An Interview with Saleit Shahaf Poleg: All the Way from Oklahoma – Stories (Shtaim Publishers, 2024) conducted by Dr. Klarina Priborkin
Klarina: Women are often responsible for cleaning the emotional dirt in the family keeping the family running.
Saleit: The husband and children in the story see the narrator as the one whose function is to clean after them, physically and emotionally (like the teenage daughter who bursts in rage towards her, and then comes for a hug). I think many mothers feel this way sometimes. After the transformation, she thinks to herself: what’s the point of the change if the house is the same with the same children and husband. The story manifests a deep need for transformation – maybe everything must change because we cannot continue that routine anymore.
Klarina: When the house burns, the reader, identifying with the narrator experiences a kind of salvation, a liberation, a catharsis. The house is unbearable; the narrator cannot take it anymore, and so this dramatic ending seems like a logical solution. Does this ending echo with the fear of the burning social and political issues that we are facing in Israel?
Saleit: I’m not sure. Maybe in order to understand yourself and what’s important, you have to burn your house down and reconstruct everything you know about yourself and others.
Klarina: Lately, we are more and more worried that our house, our homeland, is disintegrating and might be in danger due to social divides and outside threats. In the story “Everyone Wants to Kill me Today,” you describe a mother who probably imagines that her doctor, mother and finally husband are all trying to kill her. Everyone’s gaslighting her and no one sees her struggles.
Saleit: When you’re under a lot of stress you might get into a state when you think that everyone attempts to kill you. In this story I mentioned the “Old Hag” syndrome which is a sleep paralysis that happens due to a lot of stress. In this syndrome, people awaken suddenly, but are unable to move and have difficulty breathing due to a feeling of heaviness on their chests. Many people report a strong sense of something evil or sinister; sometimes they “see” someone is approaching them. I felt this is quite similar to the existential crisis we experience in Israel. We all felt we were “asleep” for a long time, unaware of evil forces conspiring to invade the country and hurt us and woke up one Saturday morning to the horrible reality.
When we had to hide in the bomb shelter almost every day during the current war, my youngest son asked me: “why does everyone try to kill us?” And I did not have a good answer. We don’t really know why there’s so much darkness in the world. We know logically, maybe, but not emotionally. We are expected to be very courageous, and as responsible adults, we have serious social and political explanations, but they are not really valid when you think about them on the emotional level. Eventually, the narrator says to her son “don’t take it so personally,” but in fact when someone bombs your house, it becomes the most personal issue.
A few days after the members of my family realized the scope of the military events, my mother and youngest son Googled how to prepare Molotov cocktails, and I was shocked at first, but then I realized it made them feel more empowered and secure. The lack of control became more prominent for all of us after Oct 7th and they found a way to reduce their fear to a certain extent.
Klarina: “Everyone Tries to Kill me Today,” mirrors “Africa” on so many levels. While in the former story the narrator is afraid that the house will be destroyed, in the later she burns the house thus taking control over her life.
Saleit: Think about Africa as the dawn of civilization, this is where the first man began his journey to the rest of the world. The protagonist in the story also wants a fresh start; some primal experience that can be achieved by the fire. But in “Everyone Tries to Kill me Today” the bombs are an external and existential threat that is induced by the siren; it roots the narrator back into reality and to another primal urge of survival – to make sure you and your loved ones will survive.
Klarina: The grotesque appears in many stories in the volume depicting the tension between the social tendency to conceal the truth and the individual’s need to reveal it. For example, in Africa, when the narrator sheds her old skin, she appears as the reverse image of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. Yet, while in the Metamorphoses, Gregor is transformed into an appalling cockroach, in your story the narrator resembles a beautiful butterfly that finally leaves her cocoon. In both cases the metamorphoses enable the revelation of the Truth about the relationships in the family.
Saleit: The grotesque also appears in “A Lizard’s Tongue” which explores the tension between the narrator’s need for professional and personal self-expression as an actor and the commitment to her family. The Lizard represents the seduction of glory and fame, which is reserved for artists that devote themselves to their craft completely. The narrator’s husband also accepts her escapades as an actor while the society expects her to sell her soul as the enveloping gripping tongue of the lizard symbolizes the danger in this adventurous choice. By engaging with the Theater of Life, the narrator discovers the truth about the Lizard man through the lies of the theater.
Klarina: The lizard, like the snake in Genesis, represents knowledge taking advantage of his victim and having no sentiments for her as a person. On the one hand, the narrator wants to devote herself to art, but on the other hand she does not want to give up on her family. There is a constant tension between the need to be a part of something meaningful and significant and even to be famous, but there’s something dark in this need as well.
You’re not afraid to tap on darkness in your stories while reframing it. There’s a lot of dark humor in “Batya’s Last Battle.” Batya, an elderly lady who resists the growth and development of her neighborhood refuses to sell her house even though it is intended for demolition. She engages in a mortal combat with the real estate agent who appears to her as a Pan figure or as you call it a “demonic Satir” that interestingly echoes the tempting Lizard man in the previous story we have discussed. In this story, however, the seduction is financial, and it does not work. Batya refuses to sell her house in spite of the physical threats on the part of the agent. She fights against him, transforming herself into a Rambo figure that buries her opponent in the old well that nobody needs anymore just like Batya. Unexpectedly, an old woman beats a young man.
Saleit: In Israel we live in a constant battle of the “few against many” and our traumatized subconsciousness is completely ruled by the urge to fight. Batya is revived by this battle; she forgets about her chronic pain and diseases and rediscovers her powers.
Klarina: Just like Israel these days – we rediscover our power through loss and pain. I guess one cannot live in this country without repressing the eminent danger in which we chose to raise our children.
Saleit: The grotesque stories are a faint representation of the surreal reality we are experiencing in Israel. It was especially obvious on the night of the drones when the threat from Iran became so palpable that no one could fall asleep thinking that we are facing the next world war. Yet, the morning came and many of us went on with our lives, drinking coffee, going to work and school. It felt like a parallel reality to me, and with this dissonance we wake up every morning and go to sleep every night.
Editorial Commentary
Saleit Shahaf Poleg’s brilliant collection of short stories “All the Way from Oklahoma” explores in many different ways what it means to be an Israeli single woman, a solider, a mother, a wife and even an elderly woman. Even though most stories in this collection have been written before October 7th massacre, they are more relevant than ever in the context of the recent war. While the opening story of the collection, which also serves as the title of the volume, teleports the reader to U.S Route 101 the next story roots us back into the Israeli soil, portraying an elderly woman, Batya, whose house is intended for demolition by a local real estate company. The stories in the collection travel from America to Israel and back again manifesting the conflicts and fantasies of Israeli women who struggle to define their identities balancing between the individualistic yearning for freedom and adventure, and with their commitment to a romantic relationship, social expectations, or family life. In the following conversation Saleit and I discuss the main themes of the collection in relation to the recent events that befell upon us in Israel.
Klarina: In the first story of the collection the narrator’s boyfriend surrealistically “disintegrates into large, jagged pieces” (my translation throughout) during the couple’s long trip across the U.S. West Coast, and she is compelled to take charge of their journey. At first the narrator panics a bit because she does not know how to get along without her boyfriend’s love, but then she comments that it would be interesting to see the US all alone “without [his] footnotes”(8).
Saleit: It seems that even in a constructive, positive and loving relationship, let alone in marriage, women and perhaps men, too, sacrifice their freedom and individuality for the sake of commitment, security and stability. In this story the narrator undergoes a miscarriage before the trip begins, yet it is her partner who disintegrates, and she is the one who reconstructs his pieces in the end of the journey. The Israeli women know how to survive.
Klarina: While the first story takes place in the US, “Africa,” the last story of the volume, is set in Israel and the narrator is a middle-aged mom, a journalist who promotes a body positive agenda, but deep down in her heart believes that successful women should be skinny. One day, the woman literally sheds her old skin and becomes a more beautiful and successful version of herself.
Saleit: Yes, in fact she has been following social expectations all her life, yet it is only when her appearance finally subscribes to the social norms that she starts doubting the choices she made in life. Sometimes we don’t know who we are without the layers that we put on ourselves. In the end of the story, she burns her old skin while “accidently” setting fire of her family house. In the earlier versions of the story, she has also burnt the family house down with her family inside, but obviously this image became a horrible reality on Oct 7th and lost its metaphorical gist.
The protagonist wants the whole place to burn because the house symbolizes the burden of house maintenance and family life. It’s not a coincidence that the only person in the family who actually cares about her is the cleaner who helps her cope with all the dirty work that she is responsible for at home. He is the only one who pays attention to her physical transformation too.
– Dr. Klarina Priborkin