Zion's Fiction

by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)

  Fantasia 2000 took on, consciously and conscientiously, the task of cultivating local talent. The results were mixed. Not a few prospective writers sought to emulate American and British magazine SF/F, producing anodyne stories with clunky plots and nondescript characters. Very little about these offerings could be construed as particularly Israeli, or even Jewish, except by dint of authorship. But there were some standouts. In 1980, short story writer David Melamed published Tsavo’a beCorundy (A hyena in Corundy), an accomplished collection featuring several stories first published in Fantasia 2000. But the book received little critical recognition, leading Melamed ultimately to flee the genre. Hillel Damron, a filmmaker for the Histadrut, the national trade union, published the novel-length version of his memorable short story Milhemet haMinim (The war of the sexes) in 1982. Shortly after, Damron immigrated to the United States, where he self-published several mainstream novels in English.

  Other notable Fantasia 2000 alumni included geneticist Ram Mo’av, Ruth Blumert, Yivsam Azgad, Ortsion Bartana, and Mordechai Sasson. Sasson’s story, “The Stern-Gerlach Mice” (1984), featured in this anthology, is a typical example of the original stories published in Fantasia. Editor Aharon Hauptman pursued a career as a futurist and is currently a senior researcher in the Unit for Technology and Society Foresight at Tel Aviv University. Gabi Peleg, Fantasia 2000’s last editor, went on to computer programming. Illustrator Avi Katz, who had joined Fantasia early on, later contributed covers to HaMemad haAsiri of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy (ISSF&F, on which see below) and to the Jerusalem Report, and still later provided art for this anthology.

  Despite the emergence of a nascent fan scene, and the staging of the country’s first SF/F convention in 1981, the bloom fell off the boom in 1982. That was when the June War with Lebanon helped sink an already strapped international convention in Jerusalem. Subsequently, the Israeli economy plunged into hyperinflation. (For example, the newsstand price of issue no. 33 of Fantasia 2000 (July 1982) was 37 shekels; issue no. 44 (August 1984) cost 750 shekels. In terms of purchasing power, these sums were roughly equivalent). In 1984, Fantasia ceased publication, having lost a major part of its readership.

  The next attempt at a commercial SF/F magazine, Halomot beAspamia (Pipe-dreams in Spain, the place where castles are built, according to both Hebrew and English idiom), would begin publishing original Hebrew fiction in 2002 under the aegis of Nir Yaniv and Vered Tochterman. That effort, too, folded in 2008, to be revived in early 2016 as a web-based publication. An English-language fanzine, CyberCozen, published in English since 1988 by a fan club based in the town of Rehovoth, can be found online.23 Israel’s first SF-oriented website was created by Yaniv for the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy in 1996.

  The boom and bust cycle of Israeli SF/F faithfully reflected the vicissitudes of the Israeli economy (itself often subject to the vagaries of intermittent military crises). This view was taken by sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda, who attributed downswings to lingering ideological rejection by the wider culture of pluralism and its suspicion of individuated social subcultures. The cultural gatekeepers had lost much of their power, but they still held some of the keys to publication, controlling as they did the editorial boards of major publishing houses and various influential, if little read, literary magazines.

  This went on until the mid-1990s, when the Internet hastened the ultimate fragmentation of the Israeli cultural matrix. As scholar Oren Soffer observes, its advent, and especially the penetration by cable and satellite television, resulted in a proliferation of global or, more specifically, American influences. These factors have been blamed by observers for a decrease in social cohesion and the reinforcement of (sub)group identity and individualism. These, Soffer says, “appear to be part of the social and cultural processes linked to the decline of national solidarity and, alternately, to the reinforcement of individual trends and consumer culture.”24 Decentralization is still going on, helped by the diminished ability of the nation-state to supervise and control media messages.

  Not surprisingly, Israel’s remaining cultural gatekeepers now found themselves with their backs against the wall. Although still intent on setting and patrolling the border between canonical and pop literature, they simply no longer had a single point of entry over which to stand guard. The walls themselves had become permeable, leading to a gradual yet unavoidable fragmentation of national identity. “Realism,” says Elana Gomel, is now “the Israeli fantasy.”25

  The social margins, as cultural commentator Stuart Hall argues, had paradoxically become highly charged and increasingly powerful places, especially insofar as the arts and social life are concerned.26 Not surprisingly, science fiction fandom, which combines the two, suddenly began to flourish in Israel.

  A more robust fan scene started emerging during the mid-1990s. In 1996, Hauptman, editor and translator Amos Geffen, and others joined the prolific translator (and Zion’s Fiction coeditor) Emanuel Lottem in founding the ISSF&F. Within the next few years several narrower special-interest groups took to the fore as well, including Starbase 972 (catering to the Israeli Star Trek fan contingent) and the Sunnydale Embassy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom). Both are now moribund. The Israeli Tolkien Community, the Israeli Society for Role-Playing Games, and AMAI, the Israeli Manga and Anime Society, all currently active (the last despite the oddly expressed displeasure of the Israel Defense Forces, which for a time refused to recruit its members), have shown greater staying power.

  The ISSF&F, among its other achievements, has regularly staged several annual conventions, notably ICon, Olamot (Worlds), Me’orot (Lights), and Bidion (Fiction), some as collaborative events with one or more of the groups mentioned above. Its major thrust at international recognition within world fandom was to have been ArmageddonCon, intended to usher in the new millennium at Har Megiddo, known worldwide as Armageddon (on the correct date, namely midnight on December 31, 2000); alas, it had to be canceled because of the outbreak of the second armed Palestinian uprising, or Intifada.

  Like other such organizations, the ISSF&F inaugurated a semiprozine, HaMemad haAsiri (The tenth dimension), which took over where Fantasia 2000 had left off in publishing original fiction by Israeli writers. It also features short original fiction on its website. In 1999 the ISSF&F inaugurated the annual Geffen Prize—named for its cofounder, revered translator and editor Amos Geffen (1937–98)—for the best original and translated SF/F material published in Hebrew during the previous year. Another award, the Einat Prize for hitherto unpublished short work in Hebrew, was launched in 2005 by the ISSF&F with the support of a private family-based foundation. Genre aficionado Ron Yaniv publishes the Geffen nominees and winners annually as e-books in a private venture. The Geffen Prize volumes began publication in 2002. In 2009 the ISSF&F replaced HaMemad haAsiri with the annual softcover volume Hayo Yihyeh (Once upon a future) to showcase new and unpublished short stories written for the most part in Hebrew. The scarcity of venues for short fiction in Israel in general affords these collections added import.

  One area in which the ISSF&F utterly failed was its attempts (in which coeditor E. L. was involved) to persuade educators and Ministry of Education officials to include SF/F in school curricula. Some stories, they argued, possessed sufficient literary value to be included in literature classes’ reading lists. Others could be usefully included in science classes to bring some life into a regimen of eye-glazing textbooks. All these efforts were in vain: the remnants of the Old Guard had not yet perished, nor did they surrender. The gatekeepers still controlled what schoolchildren could read in classes.

  On a more positive note, the organization of Israeli fandom proved crucial for budding writers who hitherto felt there was neither readership for their work nor colleagues with whom they could interact. Meeting like-minded individuals at conventions, and reading stories—and later on, novels—by aspiring writers just like themselves, there was no stopping them now. Some of their stories are included
in this volume, and more, hopefully, will be showcased in subsequent ones.

  More strikingly, several important mainstream writers, including three Prime Minister’s Prize recipients, decided to trade in their chips for a new stake in SF/F tropes and trappings. The late Nava Semel, for instance, published three SF novels (one of them under a pen name), an opera libretto, and a play; Gail Hareven, a masterful collection of short stories; and Shimon Adaf, a mammoth SF/F novel of great wonder and complexity, one that the unusually peripatetic and internationally acclaimed British-based SF/F writer Lavie Tidhar has described as the first Israeli genre masterpiece. Upon first anteing up, however, they discovered that one of the tables in the room had already been taken by such public luminaries as Shlomo Errel, a former naval commander-in-chief, and Amnon Rubinstein and Yossi Sarid, both past ministers of education.27 None of the latter would admit to having actually written science fiction. But their literarily established counterparts showed no such reticence. Their work, brazenly genre, proved exemplary.

  The Internet provided an extremely useful tool in the service of genre proliferation. No longer did writers have to submit their creations for editorial consideration; they could publish themselves, either on their own blogs or on any one of several dedicated websites. The most outstanding one, Rami Shalheveth’s Bli Panica! (Don’t panic!), was inaugurated in 2001 and is still going strong.

  As Haifa University’s Keren Omry reported in a paper published by the Science Fiction Research Association in 2013, the field has proved sufficiently fertile to attract and sustain academic attention.28 Each of Israel’s public universities currently offers survey courses on speculative literature, both of the foreign variety and increasingly of the homegrown kind. The Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, for example, hosts a series of annual SF symposia. Students, meanwhile, have been awarded graduate degrees in this field from Israeli institutions, including at least one doctorate so far.

  In 2009, moreover, Graff Publishing released Im Shtei haRaglayim Amok baAnanim (published in English as With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature by Boston’s Academic Studies Press as part of its Israel: Society, Culture, and History series). Disregarding Ortsion Bartana’s more esoteric tome HaFantasia beSiporet Dor haMedina (Fantasy in literature of the statehood generation, 1986), as well as Rachel Elboim-Dror’s 1993 HaMachar Shel haEtmol (Yesterday’s tomorrow), Im Shtei haRaglayim Amok baAnanim was described by its editors as “the first serious, wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated exploration of fantasy in Israeli literature and culture.”29 It did not, however, address Israeli science fiction in a thorough manner, leaving room, we hope, for a companion volume.

  “As the field grows richer,” writes Omry, “so too [do] the pleasure and insights the locally produced genre fiction provides, leaning less and less as of yore on Anglo-American themes, traditions, and locations and becoming more quintessentially and more complexly itself: Hebrew-language Israeli SF.”30

  What, then, do Israeli writers write about when they write speculative fiction? With some notable exceptions, many of them write about the end of all things. Or, to be more exact, all things Israeli.

  “In Israel, even more than in any other society,” observes Baruch Kimmerling, “the past, present and future are intermingled; collective memory is considered objective history.” One important element of this commingling is the once universal belief, still held in certain religious circles, of “a miraculous, messianic return to the Holy Land at the apocalyptic ‘end of days.’”31

  Israelis must contend perennially with the contradictions presented by the secular messianism of the founders of their state (who subscribed to the notion that flaws and corruption in the world, and specifically “the Jewish situation,” must be replaced by a new order), and the unyielding, murderous, even exterminationist opposition espoused, overtly or otherwise, by many of their neighbors. They seek respite from these opposing impulses through the projection of prodigious military deterrence, through resort to nostalgia, and through perennial low-grade anxiety over potential apocalypse.

  For Israelis, engagement in apocalyptic thinking is no mere fear mongering or neurosis. Just consider the Holocaust, which functions as a cogent engine for this activity. In Translating Israel, Alan L. Mintz extols the work of lauded author Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018), whom he says “most unequivocally [took] the Holocaust as a field of imaginary activity,” that is, speaking of the unspeakable.32 Mintz asserts, moreover, that “if messianism, even misplaced messianism, is the ‘positive’ paradigm of the Jewish apocalypse, the Holocaust, both as an event and as a symbol, is its negative pole.”

  The notion of examining the extermination of two-thirds of European Jewry through the prism of SF/F may, as the late Israeli literary critic Gershon Shaked—a prominent figure among the gatekeepers mentioned above—once observed, seems grotesque. The fantastic, writes Gary K. Wolfe, “by its very nature violates the norms of realism that have dominated not only Holocaust texts but virtually the whole body of what has been received and taught as ‘serious’ literature for the past two centuries.” Yet some British and American novels, such as Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Harry Turtledove’s In the Presence of Mine Enemies, J. R. Dunn’s Days of Cain, and Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, as well as Lavie Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming, have done so innovatively, proving Shaked misguided, if not hidebound, though not as misled as those who argued that the only fitting response to the Holocaust was silence.33

  If the Holocaust is to remain “a continuing confrontation with unimaginable evil,” adds Wolfe, it must “be reimagined for succeeding generations on their own terms.” Nonsurvivors find themselves at a particular disadvantage, since the Holocaust still remains, as Judith P. Kerman has observed, almost “too fantastic to contemplate.” Which is why almost every account reports refusal by so many European Jews to believe the specific and generally accurate warnings they had received, even as they were herded onto the trains that transported them to the death camps and into the gas chambers that awaited them. “When the real is so fantastic, what literary effects will succeed in making it credible, and in helping the reader comprehend its human meaning?” she asks. And Jews outside Nazi-dominated lands simply refused to believe that such a thing could take place at all. In July 1943, for example, a gentile refugee from Poland, Jan Karski, arrived in Washington, DC, and was interviewed by Justice Felix Frankfurter, perhaps the most prominent Jew in the United States at the time. After hearing Karski’s eyewitness report on what was going on in his homeland, Frankfurter said: “I am unable to believe what you have told me.”34

  The Holocaust was the first wholly industrialized genocide. Science fiction emerged as a response to industrialization and the impingement of science and technology on modern life. Nowhere has there been a greater travesty involving these three elements, bolstered, it should be noted, by the insidiousness of near faceless bureaucracy. It stands alongside the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as one of the elementally apocalyptic events of our time. Polish-Israeli author Mordecai Roshwald understood this intrinsically. So did firebrand Amos Kenan, who described future Holocausts in Shoah 2 (1975) and Block 23 (1996).

  One of the tasks undertaken by Israeli speculative literature has been to expose both these dangerously juxtaposed motivations—an atavistic paganism and, perhaps to a lesser extent, religious and secular messianism and romanticism—that led to the Holocaust. Given the country’s utopian origins and Hebrew literature’s unstinting examination of the Zionist enterprise and its fallouts, the main burden for assuaging these anxieties has defaulted to the dystopian novel. As Rovner declaims, “There is nothing new in Jewish literature about predicting the end as a means of forestalling it.”35 Just read the Book of Jonah.

  Dystopian literature serves as the main exception to the rule that most Israelis disdain the fantastique. It may not have proved as wildly popular in Isra
el as in the contemporary West, where adults and youngsters alike thrill to the hyperbolic drama in novels and films of cataclysmic Hunger Games/Mad Maxian continuums. But as Rovner observes in his seminal study of Israeli end-time literature, “nearly 40 years’ worth of apocalyptic Hebrew fiction has in fact been translated into English worldwide.” Examples, several of which we address below, include Amos Oz’s novella Late Love (1975), Orly Castel Bloom’s Human Parts (2004) and Dolly City (2010), and Ari Folman’s graphic novel adaptation of his 2008 Academy Award–nominated film Waltz with Bashir. (Folman would go on to film a combined live-action/animated version of the late Polish-Jewish writer Stanislaw Lem’s satirical SF novel The Futurological Congress (1971), released in 2013 as The Congress.)

  This would seem to fly in the face of the trend among English-speaking Jews (identified by Alan Mintz) to disengage from Israeli literature that does not reflect their heroic idealization of Israeli society. “I would argue,” contends Rovner, “that the central reason these literary works were selected for translation [into English] is precisely because they acknowledge that Israeli reality falls short of the Zionist ideals of cultural rebirth and national security. To clarify further: what explains the existence of these works in translation is that readers in the Diaspora seek to reinforce the mythology of Israel’s heroism and military prowess, while at the same time they seek to retain a martyrology of Jewish victimization.”36

  Misgivings over past military actions going as far back as Israel’s War of Independence, incessant terrorism, the overwhelming shadow of the Holocaust looming over Israeli imagination—and that cast by a fortress hillock overlooking the crossroads linking Europe, Asia, and Africa in the heart of Israel—have also helped bring apocalyptic tropes to the fore. Trapped between an unsustainable longing for the halcyon days of what Israeli singer Arik Einstein nostalgically called “Good Old Eretz Israel” and the imminent expectation of cataclysm, a significant portion of Israeli literature, Rovner says (referencing modern Hebrew literary scholar Arnold Band), is impelled by a “nostalgia for nightmare.”37