a tale of love and darkness (amos oz, tr nicholas de lange)

Oz’s lengthy book is part autobiography, part deep dive into his roots. The first half deals extensively with the Ukrainian origins of his mother’s family. He traces the routes of both sides of his family towards their arrival in the state that would soon become Israel. His mother’s subsequent decline in her new land is illustrative of the uneasy ties of Oz’s parents’ generation to their new land. They were bookish, urbane people who had deep ties to the lands they left behind, far from the arid soil of Palestine.

The Palestinians themselves, as Oz makes clear in the two sequences where Palestinian people feature in this 700 page book, were a reminder of the immigrants’ foreignness. The Palestinians exist on the edge of this account, shadowy creatures who the new arrivals assume crave the annihilation of the newcomers. Which, from the perspective of the immigrants, has a certain logic, given the war footing at the founding of the state. Then, in two episodes, the young Oz succeeds in stepping out of his silo and having actual human interaction with Palestinians. In the first instance, Oz, aged 6, is dragged into an Arab-owned Jerusalem clothes shop by his nagging aunt. In the cavernous women’s clothes shop the child wanders off and finds himself terrified and lost, until he is rescued by the kindly Palestinian owner of the shop. In the second episode, an adolescent Oz is invited, the year before the state of Israel is officially brought to exist, to an event at the house of a wealthy Palestinian in an Arab quarter of Jerusalem. There, he is attracted to a young Palestinian girl, and seeking to show off, he causes a terrible accident to her young brother.

For a contemporary reader, these incidents have more impact than almost anything else in the book. It’s impossible not to see them as parables, which Oz might have intended. The outsider clumsily trying to assert his presence, sowing disaster. What is perhaps curious is that the implication of these stories are never followed through. The Palestinians remain a categorical ‘other’ and return to the edge of the narrative. There is consciousness, but there is no attempt at reconciliation. Instead the dominant conflict in the writer’s worldview is between the immigrant Jews of his parents generation and the Kibbutzers who have another vision of Jewery, one that is active, vigorous, uncowed. Oz moves away from Jerusalem and becomes one of this new school, working on a rural kibbutz, to his father’s dismay.

However, as the book sometimes makes clear, the story is still more complex than this. Because there has been another sector of the new Israel which has always existed, co-existing with the Palestinians, Christians and other sectors of society that made up this multicultural land. They too have been displaced from this narrative by the arrival of the immigrants. And the old Jerusalem that Oz catches glimpses of before the state of Israel is declared will soon be dismantled, with the arrival of the first Nakba. The Arab quarters will be annexed, geography rewritten, and the seeds of an ongoing, unresolvable crisis which will haunt Israel forever will be sown.

Oz’ account of the way the UN declaration of the state of Israel was received in Jerusalem and the war that followed is one of the most effective pieces of writing in the book. But every word about the hardship endured in those days now feels as though it has been mirrored and multiplied a million times by the violence inflicted on Gaza, part of that unacknowledged other which the new state has displaced.

“After that they talked for a while, the others, not my man, my man did not talk but just stroked my cheek and patted me twice on the shoulder and left. Who knows what he was called? Or if he’s still alive? Is he living in his home? Or in dirt and poverty, in some refugee camp?”

Nb - i recognise that this is only one of Oz’s books and it might be injurious to comment on the author’s attitudes through a reading of this work alone. However, it is an autobiography, and as such feels representative of the new Israel’s first generation, something the writer’s accounts of his interaction with Ben Gurion only helps to reinforce. It’s also worth noting what Khoury has to say in My Name is Adam: “I can’t understand how a novelist could write about Jerusalem without revealing the scale of the tragedy that befell the original inhabitants of the city’s western districts, which the Israelis occupied, expelling their occupants from their homes. I both blame him and wonder at him for not seeing the light in the stones of Jerusalem, of whose gradations of colour the Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra wrote at such length. Oz saw only a dark city clothed in the fog of his European memories, but anyone who visits Jerusalem knows that it is a city of light and that its roseate stones radiate and glow even in the darkness.”

the death of the french intellectual [shlomo sand]

In spite of the recherché title, there’s something pressing and universal about Sand’s disjointed text. There’s a reason it’s disjointed, that in the end it feels like two texts knitted into one. However, it’s a compelling reason, which only goes to show that scholarship need not always be about conformist lines and arguments. 

The book’s first part is an analysis of the role of the intellectual in French society. Working his way through the usual culprits, including Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as a host of others who are lesser known in the Anglo-Saxon world, Sand looks at the dialectic between the intellectual functioning as an apparatchik of the state or, in contrast, as a kind of spiritual guide, someone capable of surveying society from a lofty distance, removed from the petty debates of politics. Sand analyses both positions, questioning their integrity and the degree to which they truly promoted the idea of independent thought. Examining the role via the complexities of French socio-politics leads him, via Gramsci, to state at one point: “the ‘independent’ intellectual appears as bearer of the universal interest, and by this fact alone manages to better conceal both the specific interests of the rulers and their own. This is one of the ways in which cultural hegemony so essential for the maintenance of social order is created.”

Which is not to sat that Sand seeks to reject the importance of the intellectual. The book is spotted with small details from his own life, which help to explain how and why he himself has become an intellectual, and the role that the intellectual plays within a socially conscious world. If anything, there’s sometimes a tone of nostalgia for the days of serious thought, which, it would seem from the final chapters, he feels is being displaced by soundbite-savvy, media-literate figures who have learnt to package a semblance of complex thought into digestible doses. This is most apparent in the final chapter, where he specifically takes on two ‘philosophers’ whose work has risen to prominence as they embrace a critical stance towards Islam. (He also look at Houllebecq’s novels in this context.) Sand is an Israeli by birth, who has a strong residual understanding of the way in which cultural stigmatism functions. The closing chapter of the first part of his book has looked at the way that some French intellectuals embraced fascism. Part of the book’s argument is an investigation into how the idea of the intellectual, constructed in the enlightenment, could have lead to representatives of that term embracing the impoverished ‘philosophy’ of fascism, with its specifically ethnic prejudices. He then sees this being repeated in the twenty first century, as intellectuals turn on Islam, in the same way many from the wartime generation turned on judaism. 

All of which makes for a book which is brave and urgent. Sand has the courage to make clear his mixed feelings regarding Charlie Hebdo, calling out the magazine as having been openly racist (whilst never suggesting that this meant it deserved its fate). His closing chapters trace what he sees as a dangerous trend towards Islamaphobism, noting the way in which the arguments in favour of this trend are backed up and given agency by “intellectuals”. Clearly, Sand is identifying a trend that goes beyond the borders of France. At a time when the spectre of fascism appears to have re-emerged to threaten civil society as well as moral absolutes which in another age are envisaged as unimpeachable, Sand’s book is a vital tool to an understanding how we’ve got to where we’ve got to, and possibly signals ways we can start to get out of this mess, before it gets any worse. 

ajami (w&d scandar copti, yaron shani)

Ajami has apparently been nominated for the best foreign film at next year's Oscars. Already. Something of a curse, by and large, as it signals a worthy if uninspiring piece that has done enough to suggest its importance without in any way shaking up Hollywood's great and good.

As it opens, Ajami, a crime drama, has more than a touch of that perennial non-Oscar winner Scorcese about it. It promises to be gritty, high-octane film making, with a swaggering but loveable gangster as its lead. The film's structure then moves in a sideways direction. The narrative is broken up into chapters, which float in time as they describe a drugs deal gone wrong in black humoured fashion.

Ajami is named after a suburb of Jaffa, a predominantly Arabic part of Israel. The film is co-directed by an Arab and a Jewish Israeli, and the narrative shifts between the country's religious communities (a key character is also Christian). Probably more than its adept and subtle aesthetics, this multi-faith approach explains the Oscar nomination. But the way in which the film reveals the complexities of modern Israel, a state more sectarian than anyone realises (with the constant focus on the Palestinian territories) is impressive. A Jewish man engages in what seems like an amiable debate about his neighbour's animals, which keep him awake, and the debate ends in bloodshed. Another man (played by one of the directors) is a Palestinian with a Jewish girlfriend, spending half his life dancing in Tel Aviv nightclubs and the other half hanging out in his Palestinian hood. Language creates a constant faultline, and the problems the country faces come across as, in many ways, even more complex than they are portrayed in the media.

Ajami is a slow burner, and the fractured narrative is sometimes challenging, but in the end its both a film which succeeds in being both politically and cinematically powerful, and perhaps deserves better than to be honoured by the elite of a Hollywood Academy.

waltz with bashir (w&d ari folman)

Hot on the heels of Hunger comes Waltz With Bashir, another piece dealing with near-forgotten episode from the eighties. Oddly both pieces summoned up similar memories of being in the library of Freddies, as the house I lived in was somewhat comically named. The library was primarily used as a snooker room, but the papers were also laid out there, and 1982 was around the year when I first began to take a regular interest in the wider world. The massacre of Sabra and Chatila affected me. I cut out a picture from the paper, not dissimilar to the images at the end of Folman's film, and kept it in a yellow hardback book I had been given for Christmas (selected essays of Bernard Levin). 

Folman's film is about many things, and I'd hope he'd recognise the purpose of my introductory flannel. Like McQueen's film, he is looking at the way history is constructed, which also means the way in which we choose to either remember or forget that which has gone before. The film explores his own memories of being in Beirut as an Israeli soldier at the time of the massacre. As such it is also a film about memory - including one diverting sequence where a psychologist explains the human tendency to construct, even invent memories, noting that memory is an active, ongoing project for each individual. Folman, whose autobiographical story the film tells, has blocked out any recollection of being in Beirut, and the film narrates his mission to recover his memory, thereby erasing a collective amnesia on his country's part about the role it played in this war crime.

Any news we receive about Israel nowadays is tied up in its role in the geopolitical struggle that country was always heir to, and how it is conducting that struggle. In the midst of this maelstrom, its hard not to feel that Jewish culture, such a key component of European culture, gets forgotten. Folman's film reminds us of a heritage which its easy to feel has been lost since Judaism found a home. Folman's mission is a humane, rational enquiry. He talks to his psychologist, who makes the connection between the death camps of Beirut and the camps of the Holocaust, and the implicit Nazification of Israeli foreign policy at that time. These are bold points, made with a light touch, as pretty images float across the screen.

Which, of course, is Waltz With Bashir's USP. How does a factual essay about war crimes; Jewish identity; and memory, get a mainstream release? It does it by making itself as an animation. Folman's drawings are witty, pretty, striking and thought-provoking. The animation allows him to recreate a city in the midst of civil war, and describe the invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli army. It also allows him to include several fantasy and dream sequences. The poetry of the images buys him space for the more banal documentary talking heads images (which nonetheless exude a quirky fascination in comic strip form). After Persepolis, I was somewhat wary of the notion of an animated political film, but Waltz With Bashir uses the medium to remarkable effect, not least because of the quality of the animation itself. But more than this, the choice to make the film in an animated form allows the director to clandestinely smuggle issues into the cinema which he wouldn't be able to do any other way.

Waltz With Bashir is a brave film. Art cannot redeem the mistakes of the past, (and the film's sudden shift of tone at the end might be a nod to the limits of the power of artistry), but it can contribute to an understanding of what has gone before. Furthermore, it is also part of the discourse of history, and by refusing to let his personal amnesia lie, Folman might have gone some way towards helping his collective nation recognise the responsibility it bears for its part with regard to Sabra and Chatila, a responsibility it would normally prefer to be clouded in the fog of long-lost memory.

the band's visit (dir Eran Kolirin)

Kolirin knows how to frame an image. The opening shot shows a man trying to fit a yellow balloon into the front seat of a camper van. We don't know why the man is doing this, nor will we ever learn. The man gets in the van, drives off, and is never seen again. What lies behind the van is a group of eight policemen, members of the police band who have arrived in Israel to perform. They stand there, puzzled, immobile in the their faintly comical powder blue uniforms. The camera has never moved.

This eye for a set-up continues throughout The Band's Visit, lending the film a crafted, dispassionate aesthetic. A military band carrying instruments of various sizes through a dusty desert is a visual treat, and the director is not afraid to spoil us, lingering over their haphazard progress. However, there is more to this dispassionate eye than mere pretty pictures. The danger that the film's narrative runs is that it will become too sachirine. Kolirin resists this with his pared back script and the cast's understated performances.

The film tells the story of a military band who get on the wrong bus and end up in the middle of deepest Israel. They are befriended by Dina, a free-spirited and bored cafe owner, with a curious history, never revealed. There are no more buses, so the band is forced to accept the hospitality she and a friend offer. The next day they leave for the concert. That's it. The drama is all in the culture clash, the coming together of old enemies. In Dina's cafe, one of the policeman hangs his blue hat over a picture of an Israeli tank.

Any hint of sentimentality would undercut the film, and leave it open to charges of implausibility. Wisely, Kolirin's script is as carefully composed, and restrained, as his shot composition. There's no Hollywood ending. The characters don't find it easy to get on with the enemy. They have to negotiate for common ground, scrabble around for moments where they can trust and alight upon the field of their common humanity.

Music helps, nowhere more so than in the scene where three bandsmen sing Summertime lugubriously, in the company of an awkward Israeli family. Perhaps oddly, the other thing that assists them is their lack of a common language. They are forced to resort to English, and in their mutual uncertainty with the second language they find common ground.

You can see why The Band's Visit has been so successful on the international festival circuit. The band finally find their way to the site of their performance, and the film concludes with Tawfiq, the weather-beaten bandleader, singing a traditional Arabic tune. Israeli and Egyptian flags flutter in the background. The hope is tangible: culture alone gives a framework for the possibility of understanding. The most intractable of divisions can be overcome.

However, The Band's Visit's restraint, and gentle pacing, alludes to another truth: that these divisions will not heal in a rapidly edited hurry. They healing must be allowed to proceed at its own pace. It must be handled with due care, and great consideration.