Jewish books: Fishman and Tsabari explore home and displacement in new fiction

In my examiner article (next paragraph) I write: "Two fiction books published this month explore what home means for two distinct waves of recent immigrants. Boris Fishman continues to relate the experiences of Russian speaking Jews who immigrated to America in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s in his second novel Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, and Canadian-Israeli writer Ayelet Tsabari explores the lives of young Israelis at home and abroad in her debut book of short stories The Best Place on Earth: Stories, which won the Jewish Book Council’s $100, 000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2015 for the 2013 Canadian edition." Also see my New York Journal of Books reviews of the two books:
http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/dont-let-my-baby http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/bo…/b...

Moving is one of life’s most traumatic experiences and all the more so when moving to another country and living in a new language. Two fiction books published this month explore what home means for two distinct waves of recent immigrants. Boris Fishman continues to relate the experiences of Russian speaking Jews who immigrated to America in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s in his second novel Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo , and Canadian-Israeli writer Ayelet Tsabari explores the lives of young Israelis at home and abroad in her debut book of short stories The Best Place on Earth , which won the Jewish Book Council’s $100, 000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2015 for the 2013 Canadian edition.

In my New York Journal of Books review of Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo I synopsize Alex and Maya Rubin’s experiences as adoptive parents and how Maya in the second half of the novel becomes a femme fatale, a role that is foreshadowed earlier in the novel when Alex compares her to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

“Railroad mind”—that was Alex’s term for the hive of Maya’s brain. Railroads made him think of motion, steam, frantic activity. What he really meant was that she was like some Anna Karenina—superfluously melodramatic. And Maya understood what he really meant only because she had a railroad mind.”

The age at which one immigrates also influences one’s ability to adapt to a new country:

“Alex had been ten years younger than Maya’s eighteen when his family had come to America; the Rubins had come for good, whereas Maya had come on an exchange program in 1988, the first year such things were possible. After college, Maya was supposed to return to the USSR—a plan altered by her love affair with Alex and the end of the USSR. Alex had taken to America—he spoke with confidence about Wall Street, the structure of Congress, technology. Maya conceded his authority. Only once had she exclaimed that in twenty years he had almost never left New Jersey, so what did he know? Alex had looked at her as if at a child who doesn’t understand what it means to say things one will later regret, and retreated upstairs. He did not speak to her for three days, their sullen meals spent communicating through Max and his grandparents, and Maya never said that again.”

Tsabari’s Israeli ex-pats are only a few years older than Fishman’s Maya was when she moved to America, and yet for them it is more of a choice. In my New York Journal of Books review of The Best Place on Earth I note how well adapted Tsabari’s Israeli-Canadians are to life in Canada. But in an article in LitHub Tsabari relates how hard won is her ability to write in her second language:

“During those first few years in Canada, even speaking in English was a challenge. I was discouraged by my failure to convey complex thoughts, irritated by my inability to fight with my boyfriend in an eloquent way, embarrassed by my frequent misunderstandings and mispronunciations.”

At a certain point she lacked mastery in both Hebrew and English, a feeling I experienced after living in Israel for five years when I sensed I was forgetting English but still didn’t write well in Hebrew. “My Hebrew was becoming rusty from lack of use, while my English was still not good enough. My dream of writing—the only dream I had ever truly held on to—was slipping away from me.”

While supporting herself by waitressing and cleaning homes and apartment building lobbies, Tsabari forced herself to write in English. Eventually the effort paid off and mirrored her emotional state now that she lived in Canada: “ I was calmer, lighter, more confident, and my English writing was cleaner, more straightforward, less flowery.”

Some of Tsabari’s stories set in Israel capture the stress and tension of living in a country where there is a constant threat of violence, which explains why for Tsabari’s Israeli new Canadians life there feels comparatively calmer.

It is said of the Israeli poet Leah Goldberg that she thought in Russian and wrote in Hebrew, and likewise the quality of Tsabari’s writing in English improved when she allowed Hebrew to influence it:

“Once I let my English writing be inflected with my Hebrew, infused with my voice, my accent, my background, and with the multiplicities of identity—the passion and drama of the Middle East, the oral traditions of my Yemeni ancestors, the tension and urgency of Israel—a new writer emerged.

“… Writing in a language foreign to me and to the place I am depicting seems fitting for a book like mine, preoccupied with in-between-ness. It adds layers of displacement that echo the experience of my characters, travelers, migrants, expats and outsiders who are often at a crossroads, in between places, in between identities, in between languages.”

That experience of displacement is something Fishman and Tsabari’s characters have in common. I conclude my review of Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo by writing that it “fulfills and surpasses the promise of [his debut novel] A Replacement Life.” Likewise I write that readers of Tsabari’s The Best Place on Earth will look forward to her novel in progress “with avid anticipation.” For a fuller discussion of these books read my reviews in New York Journal of Books.

Israeli books: Youval Shimoni's experimental post-modern fiction classic A Room

In my New York Journal of Books review of Youval Shimoni's A Room I write: "A Room is strongly recommended to readers of post-modern and experimental fiction who enjoy stream of consciousness narratives and who are willing to delve deeper than a thin plot’s surface level." Read that review first. Additional excerpts from the novel and my additional remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.

Youval Shimoni’s 1999 novel A Room is known in Israel as an important work of post-modern fiction, and now it is available to English language readers in Michael Sharp’s translation thanks to Dalkey Archive Press. In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend A Room “to readers of post-modern and experimental fiction who enjoy stream of consciousness narratives and who are willing to delve deeper than a thin plot’s surface level.”

A Room is the second of Shimoni’s four books and the first to be published in English, but the book actually consists of two novels, The Lamp and The Drawer and a short story “The Throne,” and its themes are developed over all three texts. Those themes concern artistic creation, the leap between conception and execution, and what can go wrong during the latter. When the work of art is completed, then perhaps the viewer/reader’s process of engaging with it in some sense mirrors the artist’s process of creating it.

In The Lamp a mixed civilian and military film crew prepare to make a short army instructional movie about how to use a gas mask. In the first chapter we are told that a man has burned to death in an explosion during the filming, and the subsequent chapters describe what happened leading up to that unanticipated tragedy.

In his sonnet "On His Blindness" the 17th Century English poet John Milton wrote, “They also serve who only stand and wait,” and for most of The Lamp the narrative explores what the characters are thinking about as they stand around waiting while a piece of equipment is being repaired. Nearly all of those mental digressions are placed in parentheses, and the word count of the text in parentheses is several times greater than that of the rest of The Lamp. Likewise the language alternates between the everyday colloquial and long dense handsomely written stream of consciousness passages.

In some of the most lyrical of the parenthetical digressions characters recall foreign travel:

“(Millions upon millions of waves stormed toward the cliff on which the hut stood, and everything he had abandoned now came upon him with a vengeance, his entire body, which had become thin and feverish, was filled with this knowledge: far above the unraveled mosquito net and above the thatch and above the clouds that the lightening sliced with a thrust, in the depths of the highest heaven, gigantic thunderous balancing scales moved; seven degrees from the equator he heard them with absolute clarity—in his eyes the mark of the location was not without meaning; and in the white of a grain of salt he could see the movement of a wave from the end of the ocean, the blazing of the equatorial sun, the refining and the purifying of the wave, its slow drifting toward the sky, its slow condensing and the touch of those kneading fingers endowing each cloud with its mark, until it ripens and falls and billows—on one scale was this island to which he had traveled far with all its bays and hills and masses of palm trees, and on the other a handful of dried leaves, upon which they had once lain: at the time a small sparrow stood on the sill beneath the stuck shutter and whistled.)”

In The Drawer an Israeli art student in Paris promises three local homeless people each a meal at McDonalds in exchange for posing as models in a hospital morgue with its refrigerated drawers in a remake of a famous renaissance painting of Jesus’ post-crucifixion pre-resurrection corpse. In the original painting “the ribs stretched his skin like a drum upon which perhaps drops of rain drummed afterwards, grains of hail or the beaks of birds. In the place to which you are going the cold will seep in from the holes in the palms and the soles and from the cut in the chest, until it fills the entire body and turns it blue; the stainless steel drawer will reflect the pale light of the fluorescent lamps, there were always fluorescent lamps in places like that, and perhaps the drawer won’t close with the bottle that will be standing in the corner instead of the goblet.”

The final text in A Room, “The Throne,” describes the many discarded designs a memorial monument goes through from conception to execution, and is a kind of commentary on the previous two novels.

For fans of post-modern experimental fiction A Room is a must read.