Fiction & War: a conversation

Lonnie: Thanks for sharing your story, Haim. Now, we’re going to move into the conversational part of the evening. I’m gonna ask Haim some questions about story writing and about what’s going on today. And we’ll see where the conversation goes.

So, first of all, I wanted to get your reaction about an ongoing event which perhaps we could call the “Joanna Chen” situation.

I forget the timeline now. I’m sure everybody’s sense of time is a little wacky. It was in the last few weeks that Joanna had an essay published in that magazine, Guernica. It was about her efforts to find empathy in a time of brokeness.

Haim: Yeah, and mostly about how you could empathize with both sides.

Lonnie: Yes, that you can empathize across the many sides of what’s going on right now. And then, once the magazine published and promoted the essay, especially on Twitter [now known as X], there was an unexpected backlash. Thousands upon thousands of people threatened the publication and shared all sorts of horrible messages about Joanna. More surprising than that response was that a big chunk of the volunteer editorial staff actually quit working on the magazine because the piece was published there. They claimed that an Israeli writing from her perspective shouldn’t have a place on their platform. I’m probably already starting to insert a bit of my interpretation of it, but the basic idea is that an Israeli writer published something on this mostly international, but I think American-based magazine, Guernica.

Haim: Joanna’s published there before, a number of times. In fact, she recommended me. [Laughs in the audience.] I do some poetry translations of, in my opinion, the greatest living Hebrew poet today, Yitzhak Laor, that I’ve been trying to place for a long time. I actually had a conversation with Joanna just before the incident that we’re talking about, asking her where she thought to submit it, and she said, “Well, you should try Guernica.” [Laughter.] So I sent them the stuff. I never got an answer, so I guess they don’t want it [more laughter], but I read Guernica every so often. They often publish very interesting pieces, but it’s very, very left-wing. Along with the rest of the far left, it’s become very, very anti-Israel. 

Lonnie: If anyone hasn’t heard about this, you can read much more online. The fact that the magazine pulled the essay became, in and of itself, a newsworthy story that was picked up by big platforms. So, what’s your reaction as someone who’s so close to Joanna, both, I mean, you actually know her, but also your lines of work are so similar?

Haim: Well, on the one hand, I wasn’t surprised because I know the magazine. Or rather, I was a little surprised because Joanna was a regular contributor. She wasn’t someone submitting out of the blue. It was especially odd to treat Joanna like that because she had all the credentials to be accepted as an authentic voice, and an important voice by the magazine. So it seemed like a very odd way to treat someone.

Lonnie: Or you would’ve thought.

Haim: Yes. Well, it shows where we are now.

Lonnie: Do you imagine that this goes beyond Guernica? In other words, what hope is there for publishing Israeli work in English or in translation outside of Israel now?

Haim: Well, you’re assuming that I had faith before that [laughs]. I know a number of people here are writers. I think we’ve all experienced the fact that, and this is not specific to Israel, but there’s a certain narrative that, when a publisher or an agent overseas is approached by an Israeli writer, there are certain narratives that are expected. If you don’t fit into one of those boxes, it’s very, very difficult to find an audience.

You need to check one of the boxes. The Holocaust, obviously; if you’re writing about contemporary Israel, then the Israel-Arab conflict; you should certainly have a kibbutz in the story, if you want to sell it; at least one male character should be a tough guy, you know, a sabra who doesn’t shave very often and who’s very rough. These are what people expect.

A friend of mine, Josh Lambert, wrote a very interesting book,The Literary Mafia (Yale University Press, 2022). It’s about the New York publishing world in the mid 20th century. One of the things he talks about there is that there was a certain narrative, and he shows how that Jewish-American narrative got created. It became the accepted narrative that we know, that of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud. All of them are great writers, but they all shared an experience of being first generation Americans who were rebelling against tradition, rebelling against their Yiddish speaking parents, and trying to find their place in American society. That was the narrative that got published. It’s not that there weren’t other manuscripts out there and other writers writing about other things, but you never hear about them because they didn’t fit that narrative. With very rare exceptions, those other narratives weren’t published. And if they weren’t published, they didn’t get much attention.

I am not a writer who generally deals with big issues. I deal with small moments. For instance, one of the most interesting things that’s happened in this war is the activities of Rachel Azaria. She’s a social activist, former Knesset Member, who did an amazing thing when the war started. Everyone was out sending food and equipment to the soldiers and Rachel suddenly said: “Well, what about the family members who are staying home?” Okay, it was obviously mostly wives, but also husbands in many cases. You know, my own son and daughter-in-law were both called up.

Anyway, she [Rachel Azaria] set up an organization called HaOgen, which means “the anchor,” that has been working very hard to provide support for husbands, wives, and children of people who are serving as reservists. That’s a story that doesn’t get told. I find that the most interesting story of all. Actually, the stories that I’ve been working on, a lot of them are about that, about those people. I doubt trade publishers will be interested in those kinds of stories. We’ll see. But I’m not particularly optimistic.

Lonnie: On a positive note, you did get support, along with a number of other writers, from the Jewish Book Council. 

Haim: Well, that was an initiative that was very nice. And that’s really what got me started on this series of stories, or serial novel.

Lonnie: Are they [the Jewish Book Council] the ones who also invited you to tour through the sites in the South?

Haim: No, no. That was different.

Lonnie: So how did that tour happen? I mean, if anybody’s interested in more writing about the war, the Jewish Book Council has been publishing material online this whole time. Haim has a number of links [on his substack] to the works that he wrote, under their auspices. But, yes, if you want to tell us about visiting those sites and how that affected your understanding of the war and maybe even seeped into your stories and your writing.

Haim: Well, what happened was that it was a few days after I’d written my first story, called “Cold Water,” which [Haim’s friend and performative collaborator] Annabelle read at a Literary Modiin event [“Israel Solidarity Event” October 22, 2023]. “Cold Water” was the first of the short stories to appear online. Then a friend and neighbor of mine, Aren Maeir, who’s a professor of archeology at Bar-Ilan, called me up. It was a Wednesday night, and he said, “Do you want to go to Be’eri tomorrow?” And I said, “No way!”

You know, when all this stuff started, I didn’t look at any of the film clips and any of the awful stuff going on. I just couldn’t handle it. So I said, “no way,” and then I went upstairs and I told my wife, Ilana. I said, “You know, Aren called me up, and he has this crazy idea. He wants to go down to Be’eri with him to visit sites of the massacre.” And she said, “Well, maybe you should go. Maybe it’s your responsibility as a writer to go and write about it.” I thought about it, and I said to myself, “You know, she’s right.” So I called him back and said I would come.

We went down and we spent a whole day there. We went to the site of the party, Re’eim, to Kfar Aza, and to Be’eri. It was just horrifying. This was just 9 or 10 days after the massacre. There was blood and gore. There were soldiers there, from the Military Rabbinate, identifying bodies. The connection with archeology was that the Israel Antiquities Authority had been called in to help find human remains. What happened was that people, for instance, went into their security rooms and the Hamas terrorists set the homes on fire. So people were literally burned into ash inside their security rooms. There was nothing left except, in some cases, teeth or bone fragments. The archeologists were sifting through the remains, to find remnants that could be used to run genetic analyses on. They still didn’t know, at that point, who was missing and who had been taken captive. It was just horrifying.

We spoke, at Be’eri, to the deputy commander of the rapid response team at the kibbutz, who told the whole story about how eight of them had been there for a whole day until they were reduced to just three. The army didn’t come, and they were calling desperately for help. So, after coming home, I sat down and Ilana said, “What happened?” And I said, “I can’t talk now. I have to write.”

I sat down and I wrote a piece called “Books of the Dead” that appeared on the Jewish Book Council website, and I did a Hebrew version that appeared in Haaretz. It was about this one house we went into where the whole house had been burned. There was this little corner where there was a writing desk and some books shelves, and it was as if nothing had happened to that corner. I imagined this woman, who had sat down there on Friday night and left something that she intended to pick up the next morning. That was the experience. At that point, I’d just written one story. That experience made me feel like I needed to go on with writing stories, to find my own way to address what had happened. But, as my method always is, it’s not by addressing it directly, but indirectly. 

Lonnie: So, you’re reminding me of that Shirley Kaufman poem [“After the Wars,” which Lonnie read in the introduction to the event]. In response, you mentioned how 1984 reminds you of the First Lebanon War, which was a war you fought in. I think both olim and, in general, younger people in Israel look at the gravity and the duration of this war as being so different from their, or maybe I should say our, experiences with previous wars. At the same time, there is, I think, for most Israelis, this acceptance, I hate to say, of a kind of cyclicality of war. As a fiction writer, and as someone who’s been here for so long, how has this kind of cyclicality of war affected your work, both as a reader and a writer? Have you written about previous wars in this way, or is this time different? Maybe that’s one way to ask the question: Is it any different this time writing in the middle of this war than having written in previous wars?

Haim: Well, it’s different. I write a fair amount about soldiers. I mean, my first book Company C (FSG, 2005) was a memoir about my time as a reservist. Basically, it was a way of explaining to myself why I continued to serve during the course of the First Intifada while, in civilian life, I was demonstrating against Israeli policy and the Occupation. I grappled with why I still felt compelled to serve in the reserves, suppressing the uprising. Being a reservist was a very important part of my identity. It was something I felt very strongly about, and I still have close friends from that time.

So, the story of people who are both citizens and soldiers is something that comes up in my stories a fair amount. I think it is the way we live. I don’t think I was any different from a lot of other people in that I was hoping that we were making progress, little by little towards peace and mutual understanding. I think the demonstrations against the government’s attempt to take control of the judicial system, during the year before the war, started to raise some hope that we could mobilize the country towards more democracy and more equality. I was as shocked and as dumbfounded as everyone else was when this happened. 

Also I was very angry, as I think a lot of us were. Angry at the army for screwing up. Anyone who’s been in the army knows. We’ve seen the negative and we’ve seen the positive side. We’ve seen how reservists have volunteered and were called up. Lonnie, you know, you were also there. That’s the very good side of it. The bad side, on the other hand, is that our army, as much as we’d like to think of it as the strongest army in the Middle East, is a huge bureaucracy that screws up a lot. The army screws up in almost every war. I mentioned the First Lebanon War simply because that was another major screw up. Another time when there was no Plan B. There was this grand idea that we were going to march into Beirut and put in a friendly government and then go home.

Well, that didn’t work. A lot of people died as a result because we got stuck in Lebanon. You talked about how this war is drawn out, but that war lasted for, depending on how you define it, for a couple of decades. Obviously we aren’t in a position where wars are going to be a thing of the past. Unfortunately, war is going to be part of the story that we tell about our country and about ourselves.

Lonnie: We seem to have zoomed out to address some big issues. Maybe it’s time to return to the smaller details of your stories. I think I’ve told you, I’m not actually such a big fiction reader. Still, one of the things about your stories that moves me is that a lot of your characters are anonymous while still feeling like recognizable types. Especially if you live in Jerusalem, or in Israel, you start to recognize them. I think a lot of people are excited to talk about or to work with big ideas and big names but I doubt that we’ll ever see Bibi or Gantz in one of your stories, unless I missed something. 

I think I mentioned to you that a friend of mine, Josh Friedlander, wrote a little response to two of your stories. He offered another perspective, which I thought was thought-provoking. He pointed out that these recognizable characters appear like archetypes, though I wonder if just calling them types is better. Anyway, he claimed that these types, which arise in day-to-day life in Israel, could be seen as the cause of the situation. Then, he said that it would be nice to see characters outside of these types. That is, he would like to see fiction set in Israel that includes surprising people doing new things and presenting new paths and responses, etc. What do you think of his criticism?

Haim: I actually hadn’t seen his piece until you flagged it for me yesterday. When I read the whole thing, I was saying to myself: “It doesn’t seem like he really read what I was writing.” What I’m trying to do is exactly the opposite, to not show the typical characters. Take “Cold Water.” The first story that Annabelle read [at the Literary Modiin event, linked above] and the series of stories that followed are not about soldiers. It’s about these two women in a shikun [projects] in Katamon who are reacting to the war but not to the history. They’re reacting as people who have children and grandchildren in the army, and they have issues at home. That’s how they live during the war. They’re not talking politics and they’re not talking about the government. They’re talking about how it’s impacting their lives.

One chapter that was a candidate for this evening, though I didn’t read it, talks about a grandmother who’s left dealing with grandchildren because both father and mother have been called up for reserve duty. Josh described her as, I forgot the words he used, but something like the typical tough grandmother. But the grandmother is anything but tough. She’s falling into pieces [he laughs].

Lonnie: Well, I guess it’s a shame he is not here. Josh used to come to the events and he was our favorite person to throw under the bus to get the conversation moving. So, he’s still helping us out in that way, I guess. [Audience laughs.] 

Anyway, before we wrap it up, did you want to tell us where the stories are going to go? Also, we already mentioned the upcoming play. Would you like to tell us about that?

Haim: I don’t know where the stories are going. That’s part of the fun of it: I don’t know where they’re going. I hope to get back to them soon. Probably not on a weekly basis anymore. I don’t think that’s sustainable. I started working on a new play now and I’m very excited about it. So that’s also distracting me from the stories. 

The new play has an interesting backstory. I recently listened to an audio version, once again, of Shaw’s masterpiece Heartbreak House (1919), which he wrote right after World War I. To my mind, it’s one of the great works of theater. It’s sort of deceptive because, on the surface, it seems to just be a drawing room comedy. There are upper-middle class people in a drawing room, with love interests. So they’re falling in love and falling out of love, but in the background there’s something strange going on. We learn in the course of the play that there’s a munitions house on the grounds of this country house, and at the end of the play it blows up. This was Shaw writing about the end of English society as we know it after the Great War. It struck me that it’s the kind of play that we need now, for this situation. So I’m not exactly doing an adaptation, but my play is inspired by that and I’m writing in Hebrew because I think that it needs to be in Hebrew. The last play I wrote probably needed to be in Hebrew too but it wasn’t. There’s a Hebrew version but it was translated.

Lonnie: Once again, thanks for joining us and sharing your work Haim!

Haim: Thank you! You know when you write these stories and you put them out and there’s very little reaction. You have no idea who’s reading and what people think. So it’s great to have personal contact. Like you said Lonnie, not just online, but in-person.