The unrelenting nightmare which began on October 7 continues. One hundred days, one hundred and fifty, one hundred and seventy-two days; one hundred and thirty-four hostages still held in Gaza, their number going down only by the attrition of war and disease and occasional friendly fire. The ground operation drags on with no clear aim. There is a steady drip-drip-drip of military funerals, a hundred thousand internally displaced, the cities of the northern border deserted. Starving civilians huddle in the ruins of Gaza. In such a situation, can art hold a place? Is there poetry after Auschwitz?
Strangely, confoundingly, life also goes on. Cafes are full, most reservists have returned to their jobs, the colour has returned to Netanyahu’s cheeks and he is lying with the same vigour of October 6. It seems obscene that nothing could change, and yet, perhaps, nothing has changed.
Haim Watzman has started working on one of the earliest fictional responses to the situation (beginning in December), with a series of stories told in weekly installments, reviving an old novelistic tradition (even publishing in the modern day equivalent of a broadsheet, the online-only Times of Israel). He has put out two stories so far, “The Crater” and “Holes,” forming the first chapters of a planned novel.
The first opens with soldiers on guard duty at a destroyed kibbutz on the Gaza border, cursing each other while mourning a friend just killed by a direct hit from a rocket. They encounter a human rights lawyer who has come to document the horrors, and a shell-shocked survivor who has locked himself in a shed, his family all dead or in tunnels under Gaza. A former actor, he styles himself Prospero, alone in an island in his mind, wielding strange magic. The second story follows several women on a car ride to Gaza, each connected in some way to the situation via men, who they love or miss or fear.
The characters in these stories are well-defined, and they embody familiar Israeli archetypes: the vulgar and rough-edged but caring soldier, the tough grandmother, the prickly bully who turns out to have undergone trauma. I experienced the pleasure of recognition, yet also a kind of dissatisfaction. Can we go back, after October 7, to the same fiction, the same characters, are we to resume living our lives in the same way? It seems that there ought to be a new language for talking about this situation, a radical overturning of all we thought before.
Yet this might be all we have. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed.
Editorial Commentary
A Tel Aviv-based hi-tech worker by day, Josh Friedlander moonlights as a volunteer book reviewer, sharing his insightful responses and commentary on Goodreads. Inspired by the upcoming Jerusalism event, Fiction & War, Josh turned his critical gaze to two ongoing short story series written by the featured reader of the event, the accomplished writer and translator Haim Watzman. As Friedlander’s writing illustrates, Watzman presents us with challenging stories that respond to the current situation in Israel and invite interesting conversations.
For updates and links to Watzman’s work, check out his Substack newsletter, and to receive future reviews by Friedlander join his email list.
~ Lonnie