Last night we had the pleasure of hosting Sheldon Teitelbaum who spoke about sci-fi in Israel. I had been avoiding reading his work because I kept thinking that I don’t want to think about tomorrow. Tomorrow keeps coming up into my face as it is.
But Sheli explained that our literature here comes from social realism – and that is the reason why we are geared to sci fi. And then I brought Elana Gomel into the conversation with her Russian pessimism and her vast knowledge of the genre.
So it was hard to sleep that night. I mean I’d really prefer not to plan tomorrow when I don’t know how today is. It was only when I remembered Shimon Peres and his idea that we should study dreaming more than history that I relaxed.
That’s when I realized. Dreaming possibilities for the future is precisely what is needed.
Ever since I sat on a panel and didn’t know we were supposed to be talking about Ka-Tzetnick and his negtative influence on Holocaust literature (because he wrote untruths about himself) I have been absorbed by his situation. He said he spent two years in Auschwitz, Dina Golan says that according to the records he spent a month or two, for example. He wrote about Jewish women as sex slaves for the Nazis, history says it couldn’t have existed because of the laws about purity of the race. Etc. etc. etc.
So in a terrible inappropriate choice, I started reading his book about his treatment with LSD for post-trauma, Shivitti while waiting for a doctor at Ichilov to treat me. (As before he stuck needles into my face while explaining to a bunch of residents what he was doing to me – after failing to check if the anesthetic had been administered in the right place. So it was pretty agonizing experience – but one created by my own vanity ).
Anyway Shivitti describes the LSD experience of reliving the horrors of Auschwitz with the questions of religion. He questions a God that would have allowed this genocide and discovers that under different circumstances the identities of the Nazis and the persecuted Jews could have been exchanged, that the source of the evil is in mankind. The moment is one of transcendence reminding me of the Bhaggavad Gita, and I’m sure this is a sentence I will have to examine and explain in a much more careful way (Perhaps when Iran has finished bombing us) .
In a side note, I might add that Israel has been using permantin for post-trauma. I’m not sure to what extent or with what results, but I hope to be looking into all this soon.
Jim Morrison and Aldous Huxley’s “Open the Gates” is repeated in Ka-Tzetnik’s writing here, and I first have to find out whether he is quoting them or understanding that LSD will open his gates to perception.
As for Iran, I hope they are just bluffing or trying to push Trump into the catbird seat.
I was too busy to write anyway because I was planning, together with a Muslim friend, their wedding celebration – all multilingual poetry. All we could think about was how to bring people together, bring languages together. The entire idea of literary censorship was so antithetical to my entire concept of literature I couldn’t believe it.
But then I remembered many years ago when I was a guest of the British Government, that we were told to go to a writer’s house for dinner. But when we got there on a rainy night, there was no one home. Fearing I made a mistake, I called her number. And after I went home (hungry) and emailed her, she never answered.
I didn’t report this to the government, but I knew what it meant. You do too.
Last April we went to an exhibit about breaking boundaries at the Holon Museum. So much has happened since then, and so many boundaries have been broken, not only the cute sexual ones indicated here:
but the ones in the army in the front.
The greatest impression on me was the ads for underwear from amputees. I thought it was so daring, and so imaginative. What I didn’t realize was that it is real. Delta, the most popular brand in the country, has an entire line of underwear for women with disabilities:
https://www.delta.co.il/women/collections/10315
This tells you something about daily life here. You have to scroll through the whole collection in order to understand what the young people of Israel are going through.
Since my aunt was one of the escapees I’ve always been fascinated by this unique life-saving project, so antithetical to the death tunnels in Gaza and Lebanon.
With a day that began with a terrible terrorist attack, killing, so far, only one, but injuring over 35, we mourn the losses of the past year. And while we’re trying to sort this out, two people were injured from a Hizballah drone in an Arab village. In the past week we’ve had 56 new orphans from soldiers who were fathers but were killed in combat. It is all incredibly confusing.
Most of us don’t want to think about it. If we’re not in the front or don’t have captured or displaced friends we try to ignore the situation when there are no rockets. But we always know there are terrible threats around the corner, and any bad news reminds us of that. I see it in the daily behaviour of people, the little slip-ups, the wrong turns, tiny things forgotten.
But with all that – we’re still thinking straight and functioning. We have been roped into a serious war by two major attacks on Israel by Iran – and now we’ve got to stay even-headed.
So we spent the evening helping a grandchild study for a math test of Sunday. Will there be school on sunday? Will there be a test?