It is not difficult to understand the meaning of Sha'anan Street's attraction - for 25 years the lead singer of "The Snake Fish", and starting in recent weeks also a writer who has signed the book "Eternal Moment" - to the skater scene of Jerusalem.
The city that was put together has always been present in the musical work of the Israeli rap pioneer, and there are quite a few parallels between the hip hop scene and the one inhabited by surfing enthusiasts.
Street himself, as he testifies in interviews he holds on the occasion of the release of his debut work, rode a skateboard no more than once, before crashing and deciding to focus on music.
But the great resemblance between the scenes in which he acts and the skater (from aesthetic and fashionable terms to elements of urbanity and individualism alongside group values) made him dedicate an entire book to the subject, based on interviews he has conducted for years with riders from around the world. "From Nachlaot to Barcelona," as he writes at the end.
Armed with a wealth of knowledge about the social-sports subculture, with good intentions and free time (resulting in long closures and lack of performances), Street wrote a book that was all a love letter to the city where he grew up and its street culture.
Indeed, reading "Eternal Moment" is a light and flowing experience, even rolling if you will, that manages to reliably and effortlessly describe the internal dynamics of a group of marginalized young people from a not particularly high socio-economic class.
Leading them is Elena, a skater who faces financial problems and cultivates a (almost) unattainable dream of studying art at Bezalel.
It is clear that Street's research, along with his many years of acquaintance and friendship with the workers in the city's skating scene, helped him create an accurate picture of what was going on in it - its customs, rituals, its street art connections, its guiding principles and professional concepts.
The dialogues between Elena's friends, which occupy almost every 219 pages of the book, sound particularly authentic and believable - not a trivial matter when it comes to a writer with no previous experience, especially a 50-year-old who describes dynamics between young people scattered across high school The 20th.
Dialogues are due to the Achilles heel of quite a few writers, but Street manages to cross that hurdle, and no sentence uttered by a character in the book sounds like one that can not be said in the same way in reality, or as an adult trying awkwardly to use young jargon.
But in a sense the dialogues that lead the book are also its weak point, from the fact that the slang and street language are also used as the omniscient narrator in describing the plot moves of the story.
In this place a sense of sloppy writing is created.
Some will tell you that this is a conscious stylistic choice, which uses dialect and language coins from the world of content that the book deals with to describe what is happening and to make it accessible - conceptually and aesthetically.
This is not a lean language, as there are quite a few descriptions and images here, as it is spoken.
Maybe too talked about.
In other words, Street does not make a transition between the language of dialogue and a higher literary language as it moves to the position of narrator.
The tendency to use tongue-in-cheek, slang and blasphemy is evident in the textual worlds of hip-hop he has been producing for years, but reading "Eternal Moment" can not help but betray the fact that it is a work not written by a writer, and probably not a person who reads too much.
The use of terms such as "pauses", "Down for Life", "Straway" or "Bazon" may be true to the language of those who seek to describe Street in his book, but to what extent a person who does not come from these social areas, or one who is not in the age group Legitimate to his spoken Hebrew, can understand or connect to what is described here? What is the chance that a person of Shaannan's age, who does not come from the professional and cultural worlds he comes from, will want to continue reading a book that has a line on its second page like "Elena's younger brother, who was the boy in their group, "Full of beats, maybe because of his young age. And not that any of the bats knew what 'full member' meant?"
The characterization of the characters is also lacking here, and most of them - except perhaps for the main character and one who remains enigmatic until the end of the book - remain quite flat. They are usually described as "Man June", "Ezrush" or Yoav in Malail, and apart from being part of a collective it is difficult to say that they are going through any process, even though the book is described as a story of growing up. This comes, in the end, at the end of the story - in the form of an almost rude leap into what seems like a decade later than what is described in the rest of the school. At the end of "Eternal Moment" it seems that the process that went through the characters was spared us, in favor of a happy ending (or "happy ending", if you ask stylistically from the author) is not completely justified.
On the one hand - Street's much appreciation for the skating culture is evident, and it best describes values it sanctifies - such as friendship and a do-it-yourself approach to life;
On the other hand - even if like its subject, the story told here tends to unfold quickly and easily, the author's affiliation with the subject may have led him to write a book for scholars, a relatively old and limited group of readers - probably young, who may like to jump high, but not read them Heights.
Sha'anan Street / Eternal Moment, Locus Publishing, 219 pages
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