with a new sociocultural order. It would not be wrong to say, however, that the majority of Jewish sources from the biblical era, the Second Temple period, and the talmudic age display a propensity for the apocalyptic approach. The apocalyptic approach to messianism has several implications, among them: 1.

2.

3.

The anthropological model of the future: according to this perception, future human beings will be entirely different from those in the present, both morally and intellectually. Indeed, in the future people will be flawless. Antinomism: Since people will have no failings whatsoever, there will be no need for Halakha (religious law). Although some thinkers advocated preservation of Halakha despite their apocalyptic attitudes,3 in terms of the system itself, it will be superfluous in the messianic future. The figure of the Messiah: The religious approach propounds the idea of messianic personification, that is, that the characteristics of the future will be embodied in a concrete figure. According to the apocalyptic perception, the Messiah will be, above all, a miracle worker and a wondrous warrior who can use his supernatural powers to modify nature.

The apocalyptic fantasy was given form in Jewish sources in a series 3.

Rabbi Saadia Gaon is one example. — 266 —

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of short midrashic compositions that began to appear during the time of Greek rule in the Second Temple period. They were written in the style of visions by anonymous authors who attributed them to the nation’s dignitaries. Known as “Apocalypses,” these writings use biblical or mishnaic language and are rife with lengthy imaginative descriptions of the future world, combining changes in the cosmic order with the fantasized superiority of the Jews. “The Apocalypse of Elijah,” for example, contains the following description: At that time the Blessed Lord said to Abraham: As your sons have descended to the lowest level . . . so shall they rise above all the nations . . . and then all the nations will come and bow down to every one of Israel and lick the dust of their feet . . . and there will be a crucible of wheat making nine hundred crucibles, and wine, and oil. And each tree will be heavy with delicacies and fruit.4 The beginning of the passage shows the motif of superiority over the Gentiles and the revenge exacted for their treatment of the Jews in the Diaspora. The end describes the fantasy condition of immeasurable crops (a ratio of one to nine hundred). Traditions in the spirit of the Apocalypses can also be found in talmudic and midrashic literature. In the Middle Ages, the apocalyptic approach was given theoretical shape, set forth in theological essays. In this period, it contended directly with the naturalist approach—and triumphed over it.5 The apocalyptic genre maintaining that the end of the world will precede the messianic era, which continues to attract attention to this day,6 also includes the theory of cosmic cyclicity, proposing a repeating cycle of destruction and rebirth. This theory appears occasionally in talmudic literature, and was later expounded systematically in the Kabbalist Doctrine of Sabbaticals, which holds that the world exists in 4.

5. 6.

Y. Even Shmuel, Midrashei Geula: Pirkei ha-apokalipsa ha-yehudit [Homilies of Redemption: Excerpts from the Jewish Apocalypses] (Jerusalem & Tel Aviv: Massada, 1944) [Hebrew]. See also Joel Marcus, “Modern and Ancient Jewish Apocalypticism,” The Journal of Religion 76 (1996): 1-27. See Dov Schwartz, Ha-ra‘ayon ha-mishikhi ba-hagutha: yehudit bimei ha-beinayim [Messianism in Medieval Jewish Thought] (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2005) [Hebrew]. See, for example, David S. Katz & Richard H. Popkin (eds.), Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998). — 267 —

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cycles of 7,000 years. Although there were some scientific versions of the theory, it was spread mainly by Jewish mysticism, where its apocalyptic nature is abundantly apparent.7 The variety of interpretations of the motif of the end of the world, which characterizes apocalyptic messianism, is evidence of the lively messianic imagination. The apocalyptic approach was a major motivating force behind the religious Zionist movement. Although the movement regarded burgeoning Zionism as a stage in naturalist messianism, that is, redemption as a natural progression, this stage was considered merely a gateway to apocalyptic redemption, whose parameters were beyond imagination. To illustrate, Rabbi Nachum Grunhaus of Hovevei Zion, one of the leaders of the Mizrachi movement at the time of its establishment, wrote: When for our part we attempt to prove in actuality how precious and beloved to us is the land of our forefathers, we can do so by holding the hand of the laborers who toil by the sweat of their brow upon the Judean Hills to bring the land back to life, and each of us should strive to the best of his ability to support the hands of our brothers endeavoring to bring our people back and turn the desert into Eden. Then we will please God to grant us a foothold and hope, and our righteousness and the righteousness of the Holy Land will be proven, for the Lord will do miracles and wonders for us beyond the way of nature.8 In view of the context, these remarks are a form of apologetics, maintaining that Zionism does not seek to substitute human redemption for divine redemption, but merely opens the way for it. Thus, religious Zionism assured the non-Zionist Orthodox world that it had no intention of overlooking the miraculous apocalyptic aspect of 7. 8.

See Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1996); Dov Schwartz, The Messianic Idea, 164-165, and the entry “torat ha-shmitut” in the key. From Y.L. Maimon (Fishman), “Toldot ha-mizrachi ve-hitpatchuto” [The History and Development of Mizrachi], in Sefer Ha-mizrachi [The Book of Mizrachi], 57 (Hebrew); see also Dov Schwartz, Hatzionut ha-datit ben higyon le-mishikhiut [Religious Zionism between Logic and Messianism] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1998) [Hebrew]. — 268 —

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the messianic era. Nevertheless, it is clear from Grunhaus’s description that he believed the apocalyptic vision was at the foundations of the Zionist process, and would be realized in its wake. A perception of Zionism as the start of the realization of the final redemption can also be found in the words of Rabbi Pinhas Rozovsky, another religious Zionist activist from the same period, who identified the nineteen century as the End of Days.9 The same attitudes were shared by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and his followers. How did fantasy become a central element in the shaping of messianic hopes in Jewish literature? It may be assumed that the status of the Jews throughout centuries of life in the Diaspora contributed to the predominance of the apocalyptic vision. Persecution, suffering, and humiliation undoubtedly promote the desire for a different reality and for vengeance against the persecutor and abuser. It could also be claimed, however, that since apocalyptic ideas have their roots in the words of the Biblical prophets, they are a product of religious intuition itself. Whatever its source, the fact remains that the apocalyptic approach occupies a crucial place in Jewish messianism. And since it is based on fantasy, it channels religious thinking in that direction. Fantasy 2: The Pure Body As we have seen, apocalyptic messianism envisions a perfect world, utterly different from the world we know in reality. This approach gave rise to a series of fantasies, two of which are discussed below. We begin with the character of the human being in the process of redemption, and then consider the image of animals in the time to come. A further development of the messianic fantasy is the notion of the pure body. Apocalyptics envision the human in the future as a material, physical being who lives and functions in an imagined reality. Materiality, however, contains elements that attest to weakness, imperfections, and aesthetic flaws. Thus, it is clear to apocalyptic messianists that in the future the human body will not perform the acts of digestion and excretion, for example. Moreover, they envision it as immortal. The body familiar to us today disintegrates after its aging and demise. Consequently, the future body, which will live forever, will 9.

Maimon, “The History and Development of Mizrachi,” 80. — 269 —

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have to be something quite different. The concept of the pure body was at the heart of the debates over the philosophy of Rambam (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, or Maimonides), where it is discussed in respect to the question of whether or not the words of aggadic and midrashic literature can be understood other than literally, and if so, to what degree. The matter at issue was therefore the borders of allegoric interpretation, as these writings are rife with statements about the world to come in the messianic era. As noted above, most of the descriptions are apocalyptic in style, as well as in content. Rambam argued that they should not be read literally. In his major Halakhic work, Mishne Torah, he states explicitly that compositions depicting the messianic era as a miraculous time are to be read as “allegory and riddle” (mashal ve-hidah).10 In other words, apocalyptic messianic comments are to be removed from their literal context. The question then becomes: how far are we allowed to take them? Rabbi Meir Halevi Abulafia (known as Ramah), a young religious scholar who began his polemic endeavors toward the end of Rambam’s life, criticized the great man for his perceptions of the messianic world. He sent a number of hostile letters to the center of Rambam’s followers in Provence, one of which was answered by Rabbi Aharon Ben Meshulam. Rabbi Abulafia quoted from Rabbi Aharon’s reply regarding messianic interpretation: You wrote: How can anyone take the words of the aggadah literally and the verses as written, for the Sages have said that in the world-to-come (olam ha-ba) there is no eating nor drinking,11 and elsewhere that the Lord will make a banquet of the leviathan for the righteous in the world-to-come,12 and several places show that in the world-to-come there is eating and drinking. And so when the words contradict each other, he who hears the word of the Lord, he shall see the truth in the eye of his heart.13 10. 11. 12. 13.

Mishne Torah, Hilchot malakhim, 12, 1. Babylonian Talmud, Berachot, 17a; Babylonian Talmud, Baba Bathra, 75a. Katab Alrasail [The Book of Alrasail (Rabbi Abulafia)] (Paris: Yehiel Brill, 1871), 56 [Hebrew]. — 270 —

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Rabbi Aharon points to a contradiction in the words of the sages over whether or not there is eating and drinking in the next world.14 The Talmud relates that God created the male leviathan and its female counterpart, and then killed the female in order to prevent them from mating and “to provide part of the feast of the righteous in the world to come” (Baba Bathra, 74b). Hence, in contrast to the words of Berachot, there is a feast in the future messianic world. Rabbi Aharon believed that there was no eating in the next world, and the feast of the leviathan should be read allegorically. However, it was not merely an allegory of nourishment. For him, eating and drinking were merely examples of the total absence of materiality in the world to come. In other words, he accepted the interpretation of Maimonides, who had previously presented this tale as an indication of the immortality of the intellect, and not as a literal description of the messianic future. Rabbi Abulafia responded sharply: If only I could understand where your heart and your ideas were leading, or what your eyes were implying. If you mean to remove the verses and homilies that demonstrate the resurrection of the dead in the world to come from their literal meaning, Heaven forbid you should say such a thing to anyone who understands and envisions. For the Talmud is overflowing with clear evidence of the final world to come, that it is the end of rewarding the righteous and punishing the evil, and it has corps and body, and no pious man should question that. Do you mean to say that all the homilies which tell of eating and drinking in the world to come, because you found that the Sages said explicitly that there is no eating and drinking, they should not be read literally and the eating and drinking they speak of should be interpreted as an allegory (mashal), to mean that they are 14. Rabbi Abulafia saw “the world to come” as the stage in the messianic era when the dead will be resurrected. In this stage, the body and soul alike would live for eternity. In contrast, Rambam interpreted the term to mean the continued abstract existence of the mind following death. Thus, Rabbi Abulafia differed with Rambam in respect not only to the allegoric method of interpretation, but to the meaning and nature of the next world as well. — 271 —

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basking in the light of the Divine Presence (shekhinah), when the rabbis interpreted them as written? But how can we not read the words about the resurrection of the dead in the world to come as written, for we have found no convincing evidence that they should not be interpreted literally neither large nor small?15 Rabbi Abulafia was unwilling to accept the inductive method as a solution to the contradiction. He advocated a limited allegory: he was ready to admit that there was no eating or drinking in the next world, but utterly rejected Rabbi Aharon’s position that eating and drinking were an allegory of the total absence of materiality in the messianic future. As we have seen, Rabbi Abulafia’s approach could be labeled “the pure body” proposition, which contends that physical life will exist in the eschatological world, but the body will be purified and therefore will not be in need of digesting and excreting food.16 Rabbi Abulafia remained firm in his belief in the physical existence of a pure immortal body in the world to come. Further examples of the “pure body” proposition can be found in Hasidic literature. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the Chabad movement, related to different periods in the messianic world (the Days of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead), and vacillated between two alternatives. On the one hand, he claimed that in the Days of the Messiah there would still be “eating and drinking for the bodies, for all human behaviors will be conducted then as now, and all the commandments will be performed then regarding physical matters just like today, and there is no difference between now and the Days of the Messiah save for the revelation of the light of wisdom, that is, there will be much added wisdom and knowledge in all men.”17 On the other hand, however, he also stated: [In the future, people] will not live from food and victuals at all in the Days of the Messiah, but will live from the hunger in itself, for they are hungry and thirsty 15. Katab Alrasil. 16. For more on this position, see Dov Schwartz, The Messianic Idea, 108-109. 17. Ma’amarei admor ha-zaken [Essays of the Venerable Master and Teacher], 1808, 181 [Hebrew]. — 272 —

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for the living God, of that there will be an abundance to their soul . . . until even their physical body will receive an emanation of life from the vitality of the Elohim deatzilut with all the flavors of material food and victuals.”18 Thus, in the Days of the Messiah, the body will not be nourished in the natural fashion. As we can see, Rabbi Shneur Zalman was undecided as to the form the body would take in the future time. In contrast, he was consistent and unequivocal in regard to the resurrection of the dead: not only the soul would arise, but the physical body as well would reflect the Divine Presence that was the foundation of existence. As he put it: “The physical will also be purified and God will be revealed in bodies as well.”19 The new body that will result from the dew of the resurrection will be “immeasurably purer than the human body now.”20 In Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s perception of the pure body that will follow on the resurrection of the dead, physical nourishment is replaced by spiritual sustenance. Contemplating the secrets of the divine will serve as a substitute for eating and drinking: In the future to come, the body will be sustained primarily by the light of Ein-sof21 as now man is sustained by food, so his body will live and be sustained in the world to come by contemplating on and knowing the light of Ein-sof.22 But in the future to come, when the revelation of the light will encompass the world (sovev kol almin), the physical body will also arise in the resurrection of the dead and will bask in the light of the Divine Presence (shekhinah) and will live with no eating and drinking, for 18. Ma’amarei admor, 1804, 138. 19. Ma’amarei admor, 1808, 64. See also ibid., 374. In certain places, Rabbi Shneur Zalman stated that in the Days of the Messiah, “the physical of this world will be purified,” and then people “will be able to tolerate much greater enlightenment forever,” Siddur admor ha-zaken [Siddur of the Venerated Master and Teacher], 19b [Hebrew]. 20. Likutei torah [Torah readings], 28a. For an extensive discussion of the perception of the pure body and its grounding in the nature of the future world, see Ma’amarei admor, 1809, 42-45. For the motif of the dew of the resurrection, see Dov. Schwartz, The Messianic Idea, 136-140. 21. Chabad distinguishes between infinity, which can not be defined and is therefore beyond discussion, and the infinite light, which is the source of the processes in Creation. 22. Ma’amarei admor, 1803, I, 202. — 273 —

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nothing at all is hidden from the substance of the light (itself).23 Moreover, the joy of revelation for the body and soul alike will derive from the supreme primordial emanation (“beyond tzimzum and division”).24 Rabbi Shneur Zalman encapsulated the distinction between the next world and the resurrection of the dead in terms of perception and emanation in the Kabbalistic precept that the source of emanation in the next world is the sephira of wisdom, while in the time of the resurrection of the dead it is the “all-encompassing (makif kelali) light,” which is superior to the sephira of wisdom.25 The resurrection of the dead is therefore the height of intellection, transcending the Days of the Messiah and the world to come alike. How are we to understand the attribution of realization and fulfillment to the physical body with the resurrection of the dead? Rabbi Shneur Zalman explains that the Divine Presence has two dimensions: 1. 2.

The immanent dimension, which is present in the world and drives it from within. This he terms “fills the world.” The transcendental dimension, which is indifferent to and above the world. This he terms “encompasses the world.”

At the time of the resurrection of the dead, the presence that encompasses the world will reveal itself. What is the meaning of this 23. Likutei Torah, Song of Songs, 42c. 24. According to Likutei Torah, Beha’alotcha, 36a; Shlach, 47d, 48a, 49a. In his writings, Rabbi Shneur Zalman propounded the pure messianic body position, claiming that “in the future to come, when the revelation of the light will encompass the world the physical body will also arise in the resurrection of the dead and will bask in the light of the Divine Presence and will live with no eating and drinking” (Ma’amarei admor, summarizing of Rav Pinhas, 170). And also: “And this is sick of love (Song of Songs, 2:5), in the Diaspora, for the people of Israel can see the infinite light (or Ein sof) in terms of the emanation, but in terms of their physical body they can not perceive its essence and they cried unto the Lord in their trouble (Psalms 107:6) until they were sick, meaning their cry was like the cry of the sick for food who loves it dearly but can not receive it because of the poorness of his body, so because of the poorness of his body so it is because of the poorness of the physical body that all food is despised (ibid., 18), meaning they cannot contemplate on and perceive the essence of the infinite light and if they do it will upset them until they vomit . . . but in the future to come their body will be recreated, meaning they will have thorough purity of body until they attain perception of the essence of the infinite light or Ein sof and will receive plentiful emanation from it” (Ma’amarei admor, 1803, I, 273-274). 25. Ma’amarei admor, 1808, 420. — 274 —

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revelation? As we have said, this dimension is utterly indifferent to its environment. It is often compared to a circle, all of whose points are equidistant from the center. On the other hand, the distinction between the body and the spirit is a personal issue. Consequently, when the encompassing dimension is realized in the period of the resurrection of the dead, the barriers between the body and the spirit will fall, and the body too will be capable of intellectual perceptions.26 Thus, Rabbi Shneur Zalman perceived the resurrection of the dead as the recreation of the world and a new beginning. Neither the occasion of the resurrection in particular, nor the events of the Redemption in general, can be explained in terms of the improvement of the existing order (that is, as a progression). Rather, the resurrection is characterized by a “great leap (dilug),”27 and hence the dramatic future change will obviously occur in respect to the body as well. The concept of the pure body has therefore undergone further development: it is perceived as capable of understanding and wisdom, just like the mind. Another example of the pure body concept comes from Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the son of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the spiritual leader of the Gush Emunim settler movement. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda promoted the animistic idea of a soul in animal and vegetable life, following an ancient scientific theory that also influenced philosophy in the Middle Ages. According to this view, vegetarianism is a virtue. In light of his position, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda wrote: After all this, there is room for a vision of the future, that in the future there will be no eating and drinking, that in the End of Days, together with the greater encompassing universal cosmological perfection the nature of the individual will also be elevated, and there will be no place then for one person to enjoy greater emanation than another but for a whole healthy economy nourished by the original personal individual emanation with no need for other private aid, only from the vital general emanation, the pleasure of the light of 26.

Ibid., 420, 570.59, 65. In Likutei torah, he writes: “When the body is purified to rise to the heavens in the same manner that the purified worlds themselves will rise” (28b). 27. Ma’amarei admor, 1803, 202; 1808, 91. The concept of a “leap” is important in Chabad thinking, and represents the ability to skip over intermediate stages and go directly to the source. — 275 —

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the Divine Presence, which will supply the full needs of all life and existence. The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.28 Thus, in the world to come, human beings will be sustained by themselves and the divine light which will be like a fountainhead. In the new world that will exist in the End of Days, there will be no distinction between animal and vegetable life in terms of the soul, and so the human being who will emerge will require no food. Although Rabbi Zvi Yehuda did not define what he meant by the “End of Days,”29 he appears to be referring to the period of the resurrection of the dead, which will give rise to an immortal man who is not characterized by the physiological functions we perform in the present world. It is impossible to overlook the element of fantasy in this depiction of the messianic period. As we can see, the messianic fantasy led to the concept of a body so pure as to blur the borders between body and soul. Physicality becomes a flawless state, rising to the animative level. Fantasy 3: Alteration of the Animal Kingdom The obsession with the imaginary world that would come into being in the messianic future also led to discussion of the ferocious nature of certain animals. In order for this dream world with no evil in it to exist, the predatory and harmful character of animals would have to change. Maimonides, the sworn enemy of the messianic fantasy, spoke out unequivocally against a change in the nature of the animal kingdom, again indicating his interpretative approach. In Mishne Torah, he wrote: Do not imagine that in the days of the Messiah anything in the way of the world will be done away with, or there will be any change in Creation, but the world will proceed as always, and what is written in Isaiah, the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down 28. Isaiah 60:19; Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, Or le-netivati [Light for My Path], ed. H.Y. Steiner & V.A Kalonsky (Jerusalem: 1988), 247 [Hebrew]. 29. In certain places, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda also referred to the present time as the “End of Days,” e.g., ibid., 260; Netivot yisrael, I, 208, 226; III, 40; Tzemach tzvi, 97; Mitoch haTorah, 147. — 276 —

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with the kid, is an allegory and riddle, for it is said a wolf of the deserts shall destroy them and a leopard shall watch over their cities. So let everyone return to the true faith, and not hurt and not destroy, but eat what is allowed to the people of Israel, for it is said the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and so all that follows these words in the matter of the Messiah are allegories, and in the Days of the Messiah King everyone will know that these were allegories and what they alluded to.30 According to Maimonides, the animals are a metaphor for the nations, and the change in their nature refers to amicable political relations and world peace. The character of the predatory animals (such as the wolf and the leopard) will not be altered in the messianic period. His remarks, phrased as religious rulings, drew considerable opposition. One of his perennial critics, Rabbi Abraham ben David from Provence, an early Kabbalist, wrote a long litany of objections to Mishne Torah. In response to the ruling above, he stated concisely: “Do not imagine that in the days of the Messiah etc. to allegories. I say, in the Torah [it says] I will rid evil beasts out of the land (Lev. 26:6, Ezek. 34:25)?!” Rabbi Abraham advocated interpreting the Torah as written. And the Torah states that there will be no evil beasts in the future to come, or that their nature will be altered. Even in the Middle Ages many scholars sided with this view, including Rabbi Netan’el al-Fayyumi, Nahmanides, Rabbi Joseph the Official, and Rabbi Isaac Arama.31 This approach was promoted even more strongly by the followers of Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, the first chief rabbi of Israel. Before arriving in what was then Palestine, Rabbi Abraham Kook published a series of essays in which he attacked secular nationalism, which he considered insufficient. The articles appeared in the journal Hapeles, edited by Rabbi Eliyahu Akiva Rabinowitz of Poltava. Although Rabbi Rabinowitz initially supported the Zionist movement, he became a harsh critic of it in the wake of the controversy over the move to shape a secular culture. Hapeles, launched in early 1900, consistently lashed out at the Zionist movement, predicting its demise. When the Mizrachi 30. Hilchot Malakhim, 12, 1. 31. Dov Schwartz, The Messianic Idea, 42, 54, 104, 210. — 277 —

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faction was founded, it became a favored target of Hapeles. To a certain degree, its periodical Hamizrach, edited by Rabbi Zeev Ya‘vetz , was initiated as a response to Hapeles. In his articles, Rabbi Abraham Kook described the ideal of religious Zionism, one of whose features was a gradual abstinence from the eating of meat. Rabbi David Hacohen, a student of Rabbi Abraham Kook and a strict vegetarian, edited and republished extracts from his mentor’s articles, all of them dealing with the status of animals, in Hapeles. One, entitled “The Elevation of Animals in the Future to Come,” stated: In a silent voice says the Wisdom of Israel, the Holy One Blessed Be He, the level of animal in the future to come shall become like the man32 today by the ascension of the worlds. And that is the glory of the picture the prophets painted for us of the cultural condition of predatory animals. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the viper’s den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.33 Rabbi Abraham Kook and Rabbi David Hacohen, like many other religious Zionists, accepted the theory of evolution, seeing it as a reflection of the elevation of worlds until their perfection in the messianic era.34 This transcendence will have no limits: the nature of animals will be altered until it becomes the same as that of human beings. Thus, in contrast to the approach of Maimonides, the words 32.Heb. Ha-medaber is a reference to human beings. In other words, in the messianic period, animals will occupy the status that human beings do today. 33. Isaiah 11: 7-9. From Rabbi David Hacohen (“collector and editor”), Hazon Ha-tzimchonut ve-hashalom mi-behina toranit [Vision of Vegetarianism and Peace from the Perspective of the Torah]. Cited in Le-chai ro’i: Ner nishmat yitzhak ra’anan kook (Jerusalem: 1960), 41 [Hebrew]. Originally published in Hapeles, 1903-1904. 34. Examples include Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, founder of the Mizrachi Movement, and Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, chief rabbi of Antwerp and later of Tel Aviv; see Dov Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 217-218. — 278 —

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of the Torah in respect to the nature of the animal kingdom are interpreted literally. As we have seen, Rabbi Hacohen’s republication of Rabbi Abraham Kook’s remarks was ideologically motivated, as the remarks he chose faithfully reflected both his vegetarian ethos and his interpretative method. His son, the current chief rabbi of Haifa, Rabbi She’ar Yeshuv Hacohen, is also a strict vegetarian. But the concept of apocalyptic messianism is no less a driving force behind the belief in the alteration of the nature of beasts than vegetarianism. Once again we find ourselves with a fantasy that blurs the lines between the animal kingdom and the human species. The Battle against Fantasy There is no boundary to the power and influence of the imagination. It is amazing how many heated controversies in Jewish thinking revolve around issues that belong entirely to the realm of fantasy. Naturally, each scholar draws on his own world-view and manner of thinking. Yet the polar differences of opinion discussed here concern questions that, by their very definition, cannot be objectively confirmed, so that the thinkers are dealing interminably with the meaning of a fantasy. On different occasions, the more intellectually minded sought to moderate, temper, or even do away with the element of fantasy. We have seen how Maimonides, a fine representative of intellectualism and rationalism, strove to eliminate the fantasy by means of interpretative and Halakhic tools. In “Hilchot Melachim” and at the end of Mishne Torah, he fastidiously removed the miraculous dimension from the Messiah, and indeed from the entire messianic era.35 Moreover, in a noted passage he explicitly ruled that one should not concern oneself with fantasy: And all these words and their like, human beings will not know what they shall be until they are, for they are obscure words by the prophets. Even scholars have no understanding of these words except by the content of the verses, and therefore they are divided over these 35.

Numerous researchers have dealt with the approach of Rambam. For a discussion and bibliography, see Dov Schwartz, The Messianic Idea, 69-89. — 279 —

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words, and in any case there is no sense to these words and their precise meaning can not be understood. No man must ever concern himself with the words of the Aggadah nor delve into their homilies on these matters and the like, nor give them importance, for they lead neither to piety nor to love.36 We can see the great effort Maimonides put into removing messianism from the philosophical and historical agenda. As both a political and a spiritual leader, he was well aware of the power of the messianic fantasy and feared its implications. But he was destined to fail. History and Jewish scholarship continued to occupy itself with the messianic fantasy and repeatedly test its boundaries. Phenomena like Sabbateanism demonstrated its ability to attract thousands of people who were waiting impatiently for the fantasy to be realized. Conclusion I have dealt here with several motifs of the messianic fantasy in the Jewish world which have had an enduring influence. There is no need to go into detail about the marks of messianism in the events of the twentieth century. Allow me merely to list a few examples: messianic terminology featured prominently among early secular Zionist thinkers such as Micha Josef Berdyczewski and A.D. Gordon; the figure of Rabbi Joseph Della Reina, who sought to hasten the redemption by conjuring magic, became popular in Yiddish and Hebrew literature from the end of the century; and of course, religious Zionism’s interpretation of the events of this generation as stages in the process of the Redemption. It would be wrong to underestimate the role of fantasy in shaping the spiritual, political, and national climate of the Jewish people. The fantasies I have presented here, which occupy the minds of messianic thinkers, can be seen as landmarks in a venerable saga. Moreover, there seems to be no doubt that religious messianic fantasies have served as a fertile source of science fiction and fantasy literature. It would be hard to understand the end of Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, without reference to apocalyptic 36. Mishne Torah, Hilchot Malakhim, 12, 2. — 280 —

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messianism. For centuries, Western religious traditions have been giving vivid expression to the human imagination. The influence of the Jewish messianic idea on the Western world has also made a significant contribution to delineating the borders of the imagination.

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‫—————————————— ‪—————————————— List of Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction‬‬

‫‪Israeli Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction‬‬ ‫‪Published From 1948 to 2011‬‬

‫ס‪ .‬גולדפלוס‪ ,‬ישראל בשנת ‪ ,2000‬תרגום‪ :‬ש‪ .‬סקולסקי‪ ,‬הספר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב‪,‬‬ ‫‪[ 1951‬בבל‪.]2002 ,‬‬ ‫משה בן דור‪ ,‬אמנון מספר לנו על צבא השמיים‪ ,‬ראובן מס‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1956‬‬ ‫שמואל יוסף עגנון‪“ ,‬האדונית והרוכל” (‪ ,)1943‬בספר‪ :‬סמוך ונראה‪ ,‬שוקן‬ ‫תל‪-‬אביב‪.1966 ,‬‬ ‫יצחק חייק‪ ,‬המלחמה הבאה‪ ,‬רמדור‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1968‬‬ ‫יצחק חייק‪ ,‬קץ כדור הארץ‪ ,‬רמדור‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1969‬‬ ‫יהושע גרנות‪ ,‬פרגוד הבדולח‪ ,‬אותפז‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1969‬‬ ‫יוסף עופר‪ ,‬זוהר הארגמן‪ ,‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1970‬‬ ‫עמוס קינן‪ ,‬שואה ‪ ,2‬א‪ .‬ל‪( .‬הוצאה מיוחדת)‪.1975 ,‬‬ ‫מרדכי שישא ואליעזר שישא‪ ,‬אנטרופיה‪ ,‬אל”ף‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1979‬‬ ‫דן צלקה‪ ,‬המסע השלישי של האלדברן‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1979‬‬ ‫יוסף עופר‪ ,‬זוהר הארגמן‪ ,‬ביתן‪.1970 ,‬‬ ‫חיים רבין‪ ,‬היבשת האבודה‪ :‬ארץ האוניקלונים‪ ,‬ניב‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1974‬‬ ‫דוד מלמד‪ ,‬צבוע בקורונדי‪ ,‬תמוז‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1980‬‬ ‫עמירם פאל‪ ,‬מסע במרחבי הזמן‪ ,‬אור‪-‬עם‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪1980.‬‬ ‫הלל דמרון‪ ,‬מלחמת המינים‪ ,‬דומינו‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1982‬‬ ‫אלי שרייבר‪ ,‬שוויצריה‪ ,‬דליה פלד‪ ,‬הרצליה ‪.1982‬‬ ‫רם מואב (מילשטיין)‪ ,‬זרמת חכמים‪ ,‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1982‬‬ ‫עמוס קינן‪ ,‬הדרך לעין חרוד‪ ,‬עם עובד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1984‬‬ ‫בנימין תמוז‪ ,‬פונדקו של ירמיהו‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1984‬‬ ‫רות בלומרט‪ ,‬הצריח‪ ,‬כתר ירושלים‪.1984 ,‬‬ ‫אורציון ברתנא‪ ,‬שריפות‪ ,‬ספריית הפועלים‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1985‬‬ ‫רם מואב (מילשטיין)‪ ,‬לונה ‪ -‬גן העדן הגנטי‪ ,‬זמורה ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1985‬‬ ‫דן צלקה‪ ,‬משחק המלאכים‪ ,‬עם עובד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1986‬‬ ‫דוד גרוסמן‪ ,‬עיין ערך אהבה‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1986‬‬ ‫נעמי קיטרון‪ ,‬ואת להט החרב המתהפכת‪ ,‬יוסף שרברק בע”מ‪ ,‬תל אביב ‪.1987‬‬ ‫בנימין גלאי‪ ,‬המוות השחור או דברי ימי גמיני‪ ,‬דביר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1987‬‬ ‫יצחק בן‪-‬נר‪ ,‬מלאכים באים‪ ,‬כתר ירושלים ‪.1987‬‬ ‫עמוס קינן‪ ,‬את והב בסופה‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1988‬‬ ‫יעקב אבישר‪ ,‬אנשים מכוכב אחר‪ ,‬רשפים‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪1988‬‬ ‫גדעון תלפז‪ ,‬אבשלום והנזיר‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1989‬‬ ‫— ‪— 282‬‬

‫—————————————— ‪—————————————— List of Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction‬‬

‫י‪ .‬בוסידן‪ ,‬סוד הראשונים‪ ,‬תמר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1984‬‬ ‫יהושע בר יוסף‪ ,‬אוטופיה בכחול לבן‪ ,‬ספרית מעריב‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1990‬‬ ‫אורלי קסטל בלום‪ ,‬היכן אני נמצאת‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1990‬‬ ‫יבשם עזגד‪ ,‬עבודת נמלים‪ ,‬ספרית הפועלים‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1992‬‬ ‫עמי דביר‪ ,‬אבימלך עולה בסערה השמימה‪ ,‬ספרית מעריב‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1993‬‬ ‫גיל אילטוביץ‪ ,‬תיקון ‪ :‬מסע מיסטי אל סוד הקיום‪ ,‬ירון גולן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1994‬‬ ‫י‪.‬ל תלו‪ ,‬האני מאמין של ורה‪ ,‬סער‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1995‬‬ ‫יבשם עזגד‪  ,‬מעוף כלולות‪  ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1995‬‬ ‫גבריאל מוקד‪ ,‬ואריאציות‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד תל‪-‬אביב‪.1995 ,‬‬ ‫עמי דביר‪ ,‬הקוף הפטפטן‪ ,‬ספרית מעריב‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1995‬‬ ‫אורלי קסטל בלום‪ ,‬המינה ליזה‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1995‬‬ ‫אילן עמית‪ ,‬ים השמשות‪ ,‬ירון גולן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1996‬‬ ‫מיכאל עומר‪ ,‬הגיאוגרפיה של סוף העולם‪ ,‬אופוס‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1997‬‬ ‫גדעון פלד‪ ,‬צחוקו של צבוע ‪ -‬ועוד סיפורי כשפים‪ ,‬הד ארצי – מעריב‪.1997 ,‬‬ ‫חמוטל שבתאי‪ ,2020 ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1997‬‬ ‫אסף גברון‪ ,‬אייס‪ ,‬גוונים‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1997‬‬ ‫הדי בן‪-‬עמר‪ ,‬בשם שמים‪ ,‬עם‪-‬עובד תל‪-‬אביב‪.1998 ,‬‬ ‫אתגר קרת‪ ,‬הקייטנה של קנלר‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1998‬‬ ‫מיכאל עומר‪ ,‬מתקפת ברווז‪ ,‬ירון גולן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1999‬‬ ‫אביבה גיטלמן ‪ 2030 ,‬וקצת‪ ,‬א‪ .‬נרקיס‪ ,‬הרצליה ‪.1999‬‬ ‫אלכס אפשטיין‪ ,‬אהובתו של מטפס ההרים‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1999‬‬ ‫אורלי תורן‪ ,‬נשיקת מוות‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1999‬‬ ‫גיל הראבן‪ ,‬הדרך לגן עדן‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.1999‬‬ ‫חיים חיימוף‪ ,‬החווה‪ ,‬זמורה ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1998‬‬ ‫ברי (ברוך) פריגת‪ ,‬הארץ המובטחת‪ ,‬הד ארצי‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.1999‬‬ ‫אלכס אפשטיין‪ ,‬הגיבורים הצהובים‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.2000‬‬ ‫מילון מהפך‪ ,‬עם הקדמה מאת אלכס אפשטיין‪ ,‬גוונים‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪2000‬‬ ‫מנואלה דבירי‪ ,‬ביצה של שוקולד‪ ,‬ידיעות אחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2000‬‬ ‫שלמה שובל‪ ,‬למה העב”מים טסים בדרך כלל בשלשות?‪ ,‬כרמל‪ ,‬ירושלים‬ ‫‪.2000‬‬ ‫שריאל שני‪  ,‬הנוכרי בסבך הגדה‪ ,‬ידיעות אחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2000‬‬ ‫יעל חבר‪ ,‬על אחת כמה וכמה‪ ,‬כרמל‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.2000‬‬ ‫אכס אפשטיין‪ ,‬אודיסיאה‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.2001‬‬ ‫גלעד עצמון‪ ,‬מורה נבוכים‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.2001‬‬ ‫אמיר אור‪ ,‬שיר טאהירה‪ ,‬חרגול‪-‬עם עובד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪. 2001‬‬ ‫חנן שטינהרט‪ ,‬קוקש קודש‪ :‬סיפורו של דחף לא בר‪-‬כיבוש‪ ,‬סהר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב‬ ‫‪.2001‬‬ ‫נאווה סמל‪ ,‬צחוק של עכברוש‪ ,‬ספרי חמד‪-‬ידיעות אחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪2001‬‬ ‫— ‪— 283‬‬

‫—————————————— ‪—————————————— List of Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction‬‬

‫אתגר קרת‪ ,‬אניהו‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב‪.2002 ,‬‬ ‫קרלוס בן‪-‬נון‪ ,‬האמת‪ 4102 ,‬צ’ריקובר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2002‬‬ ‫ורד טוכטרמן‪ ,‬לפעמים זה אחרת‪ ,‬אופוס‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2002‬‬ ‫אורלי קסטל בלום‪ ,‬חלקים אנושיים‪ ,‬כנרת‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2002‬‬ ‫אתגר קרת‪ ,‬צנורות‪ ,‬זמורה ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2002‬‬ ‫עמיחי שפירא‪ ,‬יום הדין ‪ :‬רומן אפוקליפטי‪ ‬הוצאת חלונות‪-‬עלים‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב‬ ‫‪ 2002‬אלכס אפשטיין‪ ,‬מתכוני חלומות‪ ,‬בבל‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2002‬‬ ‫אלכס אפשטיין‪ ,‬ספריה דמיונית‪ ,‬בבל‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪( 2002‬מצוי גם בגרסה‬ ‫מקוונת)‪.‬‬ ‫אורציון ברתנא‪ ,‬אדום וסיפורים אחרים‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2002‬‬ ‫גל אמיר‪ ,‬לילה אדום‪ ,‬זמורה ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2003‬‬ ‫אלי שרייבר (חתולי)‪ ,‬מותק‪ ,‬ידיעות אחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2003‬‬ ‫דרור בורנשטיין‪ ,‬אבנר ברנר‪ ,‬בבל‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2003‬‬ ‫אפרת רומן אשר‪ ,‬עירושלם‪ ,‬בבל‪.2003 ,‬‬ ‫שלמה לניאדו‪ ,‬אדום‪ ,‬ידיעות אחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2003‬‬ ‫גיא חסון‪ ,‬הצד האפל‪ ,‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2003‬‬ ‫עמנואל עצמון‪ ,‬העגורן‪ ,‬עצמון‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2003‬‬ ‫דניאל שלם‪ ,‬אחים מן המדבר‪ ,‬ידיעות האחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2003‬‬ ‫חנן קוגל‪ ,‬ארמדין (חלק ‪ :)I‬חרב אלף הראמות‪ ,‬מישכל‪-‬ידיעות אחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬‬ ‫אביב ‪.2003‬‬ ‫הגר ינאי‪ ,‬מכונת הנצח של אלכס‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫דוד טרבאי‪ ,‬סטלקר‪ ,‬עם עובד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫שלמה שלמון‪ ,‬רקויאם לרנסנס‪ ,‬תמוז‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫אלונה קמחי‪ ,‬לילי לה טיגרס‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫סייד קשוע‪ ,‬ויהי בוקר‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪2004‬‬ ‫גיל אילוטוביץ‪ ,‬יש כאן מישהו‪ ,‬ידיעות אחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫אופיר טושה גפלה‪ ,‬עולם הסוף‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫אלי שרייבר‪ ,‬בוקר טוב אליהו‪ ,‬גוונים‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫לאה איני‪ ,‬ענק‪ ,‬מלכה ואמן המשחקים‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫יקי מנשפרנרוינד‪ ,‬הכובש והכלב‪ ,‬בבל‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫יהודית שמר‪ ,‬ברוח ובדם‪ ,‬צבעונים‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2004‬‬ ‫אורלי קסטל בלום‪ ,‬עם אורז לא מתווכחים‪ :‬מבחר סיפורים‪ ,‬כנרת‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב‬ ‫‪.2004‬‬ ‫חיים חיימוף‪ ,‬הקדחת השחורה ומות החילוני האחרון‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬‬ ‫אביב‪.2004 ,‬‬ ‫חנן קוגל‪ ,‬ארמדין (חלק ‪ :)II‬אל ממלכת החושך‪ ,‬מישכל‪-‬ידיעות אחרונות‪,‬‬ ‫תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫גיא חסון‪ ,‬מציאות המשחק‪ ,‬תרגום מאנגלית‪ :‬יעל אכמון‪ ,‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב‬ ‫— ‪— 284‬‬

‫—————————————— ‪—————————————— List of Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction‬‬

‫‪.2005‬‬ ‫עמוס עוז‪ ,‬פתאום בעומק היער‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫חגי דגן ‪ ,‬למלך אין בית‪ ,‬חרגול‪ ,+‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫נמרוד הראל‪ ,‬כפירה‪ ,‬אסטרולוג‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫אלכס אפשטיין‪ ,‬לכחול אין דרום‪ ,‬עם עובד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫מרית בן ישראל‪ ,‬טבע דומם‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד ‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫רונן אברמסון‪ ,‬האדם האחרון‪ ,‬תמוז‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫יעקב קמין‪ ,‬יממה‪ ,‬קדמת עדן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫יעקב קמין‪ ,‬סטראני‪ ,‬קדמת עדן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫יעקב קמין‪ ,‬בבואה‪ ,‬קדמת עדן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫רונן אברמסון‪ ,‬האדם האחרון‪ ,‬תמוז‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫ירון שמש‪ ,‬התולעת‪ ,‬אורלי לוי‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2005‬‬ ‫נאווה סמל‪ ,‬אישראל‪ ,‬ידיעות אחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫חגי אברבוך‪ ,‬קליידוסקופ‪ ,‬קדמת עדן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫מיקי בן‪-‬כנען‪ ,‬אם החיטה‪ ,‬ספרא‪/‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫ניר ברעם‪ ,‬מחזיר החלומות‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫עזריאל לורבר‪ ,‬רעש מלחמה‪ ,‬ידיעות ספרים‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫אלה מושקוביץ‪-‬וייס‪ ,‬גם אתה יכול!‪ ,‬ידיעות אחרונות‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫אורי עידן‪ ,‬נולדו חופשיים‪ ,‬פרדס‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫ניר יניב‪ ,‬כתוב כשד משחת‪ ,‬אודיסאה‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫זכריה סיטשין‪ ,‬כוכב הנפילים‪ ,‬בן‪-‬עמי‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫גלי צבי‪-‬וייס‪ ,‬צלילות הערפל‪ ,‬טרקלין‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫יואב אבני‪ ,‬שלושה דברים לאי בודד‪ ,‬כנרת‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫אסף מזוז‪ ,‬קינת העורב‪ :‬איחוד הגורלות‪ ,‬אסטרולוג‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2006‬‬ ‫שהרה בלאו‪ ,‬יצר לב האדמה‪ ,‬כנרת זמורה‪-‬ביתן דביר‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.2007 ,‬‬ ‫אמנון רובינשטיין‪ ,‬הים שמעלינו‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2007‬‬ ‫חגי דגן‪ ,‬והארץ שטה‪ ,‬חרגול‪-‬עם עובד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2007‬‬ ‫ארז משה דורון‪ ,‬לוחמי התמורות‪ :‬קורות הלחמה האחרונה‪ ,‬לב הדברים‪,‬‬ ‫מבוא חורון ‪.2007‬‬ ‫רביב מיוחס‪ ,‬המגשר‪ ,‬אופיר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2007‬‬ ‫עופר דגן‪ ,‬איילנד‪ ,‬סער‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2007‬‬ ‫אורלי קסטל‪-‬בלום‪ ,‬דולי סיטי‪ ,‬הספריה החדשה‪-‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב‬ ‫(‪.2007 )1992‬‬ ‫שי בצלאל אבנון‪ ,‬פארק באקפנהיים‪ ,‬אסטרולוג‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2007‬‬ ‫אסף אשרי‪ ,‬סימנטוב‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2008‬‬ ‫יוסי יזרעאלי המשורר השביעי‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.2008‬‬ ‫אסף גברון‪ ,‬הידרומניה‪ ,‬זמורה ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2008‬‬ ‫סיגלית דיל‪ ,‬הבובה‪ ,‬עם עובד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2008‬‬ ‫— ‪— 285‬‬

‫—————————————— ‪—————————————— List of Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction‬‬

‫גור שומרון‪ ,‬קפל זמן‪ ,‬מודן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2008‬‬ ‫גבריאל מוקד‪ 8 ,‬מטאוואריאציות ‪ ,‬מהדיר‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2009‬‬ ‫יואב אבני‪ ,‬החמישית של צ’ונג לוי‪ ,‬זמורה ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2009‬‬ ‫אופיר טושה‪-‬גפלה ‪ ,‬ביום שהמוסיקה מתה ‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.2010‬‬ ‫מיקי בן כנען‪ ,‬הקרקס הגדול של הרעיונות‪ ,‬אחוזת בית‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2010‬‬ ‫אתגר קרת‪ ,‬פתאם דפיקה בדלת‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2010‬‬ ‫יהודה ישראלי ודור רווה‪ ,‬מסופוטמיה‪ :‬שתיקת הכוכבים‪ ,‬עם עובד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב‬ ‫‪.2010‬‬ ‫גון בן ארי‪ ,‬ילדי הסקויה‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2010‬‬ ‫שמעון אדף‪ ,‬כפור‪ ,‬כנרת‪-‬זמורה‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2010‬‬ ‫יואב בלום‪ ,‬מצרפי המקרים‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים ‪.2011‬‬ ‫יואב כץ‪ ,‬נתב”ג‪ ,‬עם‪-‬עובד‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2011‬‬ ‫יהודה איגוס‪ ,‬מפגש לילית ‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2011‬‬ ‫שמעון אדף‪ ,‬מוקס נוקס‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2011‬‬ ‫יואב אבני‪ ,‬הרצל אמר‪ ,‬זמורה‪-‬ביתן‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2011‬‬ ‫ורד טוכטרמן‪ ,‬דם כחול‪ ,‬יניב‪ ,‬תל‪-‬אביב ‪.2011‬‬

‫— ‪— 286‬‬

—————————————— List of Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction ——————————————

Editors Danielle Gurevitch is an ethnologist and associate dean of the Faculty of Humanities, and the director and lecturer at the Multidisciplinary Program at Bar Ilan University. Her studies include contemporary fantasy literature and its origins in medieval English and French prose. Gurevitch is the editor of the Hebrew version of With Both Feet on the Clouds: On Fantasy in Hebrew Literature with Hagar Yanai, published by Graff Press and the Heksherim Institute at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2009. Elana Gomel is an associate professor at the Department of English and American Studies of Tel-Aviv University, Israel. She has been a visiting scholar at Princeton, Stanford, the University of Hong Kong, and other institutions. Her interests include narrative theory, Charles Dickens, multiculturalism, and science fiction. She is the author of You and We: Being Russian in Israel (2006), in addition to four academic books, numerous articles and a forthcoming fantasy novel. Her latest book is Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination (Continuum, 2010). Rani Graff is the chief editor, founder, and publisher of Graff Publishing. Graff Publishing, founded in 2004, specializes in science fiction, fantasy, and young adults literature. A lawyer and content team leader for a hi-tech company in his past, Rani was also the second chairman of the Geffen Award, to which he also wrote the first set of rules. Among the authors that have been published by Graff are Guy Gavriel Kay, Connie Willis, Robert Charles Wilson, Ellen Kushner, Diana Wynn Jones, Cory Doctorow, Rick Riordan, Cassandra Claire, Holly Black, and Mark Twain. Graff Publishing was also the Israeli publisher of the Hebrew edition of With Both Feet on the Clouds, which was the first non-fiction book dealing with Israeli fantasy publishing (or lack of it) in Israel since the country was founded.

— 287 —

—————————————— List of Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction ——————————————

List of Contributors by Alphabetical Order

Anat Aderet, coordinator of the Yiddish program at Bar-Ilan University, wrote her PhD on Itineraries in Yiddish to Eretz-Israel in the 17th and 18th centuries under the supervision of Prof. Avidov Lipsker (2006). Eitan Bar-Yosef is senior lecturer in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Author of The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism, Bar-Yosef specializes in postcolonial theory and Israeli cultural studies. Sahara Blau is a writer and a journalist, as well as an instructor at the Holocaust Research institute. She is the initiator of the national alternative Holocaust memorial ceremonies and the editor of a play, The Last One (Ha-achrona) and the novels, The Book of Creation (Yetzer Lev Ha-adama), and Model Girls (Naarot Lemofet, 2012). Shmulik Duvdevani is a cinema researcher and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, as well as other leading cinema and arts institutes. In addition, he serves as a film critic at Y-net. His book, First Person Camera: Personal Documentary Film in Israel was published in 2010. Gail Hareven is a writer and a member of the Academy for the Hebrew Language. She studied behavioral science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Talmud and Jewish philosophy at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Hareven is one of the leading voices in Israel, and has written widely on politics and feminist issues. She has been a columnist for Maariv, Hadashot, the Jerusalem Report, and Lady Globes; she also writes book reviews for the Hebrew press. In addition, Hareven teaches feminist theory and gives writing workshops and lectures on a variety of sociocultural topics. In 2006, she was visiting professor at the University of Illinois. Hareven has published seven novels, three collections of short stories, two non-fiction books, two children`s books, and four — 288 —

—————————————————— List of Contributors ——————————————————

plays, all of which have been staged. For her novel, The Confessions of Noa Weber (My True Love), Hareven received the prestigious Sapir Prize (2002) and the Best Translated Novel Award. Orley K. Marron holds degrees in art and in biology, an MSc in Computer Science and a PhD in English Literature. She teaches students and teachers using a multidisciplinary approach to art, science and literature. Her research topics include: cognitive and emotional aspects of fantasy literature, the function of animated art in texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Lewis Carroll, alien Theory of Mind, objects as formal logic mediators, and dynamics of relationships between models, artists, art and audiences. Ioram Melcer is a writer and a translator. His books include Snow in Albania, Does Lisbon Exist?, Pelé: A God in Flesh and Blood, Hibát Zion, and The Man Who Was Buried Twice. Melcer has translated more than 80 literary works from Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, English, and Catalan, and has contributed hundreds of articles to various major Israeli newspapers and magazines. He is a regular contributor to the cultural section of the Uruguayan newspaper El País and the winner of awards: the Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew Writers; the Bernstein Prize for Literary Criticism in the Press; and the Bnei Brith Prize for Journalism. Noa Manheim studied film and television in Tel Aviv University, Multidisciplinary Studies at Bar Ilan Univeristy, and for seven years has been a literary critic for the largest newspaper in Israel. She has hosted a literary television show (alongside author and translator Ioram Melcer) and translated Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Robert McKee’s Story into Hebrew. In 2005 she joined the editorial staff of Kinneret-ZmoraDvir, the largest publishing house in Israel, as an editor of Hebrew literature. In 2009 she was appointed head of the Hebrew literature department. Ruby Newman is an associate professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto. Her publications include an edited volume on non-traditional education for women, articles and chapters on Ethiopian Israeli women’s narratives, and essays on women in — 289 —

—————————————————— List of Contributors ——————————————————

the Bible. She is currently completing a project on Jewish immigrant women in early twentieth century New York. She lectures and teaches extensively on modern Israeli fiction. Ido Peretz was born and raised in Jerusalem. He has an MA in Hebrew literature from Tel Aviv University and a degree in psychology. He is now working at Kinneret Zmora Dvir publishing house. Bilhah Rubinstein is a retired lecturer from the comparative literature department, Bar Ilan University. She is the author of Fantastic Elements in Literature (on Mermee, Gogol, Poe, Kafka, Agnon); The Concealed Beyond The Revealed: Kabala and Poetics; Joy of Life Against Attraction of Death (on T. Mann, Y. Bar Yosef, G.G.Marquez); and Reading Between the Lines. Rubinstein had also published several comparative literature articles and has translated some of the works of I. Bashevis-Singer, A. Kacyzne and Z. Shneour from Yiddish to Hebrew. Dov Schwartz, professor at Bar Ilan University, is one of Israel’s leading philosophers. Schwartz is a prolific writer; his studies vary from the intricacies of medieval astrology and astral magic to contemporary Jewish ideologies. He is chair of the Nathali and Isidor Friedman Institute for the teaching of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Philosophy and the head of the interdisciplinary programs, as well as former dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Bar Ilan University.

— 290 —

————————————————————— Index —————————————————————

Index

Abarbanel, Nitza 18 n.69 Eve and Lilith 18 n.69 Abraham Ben Eliezer ha-Levi, rabbi 248 The Epistle of the Mystery of Redemption 248 Abraham ben David (RABaD) 277 Abramov, Etti 137 n.60 Ha-metim sheli lo metu [My Dead Didn’t Die] 137 n.60 Abramson, Glenda 121 n.24 Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel 121 n.24 Abulafia, Meir Halevi, rabbi 270271, 271 n.14, 272 Katab Alrasail [The Book of Alrasail (Rabbi Abulafia)] 270 n.13, 272 n.15 Adaf, Shimon 14 n.10, 58, 78 n.35 A Mere Mortal 14, 14 n.10, 78 n.35 Nuntia 58 Adams, Douglas 15 Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency 15, 84 Adams, Percy G. 210 n.14, 212, 213 n.20 Travelers and Travel Liars 16601800 210 n.14, 212, 213 n.20 Aderet, Anat 13 n.8, 207, 208 n.2, 210 n.6 Itinerariah beYiddish: Rishmei Masa’ot leEretz Hakodesh beMei’ot Ha 17-18 [Itineraries in Yiddish: Travel-ogues to the Holy Land in the 17th and 18th Centuries] 208 n.2, 210 n.6

Agadati, Baruch 141 n.3 This is the Land 141 n.3 Agadat Arba’at haShevuyim [The Tale of the Four Captives] 215-216, 216 n.27, 216 n.28 Agadat R’ Meshulam [The Tale of R’ Meshulam] 215 Aggadah 265, 270, 280 Agnon, S.Y. 66, 66 n.16, 163 At the Handles of the Lock: Love Stories 66 n.16 Leilot [Nights] 163 Akarish, Yitzhak 214, 215 n.25 Kol Mevaser, A Study of the Ten Tribes 214, 215 n.25 Akiva, rabbi 84 n.40, 255 n.4 Aleichem, Sholom 116 n.10, 151 The Treasure 116 n.10 Alekseeva, L.M. 183, 183 n.14 Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR. Noveishii period 183 n.14 Alexander, Tamar 221 n.4, 222 n.5 Darkhei shiluv ha-sipoor be-Sefer Hasidim [Integration of the Story in Sefer Hasidim] 221 n.4 ’Shakhen began eden’: Sipoor amami be-hekshero ha-iyuni [‘Neighbor in the Garden of Eden’: Folktale in the Theoretical Context] 221 n.4 Dmuto shel Ha-Ari be-sipoor hasefaradi-yehudi [The Figure of Ha-Ari in the Sephardic Jewish Story] 222 n.5 Aloni, Nissim 118, 118 n.16, 119, 140

— 291 —

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Aunt Lisa 118 Gypsies of Jaffa 118 Most Cruel the King 118 Wild Deceased, The 140 Aloni, Udi 146, 162 Forgiveness (film) 146, 162 Alterman, Nathan 74, 117, 119 Ghosts’ Inn 117 Joy of the Poor 119 Amarilio, Moni 84 Amichai, Yehuda 56 n.1, 57 n.3 Gods Change, Prayers Are Here to Stay 56 n.1 Amiel, Moshe Avigdor, rabbi 278 n.34 Amir, Eli 46 Scapegoat 46 Amitai, Smadar 110 Red Ribbons 110 Ankori, Micah 259 n.13 Ze ha-ya’ar ein lo sof [Wood Without End] 259 n.13 Ansky, S. 20 n.28, 115, 155 The Dybbuk 20 n.28, 115, 115 n.8, 116, 116 n.1, 117, 119-120, 125, 139, 155 Appelfeld, Batia 116 n.11 Nilkhamim be-toch nafsham, mitlabtim be-toch atzman: Al mishpat agudat hasofrim and ha-sifrut ha-ivrit be-inyano shel ha-dibuk [A War in Their Souls, a Debate within Themselves: On the Trial of the Writers’ Association and Hebrew Literature in the Matter of ‘The Dybbuk’] 116 n.11 Arabian Nights 148, 151, 162 Arama, Isaak ben Moses, rabbi 277 Arendt, Hannah 108 n.3 Artzi, Shlomo 86 n.42, 90 Ashery, Asaf 19 n.23, 56-57, 57 n.2, 59-61, 65 n.14, 68, 74-78, 81-82

Soothsayer 19 n.23, 56-57, 57 n.2, 58-62, 64, 69, 75 n.29, 77, 7982, 86 Asimov, Isaak 173-174, 189 Ashman, Aharon 117 This Land 117 Auerbach, Jerold S. 173, 173 n.8 Are We One? 173, 173 n.8 Austen, Jane 43 Pride and Prejudice 43 Ayme, Marcel 18, 19 n.21 Le Passe-Muraille 18 Avatar (film) 27 Avidan, David 86, 86 n.43 Power of Attorney 86 n.43 Azoulay-Hasfari, Hana 142 Baal Shem Tov 71 Babylonian Talmud 62 n.13, 72, 73 n.23, 84 n.40, 121 n.25, 270 n.11-12 Baer, Yitzhak 221 n.4 Ha-megama ha-datit/chevratit shel Sefer Hasidim [The Religious/ Social Trend of Sefer Hasidim] 221 n.4 Bagritsky, Eduard 178 February 178 Bakhtin, Mikhail 61, 61 n.11, 81, 81 n.36, 82, 83 n.38-39 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays 61 n.11 Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics 81 n.36 The Dialogic Imagination 83 n.3839 Bar Kedma, Emanuel 127 n.33 Ha-tefilot hayu le-marshim [The Prayers Became Marches] 127 n.33 Bar-Levav, Avriel 222 n.6

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Another place: The Cemetery in Jewish Culture 222 n.6 Shimon Bar Yohai, rabbi 71, 84 n.40, 250, 253 Bar-Yosef, Eitan 20-21, 21 n.30, 26 Bar-Yoseph ( Bar-Yosef), Yehoshua 13 n.8, 249, 256, 256 n.7, 256 n.9, 261-262 Enchanted Town [Ir Ksuma] 256 Tabernacle of Peace [Sukat Shalom] 256 Al kishrei ha-mitos ha-chaserim lanu [On the Mythical Connections We are Lacking] 256 n.7 Stripy Tunic 256 n.8 Barabash, Uri 147 Beyond the Walls (film) 147 Dreamers,The (film) 147-148 Baram, Nir 35 Baras, Z. 264 n.1 Barlow, Bela 113 Bartal, Israel and Shmeruk, Khone 210 n.16, 210 n.17 ‘Tela’ot Moshe’: Sefer haGeographi haRishon beYiddish beTi’ur EretzYisrael shel R’ Mosheh be-R’ Avraham haGer [The Trials and Tribulations of Moshe: The First Yiddish Geography Book and the Description of Eretz-Israel by R’ Moshe ben R’ Abraham the Proselyte] 210 n.16 Yerushalayim baZman haZeh leR’ Alexandere ben Moshe Ethoizen [Contemporary Jerusalem by R. Alexandere ben Moshe Ethausen] 210 n.17 Bartana, Ortzion 255 n.6 Ha-fantasia be-siporet dor ha-medina [Fantasy in the Literature of the Generation of State Building] 255 n.6

Bashevis Singer, Isaac 20 Baumel, Zygmunt 37-38, 38 n.20 Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence 38 n.20 Beer-Hoffman, Richard 127 Jacob’s Dream 127 Beetlejuice (movie) 133 Ben Dor, Orna and Niv, Koby 157 New Land (film) 157-160, 162 Ben-Gurion, David 172 Ben-Sasson, Haim Hillel 238 n.15 Perakim be-toldot ha-yehudim biyamei ha-benayim [Chapters in the History of the Jews in the Middle Ages] 238 n.15 Ben-Zvi, Linda 127 n.35 Ben Zvi, Yitzhak 211-212, 212 n.19, 213, 215 n.24, 218 n.29 Gelilot Erets Yisrael: im tirgum le ivrit be shem Igeret HaKodesh 212, 212 n.19, 213, 215 n.24, 218 n.29 Becker, Israel 151 2 Kuni Lemel (film) 151 Benayahu, Meir 222 n.5 Toldot Ha-Ari 222 n.5, 229, 239, 243 Benjamin, Walter 34, 108, 108 n.3, 127 Illuminations 108 n.3 Bentwich, Gur , 146 Total Love (film) 146 Berdyczewski, Micha Josef 280 Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas 31 Social Construction of Reality 31 Beowulf 13, 13 n.6 Bergman, Ingmar 132 Berlin, Charles 147 n.14 Berlowitz, Yaffa 208 n.4 Sippurei Masa’ot BaAliyah HaRishonah: Hivatzruto shel

— 293 —

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Genre Eretzyisra’eli [First Aliya Travel Stories: The Creation of an Israeli Genre] 208 n.4 Bialik, Hayim Nahman 141, 166 Blau, Sarah (Sahara), 10, 15 n.13, 58, 199 The Book of Creation [Yetzer lev haadama] 58 Bloch, Chana 56 n.1 Blum, Yoav 58, 58 n.5 Mosaic of Events (Mitzrafei Hamikrim) 58 Bodner, Ehud, and Iancu, Iulian, and Sarel, Amiram, and Einat, Haim 90 n.9 Innovations: Accommodations: Efforts to Support Special-Needs Soldiers Serving in the Israeli Defense Forces 90 n.9 Bogart, Hamphrey 148 Borges, Jorge Louis 19-20, 33, 197198 Israel 197 Boyle, T.C. 50 The Tortilla Curtain 50 Bracket, Leigh 35 The Long Tomorrow 35 Bradstreet, Anne 99 n.23 Verses Upon the Burning of Our House 99 n.23 Bresheeth, Haim 199 n.1, 200, 201 n.1 Marking the Social Other by Blood: The Vampire Genre 199 n.1, 200 The Development of the Vampire Genre: Representation of the Social Other 201 n.1 Bronner, Simon J. 109 n.5 Bronte, Charlotte 27, 27 n.2, 50 Jane Eyre 27, 27 n.2 Brown, Dan 57 The Da Vichi Code 57 Buffy the Vampire Slayer

(TV series) 204 Bukai, Rafi 147 Avanti Popolo (film) 147-148 Burgess, Anthony 16 A Clockwork Orange 16 Burstein, Yigal 146 Buzz (film) 146 Buzaglo, Haim 147 Fictitious Marriage (film) 147 Chickering, Jr., Howell D. 13 n.6 Carlson, Marvin 132 n.47 Invisible presences: Performance intertextuality 132 n.47 Carmel, Marco 146 My Lovely Sister (film) 146 Carpentier, Alejo 193, 193 n.4, 194198 The Kingdom of this Earth [El Reino de Este Mundo] 193, 193 n.4, 194, 196-197 Carroll, Lewis 14 n.9, 88 Alice in Wonderland 14 n.9, 14 n.11 TheHunting of the Snark 88 Through the Looking Glass 14 n.11 Carroll, Noel 22 n.36 Philosophy of Horror, or Paradox of the Heart 22 n.36 Casablanca (film) 148 Castel-Bloom, Orly 35, 43, 46, 191, 191 n.1, 192 Dolly City 46 Human Parts 191, 191 n.1 Taking the Trend 43, 46 Childhood’s End 47 Christie, Agatha 19 Clark, Andy 88 n.3 Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again 88 n.3

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film) 134 Clark, Arthur C. 280 2001: A Space Odyssey 280 Clute, John and Grant, John 15 n.14, 21 n.32 The Encyclopedia of Fantasy 15 n.14, 21 n.32 Cocoon (film) 134 Cohen, Boaz 26 n.1 Cohen, Jessica 103 n.1 Collins, Wilkie 50 Conan Doyle, Arthur 19, 19 n.22, 60 n.8 Coppola, Francis Ford 203 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (film) 203 Cornwell, Neil 28, 28 n.6 The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism 28 n.6 Cortázar, Julio 143 Cuddon, J.A. 208, 208 n.3 Cyberiad, The 47 Czerniawski, Adam 11 n.1 Dagan, Hagai 58, 127, 127 n.34 Ha-mitologia ha-yehudit [Jewish Mythology] 127 n.34 The King Has No Land 58 Dan, Joseph 216 n.27, 221 n.4, 232 n.13, 240 n.16, 249 n.3 HaSippur HaIvri BeYemei HaBeinayim, Iyunim beToldotav [The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages, Studies in its History] 216 n.27, 249 n.3 Iyunim bi-sifrut chasidut Ashkenaz [Studies in the Literature of Hasidut Ashkenaz] 221 n.4 Chasidut Ashkenaz be-toldot hamachshava ha-yehudit [Hasidut Ashkenaz in the History of

Jewish Thought] 221 n.4 Le-torat he-chalom shel chasidut Ashkenaz [On the Principle of the Dream in Hasidut Ashkenaz] 232 n.13 Kabalat Ha-Ari ben mitos le-mada [The Lurianic Kabbalah: Between Myth and Science] 240 n.16 Dante Alighieri 29, 30, 30 n.11 Divine Comedy 30, 30 n.11 Dar, Gidi 159 Eddie King (film) 159 Dayan, Asaf “Assi” 20, 146, 159 The Gospel According to God (film) 20, 146 Life According to Agfa (film) 159 Dayan, Nissim 147 On a Narrow Bridge (film) 147 de Maupassant, Guy 18, 19 n.21 Le Horla 18 Dialogues of Plato 16 n.16 Dick, Philip K. 15 n.13 Blade Runner (film) 15 n.13 Dickens, Charles 50 Dikiy, Aleksei 116 n.10 Dolezel, Lubomir 31 n.13 Hetercosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds 31 n.13 Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage 31 n.13 Dracula (film) 114 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 183, 188 Duvdevani, Shmuel ( Shmulik) 10, 20, 26, 113 n.2 Dymshitz, Mark 181 Eichmann, Adolf 152 Eliade, Mircea 212, 212 n.18 The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion 212 n.18

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Eliezer ben Horkanus, rabbi 213 n.21 Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer 213, 213 n.21 Eliot, George 188 Daniel Deronda 188 Eliraz, Israel 50 The Unbelievable Simply Is 50 Emerson, Caryl 61 Eshed, Eli 16 n.15 Star Wars in Israel 16 n.15 The Eternal Jew (film) 201 Even-Or, Yigal 126 Fleischer 126 Even Shmuel, Y. 267 n.4 Midrashei Geula: Pirkei haapokalipsa ha-yehudit [Homilies of Redemption: Excerpts from the Jewish Apocalypses] 267 n.4 Falk, Peter 130 Faris, Wendy B. 142 n. 4, 143, 143 n.6, 143 n.8, 151 n.19 Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative 142 n. 4, 143 n.6, 143 n.8, 151 n.19 Fedorov, Yuri 181 Feldman, Alexander 186 Feyerabend, Paul 31 Filler, Leo 151 A Miracle in Our Town (film) 151 Finkel, Shimon 116 n.10 Fogell, Melanie 172, 172 n.6 Ambiguous Selves: New Jewish Identities 172, 172 n.6 Folman, Ari and Sivan, Ori 160 Saint Clara (film) 160-161 Ford, Alexander 141 n.3 Sabra (film) 141 n.3 Fox, Eytan 159 Florentine (TV series) 159

Freud, Sigmund 77, 77 n.33, 103 n.2, 108, 171-172 Negation 77 Totem and Taboo 103 n.2, 172 Friedlander, Saul 172, 172 n.7, 179 n.11 When Memory Comes 172 n.7, 179 n.11 Fliedel, Edna 112 Frykholm, Amy 38 n.21 Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America 38 n.21 Fuchs, Sarit 120 n.22, 122-123, 123 n.27, 123 n.28, 123 n.29, 125 n.31 Ha-teatron ve-ha-pilpul [Theater and Argumentation] 120 n.22, 123 n.29 Shmuel Hasfari: Machazai shehevi et ha-gemara le-vamat hateatron [Shmuel Hasfari: A Playwright who Brought Gemara to the Theater Stage] 123 n.27, 123 n.28 Tamoot nafshi im mishichim [Let Me Die with the Messiahs] 125 n.31 Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary 22 n.35 Gamzu, Haim 117, 117 n.13, 118, 118 n.15 García Márquez, Gabriel 89, 142-143, 149 n.17, 192, 192 n.3, 193 One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien Años de Soledad] 142, 149 n.17, 192, 192 n.3 Gavison, Savi 159 Shuru (film) 159 Geffen, Shira 20, 146 — 296 —

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Jellyfish 20, 146 Gertz, Nurit 147-148, 148 n.1516, 154 n.25 Motion Fiction: Literature and Cinema 148 n.15-16 Gilgamesh 30 Gilman, Sander 188 Ginzburg, Louis 69 n.18, 70 n.20 The Legends of the Jews 69 n.18 Gladding, Jody 13 n.5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 117 Faust 117 Gogol, Nikolai 19, 20, 20 n.24, 43-44, 51 The Nose 19, 43, 51 The Overcoat 19 Golan, Matti 125 Atom 125 Golan, Menahem 151-152 Tevye and His Seven Daughters (film) 151 Golan, Ruth 77, 77 n.33 Loving Psychoanalysis: Looking at Culture with Freud and Lacan 77 n.33 Goldberg, Leah 84, 117, 210 n.14 The Lady of the Castle 117 Michtavim mi-Nesi’ah Medumah [Letters from an Imaginary Journey] 210 n.14 Goldfaden, Abraham 151 Gomel, Elana 10, 26, 170 Gordon, A.D. 280 Gordon, Y. L. 141 Graber, Yossi 112 Graff, Rani 7, 169, 287 Grant, John 15 n.14, 21 n.32 Grass, Günter 143 Tin Drum,The 143 Graves, Robert 66 n.15, 75 n.29 The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth 66 n.15,

75 n.29 Gropius, Walter 34 Grossman, David 9, 36, 42, 103, 103 n.1, 104-105, 110-111 To the End of the Land [Ishah borahat mi-besorah] 42, 103, 103 n.1 Grunhaus, Nachum 268 Gurevitch, Danielle, 10, 11, 19 n.23, 26, 28, 56, 255 Gulliver’s Travels 47 Guttman, Amos 159 Amazing Grace (film) 159 Habima 113, 113 n.3, 115-116, 116 n. 10, 117, 117 n.12, 122, 125, 126, 126 n.32, 127 Hacohen, David, rabbi 278, 278 n.33, 279 Hadani, Ever 117 The Guards 117 Heaven Can Wait (film) 133 Hagai, Levy 146 August Snow (film) 146 Hakim, Dorit 129 n.38 Al pnei ha-adama [On the Surface of the Earth] 129 n.38 Hacking, Ian 31 n.12 The Social Construction of What? 31 n.12 Hames, Chaim 112 n.1 Handel, Yehudit 117 The Street of Steps 117 Handelsatz, Michael 117 n.13, 118 n.15 Handmaid’s Tale, The 47 Hareven, Gail 10, 12 n.4, 20, 20 n.29, 26, 28 n.5, 39, 61 n.9 Hasfari, Shmuel 20-21, 21 n.31, 112-113, 113 n.2, 119-120, 120 n.21, 121-122, 122 n.26, 123,

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123-n.27-28, 124 , 124 n.30, 125-128, 128 n.37, 129, 129 n.38-40, 130-131, 131 n.42-44, 132, 132 n.45-46, 133, 133 n.48, 134, 134 n.49, 134 n.51, 135, 135 n.53-54, 136, 136 n.55-56, 137, 137 n.58-59, 137 n.61-62, 138, 138 n.63, 139, 139 n.65, 140, 142 Accordions 130-131, 131 n.4244, 133, 133 n.48, 135 Black Wedding Canopy 120 Giving of the Torah at Six 121122, 122 n.26, 124, 124 n.30, 126 Hametz 128, 128 n.37, 129 n.38-40, 130, 130 n.41, 131132, 135, 137 Intended, The 113 n.2, 153, 162 Kiddush 112, 119, 132 n.47, 136-137, 137 n.58 Last Secular Jew, The 125 Milano 131-132, 132 n.45-46, 134, 138, 138 n.63, 140 Netanya 133-134, 134 n.49, 134 n.51 Sh’Chor (film) 20, 113 n.2 Sh’Hur 142, 144-145, 145 n.10, 146, 154, 160 Shiva 137, 137 n.62 Tashmad 120, 124, 126, 132 Woman, Husband, Home 21 n.31, 135 n.53-54, 136, 136 n.55-56, 137, 137 n.59, 138-139, 139 n.65, 140 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 99, 102, 102 n.25 Drowne’s Wooden Image 99 The House of the Seven Gables 102 n.25 Herzl, Theodor 9, 33, 36, 40, 52-53, 118

Altneuland 9, 16, 33-34, 40, 52 Hitchcock, Alfred 22, 22 n.36 The Birds (film) 22 Psycho (film) 22 Rear Window (film) 22 Hitler, Adolf 51, 54, 201-202 Mein Kampf 201-202 Hoberman, J. 179 n.12 The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism 179 n.12 Holquist, Michael 61 n.11 Horstkotte, Silke 128 n.36 Hume, Kathryn 29, 29 n.9 Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature 29 n.9, 31 Hutcheon, Linda 38 n.20 Ibsen, Henrik Johan 115, 117 Peer Gynt 117 Idel, Moshe 205, 205 n.3, 264 n.1 Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions 205, 205 n.3 Dfusim shel pe’ilut goelet biyemei ha-beinayim [Patterns of Redemptive Activity in the Middle Ages] 264 n.1 Igeret HaKodesh [Sacred Epistles] 207, 211 Igos, Yehuda 58 Lilith Tale [Midrash Lilit] 58 Ilf, Ilya and Petrov, Evgenii 180 The Golden Calf 180 Interview with the Vampire (film) 203 Ionesco, Eugène 115 Rhinocéros 115 Irwin, W.R. 29, 29 n.7 The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy 29 n.7 — 298 —

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Irving, John 48 The Cider House Rules 48 Jackson, Rosemary 29, 29 n.8 Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 29 n.8 Kafka, Franz 19, 20 n.24, 30, 46, 88, 88 n.5, 118, 177 Metamorphosis 19, 47, 88, 88 n.5 Castle 30 Trial 177 Kaletskii, Alexander 180 Metro 180 Kalmar, Ivan 171, 171 n.1-2, 172, 172 n.4-5, 189 The Trotskys, Freuds and Woody Allens: Portraits of a Culture 171 n.1-2, 172 n.4-5 Karchevsky, Hanina 73 Karloff, Boris 23, 23 n.37 Tales of Terror 23 n.37 Katz, David S. and Popkin, Richard H. 267 n.6 Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium 267 n.6 Katznelson, Berl 42 Kaynar, Gad 120, 120 n.21, 126 n.32 Between the Physical and the Metaphysical: Israeli Drama and Shmuel Hasfari 120 n.21 National Theatre as Colonized Theatre: The Paradox of Habima 126 n.32 Keinan, Amos 16, 44, 195 n.8 The Road to Ein Harod 16, 44, 195 n.8 Keller, Tsipi 86 n.43 Kelly, Grace 22

Kepler, Johannes 25 Keret, Etgar 20, Girl on the Fridge, 26, 20 n.26, 35, 87- 99, 101-102, 146 The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories 20 n.26, 89, 92, 97-98 Choose a Color 100 Fatso 87, 95-96 Girl on the Fridge, The 20 n.26 Kneller’s Happy Campers 89-90, 92 Lie-land 101 Missing Kissinger 20 n.26, 94 n.17, 95 Nimrod Flipout, The 20 n.26, 91, 91 n.12, 92, 95 One Last Story and that’s It 9798 Pipes 93 Sad Story of the Anteater Family, The 94 Suddenly A Knock at the Door 89, 89 n.8, 97 Keret, Etgar and Geffen Shira 20 n.26 Jellyfish ( film) 20 n.26 Khrushchev, Nikita 80, 176 Kichko, T.K. 176 n.10 Iudaizm bez prikras [Judaism Without Embellishments] 176 n.10 King, Stephen 27, 32, 36 The Shining 27 King Artus: A Hebrew Arthurian Romance 13 n.7 Kitai, Sara 57 Kitov, Eliahu, rabbi 72 n.22, 73 n.23 Sefer Ha-toda’ah 72 n.22, 73 n.23 Klee, Paul 127 Angelus Novus ( painting) 127 Koban, Roni 91 n.11 Kohout, Pavel 160 The Ideas of Saint Clara 160

— 299 —

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Kolakowski, Leszek 11 n.1 The Presence of Myth 11 n.1 Kook, Abraham Isaak HaCohen, rabbi 269, 275, 277-279 Kook, Zvi Yehuda, rabbi 275, 276 n.28-29 Or le-netivati [Light for My Path] 276 n.28, 276 n.29 Netivot yisrael 276 n.29 Tzemach tzvi 276 n.29 Mitoch haTorah 276 n.29 Koren, Yehuda 121 n.23 Pachad Elohim [Fear of God] 121 n.23 Kramer, Michael P. 102 n.25 Kronfeld, Chana 56 n.1 Krupnik, Joseph 135 n.52 Infinity in a Cigar Box: The Problem of Science Fiction on the Stage 135 n.52 Kushelevsky, Rella 233 n.7 ‘The Tanna and the Restless Dead’: A Jewish or Non-Jewish Legend? 233 n.7 Kushner, Tony 127, 129 n.38 Angels in America 127 Kuznetsov, Eduard 181 Lacan, Jacques Marie Émile 77 n.33, 108, 108 n.4 Ecrits: A Selection 108 n.4 LaHaye, Tim and Jenkins, Jerry 38 Left Behind 38 Laing, Alexander 17 n.19 Great Ghost Stories of the World: The Haunted Omnibus 17 n.19 Langland, William 29 Lapid, Shulamit 127 Hired Womb 127 Lavender Fagan Teresa 240 n.17 Le Goff, Jacques 13 n.5

Un Autre Moyen Age 13 n.5 Le Corbusier 34, 34 n.18 Toward a New Architecture 34 n.18 Leitz, Joseph 41 n.3 The Great Promise (film) 41 n.3 Leivick, H. 20 n.28, 115 The Golem 20 n.28, 115, 119 Lerner, Meron Bialik 222 n.7 Ma’aseh ha-tanna ve-ha-met: Gilgulav ha-sifruti’im ve-hahilkhati’im [The Story of the Tanna and the Dead Man: Literary and Halakhic Versions] 223 n.7 Lerner, Motti 120, 125 Pangs of the Messiah 125 Levin, Hanoch 21, 113, 114 n.4, 118 n.14, 119, 119 n.20, 127, 132 n.45, 139 n.64, 140, 140 n.66 Funeral 127 Rubber Merchants,The 113, 114 n.4 Schitz 119 Suitcase Packers, The 140 Winter Funeral 118 n.14 Levinsky, Elhanan 52-53 A Trip to the Land of Israel in the 800th year of the Sixth Millennium 52 Levinsky, Yom-Tov 220 n.2 Night Prayers by the Dead 220 n.2 Levy, Shimon 115 n.8, 116 n.11, 119 n.19, 139 n.64, 140 n.67 The Altar and the Stage 119 n.19, 140 n.67 Lewis, C.S. 24 n.39, 78 The Chronicles of Narnia 78 Linor, Irit 43 Little Shop of Horrors 114 Listengarten, Julia 115 n.7 Russian Tragifarce: Its Cultural and Political Roots 115 n.7 Lorch, Jennifer 44 n.1

— 300 —

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Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author. Plays in Production 44 n.1 Loshitzky, Yosefa 145 n.10 Authenticity in Crisis: Shur and New Israeli Forms of Ethnicity 145 n.10 Lovecraft, H.P. 22 n.34, 166 Supernatural Horror in Literature 22 n.34 Lubin, Orly 144 n.9, 146, 146 n.11, 154 Isha koret isha [Women Reading Women] 144 n.9, 146 n.11 Lugosi, Bela 200 Luria, Isaac, Rabbi 154, 221, 221 n.5, 228-231, 239-240, 242, 245, 248, 248 n.1, 249, 256, 258259 Mabille, Pierre 13 n.5, 15, 15 n.12 Mirror of the Marvelous 13 n.5, 15 n.12 Manger, Itzik 73 Maharal of Prague Maimon (Fishman) Y.L. 268 n.8 Toldot ha-mizrachi ve-hitpatchuto [The History and Development of Mizrachi] 268 n.8, 269 n.9 Malmgren, Carl 32, 32 n.15 Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction 32 n.15 Manger, Itzik 73, 73 n.24 A song about Elijah the Prophet 73 n.24 Mi-shirei tavas ha-zahav [Poems of the Golden Peacock] 73 n.24 Sefer Ha-shirot ve-ha-baladot [Book of Poems and Ballads] 73 n.24 Manger, Itzik and Wolf, Leonard 73 n.24

The World According to Itzik: Selected Prose and Poetry 73 n.24 Manheim, Noa 10, 163 Manheim, Ralph 84 n.40 Mandelstam, Nadezhda 171 Mandelstam, Osip 171 Marcus, Joel 267 n.4 Modern and Ancient Jewish Apocalypticism 267 n.4 Marcus, Shay 112 n.1 Marron, Orley K. 10, 20 n.26, 26, 87 Martialis, Marcus Valerius 77 n.32 Epigrammata 77 n.32 Matrix (film) 180-181 Mazya, Edna 120 McHale, Brian 32, 128, 128 n.36, 129, 134 n.50 What Was Postmodernism? or The Last of the Angels 128 n.36, 134 n.50 Mchedelov, Mikhail 125 Meir, Golda 161 Melcer, Ioram 10, 20, 190 Meletz, David 42, 52 Ma’agalot 42 Meltzer, Shimshon 73 Hagazda 73 n.24 The Little Cossack of the Grandmother from Shpoli 73 n.24 The Revelation of Elijah the First 73 n.24 Menahemi, Ayelet 159 Crows (film) 159 Mendlesohn, Farah 164 n.1 Rhetoric of Fantasy 164 n.1 Meshulach, Rivka 131 n.44 Ha-yecholet la’asot tikkun: Sikha im hamakhazai Shmuel Hasfari [The Ability to Make Redemption: Conversation with the Playwright Shmuel Hasfari] 131 n.44

— 301 —

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Merton, Thomas 16 n.16 Midrash 13 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 115 Micklethwait, John and Wooldridge Adrian 27 n.3 God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World 27 n.3 Miller, Walter 35 Canticle for Leibowitz 35 Moby Dick 44 Mona Lisa 52 Milo, Joseph 160 He Walked Through the Fields (film) 160 Mintz, Alan 110 n.7 Love and War 110 n.7 Mittelpunkt, Hillel 120 Mocher Sforim, Mendele 141 More, Thomas 16, 16 n.16 Utopia 16 n.16 Morrison, Toni 149 n.17 Beloved 149 n.17 Mosinsohn, Yigal 117 In the Wilderness of the Negev 117 Mundy, Josef 117 It Turns Around 118 Murnau, Friedrich 199-201 Nosferatu (film) 199-203 Murphy, Patrick D. 114, 114 n.5-6, 135 n.52 Murzhenko, Aleksey 181 Naaman, Rami 147 Flying Camel, The (film) 147-148 Nahmanides 277 Nachman of Breslov, Rabbi 122 n.26 Nathanel, Nurit 137 n.61 Ha-hevra ha-israelit: Kera’im she-ainam mitztarfim le-shalem; Iyun be-trilogia shel Shmuel

Hasfari [Israeli Society: Parts That Do Not Equal a Whole; A Discussion of the Trilogy by Shmuel Hasfarii] 137 n.61 Navarro, Solomon 249, 256, 260261 A Terrible Fable of Rabbi Joseph De-La Reina 249, 255 Navon, Dov 112, 157 n.26 Natoli, Joseph 38 n.20 Ne’eman, Judd 146-147, 147 n.14, 152, 152 n.21, 154 n.25, 157 n.26, 158 n.27, 162 Nuzhat al-Fuad (film) 146, 162 Silver Platter (film) 147 The Empty Tomb in the Postmodern Pyramid: Israeli Cinema in the 1980s and 1990s 147 n.14, 152 n.21, 158 n.27 Ha-ze’ev she-taraf et Rabin [The Wolf that Devoured Rabin] 157 n.26 Netan’el al-Fayyumi, rabbi 277 Netzer, Ruth 72 n.21 Masa el atzmi—alkimiyat hanefesh—smalim ve-mitusim [The Quest for the Self—the Alchemy of the Soul—Symbols and Myths] 72 n.21 Newman, Ruby 10, 103 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (film) 23 Niven, David 15 Ringworld 15 Niven, Larry and Pournelle Jerry 30 n.11 Inferno 30 n.11 Nöldeke, Theodor 41 Nolfi, George 58 n.5 The Adjustment Bureau (film) 58 n.5 Nudel, Ida 186

— 302 —

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Odyssey 47 Oedipus Rex 47 Oldman, Gary 200, 203 Orland, Jacob 73 n.24 Orwell, Geroge 16, 35, 95 Animal Farm 16, 95 1984 35 Other Side of Darkness, The 47 Ovid 99 Oz, Amos 9, 36 My Michael 54 Ozick, Cynthia 73 n.24 Paffenroth, Kim 30 n.11 Valley of the Dead: The Truth Behind Dante’s Inferno 30 n.11 Parciack, Roni 154 n.25 Ha-regesh ha-dati be-kolnoa ha-yisraeli [Beyond the Fence: Religious Feeling in Israeli Cinema] 154 n.25 Parnes, Dori 116 n.10 80 Habima Nights: 1918-1998 116 n.10 Pavel, Thomas 32, 32 n.16-17 Fictional Worlds 32 n.16-17 Paranormal Activity (film) 32 Peeren, Esther 128 n.36 Peres, Shimon 45 Perlov, David 142 Pill,The (film) 142 Pesah, Haim 13 n.7 Peake, Mervyn 30 Gormenghast 30 Pelli, Moshe 209 n.5 Sifrut HaMasa’ot keSugah Sifrutit beHaskalah haIvrit ‘Masa baArav’ leShmuel Romanelli [The Literary Genre of the Travelogue in Hebrew Haskalah Literature: Shmuel Romanelli’s Masa

Ba’Rav] 209 n.5 Sugot veSugiyot beSifrut haHaskalah haIvrit [Genres and Issues in Hebrew Haskalah Literature] 209 n.5 Peretz, Ido 10, 18, 220 Peretz, Y.L. 73, 73 n.24 The Magician 73 n.24 Pinsky, David 125 The Eternal Jew 125 Pirandello, Luigi 44, 44 n.1 Conversations with My Characters 44 n.1 Pitt, Brad 203 Poe, Edgar Allan 18-20, 100 n.24, 166, 169 The Black Cat 18 The Fall of the House of Usher 18 The Mystery of Marie Rogêt 19 The Murders in the Rue Morgue 19 The Raven 169 Rumpelstiltskin 114 Pratchett, Terry 168 Purtill, Richard 24 n.39 Why Fantasy? 24 n.39 Rabin, Itzhak 157 n.26, 161 Rabkin, Eric 31, 31 n.14, 87, 87 n.2 The Fantastic in Literature 31 n.14, 87 n.2 Rambam (Maimonides) 71, 76-77, 78 n.34, 270, 271 n.14, 276-280 Guide for the Perplexed 71, 78 n.34 Mishne Torah 270, 270 n.10, 276-277, 279, 280 n.36 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon 149, 149 n.18 Galut be-toch ribonut: levikoret ‘shlilat ha-galut’ betarbut ha-yisraelit [Exile within Sovereignty: Criticism of ‘Negation of the Diaspora’ in Israeli culture] 149 n.18

— 303 —

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Reines, Yitzchak Yaacov, rabbi 278 n.34 Remennick, Larissa 171, 172 n.3, 184 n.15-16 Russian Jews on Three Continents 172 n.3, 184 n.15-16 Reuveni, Dorit 74 n.26 Rev, Istvan 180, 180 n.13 Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism 180 n.13 Rice, Anne 203 Interview with the Vampire 203 Richardson, Brian 81 n.36 Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frame 81 n.36 Riefenstahl, Leni 141 The Ring (film) 23 Riklis, Eran 147 Cup Final (film) 147 Roh, Franz 143 n.7 Rokem, Freddie 127 n.35, 130 n.41 Hebrew Theater from 1889 to 1948 127 n.35 Lefa’amim gam al yadei malach o shaliach [Sometimes Also by an Angel or Messenger] 130 n.41 Rosenberg, Yudel 205, 205 n.4 Niflaos Maharal: Ha Golem Al Prague [Wonders of the Maharal: The Golem of Prague] 205 n.4 Rosenblum, Yair 74 Roskies, David G. 73 n.24 A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling 73 n.24 Roth, Philip 54 Rotner, Liat 14 n.10 Maladar: The Magical Amulet 14 n.10 Rovina, Hanna 117, 119, 139 Rowling, J.K. 28 14 Harry Potter 14, 27-28, 44, 141, 170

Rozovsky, Pinhas, rabbi 269 Rubinstein, Bilhah 10, 13 n.8, 248, 255 n.6 Yesodot fantasti’im be-siporet [Elements of Fantasy in Literature] 255 n.6 Rushdie, Salman 57 Satanic Verses 57 Saadia Gaon, rabbi 266 n.3 Saint Augustine 16 n.16 The City of God 16 n.16 Saw ( film) 23 Sefer Hasidim 220, 21, 221 n.4, 224, 224 n.8, 225-227, 230, 232, 234-235, 235 n.14, 236237, 240, 240 n.17, 241-242, 244 Schlor, Joachim 35, 35 n.19 Tel Aviv 35 n.19 Schmitt, Jean-Claude 240 n.17, 245 n.18 Ghosts in the Middle Ages 240 n.17, 245 n.18 Schnitzer, Meir 151, 151 n.20 Israeli Cinema 151 n.20 Scholem, Gershom G. 84 n.40, 231 n.12, 249 n.2, 264, 264 n.2, 268 n.7 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 231 n.12 Od devar [Another Thing] 249 n.2 On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism 84 n.40, 268 n.7 Sefer Yitzirah 84 n.40 Schreiber, Eli 195 n.7 Good Morning Eliahu 195 n.7 Sour 195 n.7 Switzerland 195 n.7 Schreck, Max 199, 203 Schwartz, Daniel 88 n.4

— 304 —

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Schwartz, Dov 10, 13 n.8, 16 n.16, 263, 267 n.5, 268 n.7-8, 272 n.16, 273 n.20, 277 n.31, 278 n.34, 279 n.35 Ha-ra‘ayon ha-mishikhi bahagutha: yehudit bimei habeinayim [Messianism in Medieval Jewish Thought] 267 n.5 Hatzionut ha-datit ben higyon lemishikhiut [Religious Zionism between Logic and Messianism] 268 n.8 Faith at the Crossroads 278 n.34 The Messianic Idea 268 n.7, 272 n.16, 273 n.20, 277 n.31, 279 n.35 Star Trek 15, 30 Sefer Ha-Gilgulim 248, 248 n.1 Sefer Ha-Heziyonot 248, 248 n.1, 258 Schweid, Eliezer 264 n.2 Mistika ve-yahadut lefi Gershom Scholem [Mysticism and Judaism According to Gershom Scholem] 264 n.2 Segeberg, Harro 209, 209 n.7-9 Die Literarisierte Reise Im Späten 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag Zur Gattungs-Typologie [The Typology of the Literary Journey in the Late Eighteenth Century] 209, 209 n.7-9 SG”L, Gershon ben Eliezer ha-Levi 211-212, 214, 219 Gelilot Eretz Yisra’el [Regions of Eretz Israel] 211-213, 215 n.25, 216-217, 219 Shaked, Malka 256 n.9 Chuliya ve-shalshelet [Link and Chain] 256 n.9 Shakespeare, William 95, 143 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 114

Tempest, The 143 Shalev, Zeruya 43 Thera 43 Shamir, Moshe 117, 160 He Walked in the Fields 117 Shank, Theodore 114 n.5 The Shock of the Actual: Disrupting the Theatrical Illusion 114 n.5 Shapiro, Anita 141 n.1-2 Le’an halcha ‘shlilat ha-galut’ [Where Did ‘Negation of the Diaspora’ Go] 141 n.1-2 Shcharansky, Anatoli ( Natan) 186 Sheckley, Robert 173 Shelley, Mary W. 15 n.13 Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus 15 n.13 Shemer, Naomi 74, 86 The Barrel of Meal 74 Shenhar, Aliza 110, 222 n.6 Olam ha-metim ve-harafa’im be-sipoor ha-amami [The World of the Dead and Ghosts in Folktales] 222 n.6 Sheridan, Alan 108 n.4 Shilo, Sara 43 No Gnomes Will Appear 43 Shivhei Ha-Ari 222 n.5, 228, 243 Shimon Bar Yochai, rabbi 71, 84 n.40, 250, 253 Shklovsky, Viktor 60 n.8 Theory of Prose 60 n.8 Shoef, Corina 118 n.16-17 Ivriyut’ mi-sug acher: Tipulo shel Nissim Aloni be-noseh toldot ha-yishuv [A Different Type of ‘Hebrewness’: Nissim Aloni’s Treatment of the History of the Jewish Community in Israel] 118 n.16-17 Shoham, Matityahu 76 n.30 Tyre and Jerusalem 76 n.30

— 305 —

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Shneour, Zalman 73 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, rabbi 272275 Ma’amarei admor ha-zaken [Essays of the Venerable Master and Teacher] 273 n.18-20, 23, 274 n.24-25 Likutei torah [Torah readings] 273 n.20, 274 n.23-24 Silberg, Joel 152 Kuni Lemel in Tel Aviv (film) 152 Kuni Lemel in Cairo (film) 152 Silverman Weinreich, Beatrice 73 n.24 Genres and types of Yiddish folktales about the Prophet Elijah 73 n.24 Sinai Eli 112 Sixth Sense,The (film) 137 Sipporei Ha-Ari 230 Smilansky, Yizhar (Yizhar, S.) 47 Somer, Yossi 155 Forbidden Love (film) 155, 157 Sobol, Joshua 120, 122 n.6 Sobol, Joshua and Ronen, Ilan 122 n.26 The Wars of the Jews 122 n.26 Spielberg, Steven 158 E.T. (film) 158 Spolsky, Ellen 88 n.3, 95 , 95 n.18 Making ‘Quite Anew’: Brain Modularity and Creativity 88 n.3 Word vs. Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England 95 n.18 Stanislavski, Konstantin 115 Star Wars (film) 189 Steiner, George 173, 185 Steiner H.Y. and Kalonsky, V.A. 276 n.28 Stevenson, Robert Louis 15 n.13 Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde 15 n.13

Stoker, Bram 200-201, 203 Dracula 200-201, 203 Strachey, James 103 n.2 Streicher, Julius 199, 202 Strindberg, Johan August 115 Strugatsky, Arkady Natanovich and Strugatsky, Boris Natanovich ( Strugatskys) 174-176, 178, 181, 183-184, 186, 188-189 Beetle in the Anthill [Zhuk v muraveinike] 186-187 Escape Attempt [Popytka begstva] 174-175, 178, 183, 187 Hard to Be a God [Trudno byt Bogom] 178, 187 The Ugly Swans [Gadkie lebedi] 181, 183 Time Wanderers [Volny gasyat veter] 188 Suvin, Darko 32 Suzuki, Koji 30 The Ring 30 Swedenborg, Emanuel 128, 130 Taharlev, Yoram 74 With His Hands He Will Bring 74 Tammuz, Benyamin 44, 195 n.6 Jeremiah’s Inn 195 n.6 Tanna and the Restless Dead, The 222, 223 n.7, 241 Tchernikovsky, Shaul 86 Tela’ot Moshe [The Trials and Tribulations of Moshe] 210 Teman, Elly 109 n.5 The Red String: A Cultural History of a Jewish Folk Symbol 109 n.5 Thompson, Keith 134 n.50 Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination 134 n.50 Thorndike, Lynn 7 Todorov, Tzvetan 21 n.33, 87, 87 n.1,

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Theatre: A Search for Identity 116 n.9, 119 n.18

136, 136 n.57, 137, 142, 142 n.5 Introduction a la Littérature Fantastique 21 n.33 The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre 87 n.1, 136 n.57, 142 n.5 Toldot Ha-Ari 222 n.5, 229, 239, 243 Tomer, Ben-Zion 117 Children of the Shadows 117 Touched by an Angel (TV series) 127 Tolkien, J.R.R. 12, 12 n.3, 23-24, 24 n.39, 28, 36, 78, 164 Lord of the Rings 23, 28, 38, 78, 141 Tree and Leaf 12 n.3, 24 n.39 Torat ha-gilgul be-kitvei Ha-ari ve-mefarshav [The theory of reincarnation in the writings of Rabbi Isaac Luria and his commentators] 248 n.1 Trachtenberg, Joshua 109 n.5 Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion 109 n.5 True Blood (TV series) 204 Trask, W.R. 212 n.18 Trotsky, Lev 171 n.1-2, 172 n.4-5, 180 Truffaut, Francois 22 n.36 Hitchcock 22 n.36 Turgenev, Ivan 183 Twilight (TV series) 204

Wachsmann, Daniel 153, 158 The Intended (film) 113 n.2, 153, 162 Transit (film) 158 Wallach, Yona 57 n.3 Ha-panim hayu hafshata [Faces became Abstract] 57 n.3 War and Peace 28 Weinberger-Rotman, Marganit 57 n.2 Weininger, Otto 188 Sex and Character 188 Weinreich, Uriel 73 n.24 Wells H.G. 15 n.13 Island of Doctor Moreau, The 15 n.13 War of the Worlds 27 Wenders, Wim 127, 130 Wings of Desire (film) 127 Wyndham, John 35 The Chrysalids 35

Ulmer, Rivka 109 n.5 Evil Eye in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature 109 n.5 Updike, John 143 The Witches of Eastwick 143 Uri, Aviva 57 n.3 Urian, Dan 116 n.9, 119 n.18 The Judaic Nature of Israeli

Yalkut Shimoni 70-71 Yaari, Nurit 118, 139 Yanai, Hagar 14 n.10, 78 n.35 The Leviathan of Babylon 14 n.10, 78 n.35 The Water betwixt the Worlds 78 n.35 Yassif, Eli 13, 216 n.27, 220,

Vakhtangov, Yevgeny 115, 117 Verne, Jules 15 n. 13, 25 A Fantasy of Doctor Ox 15 n. 13 Vital, Chaim, rabbi 228, 248, 256, 258-262 Sefer Ha-Heziyonot 248, 248 n.1, 259

— 307 —

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221 n.3, 224 n.8, 225 n.9, 227 n.10, 240 n.17 Exemplum in ‘Sefer Hasidim’, The 224 n.8 Sippur HaAm HaIvri [The Hebrew Folktale] 216 n.27, 221 n.3, 225 n.9, 227 n.10 Shvarim giluchei zakan: Hama’avak al ha-mitos shel tzfat be-yamim ha-hem bi-zman ha-ze [Clean-shaven Bulls: The Fight for the Myth of Safed in the Past, in the Present] 240 n.17 Ya’vetz, Zeev, rabbi 278 Yehoshua, A.B. 9, 36 Yerushalmi, Dorit 112 n.1, 115 n.8, 116, n.11, 117 n.12, 138, 139 n.64, 140 n.66 Shnay kolot be-kfifa achat: Habima mi-ba’ad le-foalam shel Baruch Chemerinsky ve-Zvi Friedland [Two Voices at Once: Habima through the Work of Baruch Chemerinsky and Zvi Friedland] 117 n.12 Teatron ha-mavet ve-hamchashat he-he’ader: Al dfusei ha-bimui shel Hanoch Levin [Theater of Death and the Realization of Absence: On the Directing Modes of Hanoch Levin] 139 n.64, 140 n.66 Yeshurun, Yitzhak Zepel 147 Green Fields (film) 147 Yizhar, S. (Yizhar Smilansky) 4647, 79 Discovering Elijah 79 Khirbat Khizeh 46 Yzraeli, Yossi 58, 122 n.26 The Seventh Poet 58 Yohanan ben Zakkai, rabbi 216 n.28

Yossi, Yonah and Shenhav, Yehouda 147 n.12 What is Multiculturalism? On the Politics of Identity in Israel 147 n.12 Yovel (Yovell), Yoram 48, 90 n.10 Helen on the Roof 48 Mind Storm 90 n.10 Zand H. 201 n.2 Zar Zion, Shelly 115 n.8 Ha-dibuk: Le-kinuno shel semel tzioni [“The Dybbuk”: The Creation of a Zionist Symbol] 115 n.8 Zarchi, Nurit 164-169 Alma o ha-yom ha-shishi [Alma or the Sixth Day] 168 n.13 Ambatyam [Bathnymph] 167 n.8 Amory asig atusa [Amory Catches Up and Flies] 168 n.10 Arbelon mi-beit havrosh [Arbelon of the Cypress Tree House] 168 n.15 Eyn sham arieh [There is No Lion There] 167 n.7 Gan ha-bambumbalim [The Bambumblim’s Garden] 168 n.11 Ha-even ha-chalaka ba-taba’at [The Blue Stone in the Ring] 166 n.5 Khoveshet keter ha-niyar [The Bearer of the Paper Crown] 165 n.4, 169 n.17 Mi yatzil et Tanina? [Who Will Save Thanina?] 165 n.3 Paz ve-ani [Paz and Me] 168 n.12 Shlosha agasim ve-chad-keren [Three Pears and a Unicorn] 169 n.16 Yoni ve-ha-sus [Yoni and the Horse] 167 n. 6, 167 n.9 — 308 —

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Zarchin, Shemi 146 Passover Fever ( film) 146 Zerubavel, Yael 152 n.23 Mot ha-zikharon ve-zikharon ha-mavet: Metzada ve-ha-shoa ke-metaforot historiot [The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors] 152 n.23 Zfatman-Biller, Sarah 215 n.25 Igeret beYiddish miSof haMei’ah haShesh Esrei beInyan Aseret haShevatim [A Letter in Yiddish from the Late Sixteenth Century

about the Ten Tribes] 215 n.25 Bein Ashkenaz LeSefarad: LeToldot HaSippur HaYehudi BeYemei HaBeinayim [The Jewish Tale in the Middle Ages: Between Ashkenaz and Sepharad] 215 n.26, 216 n.26-27 Zimmerman, Moshe 159, 201 n.2 A Night without Na’ama (film) 159 Zohar 84 n.40, 239-240 Zohar, Rivka 74, 74 n.28 Zunshine, Lisa 88 n.3 Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible 88 n.6

— 309 —

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— 310 —