"A man who is not able to play, pretend, put on another soul - his death is a death that has no burial ground, like going up in a fire, he burns inside himself."
"The Actor", the new collection of stories by Eli Rauner, translator and literary researcher, is a thin book - four stories in total - but thematic compressions and tightening allow it to contain a whole world.
All the stories in the file deal in one way or another with the theme of change and identity exchange, and they are like musical variations on a common motif, which explore and overwhelm it in different ways.
"The Actor", which gave the book its name, is the longest story in the file.
It consists of an exchange of letters - albeit somewhat fragmented and confused - between an older actor and a psychologist who treated him years ago.
The actor describes a crisis he experienced, involving a sense of loss of identity: "I walk like a hollow body, a body that is nothing but a shell" (7).
Similar to Shakespeare's description in "Everything and Nothing" to Borges, he describes his theatrical roles as a series of costumes designed to fill and hide the void that was gaping in his heart.
His letters, which are presented one after the other as a kind of monologue, return to the past: first to his difficult relationship with his father, whom he wished not to resemble due to his mother's warnings;
And then to his grandfather Ben Moshev, to whom his house was sent as a child every summer, and to the pack of hunting dogs he raised.
In the night that is like a dream, the grandfather is described as having spoken to the dogs in their language, and the boy pretended to be dead to escape from them - a pretense that something of her remained in him ever since.
These possibilities of change - actor to character, son to father, living to dead, man to animal - are joined by other possibilities, which come from the thoughts of the actor and the letters of the psychologist: the actor refers to the medieval concept of life in this world as the embodiment of a character.
About himself he writes that "life was all preparation for the game" (28).
The psychologist, for his part, describes the exchange of identities not as life, but as the extension of death to infinity.
The role of the psychologist's letters is not clear until the end: sometimes it seems that he seeks to bring order to the events, to separate and delimit the identities, but sometimes it seems that he actually pushes the player towards the most radical change, the one that is expressed at the end of the story: "I feel that Govech is getting bent" , he writes, "Your fur stands on end, you bare your teeth or lick your belly" (37).
"Agony", the second story in the collection, takes place in France after one of the world wars.
The hero, a 19-year-old young man, meets one of the war widows in a public garden - a woman who spent so much time in her widowhood that the grief became recognizable to her.
The bereavement is described here as a performance or as a ritual, in which the widow is given a liminal status: "This eternal widow, like a temple priestess, walks on the sidelines of the military parade and accepts the task of mediating between life and the other world, in cycles, year after year... she is the body that embodies the The fictional power of the nation, the duty of the nation towards the sons..." (60).
If "the actor" is spread over an entire life course, here the story focuses on one afternoon, on a dialogue between two characters, and on the delicate and extraordinary moment when the widow recognizes in the young man the portrait of her dead lover.
The situation is ambivalent: it is difficult to say whether the young man accepts the identity or whether it is imposed on him, whether there is a show of empathy or a magical ritual, whether a personal and one-time meeting or a symbol of the way the nation constructs bereavement and passes it on from generation to generation.
The result of all these contrasts and question marks is a charged and powerful meeting, almost bewitching.
"פרידה" מתרחש בקיבוץ בישראל בזמן מלחמת לבנון השנייה. במוקדו עומדת משפחה אחת - רעיה, גברי ובתם רנה. גברי בוגד ברעיה עם ורה, אשתו של חברו המת, וההורים מתכוננים לספר לרנה על סיום הנישואים כשמהומות פורצות לפתע בקיבוץ. המהומות, שמתגלות כמרד של עובדים זרים ממזרח אסיה כנגד תנאי העסקתם, מפגישות בין רנה לבין דני, בתה של ורה, ומסתיימות בטרגדיה כפולה. הסיפור מתחיל במבט במראה, ומבחינה תמטית כולו בנוי כמשחק מראות (כאן אנחנו נתקלים שוב בבורחס): התפרקות המשפחה משקפת את התפרקות הקיבוץ, תחילה מערכיו הסוציאליים ולבסוף באופן פיזי; וכל דמות פוגשת את תמונת הראי שלה: רנה את דני (שמבקשת לשנות את שמה ל"שם מסחרי", שבכוחו, כך היא טוענת, ניתן להיות כל דבר); רעיה את ורה; ואילו גברי מוצא את מקבילו בדמות של צעיר סיני, שמשמש מעין דמות אב זמנית לילדות החטופות.
"The Disappeared" takes place in Buenos Aires during the days of the military junta.
Plainclothes policemen break into the home of the Kishinskis looking for their son, Pablo, a socialist Zionist activist who wants to immigrate to Israel.
The story revolves around a question of identification and misidentification: the police present a blurry picture to the parents;
A neighbor to whom the couple turn for help questions the very existence of a permanent identity;
And finally Father Kishinski is put in the same cell with his son, pretending not to recognize him and in a way accepting his place and his punishment.
However, in my opinion, this is the least interesting story in the collection, and its handling of the theme is a bit simplistic compared to the others.
The theme of transformation is fundamental to literature and has been addressed by many great authors, from Ovid, through Shakespeare to Kafka.
Instead of this abundance being silenced, it serves as another tool in Rauner's writing, which is full of interjections and allusions: from Augustine's concept of divinity to Goethe's "Faust", from slaughtering rituals in ancient Greece to the stories of Oscar Wilde.
Occasionally the result is a little too philosophizing - for example, when the psychologist states that "the infinite acceleration of time produces a fixed and inert space" (36) - but for the most part, the author knows how to use gestures as a spice that does not replace the writing but is added to it.
This is a book that invites a slow reading, and perhaps more than one reading: the writing is mostly fluid, yet it seems to fold within it layers upon layers, as well as thin threads that connect the stories, and I could only unfold a few of them here.
Rauner's engagement with the themes he treats is similar to a collection of dots, which readers are required to connect according to their discretion and which may create different shapes depending on the point of view.
Omri Herzog, in his review of the book, lamented the narrow dimensions of the book, which leaves a taste for more.
At this point, I would like to disagree with him: in my eyes, there is little here that holds the majority, a tightly packed book that an addition might actually damage its cohesion or make it too busy.
As it is, there is no doubt that this is a rich and intriguing reading experience.
Ili Rauner / the actor, Pardes Publishing House, 108 p.
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