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April 19,
2003
Haunted by History
Oz Shelech's
Picnic Grounds
by
NEVE GORDON
Picnic Grounds, A Novel in Fragments,
by Oz Shelach, City Lights Books, 2003.
Even though people often strive to suppress it,
"the past," as William Faulkner once wrote, "is
not dead, it is not even past." Surely, many of us frequently
attempt to stifle, elide or erase certain elements in our past,
yet ultimately the thorny business called history comes back
to haunt us, demanding that we confront it.
Picnic Grounds, Oz Shelach's first book
of short stories, is, in many respects, an attempt to address
some of the hidden aspects of Israel's past, disclosing certain
facets of the Israeli landscape and culture which for years have
been buried in some dark corner. It is an archaeological excavation,
of sorts, an excavation into the heart and soul of Israeli society.
Shelach digs in cautiously and skillfully, using irony, wit,
and humor to lure his readers into the mysterious and, at times,
sinister attributes that have, for the most part, been concealed
from the public's eye.
In the book's first story, "One
Afternoon," a history professor takes his family on a picnic
in a pine forest near Givat Shaul, a Jerusalem neighborhood.
The professor teaches his son some of the camping skills he learned
while serving in the Israeli military, using old stones to block
the wind and to protect the newly-lit fire. The stones, we are
told, are the remains of homes of a village known as Deir Yassin.
Although Shelach does not say as much,
Deir Yassin was a Palestinian village located on the outskirts
of Jerusalem. The Jewish neighborhood which now stands in its
place was built  not long
after Israeli paramilitary forces evicted its Palestinian residents
by carrying out a massacre, killing an estimated one hundred
men, women and children out of a total population of 750.
Shelach does not recount this history;
he simply describes how the father uses the old stones to teach
his son how to build a fire. The story ends with an ironic, perhaps
tragic, twist which underscores Shelach's concern with the past,
and more precisely, the trepidation and ultimate denial of many
Israelis when confronting their past. The final sentence reads,
"[The history professor] imagined that he and his family
were having a picnic, unrelated to the village, enjoying its
grounds, outside history."
There is something striking about the
book's pithy style. Using a small number of words, Shelach manages
to describe events which reveal hidden truths about Israeli society,
truths which are seldom discussed. A story called "Complaint"
is one example.
The proprietor of a bar in the Russian
Compound received complaints from patrons about sounds that filtered
into his bar at night and tainted the drinking pleasure. He sent
numerous letters to the police, pointing out that these unsettling
voices, as he called them, came from the jail across the street,
traveling from the interrogation rooms deep under the police
station -- four, some said six floors underground -- all the
way up to his bar on the street level. He even visited the police
headquarters in person to make his case heard, but the voices
persisted. Finally, the bar owner had no choice but to increase
the volume of the music playing in his bar during quieter hours.
His hearing deteriorated.
Many a young Jerusalemite has visited
the bars located outside the Russian Compound, where the Israeli
secret services continue to interrogate Palestinian detainees.
Shelach captures the surreal reality of cocktails, music and
torture. The somewhat quirky ending -- "His hearing deteriorated"
-- only serves to highlight that the atrophy of human senses
has become the condition of possibility for many Israelis, who
could not otherwise cope with the fierce reality of the Middle
East.
"Complaint" also draws attention
to the idiosyncratic way Shelach uses the English language. It
is almost as if he is speaking Hebrew, but in English. Indeed,
the author is very conscious of the words he employs, attempting
to give the English reader a taste of the Hebrew, while simultaneously
exposing some of the peculiar characteristics of Hebrew terms.
In this sense, and not only due to the distinctive plots, Shelach's
collection of short stories is much more Israeli than most Hebrew
books which are translated into English. There is something about
the sound, tempo, and rhythm of these stories that gives them
a uniquely Israeli flavor.
Language, as bell hooks once said, is
a place of struggle. Shelach, so it seems, has adopted this view
and is interested in using English -- the language in which he
still feels uncomfortable -- to expose Hebrew, the language in
which he is at home. "Home" and the "well-known,"
he appears to sense, can also come to mean mediocrity, the existential
condition of becoming comfortably numb. In one story he translates
Misrad HaMishpatim as the Ministry of Trial, exposing, as it
were, to the English reader the literal meaning of the ministry's
name (in English newspapers it is translated as the Israeli Ministry
of Justice). Simultaneously, this literal translation in and
of itself suggests to the reader that this ministry deals more
with trials than with justice.
I met Shelach in 1990 in the dark labyrinths
of the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
We were both undergraduates, both active in the liberal left
party Ratz. The first Intifada (Palestinian uprising) was underway,
and yet most students and faculty at the university continued
their daily routine as if life outside the university walls was
in some sense normal; they were living, in Shelach's words, outside
history. In the story called "A Reflection" this so
called unbearable lightness of being forcefully comes across.
"Prepositions differ from one language
to another in apparent arbitrariness, but they illustrate the
presuppositions of a language" Each Tuesday afternoon throughout
the fall semester the student was lulled to sleep by her professor's
lectures on epistemology. Five of the walls that formed the octagonal
classroom were too small that the classroom looked more triangular
than octagonal. The door was painted orange in agreement with
all the doors of the same octagonal foyer, distinguishing it
from the next octagonal foyer, which was governed by lilac, from
the next, governed by pale green, and so on until foyer number
eight, designed, the student thought, like the entire Hebrew
University to block any view of the outside, to narrow the mind,
to keep everyone focused on their own reflections and ignorant
of anything important. When she woke up and saw, in the single
window, a shining object sticking up into the sky, no other student,
nor their professor, was looking out the window. She could not
tell it was the setting sun reflected by a minaret-top golden
crescent, on the next mountain peak to the east. The sound of
shots drifted into the classroom window. Beyond the narrow view,
in the fold of the valley, our soldiers were mowing down protesters.
Then the shining crescent disappeared into the long shadow cast
by the university tower.
"There's something so captivating
about these 'fragments,' about their beguiling simplicity, about
the things they so eloquently withhold, something so pure and
unpretentiously fresh," Anton Shamas writes on Picnic Grounds
cover. And indeed, Shelach has produced an enticing little book,
that is both luring and unsettling, but most of all helps one
understand some of the major undercurrents informing modern day
Israeli society and culture. It is a fascinating read.
Oz Shelach will be touring the United
States in the next three months and recently told me that he
is still looking for reading engagements. He can be reached at
book@oznik.com.
Neve Gordon
teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is a contributor
to The
Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent (New Press
2002). He can be reached at ngordon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il.
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