When I ask Ilan Sheinfeld what led him to write a series of historical novels about the Jewish past, he opens with a chain of stories that more than anything else mention his writing style in these historical novels - the last of which is "The Jewish Monk", preceded by "An Act in the Ring". "When the Dead Return" and "The Jewish Pirate Wife". Like his historical novels, the conversation between us is replete with magical stories and hair-raising coincidences that it is not clear what is real and what is a tale, and where does the writer end and his literary hero begin.
It all started, he says, when he was busy writing his first novel, an autobiographical novel called "Only You" (published in 2000) which is a love story for his first partner, the painter Saar Efroni.
He was then visited by a series of signs - dreams, visions and strange encounters - that heralded the sudden death of his partner from a rare illness at the age of 28. "" How do you believe in this fabrication? "" Then, around his death, things happened that I could not explain. So maybe Saar was right all these years when he talked to me about channeling? It changed my world. "
Walk around with notes
The channeling opened the channel of prose in his writing. Until then, he recounts, he only wrote poetry and the autobiographical book, but now he has been given a message through a messenger that "a high being holds your right hand and wants to write through you." He says that he put a page in the typewriter and within two weeks "Schedeltz" came out - a cycle of Hasidic stories about the town where his mother was born, even though she never said anything about it and Scheinfeld himself never visited it.
The two books, "Only You" and "Scheldtz", were published together, and Scheinfeld edited them so that they were related to each other: And so he connects to the protagonist of the autobiographical book, the son of Scheinfeld's character. Thus, the last line of "Scheldelt" is the first line of the autobiographical book and vice versa. "I created a deliberate ontological loop in which it would not be clear who created whom.My Israeli character The gay sabra created the Jew-frog, or the Jew-frog the son of my autobiographical character. "
Funeral in the Polacas Cemetery, Rio de Janeiro / Photo: Courtesy of the Rio de Janeiro General Municipal Archive,
After the publication of these two books, he stopped writing prose.
"I said, I'm not a writer. In 'Schedeltz' I had a channeling, the autobiographical novel is my memories of my partner, and I continue to be a poet. "The Polakas" (which will form the basis of the historical novel "An Act in the Ring", KD) - and I'm not one to miss.
I teach this in writing workshops, which always have to go around with notes.
It happens to me with every book - they come to me, they ask me to write them.
I have no other way to explain it, they do not let go. "
But from his words it seems that not only the stories do not let go of him, he himself does not let go of them: following the edges of the stories that came to him he traveled to Europe, Africa and South America, learned Spanish, interviewed experts and distant relatives, and of course read from next.
"In the end I do a very meticulous research. It's not the channeling that does the work. But I start the work through channeling."
"I fabricate history"
His new historical novel, The Jewish Monk (Kinneret Zmora Dvir), about converted Jews in South America in the 16th and 17th centuries, also began with such a coincidence that when he visited Lima a few years ago, his feet carried him to the Inquisition Museum. He photographed the cells of the prisoners and the courtroom, and only years later did he come across the name of the Jew Enos Franciscus Maldonado de Silva, who lived in the 17th century and was imprisoned in the exact same place for 12 years.
The story of the Jew who takes vows of nunhood during his imprisonment and quarrels with his inquisitor over theological questions, until he is burned at the stake, is told here in part precisely through the point of view of his inquisitor. But the Inquisitor is a gay man in the closet who is intrigued by the prisoner's story, longs for it and that is precisely why he tortures him more.
Please draw a line between this point of view, of the gay inquisitor in the closet, and the biography of Scheinfeld, as one of the first homosexuals declared in Israel.
But the book has another biographical dimension, more disguised.
Sheinfeld, who had been a sworn Tel Avivian for many decades, moved to Kibbutz Tuval in the Galilee about six years ago, with his two sons, whom he raises as a single pain.
"I miss Tel Aviv terribly. All my life I have been in the city, my literary milieu there, the literary evenings," he says, "but in Tuval I have peace, and my sons have a wonderful childhood that I do not want to violate. We have a bitch, two cats, "Only chickens and a vegetable garden. It was only when I finished working on 'The Jewish Monk' that I realized I was writing about him because I, too, to some extent live the life of a loner monk."
Sheinfeld writes in a typewriter - a rare interest among writers today. He arranges the printed papers in long lines on the floor of his house, rewrites them in handwriting, and edits with scissors and duct tape. He explains that this method, which does not allow him to delete large chunks of text, requires him to deal with the materials that are candidates for deletion. "Precisely in what is deleted, in ideas that seem most unrelated, most deviant from the plan, that is where the gold is often. We do not have the ability to evaluate them in real time. I communicate only when I write with a typewriter. When I write by hand, I am close to the tree, but when I am with The machine - my soul goes to completely different places. "
He shows me his drafts: he begins by writing about the worries of the day and yesterday, about what is seen through the window, and within a paragraph or two the entry into his hero's consciousness begins.
"I always start from myself, from my reality. Then I make the transformation into a third person, and bring things into the world of my characters. So I do not write historical novels, I fabricate history. I animate fascinating characters with my psychic materials. I control my subjectivity, And within it is also my homosexuality, about the history of the Jewish people. "
This is especially complicated when writing about homosexuality: one must be careful when dubbing the consciousness of a 17th-century homosexual from the consciousness of a modern-day modern homosexual.
"I do it in all the books. In all of them there is homosexuality. In fact I am a subversive. I bring into Judaism something that has been silenced in it. Homosexuality has existed in every people and at all times, but it was an unspeakable love. ".
Created in the book of Kabbalah between the Jew in the closet and the homosexual in the closet.
"I did not think of it that way, it came to me without knowing. The Jewish context is for me the main task. People do not know, but according to a report by the Diaspora Advisory Committee from January this year, there are more than 10 million descendants of martyrs in South America."
Do you think they should be brought to Israel?
"Without a doubt. Like raising the Falashmura."
Do they even want it?
"Many of them want to. And if that happens, it will change the demographic situation in Israel. I am a leftist and I believe in two states for two peoples, but I am first and foremost an ardent Zionist Jew, and think Jews should return to their homeland. I believe in our right to this land and Kibbutz Galuyot."
Perhaps the problem is not with the rabbinate, but with the state relying on rabbinical definitions to determine who is a Jew. It may be that the state needs to determine for itself who a Jew is.
"Until then, my life's mission is to tell the story of the Jews who expelled them from Judaism. This is also a political mission. This is one of the reasons I wanted to enter the Knesset in the last election - I wanted to open the gates to all Jews." Like Algeria and Morocco and married pagan local women. These are Jews who mixed the religion with pagan customs, and were Zionists. But when they wanted to immigrate, the rabbinate did not agree to recognize them as Jews. I went there to tell their story (it appears in the book "When the Dead Returned "; KD).
"My life's ambition is to include these histories within the Jewish story not only on the literary level, but to actually bring these Jews here."
"Joy of a number of followers"
When Sheinfeld talks about the exclusion of Jews from Judaism, he is also talking about the painful exclusion of his two sons, who were born in a surrogacy process. "One of the biggest insults of my life was when my children were born in India, and it turned out that the rabbinate does not recognize surrogate children as Jews - they demand that the surrogate be Jewish, that is the ruling. My father was told 'only if your son goes to an Orthodox rabbi "But I am not willing to lie to myself. My sons have undergone a Reform conversion that is recognized for the purpose of registering the child on the ID card as a Jew, but if they want to marry a Jewish woman - the rabbinate does not recognize them."
"I, who invests all my life in Judaism, my children are not recognized as Jews. My sons know how to pray and bless - because every Friday I light candles instead of the woman I do not have - and they are not recognized as Jews? So in a sense I share the fate of Jewish descendants. I am gay. My otherness allows me to observe and ask the rabbis: Who among you is to determine who is a Jew and who is not? Did you forget that the great men of the nation were the descendants of strangers and incest?
" Digs and digs into a family's past and examines the nature of a person's blood, if he is Jewish enough according to his blood to be considered a Jew. I am considered a secular heretic. I do not fast on Yom Kippur, I do not keep Shabbat. But I am a Jew in the depths of my soul no less and perhaps much more than those who do observe these customs. "
What makes you a Jew?
"I am a Jew by virtue of the desire to contain and fight, by virtue of understanding the vision of the prophets and the grouping of the exiles."
Does spirituality complement for you what is subtracted from halakhah?
"Religion is petrified by the sages of Halacha and tradition, and in order for a new spiritual current to emerge from it, it needs to be revealed. This is the root of the development of mysticism in every institutionalized religion, and also in the Jewish religion." As a Messiah, but as a man of words, as a writer. "
In the last election, Scheinfeld was about to run for the Knesset as part of the new "Democratic" party, but today he is glad he did not.
"I see MKs who, instead of containing each other, prey on each other.
I wanted to log in to change the discourse.
I have a very introverted side, who just wants to shut himself in the house and write, and an opposite side, who wants to fix a world. "
So literature is written as part of the desire to fix a world - and the Jewish world first and foremost?
"My novels are about Judaism, not Israeliness. The short stories, which I have not yet published, and they are in a drawer, and also my poems, are about Israeliness."
Why do the novels spread over the entire Jewish space and the stories are planted in the Land of Israel?
"The atmosphere in the Land of Israel is not an atmosphere of fantastic realism. I write fairy tales, practical. I have the joy of the Hassidic narrator. But there is one more thing: I am frightened by the magic of writing, which happened to Grossman when he wrote 'A Woman Flees from the Gospel.' .