The cover of the book "Asylum: After the 7th of October"/The Hebrew Literature Institute
A few days ago, I was driving the car in the town where I live, and next to me on the sidewalk ran a cat that, because of the darkness, I could not distinguish the exact color of its fur.
He ran in a panic along the sidewalk and then gave up and went through the bars into a dark yard.
And somehow his entrance into that yard caused me great sadness, which I was not able to really understand his meaning, but he was very present at that moment and also a few days after that whole night event ended.
The thought of that sudden emotion that awoke in me accompanied me while reading the collection of short stories "Shelter" which was published just now by the Israel Institute of Hebrew Literature and refers to the events of the Shabbat in October.
It has short texts by talented and beloved writers such as Dror Mishani, Yaara Shavari, Assaf Shur and Oded Carmeli, as well as well-known writers from abroad (the book was published in a bilingual edition - Hebrew and English) such as Alisa Albert and Joshua Cohen
. I doubt the sincerity of the intentions of the writers, and also of the editors of this thin collection, Oded Volkstein and Mein Eitan, who even contributed to a short text collection of her own. I still ask myself what makes a text or a collection of words to be of a "literary" nature, whatever the meaning of the word Whatever it may be. Will the cat I mentioned at the beginning also manage to arouse in the readers some tremor in the heart, like the one that happened to me. In other words - when a very personal and private experience becomes an artistic act and continues to gallop through the darkness that may also be in the heart of the reader from the other past. What are the "conditions" in which this thing becomes possible.
It should also be said honestly (and in the same breath to recognize and kick out of us with all our might this phrase "it should be said honestly", which has now taken over almost every good or bad part of the television studios and the dishonest speech of the politicians) that the editors of this short anthology, and sometimes also some of its writers, are aware Very much to the inherent difficulty and difficulty of formulating a text of artistic quality, certainly at such a short distance and so close to the traumatic event that befell us all at the beginning of October.
And the truth is that I would not have been required for this issue, if it had not allowed me to return and reflect on the nature of the literary act.
I think that in the end this file fails in this task, first of all because it is based on a general event, as difficult and shocking as it may be, and the same basic private experience that shook the writer's soul and forced him to sit down at the writing desk is hardly felt in it.
An imagined encounter with an abductee.
Dror Mishani/Yinai Yehiel
In my view, the almost necessary condition for the existence of a literary text is, first of all, that it must always be based on some private and personal and very concrete experience, in addition to the ability of the writer to be "imaginative", that is, to try to draw in his imagination and imagination the journey of that cat in the dark.
To be in a place where reality blurs and becomes only a possibility.
A shriek that tears through the darkness.
An old memory that suddenly shook you from the time when you slept far away from your parents in the children's home on the kibbutz.
Writing is therefore sometimes a kind of leap into the dark.
Approximate location.
A long pause that the actor takes before saying the next word out loud.
And it seems that, at least in my eyes, something from this "generality" also permeates the opening words written by Oded Volkstein, a man I greatly appreciate and enjoy listening to on many occasions and witnessing the clarity of his thought.
He writes, among other things, about the texts that appear in the book that "...they are not in a hurry to settle the ruins of consciousness with the thunderous forces of the story, and they do not dress up the fragments of time with their fraternal images and do not make light of its spaces with the flow of their language...".
What do I say and what will I say - fire and smoke.
As we used to sing on Seder night in the kibbutz: A horse and its rider level in the sea.
This clash between the pomposity of the opening words and the relative paucity of the stories that follow it, creates a kind of ironic gap as if the author decided to enlist in the reserve service as well, and to send these texts "to make a pioneering scratch in the ongoing moment we are in...".
Pioneer scratch!
no less.
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Not all the texts that come later are like that of course.
There is, for example, a short story by Dror Mishani about an apparently imagined encounter with a kidnapper who goes out for a few hours to breathe in a Tel Aviv cafe, and there is a story called "Collision" by Aryeh Atias, who is told that he is "a sailor, a fisherman, and an appraiser of fuel loads", and indeed he is , perhaps because of this, writes a simple but clever story, which is evidently based on his extensive experience as a man who spends a lot of his time at sea.
At no point in his short story does he try to "make a pioneering scratch in the ongoing moment", or to dress up or not dress up the "fragments of time in fraternal images".
He is "just" trying to modestly sail his short story ship along a path he knows.
I have written quite a few times, also in this context, about dear writers such as Hagi Linik, Haim Weiss or Leah Ini, who were able to distill from their private experience a text of distinct artistic value.
Also because this often requires both distance and time, and also because the "scratch" that prompted them to sit down and write was not of a "pioneer" nature, but very private and personal.
And perhaps in all the flood of words that have fallen upon us since the events of Shiva in October (including the clumsy attempt of the writer of these lines) we need to adopt what the imaginary kidnapper in the story of Dror Mishani says: "It is not necessary to speak. You can be silent, that's good enough."
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"Shelter: After October 7th".
Published by the Israel Institute for Hebrew Literature.
70 pages.
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