Eighteen stories are included in Meirav Nakar-Sadi's "It Didn't Happen" file, and in each of them there is a whole world that is about to shatter. The immense tension is contained in delicate, sometimes downright casual sentences, so that at times it seems that "that" in the title of the book - may not have really happened, although the ripples he left continue to move in ever-increasing circles. The title of the book, by the way, is taken from a condensed and surprising story, in which a mother tries to comfort her daughter whose cell phone has broken. The shock, the denial, the attempt to bargain with reality - "Mom, did you hear what he said?" I said yes, I will start ... From other mourning worlds. After the mother recalls her own painful adolescent experiences, she initiates a burial ceremony for the dead phone, and only in this way is she able to reconnect with the daughter's psychic world.
The reality described in Nakar-Sadi's stories is almost entirely mental-emotional, so it allows her to blur so easily the boundaries between what is "real" and what is "imagined."
In the excellent story that opens the file, "Shahidit," a young woman opens the door of her home and discovers three behind it - "two in military uniforms and one in civilian clothes, with brown faces and a drooping forehead."
She immediately adds: 'I was not scared at all.
"We do not have anyone in the army," so it is clear that the scene of the disaster is mistaken for the address.
But then it turns out that the trio came to take her to a farewell meeting with her mother, who is lying in a tent and preparing to leave the world.
The strangeness is exacerbated by the description of the ominous apostles: one mouth is empty of teeth except for a huge tooth in the front and two small ones in the back, and on the neck of the other, who is supposed to be the doctor, is a small, blue silk scarf with red dots.
The narrator is surprised, but matter-of-fact: "This is not what I would expect here," she says.
"Neither this veil nor these dots."
Later in the same story, the confusion between the hallucinatory and the realist intensifies - for example, a mother who has had her hair cut all her life now has a thick gray braid: My mother, Aliza Dalal "- a mixture that emphasizes how difficult it is to understand and digest concepts such as death and separation and mourning, how much the death of a close person undermines the world and shatters the definitions that have hitherto seemed clear.
This rift is also broken down into factors in the story "A Quiet Little Quiet", in which the narrator imagines the world after the death of her father, a world she will no doubt stop a queen. "Orphans like orphans," she describes her and her two brothers. "Those who were left alone without protection.... And since this is a situation where there is no way to talk about it in realistic terms, she has no choice but to lie down on a grave and sing a song by Esther Ofarim that was loved by her father, with watery tears in her eyes, and a palm tree growing on her.
Not in all the stories does Nakar-Sadi cross the line of reality.
Sometimes, as in The Beauty Queen, the whole thing is about everyday life: the mother, who is deeply depressed after the family left the neighborhood where she lived and moved to a villa in another neighborhood, comes to visit her daughter at a summer camp "without warning, even though she was such a mother." Such a visit is appropriate for her. '
The move involves quite a few difficulties for the daughter as well, but she does not say so so as not to upset her mother, who "from the beginning said that because of this villa we go back in time instead of moving on and out of this damn city."
The same desire to protect her mother also makes her agree to participate in a beauty contest at a summer camp, where she wins third place.
Although Shankar-Sadi does not use metaphors and shows great frugality in describing landscapes, the difficulty, despair and alienation emerge very strongly from her precise sentences.
At Susita Beach, a story about a family vacation in which disaster almost struck, she tells for the first time that "at Susita Beach all the parents would change their faces. They remained our parents, but something changed in them. ' This ability to see the adult world on its own is part of her adolescence process, and it gives rise to the painful realization that 'if we go away, for example, all the children will go, they will continue to enjoy ... and in general they will have life and talk even if we are erased. Completely out of the world. ' Despite the pain, this knowledge helps her define herself and her place in the world, even if her first attempt to enter this world alone turns out to be frightening.
Adolescence and the pursuit of an independent life do not completely erase the child's sense of responsibility for the parents' mental well-being, which has also emerged in other stories, but at the same time the parents also serve as a source of strength and inspiration. For example, in Mississippi, where the narrator prepares for a graduation ceremony at an American university. Her parents pushed her to study, but while for the father it was enough to have a teaching certificate or a bachelor's degree to know that "something came out of you", and he did not understand why she was going overseas, the mother - "who had to give up the army because of her father or leave home The book for sisters because of my father 'is what encourages her daughter to expand the boundaries of her world. "Quietly she whispered to me with every whim of hesitation. ' Only the sound of that expression made me cry. '
Nakar-Sadi presents her heroines with familiar but very charged challenges: a child with special needs, a car accident, an encounter with a childhood friend who seems like a distant and different world.
She does not hesitate to touch on the emotional turmoil that arises from any situation, and she does so with restrained writing, which makes her one of the most successful writers in the short story genre.
Meirav Nakar-Sadi / It Did Not Happen, Babel Publishing, 168 pages
