“Uncle Peretz Takes Off,” a collection of short stories by the late Israeli author Yaakov Shabtai, takes place in the Tel Aviv of the 1940s. Shabtai’s Tel Aviv is a place of hot summer winds, of drenching spring rains, of fragrant fig orchards and of icy Mediterranean winter waters. It is a place of dreamers and schemers, a place of hope and a place of irrevocable loss.
Like James Joyce’s Dublin and Isaac Babel’s Odessa, Shabtai’s landscape is personal and universal. His Tel Aviv defines a people and a place, a harsh and realistic world, leavened by the writer’s sympathy for human frailty and failure.
Thus, the frightening grandfather in the opening story “Adoshem,” insists the resistant narrator-grandson prepare for his bar mitzvah. “He would lie in wait in the hall and suddenly grab my neck with his gnarled fingers. He would pull me to his chair, trapping me in the vise of his legs, covering my head with his hand, yelling in Yiddish: ‘Pray, goy, pray.'”
There is the grandson himself, who, following his bar mitzvah and his grandfather’s death, becomes “a scientific socialist full of a sense of mission, trying to drag my grandmother into arguments in order to prove to her that God did not exist, to show her how false and harmful it was to believe in him.”
And there is the grandmother, sketched in her wisdom and dignity: “She would control herself, then send me about my business with a few perfunctory words. Her God needed no proof.”
The grandmothers are the heroes of Shabtai’s stories. For their faith is abiding.
Shabtai’s Tel Aviv is filled with Jewish refugees who arrived in the 1930s from Europe, saved from Hitler, desirous of a new life, with children and grandchildren born in the new land that is not new but is the ancestral home of the Jewish people.
Yet for these immigrants there is no peace or rest, and Shabtai’s characters are drenched with melancholy and dread and disappointments.
In “Past Continuous,” a butcher remembers a lost love, thinks of his oldest son whom he hardly sees.
Amidst human folly and violence, Shabtai’s male characters remember or seek the comfort of sexual love. But these hopes are sabotaged because, as in the title story “Uncle Peretz Takes Off,” the male lover has waited too long — hesitated until his beloved has left him.
Shabtai writes no happy endings. Yet though his Tel Aviv is tragic, it is also filled with unexpected moments of courage in the face of death. In “Twilight,” a dying man in an old-age home suddenly finds the strength to sing opera. “Eyes shut he begins to sing ‘Rigoletto’ in a hoarse but pleasant tenor and the woman … smiles at everybody with a wondering grateful smile, as if they had saved him and sent the ‘Angel of Death’ away.”
Alfred, the singer, does die, but the reader is left with the feeling of human transcendence.
Also transcendent is the grandmother remembered in “Departure” by the narrator who, years after her death, finds her old prayer book and “felt the special smell, the smell of old books, which reminded me of the smell of my grandmother sitting on the stool in the kitchen, the brown woolen shawl around her shoulders and the faintest of smiles on her face.”
The grandson finds in the prayer book the dates, in his grandmother’s hand, of family yahrzeits and concludes with understated but real emotion: “I strained my memory to remember the date of her death but all I could remember was that it was a cold, cloudy day.”
Shabtai, who died at the age of 47 in 1981, was a giant of modern Israeli literature. His stories hold out no false hopes. He wrote with an empathy and compassion that is especially powerful because he was so realistic. This, his first short story collection available in English, is a fitting memorial.
“Uncle Peretz Takes Off” by Yaakov Shabtai (240 pages, Overlook Press, $24.95).