*** LOCUS SF in Israel November 19, 2018 Spotlight
Israel, I am informed, seems to be having an SF moment. Or, from the unexpectedly enthusiastic early reviews of the anthology I co-edited with Emanuel Lottem, Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature, SF may be having an Israel moment. As well it should. After all, the Jewish State drew inspiration from a knock-off of Edward Bellamy’s late 19th-century utopian romance, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, notably, Zionist ideologue Theodore Herzl’s Altneuland (Old New Land). A mere 70 years after its troubled foundation, his dream-child is recognized worldwide as a scientific and technological powerhouse and the purveyor of any number of SFnal inventions and innovations. The modern State of Israel, moreover, straddles a former Herodian fortress – Megiddo, or, as the Greeks called it, Armageddon – Ground Zero for the apocalyptic imagination. Among Israelis, fears of terminal conflagration are never far from the surface. None of which is lost on Israeli writers, who have, during the last few decades, begun contributing to a burgeoning corpus, in Hebrew, Russian, and English, of Israeli fantastika. Vaunted literary luminaries such as Shimon Adaf, Orly Castel-Bloom, Emil Habibi, Gail Hareven, Etgar Keret, Sayed Kashua, and Nava Semel now compete for bookstore space with avowed genre writers like Keren Landsman, Nir Yaniv, Yael Furman, Ofir Touché Gafla, Assaf Gavron, Yoav Katz, Vered Tochterman, Guy Hasson, Hagar Yanai, and Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel. Worldclass artists like Avi Katz (who illustrated Zion’s Fiction) now regularly adorn book covers. The country even has its own Hugos – the Geffen Prize, awarded at ICon, one of several annual confabs. This didn’t stop my agent from running into a wall while trying to sell a book he thought would be a slam dunk. “My shelves,” I whined to him, “are buckling under the weight of compendiums of Spanish, Portuguese, and Finnish fantasy. I’ve got more anthologies of Chinese SF/F than time to read them. The Philippines churn them out with the pace and regularity of visiting typhoons. Not only does my native Canada boast several national collections (with Quebec hurriedly in pursuit), but Montreal, where I grew to my majority, can lay claim to several in both English and in French. And the Arab world seemed to be
on a roll, most recently with the anthology Iraq+100. How long before the Druze, Bedouin, Circassians, and, yes, Palestinians, followed suit?” But as for Israel, where I lived from 1977 to 1986, batich. Gurnischt. Nada. Why is anyone’s guess. My own was that the Jewish State’s good name, not to put too fine a point on it, was in the toilet. Publishers, I concluded, though none of them ever spoke of this in their rejections, simply didn’t fancy becoming a target of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement, which is clearly feeling its oats. Or maybe there just wasn’t much of a market in the US for foreign literature in translation. With a few notable exceptions (Etgar Keret, Amos Oz, David Grossman, et al.), Israeli literature never gained much traction in North America, not even among American Jews, who seemed to prefer gung-ho attestations of Israeli military prowess over impenetrable expressions of suburban angst in North Tel Aviv. Israeli SF/F, a niche within a niche within a niche, may simply have been a bridge too far. The prospects of any English-language anthology of Israeli SF/F, however, didn’t particularly concern Israeli writers or their fans. A mere 20 years ago, one would have been hard put to identify more than a handful of Hebrew-language titles by local authors. Nor did there seem to be an appetite for more. Israeli readers regarded most homegrown material as substandard, preferring translations of English-language SF. Now, not only was there a market for indigenously produced genre literature, but Israeli publishers didn’t even feel the need to peddle the stuff as genre. Their wares, when merited, garnered a modicum of critical attention. And consumers, deprived of genre markers, didn’t seem to make a fuss about inadvertently finding themselves reading SF/ F. Magic realism – no problem. Urban fantasy, sure. Horror, maybe. But if they were reading it, surely it couldn’t be SF/F. In a country that fetishized social realism, that had long disdained most manifestations of the fantastique, that regarded whimsy as a fatal distraction from the exigencies of survival, and subcultural identity as inherently deviant, it was enough that the local SF/F community could indulge their own fanciful predilections without incurring total ignominy. Role-play gamers, for instance, were no longer barred from service in the Israel Defense Forces. Israeli cons provided safe spaces for displays of cosplay. Long disposed to community sing-alongs, Israelis were even starting to filk. This is a far cry from the Israel I inhabited in 1978 while moonlighting, during my voluntary five-year military stint, as a member of the editorial board of the seminal Israeli SF/F magazine Fantasia 2000. As a freshly minted lieutenant assigned to the Paratroops Corps, for instance, I had to secure permission from the base adjutant to write a monthly roundup review for the Jerusalem Post. The adjutant, a three-felafel (full-bird) colonel, informed me that I would have to donate the meager proceeds to the Lone Soldiers Association. I reminded him that I was a lone soldier – someone who did not have family, or other means of support, in Israel. “So go ask them for money!” he barked. But that was then, and this is, well, the future, and in this variant, vaunted mainstream writers now think nothing of writing the kind of SF/F you’d expect from folks with deep genre roots. Folks with deep genre roots no longer toil in the shadows, or wax despondent over the unlikely prospect of being published. Major Israeli houses know from SF/F, some even hire fulltime SF/F editors, and they will happily disseminate locally crafted work they deem worthy. Newspaper and magazine critics, who could
once be counted on either to sneer at this output or ignore it completely, now muster a measure of enthusiasm and a surprising familiarity with genre tropes. To mark this sea change, I interviewed some of the newer voices of Israeli SF/F, notably Keren Landsman and Guy Hasson, Yael Furman, alongside literary wunderkind Shimon Adaf, seasoned SF hand Ehud Maimon, and erstwhile Fantasia 2000 editor Aharon Hauptman. Trust them, of course, to throw a good measure of the arguments we made in the introduction to Zion’s Fiction, the link to which is provided here, into complete and utter disarray. Not to beat a cliché into the ground, but above all else, SF/F promises radical change. There is a famous saying I first encountered in Hebrew that goes, “The things that you see from here, you don’t from there.” These are the guys on the ground. Me, I live in LA (okay, Emanuel lives in Tel Aviv, but he’s a translator, and translators don’t get out much). Together, though, I think we’ve got it nailed. –Sheldon Teitelbaum Sheldon Teitelbaum has covered SF/F in the Los Angeles Times, Wired, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The Encyclopedia Judaica, SF Eye, Midnight Graffiti, and other publications. He is the coeditor of Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature, published in September 2018 by Mandel Vilar Press. The extensive introduction to Zion’s Fiction can be read at <locusmag.com/introduction-to-zions-fiction>.