Zion’s Fiction
Asking questions is easy and I ask a lot of them. I can choose a few to concentrate on and the rest have to go to the back of the line, but that doesn’t mean that they go away. And sometimes the answer happens to just saunter by and greet the tired old question like a long lost friend. It happens from time to time and it happened again for me recently when a friend gifted me a copy of the collection Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem.
Israel, like the Netherlands, is a small country with a strong literary culture and a healthy publishing industry. Nevertheless, certain types of subject matter don’t seem to get much play. I was able to supply a customer with Israeli chick-lit, but when I went looking for the works of the Beat generation (or an Israeli counterpart) other than a little Allen Ginsberg and David Avidan it was slim pickings. Another genre I went searching for in vain was Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy. There was some foreign material translated into Hebrew like the Harry Potter books and, for some reason, books by David Eddings, and more significantly, George Orwell. Still, the translations were too few to warrant a Sci-Fi/Fantasy section in an Israeli bookshop, and there just wasn’t anything local to serve as an anchor. The introduction to Zion’s Fiction surprised me. It was a generous answer to a question that I had set aside, a better one than I would have ever found on my own.
Teitelbaum and Lottem dismiss two theories quickly. The first theory is that Israel is just backward and slow to take up trends from other parts of the world. The other is that the domination of Rabbinic thought enforced a dim view of texts that took one away from the purposefulness of Torah study. The first theory fails when we look at how Israelis are pioneers in the development of and adoption of new technologies, a trend that goes as far back as Israel’s pioneering of drip irrigation. This was a radical idea brought to Israel by a Californian Jewish farmer, Sam Hamburg, an idea that caught on faster in Israel than the US. The idea that somehow fantasy was not a part of the Rabbinic mind is contradicted by the many supernatural events that occur in the Tanakh and arise in the Rabbi’s own creative interpretive texts in the Midrash Aggadah as well as the Talmud. There is a separate tradition of fantasy featuring travels to strange lands and other planets. The idea of created beings, Frankenstein’s monster and robots (the well that fear of zombies and AI draws on) comes from the story of the golem(s).
Another obvious puzzle thrown in is the large role of Jews in the writing of Sci-Fi/Fantasy and the essential role that Jews had in creation of the magazines and publishing houses that build out that world as well as the world of super heroes. Ability was never the problem. Rather, the difference in the literary creativity of Jews from within these two communities has to have some other explanation. To get to that, we need to put aside the fallacy that these two communities really resemble each other. The truth is that the Jews who chose to settle in one or the other, or move from one to another, we’re making a clear choice about how they wanted to live and what they were willing to do and endure in order to get those things. Initially that choice was three-fold: the old country, the new country, or the land (of Israel). There was a fourth choice, other countries where Jews had settled, but that was more a version of “the new country:” a place with greater financial opportunity, but with a thinner spiritual life.
Political Zionism followed the path laid out by Theodor Herzl in his speculative novel Altneuland [Old New Land]. Herzl imagined a Jewish state living in peace, clean, productive and for the most part harmonious, with an Arab population successfully assimilated into the larger Zionistic enterprise. In this vision and in the reality that the Zionists of the pre-State period and the governmental leaders and the thought leaders of the statehood period presented,
“There was no room in this scheme for freeloaders, including people who wished to write about imaginary worlds or predicaments. They had no moral right to pursue their idiosyncratic leanings;what they should write about must relate directly to the building of the new nation. Criticizing its fault in their stories was allowed, even encouraged; extolling it was even more welcome. Divert from these options, and no one would publish or indeed read your work.
Well before the Jewish state came into being, therefore, Israeli writers were expected to render the outlandish fantasy of a Jewish homeland in starkly mimetic terms. This is an activity referred to by fantasy and science-fiction (that is, when they don’t avoid it as a tiresome cliché) as worldbuilding. Yet this necessity, paradoxically, required stripping a then-fifty-year-old body of Hebrew literature of its artificial biblicism, its romantic strivings, its unduly nostalgia, unrealistic, idealized concerns and tropes. These characteristics, some argued, had rendered nineteenth-century Hebrew literature dangerously escapist. To counter this tendency, ideology demanded that the writers, poets, and other artists depict the Zionist mission – as unlikely and fraught an undertaking as the Exodus from Egypt – with all the grit and realism they could muster.”
The only fantastic genres that fit this mold were Holocaust counter-histories and apocalyptic tales of the destruction of the state itself.
Television was not allowed into the state until 1966 because the Zionist leaders feared the power of images to inspire fantasy and to provide an opportunity for Israelis to waste time.
The space for something else began to open up because of changes in Israeli society. The victory in 1967 led to messianic jubilation, but the losses from the War of Attrition that followed and from the humiliation of the early debacle of the Yom Kippur War created a climate of distress that opened a space for broader questioning. This led to the movement referred to as Post-Zionism. Unlike anti-Zionism, this movement was concerned with how Israel could move past Zionism. There is an argument that this should have been the mission of the leadership of the state from the moment of its founding. Precisely at that point, facts became facts and dreams should have been set free.
Access to the internet was another inversion point. Once writers and readers had access to what was out there in the broader world, reachable from their homes it became easier to find like-minded individuals and groups. For established writers, it became less questionable to include sci-fi/ fantasy elements in their writing. It also became easier to put your writing where it could be seen, whether in Israel or beyond. If one couldn’t write this kind of material for adults, it did at least get some elements of it included into children’s literature.
What we see over time is that societies vary in the degree to which there is an open space for imagination. The right to “the pursuit of happiness” is built into American society even if success often seems illusory (and harder ever more so than today). In Israel the idea has had far less currency. (Maybe, it is a little alien to the Jewish mind-set altogether, setting aside the Biblical dream of being able to “sit under one’s own fig tree”). There are so many pieces of advice that American Jews want to force on the Israeli people. Perhaps, where we should support them is in helping them progress in a direction that they have already begun to move in, the opening up of a broader space for imagination.
