Queen:     If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet:     Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not seems.

Hamlet, Act One, Scene Two

I

In February 1942 the Leningrad Theatre Institute, or at least, what was left of it, was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Pyatigorsk, together with the Philharmonic and Radlov’s Theatre Company. They had barely settled or begun recovering a little from their starvation, when the Germans began a sudden and unexpected offensive in the Caucasus and reached Pyatigorsk with unimaginable speed. The soldiers and the town’s administration all fled south to Tbilisi. Almost everyone in the Theatre Institute set off in their wake, the students walking, some hitching lifts on the last military lorries going in that direction. Initially my Mother and her friend had the luck to be offered a ride, but then the soldiers began harassing them, and finally, angered by their aloofness, they threw them back out onto the road.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her translation of Elena Shvarts’ Birdsong on the Seabed was published by Bloodaxe in 2008. Her third  collection of poetry will be published this autumn by Carcanet/OxfordPoets.

Translated by Anthea Bell

RG: It’s nice to make your virtual acquaintance, Jay, and I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can, while maintaining a novelist’s prerogative of ambiguity. Trained as I am as a philosopher, a field in which we battle against imprecision and ambiguity, I’m hyper-sensitive the deliberate application of ambiguity in literature.  A novelist has to create spaces into which the reader’s own point of view moves so that it can inhabit the work and make it into an experience of its own—one hopes pleasurable, though no novelist can secure this for every reader. That is the diceyness of the game. A novel is not an argument but rather a template for experience.  This difference between argumentation and literary experience is the subtext that runs through this novel, which takes as its backdrop the contemporary reactivated atheist/religion debate.  It’s one of the themes of the novel that the binary choices presented in the debate hardly exhaust the possibilities.  That’s why Cass says about the arguments and counter-arguments in his Appendix, which I reproduce at the back of my novel, that they don’t capture all that there is to the matter.  The Appendix is only the Appendix, and the text of the matter, our lived experience,  is something else.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

The Glass Room is Simon Mawer’s tenth book and eighth novel. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is married with two children and has lived in Italy for the past  thirty years.

After a long, weirdly warm Jerusalem winter spent in the presence of heavily armed soldiers and suspicious security guards — many Fridays a large white surveillance zeppelin hovered over town, staring down on noontime prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque and making a macabre mockery of the festive atmosphere that usually attends the launch of a hot-air balloon — I was eager to get away. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighbourhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. She lives in Jerusalem.

Since the accident, Oshri had been selling policies like crazy. It wasn’t clear whether this had to do with his slight limp or with the paralysis in his right arm, but people who’d sit through an appointment with him would take it all in, and buy everything he had to offer: life insurance, loss of earning power, complementary health insurance, you name it. At first Oshri kept recycling the one about the Yemenite who was run over by an ice cream truck the very day he bought his policy, on his way to pick up his daughter from kindergarten, or the one about the guy from the suburbs who’d laughed when Oshri had offered him health insurance and one month later called in tears, having just received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Translated from Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger

PA: Having worked in film a bit over the years I feel that writing is akin to acting — there is a similar psychological process. An actor is trying to embody another human being, to become someone else. The actor has his or her body whereas the writer has his pen. If you can do it successfully I think there’s a conviction that a reader will automatically feel. It’s a mysterious process, one which connects to the idea of play, of being a child again.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

William Heinemann, March 2009, £20.00

On the evening of 6 May 1947 Alexander Rubowitz left his parents’ home in Jerusalem and never returned. Rubowitz was 16 at the time, and a member of LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), the smallest and most ardent underground organisation fighting against the British Mandate in Palestine. Commonly referred to by the British as ‘The Stern Gang’, LEHI specialised in acts of terrorism, usually in defiance of the Jewish Agency, which led the Zionist struggle for independence. It later transpired that Rubowitz had been abducted by British  officers, serving in the Special Air Service (SAS), which led the counter-terrorist offensive. One of them, Major Roy Farran, admitted that he killed Rubowitz in the course of his interrogation, by smashing a rock against his head. The body was never found.
Those were violent days in Palestine. Arabs, Jews and the British attacked each other with varying degrees of maliciousness, always supposedly for patriotic purposes. Hence the abduction and killing of Rubowitz are hardly worth more than a footnote in the history of those dramatic times. But both the young Zionist militant and his British assassin became mythological heroes, which gives their story special significance and lifts it above the chronology of routine violence.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Telegram Books, March 2009, £12.99

In a lecture at Harvard in 1967, Jorge Luis Borges mourned the passing of the epic, a form he loved for its fusion of music and narration and its heroic breadth. In contrast to the myopic and introverted modern novel, it offered a ‘pattern for all men’ — something that we in the contemporary world hungered for just as much as the ancients.
In A Designated Man, set on the fictitious island of Skender, Moris Farhi gives us a darker, starker version of the same struggle we saw in his last novel, Young Turk; again, a multi-ethnic society is in distress. Though graced with fertile soil and a long, distinguished history, Skender is in the grip of what is known locally as the Law. First introduced several centuries earlier, and justified by a rigid concept of honour, it gives its men no choice but to surrender their lives to blood feuds.
The Law has been so successful that it now allows clans that have had all their male feudists wiped out to appoint women in their stead. Any woman who agrees must erase all trace of her femininity thereafter. Any one who resists the Law’s fundamentalist logic can expect a harsh response from Toma, the Law’s chief enforcer, who is responsible for the training and indoctrination of young feudists and also acts as agents for the faceless Gospodins, the mainland clan that has been slowly and quietly buying up the island, in the hope that Skender might one day become a Mediterranean equivalent of Diego Garcia, thereby making them a fortune. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Portobello Books, June 2009, £10.99

Anyone who expects a short story to be an impressionistic wash, a glimpsed moment that requires less than full concentration, should know that the eight stories in Sana Krasikov’s debut collection permit the reader no such idleness. On the contrary, One More Year demands commitment. Its narratives are intricately woven, populated by idiosyncratic characters, of whom many — the boyfriend’s mother, for instance, who lectures on the psychology of endurance after surviving a plane crash — are merely mentioned in passing. Each tale is alive with the minutiae of a fully-realised world and in each the author has amassed enough material to create at least one novel.
Like most of her characters, Krasikov is an émigré from Eastern Europe. Born in the Ukraine, she grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and moved to the United States when she was eight years old. In this acclaimed collection, for which she was awarded the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she describes the immigrant experience from eight different angles, in unsentimental prose laced with bruised compassion. Her characters, whether striving to assimilate in the States or reacclimatise themselves to Russia, are adrift in equally inhospitable lands: ‘an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent to another.’Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Auckland University Press, October 2009, £34.50

‘A very good portrait is a paradox,’ says Leonard Bell, professor of Art History at Auckland University. He considers how revelation and mystery co-exist in the work of Marti Friedlander, and her motivation for each of the 185 photographs included in this handsome book, many now being published for the first time.
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Marti was born in 1928 in London’s East End. Aged three, Marti and her sister Anne were put into an orphanage in Bethnal Green run by the London County Council. In 1933 she moved to the Jewish Orphanage in Norwood. You need to know this about Marti’s early life because it informs so much of her photography. Deeply steeped in Jewish sensibilities, yet always an outsider. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

The first thought crossing one’s mind after putting down The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (following an exhilarated sigh of disappointment that the roller coaster ride is over) is indeed a morosely existential one: who is going to read this book? Who is going to be inspired by it for action that makes a difference in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
The above quote appears in the ‘art & politics’ chapter of this inter-disciplinary multi-tasking, workaholic, split-personality-disorder-diagnosed Middle-East-conflict-in-space graphic novel in which every chapter is illustrated by a different artist, bracketed by questionnaires, essays, photographs, games and even a crossword puzzle. The climactic chapter is the only one written by someone other than the two artists behind this project, Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour. But when their superhero alter-egos Nonel and Vovel are getting ready to save the day and solve the conflict that transcends our planet’s borders (no spoilers!) the storyline is interrupted by a conversation between Ashery and Sansour in cameo appearance, illustrated into the sci-fi sequence sitting on a bench in London’s South Bank, discussing the problem of handing over the most dramatic chapter to a guest writer (Soren Lind).  [hidepost]
Ashery and Sansour felt that the ‘notion of a fictional graphic novel alone’ is not enough, and wanted the ‘process behind the book to be transparent and grounded in our daily reality’. Therefore, the graphic chapters unfolding the storyline are interspersed with photographs of the two in relevant locations in Israel/Palestine and London — from the separation wall to a Sunday roast meal and Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth piece in Tate Modern, better known as ‘the crack’ — probably the most engaging and communicative piece of contemporary art in recent memory. Posing as two rather experimental performance artists (Ashery last seen dressed up as controversial 17th century  messianic figure Shabbtai Zevi; Sansour notorious for her Sombrero-donning, gun-slinging character Bethlehem Bandolero) next to a piece of art popular enough to become a tourist attraction speaks volumes of the main question posed herein: can art change the world? Old question – fortunately, this book articulates it in novel (or should it say Nonel? Or Vovel?) ways.
There is a reason why it will only be revealed at this point that Ashery is Jewish Israeli and Sansour Palestinian. There is a reason it will only now be mentioned that the central concrete nemesis (notwithstanding a handful of sci-fi ones) they confront as superheroes is the separation wall in Israel, which they intend to break down. There is a reason why this review will refrain from making an analogy between Ashery and Sansour asking themselves whether their artistic practice places them in a ghetto separating them from the ability to influence reality, and indeed the wall, stranding the Palestinians in a tragically non-metaphorical ghetto. And the reason for that is that the emotions, prejudices, fears, mistrust and pre-conceptions we have in regards to the conflict on either side of the wall and of the left/right political fence constitute the more elusive and therefore more difficult wall to demolish.
Simply by revealing that this book is made by a couple of lefty arty-farty bleeding hearts, one risks erecting a wall between the crucial insights offered in their book and considerable potential readership. How sad it is that being divided to camps doesn’t mean dialogue, even polemic – but a secret, crawling civil war. How sad it is that global political discourse is light years away from the level offered by this book. How tragically deep the chasm between what politicians and artists see, how uncompromising the latter’s honesty, self-doubt, investigative drive and clarity.  How seemingly easy it is for an Israeli and a Palestinian to find common ground anywhere besides their shared homeland.
Ashery and Sansour are lefty arty-farty types perhaps, but they are certainly not naïve and wide-eyed about it. On the contrary, they are only too aware of the traps and pitfalls they face, and go through acrobatic twists, leaving no stone unturned in their determination to understand their position as politically-engaged artists, and the relevance of said position for the rest of us unsuspecting fundamentalists. The quoted bitter assertion opening this review reveals their familiarity with the ways the world always finds ways to erect a dialogue-blocking wall around them: in 2000 their agenda is too ahead of its time to be noticed, and in 2009 they’re allegedly jumping some ridiculed bandwagon. To paraphrase Reem Fadda’s (rather opaque) text in the essay section closing the book, Ashery and Sansour seek a present where their voice is heard.
Therefore, the main conflict tackled by the book is not the Israeli-Palestinian one, but that besieging the artist torn between self-fulfilment and political commitment. The novel begins as our two artists are infected by a mysterious virus that is revealed to imbue them with ‘context-responsive’ superpowers, alas it comes on account of losing their creativity. Ashery and Sansour look political art in the eye as a praxis that often betrays selfish privilege camouflaged in good intentions. Ashery and Sansour ask one another the cruellest question: are we forced to choose between a life in pursuit of artistic goals and a life of committed activism? Are the two mutually exclusive? And, facing the severity of a century-long conflict, is the solution in the hands of heroes, freedom-fighters and messiahs? Are artists — and ordinary people for that matter — out of their depth in this equation? Is the position of the artist as a passive anarcho-pacifist — always averse to violence and to the notion of wielding any level of power — the privilege of those who are living a safe, sheltered life where strife and oppression are confined to the TV screen?
Ashery and Sansour’s quest for an answer constantly breaks the book’s ‘fourth wall’: their aversion to political power is exchanged with treating their practice as control freaks; they express reluctance to go with the flow of the genre and become ‘real’ heroes who at least make a difference in this imaginary realm. This compulsion to disturb narrative as such, shatter illusion whatever form it takes, refuse to serve as propagandists to their own agenda — as if illusion, myths, and propaganda are by definition enemies one must slay to unravel a precious, forgotten, common sense clarity — condemn them, and to a considerable extent every political activist, to remain perpetual underdogs — noble losers. Ashery and Sansour confess to being trapped; yet sharing this existential cul-de-sac with us stems out of a sense of responsibility and the urgency of a desire to break free.
The biggest underlying fear keeping every concerned citizen awake at night is, to quote John Lydon, that ‘better days will never be’: the impossibility to even imagine a world based on justice and peace. This fear underpins the superior text in the book’s essay section, curator Nat Muller’s allegorical sci-fi ‘Proposal for the Venice Biennnale Intergalactic Pavilion’. Muller is masterful — and hilarious — in imagining futuristic conflicts and trends leading up to ‘galactic liberation’, a utopian ground zero after which it becomes much harder to visualise the ways of the world and the role of its artists.  Muller suddenly needs strife to trigger interest and tension. Under the ‘foreseeable obstacles’ section of her surreal proposal she details ‘unstable meteorological conditions across the Mediterranean’ threatening the realisation of Nonel and Vovel’s project. The next section ushers back what we’d think we managed to get rid of by the year 2212 — security, needed as precaution against a cult of revisionist settlers who falsely maintain that Palestine was never liberated.
If the only function we can imagine for future peacetime art is a bizarre repetitive re-enactment of a by-then unneeded heroism; If the only possible excitement, the only projected life-force is nostalgia for the extinct need to resist, aren’t we admitting our secret collaboration with the present’s state of strife to which we seem to be addicted? Nonel and Vovel make the bold step of asking this question. Possible answers contradict the aforementioned essayist Fadda’s ‘liberation through entering history’ position — three hints will be provided. First is Lydon’s above quote. Second is Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence (resonating with pre-historical ‘dreamtime’ and negating monotheism’s linear history). Final is something the recently departed thinker, essayist, columnist and artist Amos Kenan said in relation to Zionism, quoted in the biography written by his partner Nurith Gertz, ‘Unrepentant’. I paraphrase: ‘if the dream comes true and it’s not what we thought we wanted, it means there must have been something inherently faulty with the dream to begin with. We must therefore examine what is wrong with our dream’.[hidepost]

I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life, then, and a soundtrack followed me wherever I went. If I’d met Amichai at another moment — even a year earlier, when I was too little formed to be so radically changed; or a year later, when I was already well into my solidification — it’s unlikely that I’d be writing about him now. Or writing at all.
I was traveling across Israel that summer, on a program intended to foster a generation of young Jewish leaders. We saw sights, smoked a fair amount of pot, played a fair amount of the Jewish version of basketball (characterized by a lot of arguing over esoteric rules), and endeavored to couple.
In the course of the summer, we met with an eclectic cast of Israeli figures: politicians, artists, activists, archeologists, soldiers, kibbutzniks and theologians. Our summer’s final meeting was with Amichai. It’s hard to imagine why he agreed to spend time with us. Perhaps the fellowship was paying him. Perhaps it was a personal debt he owed to one of the organizers. Perhaps he actually bought into the premise of the thing, and genuinely believed — as we never could, thank God — that we were Future Jewish Leaders, that his words might redirect us, if only by a few thousandths of a degree, toward some version of Jewish Leadership that he found palatable or even inspiring.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

The consensus among Borges’ biographers and critics is that he was deeply apolitical and remained disengaged with local, national, and international affairs throughout his life. It is true that Borges was, especially in his adolescence, a dilettante à la Oscar Wilde minus the ornamental outspokenness. But to certain events he offered political comment, often heavy with sarcasm, of great force. A partial yet enlightening record of his opinions can be found in Selected Non-fiction, edited by Eliot Weinberger. Of the entire selection, only a small portion address the events in Europe; still, they are significant in that they allow a glimpse of Borges’ beliefs and the trenchant style with which he debunked ugly stereotypes. Borges denounced Hitler almost from the start, decrying the arrival of Nazism as a catastrophe for German culture. In ‘A Pedagogy of Hatred,’ he attacks the publication, in Germany of the children’s book Trau keinem Fuchs auf gruener Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid [Don’t Trust Any Fox from a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath]. Here is Suzanne Jill Levine’s translation included in Selected Non-Fiction:Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

It had struck us, and not surprisingly many others at around the same time, that the category of the ‘Jew’, not the history of Jews, Judaism or Jewish culture, but the way in which the ‘Jew’ had been perceived in modern culture, was relatively unexplored. While issues surrounding race, identity, colonialism, and Eurocentrism have become the focus of endless debate and scrutiny, the ‘Jew’ had largely been left out. It is as if the issue of the ‘Jew’ is just as much an embarrassment to contemporary cultural theorists as it was to their European ancestors.¹Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Naomi Alderman wrote this short story in response to: Connection, Continuity and Community British Jewish Women Speak Out, a review initiated and implemented by an independent group of professional and lay women led by Rosalind Preston OBE. The full report can be found at: www.boardofdeputies.org.uk/file/ConnectionContinuityCommunity.pdf

Naomi Alderman’s new novel The Lessons will be published by Penguin in April 2010.