Zion's Fiction

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

  Themes and motifs aside, you will find in Zion’s Fiction a cornucopia of good to great stories. Generally speaking, these may be divided into two categories: stories written by mainstream and genre authors. Among the former you will encounter Gail Hareven’s superlative story “The Slows,” the only Israeli SF story ever published in The New Yorker (getting any SF/F story into The New Yorker is no mean feat, even in an issue dedicated to the genre). Others authors of the same ilk include Savyon Liebrecht, Nava Semel, and Shimon Adaf. But the majority of the stories were written by authors who grew up, in the literary sense, within SF/F, including Rotem Baruchin, Yael Furman, Guy Hasson, Keren Landsman, Eyal Teler, Lavie Tidhar, and Nir Yaniv, to mention but a few. Like so many genre authors worldwide, they were fans first, published writers later on. Their emergence and their impressive output are the reasons that made us offer this anthology to the wider readership they deserve.

  One final point we wish to make concerns Russian-language SF/F writers now living in Israel. The Russian immigrants are reputed to supersede their native-born compatriots, no slouches themselves, in their consumption of books. And of all the kinds of books Russians love to read, SF/F ranks pretty highly. Highly enough that many of them view Israeli reticence over speculative fiction, indigenous or otherwise, as inexplicably nekulturny—“uncultured,” one of the worst insults in the Russian vocabulary.

  For the moment, most of them still prefer to remain ensconced within a Russian-speaking milieu. Their SF/F fanzines, journals, and live-action role-playing clubs operate largely under the Israeli radar. The majority of Israelis have absolutely no intimation as to how this hidden literary geyser will soon erupt as their progeny swap Russian for Hebrew, and, should their parents’ literary predilections endure, change the nature of Hebrew belles lettres forever.

  “I think the proportion of Russians to Israelis remain[s] roughly the same since the Great Aliyah of the 90s,” says the Ukraine-born Israeli scholar and writer Elana Gomel (whose story “Death in Jerusalem” we are delighted to present in this volume). “But I have no doubt that it has already significantly increased the appreciation of, and interest in, SF in Israel. The growth of festivals like ICon … the number of young Israelis who read/write SF (interestingly enough, often in English, even though it’s not their mother tongue), the emergence of Israeli comics, etc. In my classes on SF about half the students are ‘Russians’ (even though many of them grew up or were born in Israel).”

  For them, we wait. And with them, we dream.

  Notes

  1. First coined by M. F. Egan and subsequently espoused by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and Robert A. Heinlein, the term speculative fiction was generally intended to deemphasize the technological aspects of a great deal of earlier science fiction. Heinlein defined the term as a subset of SF involving extrapolation from known science and technology “to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action.”

  2. Horror, currently referred to as dark or weird fantasy, is a rarity in Israeli speculative fiction, although a few, among them Asaf Ashery and Orly Castel-Bloom, have valiantly tried their hands at it. Many Israelis will argue that they live with enough daily horror to avoid subjecting themselves to additional, imaginary torments.

  3. Quoted in Michael Weingrad, “Riding Leviathan: A New Wave of Israeli Genre Fiction,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2014, http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/602/riding-leviathan-a-new-wave-of-israeli-genre-fiction. Yanai would subsequently set matters aright with the publication of two unabashed fantasy novels, HaLivyatan MiBavel (The leviathan of Babylon, 2006) and HaMayim shebein HaOlamot (The water between the worlds, 2008).

  4. Danielle Gurevitch, “What Is Fantasy?” in With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature, edited by Danielle Gurevitch, Elana Gomel, and Rani Graff (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 13.

  5. Adam L. Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel (New York: NYU Press, Kindle Edition, 2014), Kindle Location 161 of 8224, retrieved from Amazon.com.

  6. Gail Hareven, “What Is Unimaginable?” in With Both Feet on the Clouds, 45.

  7. Usually, this is rendered in English as “If you will it, it is no dream.” Herzl, however, used the German word Märchen, fairy tale.

  8. Leon Uris’s protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan (Exodus), was a feeble caricature of this idealized image.

  9. See Jeff Vandermeer and Jeremy Zerfoss, Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (New York: Abrams Image, 2013).

  10. Some cases in point for this kind of bowdlerism include a 1938 translation of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover with no sex scenes and a 1924 translation of Wallace’s Ben Hur from which all references to Jesus and Christianity (including, of course, the subtitle, A Tale of the Christ) were carefully expunged.

  11. Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “Sociological Reflections on the History of Science Fiction in Israel,” Science Fiction Studies 13 (1986): 75.

  12. Quoted in Oren Tokatly, Mediniyut Tikshoret beIsrael [Communications policy in Israel] (Tel Aviv: Open University Publishing House, 2000), 85.

  13. Elana Gomel, “What Is Reality?” in With Both Feet on the Clouds, 33. The term Mizrahi applies to Jews from Middle Eastern countries, many of whom are able to trace their lineage to the Babylonian dispersion, not to be confused or conflated with Sephardic Jews, whose forefathers had lived in Spain and Portugal for centuries prior to their expulsion in 1492 and 1496, respectively, and who generally dispersed southward and eastward. In fact, these are two distinct subcultures.

  14. Ioram Melcer, “Why Doesn’t It Rain Fish Here?” in With Both Feet on the Clouds, 194; Gomel, “What is Reality?” 32.

  15. Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975).

  16. Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 8; Elana Gomel, “What Is Reality,” 33–34; Diana Pinto, Israel Has Moved (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1.

  17. Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel (New York: SUNY Press, 1989).

  18. Very early on, the Zionist movement was almost split by a conflict between two opposing views: the so-called Territorialists held that the Jewish Problem required an immediate solution and were willing to accept any territory that may be offered, notably British Uganda. The Zion’s Zionists faction, on the other hand, insisted on the Land of Israel as the only possible place in which the desired solution could be implemented. Herzl himself initially supported the former view but then yielded to the Zion’s Zionists to prevent the dissolution of his fledgling movement.

  19. Hareven, “What Is Unimaginable?” 46. This, however, has not stopped allohistorical speculation on the matter, as in “What If Frank Had Immigrated to Palestine,” in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, What Ifs of Jewish History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 187–214. Larry Niven quote from a panel discussion on the Doomsday Asteroid at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovoth, Israel, March 20, 2007, according to editor E. L.’s recollection.

  20. Rachel S. Harris, “Israeli Literature in the 21st Century: The Transcultural Generation: An Introduction,” Shofar 33, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 1–14, 200, quote from p. 1, retrieved from Proquest electronic database. Post-Zionism refers to a sense that by restoring Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel, the Zionist movement has fulfilled its destiny and may therefore be designated as complete, hence obsolete.

  21. Sheldon Teitelbaum, “Out of Science Fiction, a New View of Contemporary Reality,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1988.

  22. Hareven, “What Is Unimaginable?” 45.

  23. “About CyberCozen,” http://www.kulichki.com/antimiry/cybercozen.

  24. Oren Soffer, Mass Communication in Israel: Nationalism, Globalization, and Segmentation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 2.

  25. Gomel, “What Is Reality?”
36.

  26. Quoted in Soffer, Mass Communication, 14.

  27. Shlomo Errel, Undersea Diplomacy (Tel Aviv: Maariv Books–Hed Artzi Publishing, 2000); Amnon Rubinstein, The Sea above Us (Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House Ltd., 2007); Yossi Sarid, Accordingly We Are Here Assembled: An Alternate History [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, 2008).

  28. Keren Omry, “SF 101,” Science Fiction Research Association Review 306 (Fall 2013), retrieved from author’s website.

  29. Gurevitch, Gomel, and Graff, eds., “Introduction,” With Both Feet on the Clouds, 9.

  30. Omry, “SF 101.”

  31. Kimmerling, Invention and Decline, 16, 23.

  32. Alan L. Mintz, Translating Israel: Contemporary Hebrew Literature and Its Reception in America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 50.

  33. Gershon Shaked, “Facing the Nightmare: Israeli Literature on the Holocaust,” in The Nazi Concentration Camps (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), 690; Gary K. Wolfe, “Introduction: Fantasy as Testimony,” in The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film, edited by Judith B. Kerman and John Edgar Browning (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015), Kindle edition, loc. 137 of 4490.

  34. Judith B. Kerman, “Uses of the Fantastic in the Literature of the Holocaust,” in Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film, loc. 325 of 4490. Felix Frankfurter quote from Stanford University News Service, News Release, March 7, 1995, http://web.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/95/950307Arc5338.html.

  35. Adam Rovner, “Forcing the End: Apocalyptic Israeli Fiction, 1971–2009,” in Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture [e-book], edited by Rachel S. Harris and Ronen Omer-Sherman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 209.

  It is very interesting to note that a similar trend can be discerned now in the Arab world, where “a new wave of dystopian and surrealist fiction [emerges] from Middle Eastern writers who are grappling with the chaotic aftermath and stinging disappointments of the Arab Spring. Five years after the popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, a bleak, apocalyptic strain of post-revolutionary literature has taken root in the region. Some writers are using science fiction and fantasy tropes to describe grim current political realities…. ‘There’s a shift away from realism, which has dominated Arabic literature,’ said the Kuwait-born novelist Saleem Haddad…. ‘What’s coming to the surface now is darker and a bit deeper.’” (“Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in the Dystopian Novel,” New York Times, Books Section, May 29, 2016.) A notable example is Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel (Arabic, al Kamel, 2013; English translation, Penguin Books, 2018).

  36. Rovner, “Forcing the End,” 206, 209.

  37. Ibid., 99, 206; Arik Einstein, Eretz Yisrael haYeshana vehaTova, Phonodor album 13038, 1973.

  38. Amos Oz, Late Love, in Unto Death, translated by Nicholas de Lange (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).

  39. Hareven, “What Is Unimaginable?” 30.

  40. Sayed Kashua, Let It Be Morning (New York: Grove Press, Black Cat, 2006).

  41. Compare Robert A. Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100, in which the United States is a theocracy ruled by a self-proclaimed Prophet.

  42. Not that this would stop similarly themed novels from Amit Godenberg, Ir Nidachat [A city withdrawn], 2015; Yishai Sarid, Ha’Shlishi [The third one], also 2015; or Dror Burstein, Teet [Clay], 2016.

  43. Yitshak Ben-Ner, “Aharey haGeshem” [After the rain] (Tel Aviv, 1977).

  44. Gershon Shaked, Gal Ahar Gal baSipporet haIvrit [Wave after wave in Hebrew narrative fiction] (Jerusalem, 1985), 168; Avraham Hagorni, “A Dwarf and a Half” [in Hebrew], Davar, November 20, 1987.

  45. Yali Sobol, Etzba’ot shel Psantran [A pianist’s fingers] (Tel Aviv: Kinneret Zmora Bitan Dvir, 2012); Weingrad, “Riding Leviathan.”

  46. Orly Castel-Bloom, Dolly City (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), 76–77.

  47. Orly Castel-Bloom, Human Parts (Boston: Verba Mundi Books, 2004).

  48. Zahava Caspi, “Trauma, Apocalypse, and Ethics in Israeli Theatre,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14, no. 1 (2012): 3.

  49. Nava Semel, And the Rat Laughed [Tzhok Shel Achbarosh] (Proza, 2001; English translation, Melbourne, Australia: Port Campbell Press, 2008).

  50. Savyon Liebrecht, A Good Place for the Night [Makom Tov La’Laila] (New York, Persea Books, 2006); Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 215; Etgar Keret, HaKaytana shel Kneller [Kneller’s Happy Campers], from the collection Ga’agu’ay leKissinger [Missing Kissinger] (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007) and adapted for film in 2006 as WristCutters: A Love Story and as the graphic novel Pizzeria Kamikaze in 2005; O. T. Gafla, Olam Basof [The World at the End] (2003; translated in English, New York: Tor, 2013).

  51. Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 215.

  52. Lavie Tidhar, A Man Lies Dreaming (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014); Robert Harris, Fatherland (Billings, MT: BCA, 1992), 372.

  The Smell of Orange Groves

  Lavie Tidhar

  On the roof the solar panels were folded in on themselves, still asleep, yet uneasily stirring, as though they could sense the imminent coming of the sun. Boris stood on the edge of the roof. The roof was flat, and the building’s residents, his father’s neighbors, had, over the years, planted and expanded an assortment of plants, in pots of clay and aluminum and wood, across the roof, turning it into a high-rise tropical garden.

  It was quiet up there and, for the moment, still cool. He loved the smell of late-blooming jasmine; it crept along the walls of the building, climbing tenaciously high, spreading out all over the old neighborhood that surrounded Central Station. He took a deep breath of night air and released it slowly, haltingly, watching the lights of the spaceport: it rose out of the sandy ground of Tel Aviv, the shape of an hourglass, and the slow-moving suborbital flights took off and landed like moving stars, tracing jeweled flight paths in the skies.

  He loved the smell of this place, this city. The smell of the sea to the west, that wild scent of salt and open water, seaweed and tar, of suntan lotion and people. He loved to watch the solar surfers in the early morning, with spread transparent wings gliding on the winds above the Mediterranean. Loved the smell of cold conditioned air leaking out of windows, of basil when you rubbed it between your fingers; loved the smell of shawarma rising from street level with its heady mix of spices, turmeric and cumin dominating; loved the smell of vanished orange groves from far beyond the urban blocks of Tel Aviv or Jaffa.

  Once it had all been orange groves. He stared out at the old neighborhood, the peeling paint, boxlike apartment blocks in old-style Soviet architecture crowded in with magnificent early-twentieth-century Bauhaus constructions, buildings made to look like ships, with long, curving, graceful balconies, small, round windows, flat roofs like decks, like the one he stood on—

  Mixed amongst the old buildings were newer constructions, Martian-style co-op buildings with drop chutes for lifts and small rooms divided and subdivided inside, many without any windows—

  Laundry hanging as it had for hundreds of years, off wash lines and windows, faded blouses and shorts blowing in the wind, gently. Balls of lights floated in the streets down below, dimming now, and Boris realized the night was receding, saw a blush of pink and red on the edge of the horizon and knew the sun was coming.

  He had spent the night keeping vigil with his father, Vlad Chong, son of Weiwei Zhong (Zhong Weiwei in the Chinese manner of putting the family name first), and of Yulia Chong, née Rabinovich. In the tradition of the family, Boris, too, was given a Russian name. In another of the family’s traditions, he was also given a second, Jewish name. He smiled wryly, thinking about it. Boris Aaron Chong; the heritage and weight of three shared and ancient histories pressing down heavily on his slim, no longer young shoulders.

  It had not been an easy night.

  Once it had all been orange groves…. He took a deep breath, that smell of old asphalt and lingering combustion engine exhaust
fumes gone now like the oranges, yet still, somehow, lingering, a memory-scent.

  He’d tried to leave it behind. The family’s memory, what he sometimes, privately, called the Curse of the Family Chong, or Weiwei’s Folly.

  He could still remember it. Of course he could. A day so long ago, that Boris Aaron Chong himself was not yet an idea, an I-loop that hadn’t yet been formed….It was in Jaffa, in the Old City on top of the hill, above the harbor. The home of the Others.

  Zhong Weiwei cycled up the hill, sweating in the heat. He mistrusted these narrow, winding streets, both of the Old City itself and of Ajami, the neighborhood that had at last reclaimed its heritage. Weiwei understood this place’s conflicts very well. There were Arabs and Jews, and they wanted the same land and so they fought. Weiwei understood land and how you were willing to die for it.

  But he also knew the concept of land had changed—that land was a concept less of a physicality now, and more of the mind. Recently he had invested some of his money in an entire planetary system in the Guilds of Ashkelon games-universe. Soon he would have children—Yulia was in her third trimester already—and then grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on down the generations, and they would remember Weiwei, their progenitor. They would thank him for what he’d done, for the real estate both real and virtual, and for what he was hoping to achieve today.

  He, Zhong Weiwei, would begin a dynasty here in this divided land. For he had understood the most basic of aspects, he alone saw the relevance of that foreign enclave that was Central Station. Jews to the north (and his children, too, would be Jewish, which was a strange and unsettling thought), Arabs to the south, now they have returned, reclaimed Ajami and Menashiya, and were building New Jaffa, a city towering into the sky in steel and stone and glass. Divided cities, like Akko, and Haifa, in the north, and the new cities sprouting in the desert, in the Negev and the Arava.