Delta Fourth and Marwan Muasher on democracy and gangsters in the Arab world

Marwan Muasher's The Second Arab Awakening and the Battle for Pluralism has much to say about the necessity of expanding the breadth and inclusiveness of politics in the Middle East.  The Murder of Yasser Arafat, by "Delta Fourth" (Matthew Kalman and Matt Rees) suggests what can happen when the possibility of dissent is squelched.

Muasher, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Jordanian diplomat and government minister, offers a number of bracing assertions and recommendations.

One is that revolution, reform, and rebuilding take time. Observers should not be too quick to write off the so-called Arab Spring. Opening Arab politics will take decades, Muasher says. Another is that uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere since 2011 have already shattered several myths, among them "that food must be put on the table before political reform can move forward." Muasher's target is economic liberalization unaccompanied by democratization in the Arab world, but I can't help recalling voices here in the United States that used to blandly insist that political reform would inevitably follow loosening of economic strictures. Such a stance is no doubt good for corporate profits, but somehow one does not hear those voices much anymore, and if China has become democratic, I missed it.

The Murder of Yasser Arafat suggests what can happen when gangsters run a government, or an organization that ostensibly aspires to government. Palestinians, especially capable members of the PLO leadership kept from the highest-level jobs by Arafat's jealousy, knew the Old Man salted away millions and was an obstacle to their personal and professional aspirations. The result is apparent in the book's title. And who is the real villain? A hint: It's not Israel.

Rees and Kalman have made their short book into a mix of inquiry and hard-boiled crime. But at least one bit sounds as if it could have come from Marwan Muasher's pen::

"When the gunmen killed someone like Adnan Shahine, it looked as though they were upholding the morals of the struggle against Israel. But there was something stronger at work: the lack of democracy and due process that eventually turned everyone against the Authority, including Arafat’s own ministers."

***

Rees is also a novelist whose work includes the Omar Yussef novels, set in the Palestinian world. He says he and Kalman wrote The Murder of Yasser Arafat as hard-boiled crime. Here is my favorite such example, a nice evocation of the book's morally shadowy world:

"Muhammad Dahlan ... is officially a man without a job or any visible means of support. But he glides through the West Bank in a bulletproof black Chevrolet Suburban supplied by his friends at the CIA bearing the official red and white license plates of the Palestinian Authority. Everywhere he goes, a phalanx of armed bodyguards surrounds him, sealing off the floor of his Ramallah Hotel and waiting on him with food and drink. The source of their salaries is unclear. Their loyalty is unquestioned.

"Dahlan is on a break from an extended visit to Cambridge, where he is perfecting his English, courtesy of the British taxpayer."

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Detectives Beyond Borders looks at the Mediterranean

Photo by your humble blogkeeper

And here's that link in handy, one-click form: http://tinyurl.com/cuzmt77

A short history of crime fiction in Israel, Part 2

Last month I turned this blog over for a day to Uri Kenan, who offered a brief, eye-opening introduction to the history of crime fiction in Israel. Uri's back now to take the story from the 1980s until today, taking in along the way perhaps the only Israeli crime writer whose name many non-Israeli readers might recognize. Uri is an engineer for a Web-design company, but before that he compiled a résumé perfect for crime writing: "market research, journalism, documentary film production, private investigation (a lot more boring than it sounds), cooking, and managing a bar." He lives in Jaffa with his girlfriend and their two children, and he writes when he can.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

==========================

By Uri Kenan

In the fifty years between the first appearance of detective fiction in Hebrew and its breakthrough into the mainstream of Israeli culture during the eighties, Israeli society had changed in ways that rendered it unrecognizable. Wars, waves of immigration, and ideological and generational shifts have shaped a society that is in constant conflict both internally and externally.

Mirroring this conflict, every decade since the sixties has seen the appearance of a literary wave trying to differentiate itself from previous ones and reshape Hebrew literature. In this way the old taboos about writing genre fiction were eventually viewed as outdated. This opened the door for change in attitude toward detective fiction, but it would take more than that. The true key to the critical and commercial success was to make the fractured nature of Israeli society the star.

Outside looking in

Due to their many successes in various wars and conflicts, the Israeli secret services, the Mossad and Shabak  (General Security Service), have achieved international renown. It shouldn’t be a surprise, therefore, that in early attempts at Israeli detective and suspense fiction writers tried to cash in on these “brand names.” The first stories centering on Mossad agents had appeared during the seventies, but these were pulps and were written under pseudonyms.

In the early eighties Amnon Dankner, who wrote the political thriller Al Tiru Banasi (Don’t Shoot the President) was the first writer to publish Israeli suspense fiction under his own name. He was soon followed by Amnon Jackont with the spy novel Pesek Z’man (Translated as Borrowed Time), and the way was paved for scores of spy thrillers focusing on the Israeli intelligence community. None of these, however, has achieved the commercial and critical success of the Michael Ohayon and Lizzy Badihi novels, by Batya Gur and Shulamit Lapid respectively.

Saturday Morning Murder, which appeared in 1988 was Batya Gur’s first novel and it introduced her most enduring creation: Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon. Ohayon, a quiet, sensitive man who seems more intellectual than policeman, would traverse through the course of six novels into one closed community after another, interpreting their cultural norms and taboos on the way to solving the case.

Ranging from the psychiatric community and the academia to the kibbutz, from the world of classical musicians to the ethnic tension in a Jerusalem neighborhood and the backstage of a television channel, Gur’s subjects were communities trying to maintain their identities against outside forces while serving as stages for internal struggles. As it matured, Gur’s work became increasingly political. Her resentment towards Israeli policies in the occupied territories as well as her frustration with discrimination in Israeli society featured more and more prominently. Her last novel, Murder in Jerusalem, was a critique of Zionism and Israel society after the crash of the peace process in 2000. Batya Gur died in 2005, aged 57.

Shulamit Lapid was already an established writer when her first Lizi Badihi novel appeared. Contrary to a considerable amount of Israeli literature and film, which centers on Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, Lapid used the city of Beersheba in the Negev desert as the setting for her novels.

Badihi, a reporter for a local newspaper (a trend introduced to Israel in the 80s), was a lanky, clumsy bachelorette with a nose for a story and a natural dogged curiosity that would not back down from threats. Beersheba, normally sleepy town, appears in the Badihi novels as a battleground for passion, greed and revenge. In describing this microcosm, where everyone knows everyone else, Lapid makes use of anthropological insights, humor and even surrealism. From the ongoing rivalry of Badihi with her two police detective brothers in law to her mother’s constant attempts to get her married, from the hippies in of the remote Negev villages to the powerful bureaucrats of Beersheba’s elite Lapid’s novels are never short of color.

Ohayon and Badihi have much in common. Both are perpetual outsiders in their communities, unable to find their proper place except when busy investigating. Echoing one of the most recurrent sources of tension of Israeli society, both protagonists are Sephardic Jews created by Ashkenazi writers. In that sense they are not only tools for exploring the surrounding communities but themselves the subjects of investigations by the writers.

Gur and Lapid are the first names in Israeli crime fiction but far from the only ones. Yair Lapid, the son of Shulamit Lapid and an established Israeli publicist in his own right, has also published several detective novels; his Josh Shirman detective series is the most faithful attempt so far to bring Raymond Chandler’s style to an Israeli setting. Adiva Geffen has written suspense novels that combine detective mysteries with elements of romance. It’s also more common, these days, to encounter Israeli writers and poets who publish one-off attempts at detective fiction.

Making up for lost time

In Israel, the late eighties were filled with a spirit of change, not merely in literature but throughout Israeli culture. Post-Zionism, the critical analysis of Zionist ideology and practice, became more and more prevalent in academic circles. The most outspoken proponents of this view belonged to a group labeled “The New Historians” who challenged almost every aspect of Zionist historical narrative sparking a heated, emotional debate. This new awareness of the past led to a new appraisal of the past as subject for genre fiction. 

The first historical whodunit to appear in Hebrew was Adonis, by the poet and writer Arieh Sivan. The novel, published in 1991, takes place sixty years earlier, around the time of David Tidhar and “Sifriyat Habalsah (Detective Series),” has become a cult favorite in recent years, but only after several years of going virtually unnoticed.

Towards the end of that decade, several more novels focusing on the period of the British Mandate in Palestine appeared. Boaz Apelbaum, who had been former Prime Minister Shimon Peres’ chief of staff, wrote under the heading of the nostalgic detective. A few years later, Ram Oren, one of Israel’s most popular suspense authors, published several historical novels set around the same time period.

In 2002, Amnon Dankner published The Boneless, a mystery novel that jumps from late-nineteenth-century Paris, where the idea of Zionism was first taking shape, to twenty-first-century Jerusalem, where “new” and “old” historians are bickering over the results of this idea. A series of murders links the eras and ties the story together.

Conclusion

Detective, crime and suspense fiction has gone from hidden, guilty pleasure to legitimate voice in popular Israeli fiction. It has done so by the processes most outcast cultural forms go through when breaking into the mainstream: tapping into the social and cultural zeitgeist and reflecting it in new and original ways. That is not much of a mystery. What the success of crime and suspense fiction says about Israeli culture and society is, arguably, more revealing.

Despite the image it projects, both to the world and inward, Israeli culture and society is far from uniform. It is, rather, a continuous battleground for competing narratives. In the early days of Israel this competition could be relegated to a minor role because of the demands of the Israeli melting-pot project and the threat posed by the outside Arab world. Over time the narratives became more focused and sought for a place at center stage.  

The more overt this struggle has become, the more traction and legitimacy detective fiction has gathered. It is has given readers peeks at the various Israeli subgroups and, in some cases, a voice to those less often heard. The trend of historical detective fiction can be viewed as a nostalgic reaction, a yearning for “simpler days” when everyone knew his or her place, or else as a genuine attempt to reevaluate the past, in light of current ambiguities.

(In writing this article I relied upon the many written eulogies to Batya Gur as well as several of her interviews. I have also relied on Interviews reviews and biographical Information about Shulamit Lapid, Amnon Jackont, Amnon Dankner, Arieh Sivan, Boaz Aplebaum and Ram Oren as well as ,off course, their novels. As with the first post I would also like to thank Nir Yaniv and Lior Oryan for their valuable input.)

===========================

(Read Part 1 of A Short History of Crime Fiction in Israel.)

A short history of crime fiction in Israel, Part I

A chat in Tel Aviv earlier this year convinced me that not only does Israel have an intensely interesting and little-known crime fiction history, but that that history could rapidly grow even more interesting.

My learned interlocutor was Uri Kenan, a discriminating reader of crime fiction (he likes Kevin McCarthy and James Ellroy) and of this blog who outlined a history of Israeli crime writing dating back to the 1930s. The history includes secret authorship and anti-genre snobbery, as well as an Israeli past and present that are more urban and more diverse than traditionally thought. I immediately invited Uri to prepare a guest post for Detectives Beyond Borders. Here's the first of two parts.

(Read Part 2 of A Short History of Crime Fiction in Israel.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

=======================

“We will be like a nation like all others only after we have a Hebrew thief and a Hebrew harlot.”

— Haim Nachman Bialik

(David Tidhar: Police officer, private detective, scholar, activist, crime-fiction protagonist)

By Uri Kenan

Israelis have always considered themselves unique. This is partly the legacy of the anomalous history of Jewish communities, and partly due to the fact that all national movements must emphasize their own uniqueness.  This outlook has shaped much of the history of Israeli literature.

The story of crime writing in Hebrew is part of the much larger story of writing fiction in modern Hebrew. Popular fiction for Jewish audiences existed for years in Yiddish. This included the staples of pulp such as detective, suspense, romance, and erotica. By the late nineteenth century it was a booming market, but Yiddish wasn’t the holy tongue. It was a kind of pidgin created by European Jews for day-to-day life.

One of the earliest tasks of the Zionist movement was to modernize Hebrew from a language of prayer to the language of day-to-day life so it could replace Yiddish. Although this was intended to secularize, and to some extent vulgarize, Hebrew, some hard taught traditions didn’t die. Though not viewing Hebrew as a holy tongue anymore, many still maintained that some subjects or styles weren’t fit for Hebrew. A clearly defined distinction between low and high culture was maintained for decades. Hebrew fiction was supposed to either inspire Jews in the project of building their own nation state or else help them deal with the many dilemmas and hardships this project entailed. In this world view there was no real room for genre fiction. For several decades the gap between canon literature and non-canon would shape Israeli literature and deny detective fiction its place in the sun.

For the Kids

It is no surprise, therefore, that the first attempt at writing detective fiction was justified as an attempt at education. 1931 saw the appearance of a series of short detective stories published as individual booklets called “Sifriyat Habalash” (The Detective Series). These works were written for a young-adult audience to which it was presented as a valuable lesson in the need for cunning ingenuity and self-defense. Another feature of these booklets was that they all starred an actual detective, rather than a fictional one: David Tidhar was an officer in the British mandate police force of the early twenties until he retired and became the first Jewish private detective in the country. Shlomo Ben-Israel (Gelfer), the author of most of these booklets, was experienced in writing detective fiction in Yiddish and decided to see whether their success could be repeated in Hebrew. The stories themselves were thinly veiled imitations of pulp tropes transplanted  to the setting of British-mandate Palestine.

In an attempt to make him a role model for youth, Tidhar was envisioned as the epitome of the “New Jew”: strong, brave and self-reliant.  A Jewish Sherlock Holmes who doesn’t shrink from using his fists when he needs to. Arabs, by contrast, were depicted as nefarious, cowardly and brutish. British police officers were depicted as fans of Tidhar’s detective skills whereas in reality Tidhar himself had a quarrelsome, troubled relationship with Mandate Police.

Despite its faults (or maybe due to them) “Sifriyat Habalash” was a huge commercial success selling several thousands of copies at a time when the totals number of Jews living in the country no more than two hundred thousand. Ben-Israel was hailed by some prominent writers and poets such as Bialik, Hameiri and Bash as the originator of Hebrew popular fiction. At the same time his booklets were vilified in prominent literary magazines as corruption of the youth.

Tidhar himself found his new celebrity status difficult and after a year requested his name be withdrawn as the main character. The series continued by switching to Tidhar’s former sidekick as the star, but its  sales were hurt. Rival publishers also tried to cash in on the success by publishing detective fiction of their own and also by translating works from other genres such as the Tarzan and westerns.

“Sifriyat Habalash” was discontinued in 1932 after more than fifty booklets had been published. Ben-Israel became a journalist and moved to Europe, where he covered many of the events leading to World War II. He also translated his stories to Yiddish and even wrote a full-length novel in Yiddish staring Tidhar, both endeavors achieving commercial success. The novel was translated in the 1962 to Hebrew but was only moderately successful. By then the mood had changed.

In the late forties the British Mandate in Palestine ended, and the state of Israel was born amidst war. At the same time the search for legitimacy and commercial success through the guise of education infantilized detective fiction in Hebrew. The target audience had changed from young adults to children and the protagonists weren’t grownups but kids themselves. It would be years before complex original genre stories with multi-faceted characters and moral maturity would be attempted in Hebrew.

The Pseudonym Years

In the meantime translations would prove popular through the coming decades. In this way the works of genre greats such as Hammett, Chandler, Christie and others were translated into Hebrew. Even so the old distinction between low and high brow prevailed, and these translations were all published as pulps. Detective, spy, suspense, and genre fiction in general were still deemed good entertainment, but not proper literature.  This attitude was so prevalent that in the small, close-knit literary community of the early years of Israel, association with non-canon literature could harm a writer’s career. Some translators attempted to distance themselves from their work by signing with a pseudonym, but more interestingly pseudonyms were used to hide original local fiction and mask it as foreign.

Many Israelis had read the stories of the detectives “Slim” O’Donnell or Inspector Pierro as well as the super spy Patrick Kim and the cowboys Buck Jones and Ringo in their Hebrew translations. Their authors, with names like Abie Costine, Jacques Martel and Bert Witford were supposedly American or European. Few readers knew that these Hebrew versions were in fact the originals. Israeli writers seeking to write non-canon literature, whether out of love for it or just as a way to make a living, would use pseudonyms.  Some posed as the works’ translators. Others hid any clues leading to their identities. In some cases, such as that of the name Bert Witford, several writers would work under the same name for decades eventually amassing a bibliography of over two hundred works. On the other hand, prolific writers such as Meiron Uriel and the publicist Uri Shalgy, used tens of pseudonyms each to serve them in the novel series they worked on, spanning a variety of genres.

In such a way it was possible to make a living out of writing. The pulp writers never got credit for their work, but they did manage to avoid infamy and the ire of the hypocritical society that Israel was at the time. Though many read the pulps, none would admit to it freely. Literature was seen as a tool for mobilization and national morale, not as a means of entertainment or escape. In this claustrophobic, puritanical environment, with its many taboos and sacred cows, genre fiction could only exist distanced from its surroundings. The Hebrew reading audience could be thrilled by the stories of cops, robbers and femmes fatales so long as it could safely say none of it could happen here.

(In writing this post I relied upon the works of Professors Yaacov and Zohar Shavit, who edited and prefaced The Return of the Hebrew Sleuth – An Anthology of Detective Stories; the translator and scholar Inbal Sagiv-Nakdimon, who studied the history of Hebrew science-fiction and pulps, and the blogger Eli Eshed, who writes about Israeli pulps and comic books, plus several news articles about past and current detective fiction, particularly Amnon Jackont. Perhaps most important, I have relied upon the works of David Tidhar himself: his autobiography In and Out of Uniform, his novel Crime and Criminals in Palestine and his Encyclopedia of Founders and Builders of Israel. I would also like to thank two friends for their insight and help: Lior Oryan of Bar-Ilan University and the writer Nir Yaniv.)

==============

(Read Part 2 of A Short History of Crime Fiction in Israel.)

A Hitch in crime (or why you should read crime fiction and not the news)

I inadvertently left at home the crime novel I'd intended to read on my dinner break yesterday, but the substitute was more than acceptable, and it dovetailed neatly with some recent Detectives Beyond Borders posts.

The author is Christopher Hitchens, the book is his essay collection Arguably, and the passage I have in mind is from the book's introduction, in which Hitchens recounts his support and admiration for real revolutionaries in the Middle East and contrasts these with, among others, "the baroque corruption of the `Palestinian Authority.'”

 "It was clear," Hitchens writes, "that a good number of the audience (including, I regret to say, most of the Americans) regarded me as some kind of stooge. For them, revolutionary authenticity belonged to groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, resolute opponents of the global colossus and tireless fighters against Zionism."

Last week I wrote about my eye-opening chat in Tel Aviv about crime fiction in Israel. My informant was decidedly a man of the left, forthright and rueful about, among other things, the Israeli army's bulldozing of houses in Hebron. Yet he was equally forthright about calling Hamas terrorists. And he recounted a naval patrol from his own military service, when he marveled at the white sand beaches of Gaza and at the equally white luxury villas belonging to the Palestinian Authority elite that loomed above, built, presumably, with PA money that did not find its way into Swiss bank accounts.

Like the Israeli Arab driver who shuttled me to Hebron and Bethlehem on the same trip, that informant offered a more nuanced view of Israeli and Palestinian affairs than one is likely to get in America, where Palestinians are good and Israelis bad, or vice versa. And this, in turn, reminded me of Matt Rees' decision to turn to crime writing when he found a story "too good for Time magazine," and of the corruption of Palestinian officialdom that forms an important subtext in his novels but not of media and popular discussion of the Middle East, at least not in the United States.

And what about the Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra, who once told an interviewer

"Algerian readers like me a lot. They read me in French because I am not translated into Arabic. I am translated into Indonesian, Japanese, Malayalam, in the majority of the languages, except in Arabic. But that has nothing to do with the Arab peoples. It is the leaders who seek, as always, to dissociate the people from the elites so they can continue to reign and cultivate clanism and mediocrity."

There's another sentiment you'll likely not read in the American media, unless the reporters make themselves hip by affixing to it a fatuous social-media-related tag.

And now, readers, a question: "Crime stories reflect reality better than do the media." Do you agree? Disagree? Discuss.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012

South African speech, plus more noir pics

Woozy, jet-lagged, and happy to be back from Israel and Zurich. Yeah, sure I'm happy to be back.

Started reading Mike Nicol's Payback on the plane, and I like his use of what I assume are local South African slang, dialect, and speech patterns: "You got no staying power, my bru. ... Patience, hey." "`You smoke dagga but you don't smoke cigarettes,' Abdul said to Val. `What a stupid. Mikey the moegoe.'" I had no idea what a moegoe was, but I liked the sound of it.

In the meantime, more pictures I like to think might suggest crime stories, photos by your humble blogkeeper.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Crime fiction in Israel

(Ibex mosaic, Caesarea)

A chat over pizza on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv convinced me that not only does Israel have an intensely interesting and little-known crime fiction history, but that that history could rapidly grow even more interesting.

My fellow chatter was a reader of this blog who sketched a history of Israeli crime fiction dating back to the 1930s that includes secret authorship and anti-genre snobbery, as well as an Israeli past and present that are more urban and more diverse than traditionally thought. And that, in turn, suggests an environment ripe for hard-boiled crime fiction.

I won't steal too much more of his thunder because I've asked him to consider writing a guest post for Detectives Beyond Borders. And maybe, if you're lucky, he'll tell you about the guy who invented a criminal-slang vocabulary for his successful translation of Damon Runyon into Hebrew.

(Hippodrome from the time of Herod the Great, Caesarea)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Akko, or When days were long and knights were short

Fletcher Flora didn't just have one of the more unlikely names in noir; he could also write the stuff.

His story "As I Lie Dead" (1953) reminded me of why the American movies later called films noirs were once known as melodramas. It is overheated with sex and doom from the beginning and, as a bonus, I did not see its end coming.

*

I read "As I Lie Dead" on the train to Akko (Acre), one of the oldest in a land of ancient cities. Akko/Acre was the final stronghold of the Crusader states in the Holy Land, a place where all but the shortest Knights Templar must have taken the lord's name in vain as they smacked their medieval heads against the low roof of what some people today think was an escape tunnel.

The city's real big knights were the Hospitallers, whose "subterranean" Crusader fortress was spectacularly well preserved because subsequent occupiers simply filled its halls with rubble and buried them.

Anyone who was anyone knew about Akko, wrote about it, or invaded it: The pharaohs.  The folks who wrote the Bible. Newcomers like the ancient Greeks, the Romans,  the Crusaders, and Napoleon. I suggest that you follow them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

He walked, I rode

(Confused ass on the road to Jerusalem)

Rented a bicycle, rode along the Sea of Galilee in Tiberias, and fell off just once, in the mud at a Roman archaeological site that will be something to see if Israel ever makes it accessible.

And, in another experience that reminded me of Matt Rees' crime novels,  my driver to Hebron and Bethlehem, asked why rich Arab governments don't pour money into the Palestinian territories the way Jewish benefactors do into Israel, said: "They did. It all wound up in Swiss (bank accounts)."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Territorial imperatives

(Mosaic floor, Church of the
Nativity, Bethlehem)

Hebron is an occasional flash point of tension between Palestinians and Jewish settlers, and the city's streets are rubble-strewn relics of strife and of shops closed by a straitened economy. Parts of Hebron are probably frightening places to be caught at night.

My driver for the day, an Israeli Arab, said he can't leave his car alone in Hebron for fear that it will be stoned. Yet the only fear I felt all day came when we pulled into a gas station outside Bethlehem, to find the attendant lounging against the pumps smoking a cigarette.  I nervously asked the driver if we ought to pray for the Creator of us all to get us out of there alive.

So, why Hebron? Because it is arguably the world's most important historical site. The Book of Genesis says Abraham bought land here as a burial place for his wife, Sarah, and was later himself buried there, in the Cave of the Patriarchs, to be joined by Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Leah. This was by tradition the first acquisition of land by Jews in Israel and is thus the seminal site for the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.

Herod put up a fine building over the tombs, to which Salah ad-din (Saladin) added minarets in the twelfth century. The biblical patriarchs and matriarchs are buried in the caves, memorialized in cenotaphs in the building above, where worshipers pray to Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, and Leah in the building's Jewish section and to Isaac and Rebecca in the Muslim section. (Like much else here, the building is divided.)

A bunch of men prayed before Sarah's tomb, one young man pulling at his payot (forelocks) in religious ecstasy. A woman chanted alone before Leah's memorial, bowing and swaying, showing no sign she was distracted by the conversation and occasional clatter of metal from workers maintaining the adjacent synagogue. (Here's a bit about the physical vocabulary of Jewish prayer; read it as a counterpart to the Arabic gestures from Tuesday's post.)

So, what did the day have to do with crime fiction? I'll tell you tomorrow. Blessed be God, who created long lines, Bethlehem drivers, and cliffhangers to teach us patience!

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

History repeats itself in Israel

(It wouldn't be the first time)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bless your hands!

(Magnificent, Solly)

Matt Rees, who has written four crime novels featuring a Palestinian teacher named Omar Yussef, once explained why he translated certain  greetings rather than giving transliterated versions of the original Arabic:

"I translated them, rather than just putting the original Arabic phrase in italics, because I wanted readers to get the poetry of everyday speech. ... When someone gives them a cup of coffee, they tell them `May Allah bless your hands.' Isn't that beautiful?"

Struck by that everyday poetry, I decided to try it myself this morning, and I wished the waiter who served me breakfast يسلم يدك ("Yislamu eedayk."). From the smile and the profusion of words that followed, I suspected I had said the right thing, but who knows? The man could have had a sense of humor and been calling me a dog and the son of unworthy parents.

But he also placed his right palm on his chest, which was the clincher, because

"Placing the palm of the right hand on the chest immediately after shaking hands with another man shows respect or thanks. A very slight bow of the head may also be added."

and

"Placing the palm of the right hand on the chest, bowing the head a little and closing one’s eyes connotes `Thank You' (in the name of Allah)."

This was the greatest and most gratifying effusion of good feeling I had received since I wished the locals "Eid Mubarak" in Tunisia.  So who says crime fiction can't be educational? Thanks, Matt.

(Learn about Arabic gestures including the ones described here at a Web site that bears the evocative name www.bellydanceuk.co.uk.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Western

I felt right at home  in my first visit to Jerusalem in many years because the shuttle driver from Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport was impatient, as his kind proverbially are, but with a penchant for explaining things to the drivers at whom he raged (though no more than one could possibly have heard him). I didn't understand all his cursing, but the end of one string of invective sounded like simcha, the Hebrew word for happiness.

Spent my first evening wandering around the Old City, and I didn't get lost, at least not in any way worthy of the name.  The Old City is divided into Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim quarters, so I saw:  Orthodox priests who, with just a splash of color in their garb, could have been Piero della Francesca's King Solomon; Chassidic Jews with hats cooler than those you'd see on any American hipster, and young Israeli Arabs who were more than happy to offer spur-of-the-moment advice, including one about 12 years old, who said, "It's closed" when I tried to wander down a side street to see the Al-Aqsa Mosque. "Only for Muslims."

Read some more Elmore Leonard on the plane over, including one story that began with a long, stolid, grimly straightforward description of a buffalo hunt that ended thus (the description, not the hunt):

"Wait until he rode into Leverette with a wagon full of hides, he thought. He’d watch close, pretending he didn’t care, and he’d see if anybody laughed at him then."

The man knows how to create tension.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A thriller from Israel

I wonder what kind of discussion Yishai Sarid's novel Limassol has stimulated in Sarid's own country, Israel.

The protagonist, an Israeli secret service agent, agrees to go undercover to redeem himself after one prisoner dies in his custody and another spits in his face, earning a tooth-breaking punch in the mouth.

In his new mission, he insinuates himself into the company of an Israeli writer who has befriended a dying Palestinian named Hani whose son has become a terrorist bomber. He grows fond of the courtly, peaceable Hani (though not entirely enamored of his literary efforts), and the novel's suspense and moral dilemma spring from their friendship.

(One interesting discussion of the book contrasts the protagonist's own estrangement from his young family with Hani's yearning to see his son, suggesting that "the Palestinians are destined to overcome simply because theirs is a culture which recognizes and nurtures fatherhood." Perhaps, though the review neglects to mention that Hani has not seen his son for years, and that the son is willing to blow himself up, which may mean eternal life, but without father.)

Perhaps more controversial is a sarcastic off-hand observation about Israeli troops with low IQs being assigned the unpleasant task of guarding prisoners. Such observations are not generally uttered about the military in the United States, and an outsider like your humble blogkeeper can only wonder about their effect in a country where the military has traditionally been revered.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

If you want to read on Megabus ...

... bring your own light. The fastidious driver on the Buffalo-Philadelphia leg of yesterday's trip disabled the bus's overhead reading lights because, he explained later, the reflections disturbed him.

Obstreperous clicking of the unresponsive switches drew no response, so I cursed the driver long and silently until I remembered the portable battery-operated reading lamp in my bag. With its help, I finished Fantômas and started on Yishai Sarid's Limassol, finishing the latter just as we pulled into Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. More on both books later.

Reading lamps for use only in broad daylight. On this busiest day of travel in the United States, what is the stupidest travel regulation you can think of?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

4x4: The meme

My fellow award-winning blogger J. Kingston Pierce has tagged me with a meme tailor-made for Detectives Beyond Borders. The meme is built around questions involving the number four, and I especially liked the ones that involved travel and places where one has lived.

Since Jeff expanded the list of questions from eight to ten, I don't feel too badly about making my own adjustments. And you can do the same.


Four places I'd like to go or things I'd like to do:

1) Visit the Angkor temple complex in Cambodia

2) Visit the Ajanta caves in India

3) Hike the length of Hadrian's Wall

4) Complete a short walk I began a few years ago, along the West Kennet Avenue from Avebury to the Sanctuary


Four places I've lived:

1) Montreal

2) Rome

3) Philadelphia

4) The Boston area, which leads to my own category of ...


Four places I've lived in the Boston area:

1) Waltham

2) Brookline, whose no-overnight-parking regulations seemed intended to keep out the folks from ...

3) Brighton

4) Somerville


Four places I've been on vacation:

1) Split, Croatia. By the shimmering blue Adriatic Sea, in a hotel within the precincts of Diocletian's Palace. One of the places that has inspired me with a desire to live there.

2) 桂林 (Guilin, China.) Sweaty, hot, amid spotty air-conditioning and other trappings of a section of China making the uncertain transition to Western-style consumer capitalism. Also home of the near-hallucinogenic beauty of the sandstone natural spires, and the only place I have seen anyone playing a guitar while passenger on a bicycle.

3) Israel/Palestinian territories. Alas, it's not as easy as it once was to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs to see blind old Muslim sage-like men praying at a site so fundamental to our sense of our own culture.

4) Istanbul, in particular Hagia Sophia, quite possibly the most influential building in the history of the world, and certainly one of the most beautiful. One can see the gallery mosaics up close, and there is something special about seeing and touching the rough, unfinished stone that lines the spiral stairways to the upper levels.


Four foods or drinks I have liked:

1) A nice, medium-rare steak

2) A good Brunello da Montalcino

3) Fresh raspberries

4) Deviled eggs


Four (with ties) books or movies I could read or watch again:

1) Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility

2) Roughing It

3) Any of books 7 through 16 of Bill James' Harpur and Iles novels

4) Seven Samurai, Stray Dog and, appropriately for repeated viewing, Rashomon


Four works of art before which I have stood (or sat) either in deep relaxation, as close as I get to a meditative state, or with a profound sense of receptiveness:

1) Piero della Francesca's Resurrection and Montefeltro Altarpiece (Scan by Mark Harden)

2) Velázquez's Las Meninas

3) Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath

4) Trajan's Column


Four literary, scientific, artistic or political figures from the past whom I'd like to watch at work or meet for dinner and drinks:

1) Giotto

2) Jane Austen

3) Mark Twain

3a) Charles Darwin

4) Jawaharlal Nehru. Anyone who can write a book of world history from memory and addressed as a series of letters to his daughter is a man to be reckoned with. Anyone who can write a book about his own country and call it The Discovery of India has a passionate intellect that's worth anyone's interest. And the man had a few practical accomplishments as well, I think.


Answers have begun to arrive from four people I think might take it upon themselves to answer these questions:

1) Sucharita Sarkar (yet another evocative post from one of my favorite writers in blogland.)

2) Seana Graham (good reading!)

3) Adrian McKinty (good reading about bridges and food!)

4) Maxine Clarke

and

5) Kerrie, who stepped in graciously for Maxine and talks about her journey from Paradise to Hell and back. Thanks!

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Yasmina Khadra's "The Attack" is up for a Dagger

I'd always considered Yasmina Khadra's crime novels about Inspector Brahim Llob of the Algiers police as something apart from his other novels — The Sirens of Baghdad, The Swallows of Kabul, Wolf Dreams, The Attack — which constitute a voyage through the Islamic world examining the corrosive effects of fear and extremism on everyday life.

Khadra apparently felt the same way, once telling an interviewer that in the Llob novels, “I dreamed of writing station books, books funny and without claim that you could read while waiting for the train or the bus, or while gilding yourself with the sun at the seaside. … I had never thought that Superintendent Llob was going to exceed the borders of the country and appeal to readers in Europe, and America.” If his crime books were not quite the same as his other books, I reasoned, then his other books must not be crime books.

Perhaps, then, Khadra shared my pleasant surprise when the Crime Writers Association in the United Kingdom short-listed The Attack for this year's Duncan Lawrie International Dagger award, alongside novels by Karin Alvtegen, Christian Jungersen, Åsa Larsson, Jo Nesbø and Fred Vargas.

The Attack is a curious kind of crime story. Its protagonist and first-person narrator, Amin Jaafari, is an Arab surgeon living comfortably and successfully in Tel Aviv who is shocked when a suicide bomb rips through a crowded restaurant, and his wife disappears at the same time. Though the novel has police as characters, the investigator is Jaafari himself, driven to find out what compelled his wife into an association with terrorists. Perhaps this is why the CWA judges called The Attack "A harrowing psychological novel which explores the motivations of a suicide bomber, and lifts the conventions of the whydunnit."

And Jaafari is a curious protagonist. The novel's first eighty or so pages contain numerous references to the effects of his wife's disappearance: "The tornado that knocked down all my supports" or "when I resolve to guard against losing control." At least in the novel's first half, though, Jaafari never seems in danger of losing his moorings. He's too vital an observer, too interested in reporting on the seething world around him to be convincing as a man in danger of falling part. And that makes him a lively investigator.

More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Yasmina Khadra