What’s most uncanny about the fiction in this Modern Hebrew Literature collection “Love” is the fact that it reads like non-fiction. Every short story and novel excerpt in the book edited by Aliette Armel could be a true-life scene in present-day Israel.
Take the opening piece in the collection, an excerpt from the novel “The Bald Truth,” by satirist Ephraim Kishon, in which “the country has embarked upon a glorious war, and fighting was already taking place near the borders of the state.”
Although the Hungarian-born Kishon, who received the Israel Prize for his life work, never refers to the name of “the country,” readers can only assume he was talking about Israel.
In this novel excerpt, however, the fight is not against the Hezbollah, but rather, “the struggle against the plague of baldness.”
“Like the 10 plagues of Egypt,” this was going to be “a fight to the bitter end,” Kishon writes.
How recognizable? you ask.
Thirty-five-year-old Eshkol Nevo’s excerpt from his novel “Homesick” (awarded the Book Publisher’s Association Golden Book Prize in 2005) is just as timely.
When Nevo’s first-person narrator hears “a boom,” we, as the readers, get right inside his head as he worries about his girlfriend who took the bus to work downtown that morning. The TV flashes pictures from Shaare Tzedeck Hospital, and he’s searching the screen for a woman with black hair.
“Just don’t let any black hair pop up now,” he thinks. “No black hair.”
Nevo is just one of the authors in this collection who infuses the personal with the social and political. Esty G. Hayim, a creative writing teacher in Tel Aviv, does the same in her excerpt from her novel, “Something Good Will Happen Tomorrow.”
Her first-person narrator, the mother of a teenage son, snoops in his room after he goes to school, in a desperate attempt to connect with him.
“On the back of a sheet of squared paper filled with algebra exercises, I found something I was perhaps looking for. Elinoar is so cool, you wrote, her house is full of velvet couches and paintings on the walls, like a museum. She’s probably got seventy cats, every time another one pops up and you can talk to her for hours. It’s a pity my Ima isn’t like that, she’s never allowed me to bring even a cat’s tail into the house. It’s a pity Elinoar’s not your Ima, I thought, as I crumpled the paper in my hand … “
Like Hayim, most of the authors here show that perhaps love will give you a taste of hope in the hopelessness of conflict and despair. Playwright and novelist Edna Mazya, does it, too, in the excerpt from her novel “The Unsatisfied,” which takes place in the 1930s in Heidelberg, Germany.
Single mom Ruth and her lover, Robert, are bickering again.
“‘Robert,’ she whispered, in a voice that whistled like a dying respirator. ‘What’s happening to us?’
“‘Nothing,’ he replied, dry as ice, ‘we’re rotting away.'”
As evident by the book title, what every story and novel excerpt here has in common is love, and our sometimes-desperate attempt to get it. “Love” also includes poetry, book reviews and an interview with award-winning writer and literature professor Amos Oz.
“For us, in secular Israeli culture, the period of love was very short,” writes Oz. “Today, it’s easier for two young people to get into bed than to write each other love letters — if you give them a choice — because it’s hard to write a love letter.”
If you are looking for a little moment of love, however, in the midst of present-day violence, pick up this collection. The writers will touch you universally with their thoughtfulness and compassion.
“Love…,” a Modern Hebrew Literature collection (240 pages, The Toby Press, $12.95)