The reception extended to Ben-Ner’s opus is illustrative of the Israeli literati’s nearly implacable abhorrence of SF/F tropes. Initially, Gershon Shaked, already mentioned above as a primo literary gatekeeper, had touted Ben-Ner’s talent for “crafting of realistic plots and the accurate presentation of human situations.” But then, in 1987, Ben-Ner subverted his literary standing with HaMal’achim Ba’im, a hard-core science-fiction dystopia, leading to considerable wringing of writerly hands and gnashing of teeth. “How much longer will our readers… put up with the pranks of our writers?” asked one put-upon pundit. “Is it not time to turn our backs to a literature that treats us this way?”[44]
It would take years for this attitude to change, as an increasing number of books garnered greater public attention and acclaim. In 2008, for instance, Assaf Gavron published Hydromania, an ecothriller (translated into German, Dutch, and Italian) set in 2065 and depicting a desperately parched and dramatically truncated Jewish State facing imminent destruction by invading Arab forces. The book offers a handy example of the notion that Israelis are more open to genre forays if these address societal concerns. The Italian newspaper La Stampa, for example, observed that Hydromania “captures and unfolds the two fundamental obsessions of the country: the fear of being crushed by the immense Arab world and the fear of dying of thirst.”
In 2013, to offer another example, Yali Sobol, son of renowned Israeli playwright Yehoshua Sobol and lead singer of the prolific Israeli band Monica Sex, published Etzba’ot shel Psantran (A pianist’s fingers). The novel, yet another variation on the by now standard leftist Israeli dystopian theme—this one following the advent of yet another war—envisioned the tormenting by thought police of artists, Post-Post-Zionists, leftist columnists, kibbutz remnants, and the last remaining subscribers of Haaretz.[45] For leftist columnists, kibbutz members, and Haaretz readers observing the country’s inexorable shift to the right, such scenarios bespeak very real anxieties.
Orly Castel-Bloom’s novel Dolly City (1992; translated in 1997) presents another, albeit more extreme, case. Dolly City, a nightmarish stand-in for Tel Aviv (named for the book’s eponymous protagonist-murderess), “the most demented city in the world,” is a singular creation. Here, explains Castel-Bloom—in a stripped-down style that many claim changed (some would say diluted) the tenor of Hebrew literature forever—everyone is on the run. And “since everyone is running, there’s always someone chasing them, and since there is someone chasing them, they catch them, and when they catch them, execute them, and throw them into the river.”[46] Dolly, a surgeon, spares her son this fate, but only by inoculating him with poisonous microbes, carving a map of Israel on his back, and relieving a German baby of his kidney for transplant into her hapless boy. In no uncertain terms she strives to imprint her own Israeli nightmare on his still maturing flesh.
Castel-Bloom’s Grand Guignol gives way to what at first appears to be a more sober and less flamboyant engagement with the purely dystopian in Halakim Enoshiyim (2002; translated as Human Parts, 2004).[47] The book appeared ten years later, during the Second Intifada, when Palestinians armed with explosive belts regularly rendered Israeli civilians into unidentifiable mounds of bloody flesh at the push of a vest button. In her scenario the government proves unable to contain the carnage, the prime minister collapses, and the cabinet succumbs to paralysis. Suddenly, the country falls prey to a triple-whammy: an outbreak of the “Saudi flu,” eight-foot snowfalls, and hailstones the size of baseballs. The weather, it turns out, was caused by an undersea volcanic eruption; the outbreak of disease, by an Arab biological assault. As ocean liners careen down Tel Aviv avenues (an image that would later resound in Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv’s surrealistic novel The Tel Aviv Dossier), the country teeters on the brink of dissolution.
In 2010 the acclaimed Israeli poet and novelist Shimon Adaf published a novel, Kfor (Frost), set in a far-future Tel Aviv in which a group of yeshiva students portentously begin to grow wings. Author and editor Nick Gevers applauded the novel’s “vivid description of life in Israel as well as… its subtle, incisive treatment of the fantastic as a phenomenon and as a literary genre.” Adaf is represented in the present volume with the story “They Had to Move,” selected from the commemorative thirtieth anniversary issue of Fantasia 2000.
Perhaps the most sustained exploration of the nexus between Israel and the apocalyptic, however, can be found in Gail Hareven’s accomplished SF/F collection HaDerech leGan Eden (The road to heaven), published by Keter in 1999. In “Lir’ot et ha’Nolad” (literally, “to behold the newborn,” a Hebrew expression used to describe foresight), for example, a far-future society cognizant of impending end-times projects youngsters approaching their majority to near the end of human existence, where, it is hoped, they will witness glimmers of the causes of disaster and survive long enough to return home with useful intelligence. Gail Hareven is the most accomplished, and one of the few unabashedly genre savvy, of those mainstream Israeli authors to have discovered the promised land of SF/F.
Israeli theater has proved particularly amenable to representations of apocalypse. Literary scholar Zahava Caspi argues that this is because the stage is adept at showing the symptoms of the profound existential traumas that Israeli society has suffered since the Yom Kippur War of 1973.[48] The sense of redemption that emerged from the 1967 Six-Day War, and the sense of despair that followed the Yom Kippur War so soon afterwards, created an opening for messianic attitudes, in particular. Overall, theatrical representations of the apocalypse, especially during the 1970s, offered an outlet for what some might construe as a prodigious case of societal PTSD.
Caspi identifies two waves of apocalyptic theater in Israel, one corresponding to the Yom Kippur War near-defeat and the other to the Lebanon War and the First Intifada during the 1980s. Notable examples included Shmuel Hasfari’s 1982 play Tashmad (the Hebrew date corresponding to 1984), about a plan by Israeli settlers to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque and replace it with a new temple; Motti Lerner’s Hevlei Mashiah (Premessianic tribulations), in which such a plan comes to fruition, sparking a regional war; Yehoshua Sobol’s 1988 Syndrome Yerushalayim (Jerusalem syndrome), which portrays Jerusalem’s destruction in AD 70 as an analogy to the situation in the occupied territories today; Hanoch Levin’s Retzah (1997; translated as Murder: A Play in Three Acts and an Epilogue, 2005), which depicts an endless procession of violent actions and reactions in the Middle East; Shimon Bouzaglo’s 2002 production of Geshem Shahor (Black rain), which ends with Israel under atomic attack; and Tamir Greenberg’s Hebron (2007), in which the earth denies burial to children killed in the conflict, spewing forth their bodies in a gallery of flames that engulfs the town of Hebron.
Nava Semel’s And The Rat Laughed,[49] which deals directly with questions of the Holocaust and specific memories of that event, was afforded an operatic adaptation by the Tel Aviv Cameri Theatre with the Israel Chamber Orchestra, staged in April 2005. The narrative transpires after a “Great Ecological Disaster” inaugurates a cybernetic society in the micro-nation of TheIsrael at the onset of the twenty-second century.
44
Gershon Shaked,
45
Yali Sobol,
48
Zahava Caspi, “Trauma, Apocalypse, and Ethics in Israeli Theatre,”
49
Nava Semel,