What Israelis Read

...In short, Ben-Amotz comes across as what most Israelis, in varying measures, pine to be...

...In Western Europe or in the U.S., 1 would hazard, a book of this sort might find a publisher, but it would cause no stir...

...You said the same last time.' To my consternation, it emerged that I had met her a year before . . . and slept with her in the very same place, and at the end, said: 'That was divine.' " This 500-page compendium of arcana, trivia, erotica and philosophy by Israel's doyen Bohemian, humorist, playwright, interviewer and sometime bum contains some fine passages, such as those devoted to Ben-Amotz's BenShemen boarding school days as an orphaned refugee from Hitler's Europe...

...But the reason for the book's phenomenal sales—some 50,000 copies so far—lies in the clearly manifested anarchy of the author's soul, in the prodigious and explicit sex scenes, and in the hero's carefree lifestyle...

...The average Israeli is understandably obsessed with Middle East political and military realities...

...No doubt, a measure of cultural self-centeredness, not to say provincialism, is at least partly responsible for the translation problem...

...Israel, argues Oz, is clearly enjoying a period of building and physical rebirth...

...Those of former premier Yitzhak Rabin, entitled Pinkas Sheirut (A Service Notebook), have been no exception...

...Ben-Amotz writes: "It is probable that those 'intelligences' are at a far higher level of development [than we...

...The victor of 1956 and the claimant to the laurels of 1967 emerges as a pathetic, cunning and self-seeking politician who busily unburdens himself of responsibility for past debacles and future hazards, even at the height of October's battles...

...The reflections are a dilettante's delight: love, beauty, truth, morality, war, art—all are encompassed, chewed over and regurgitated...

...Aside from Screwing, the fiction best-seller lists have been dominated by a handful of translated foreign novels...

...For indeed, even on earth people who physically and mentally resemble one another often speak totally different languages...

...But he remained silent," writes Oz...

...An Israel Government Central Bureau of Statistics survey at the end of 1979 found that 53 percent of Israelis aged 14 years and over read at least one book a month...

...Or: "There is no need, I believe, for great powers of discrimination to see that fashion also rules in the realm of artistic creation...

...Published in June 1979, the book has already gone through four printings — unheard of for a book of this genre — selling over 10,000 copies...

...Israeli publishers are happy with a sell-out of a 5-6,000 edition in both the fiction and non-fiction categories...

...According to the 1979 survey, some 62 percent of Israeli "book-readers" read only in Hebrew, while 23 percent read only in a foreign language (mostly in English, Russian, or French...

...Like the man, the memoirs are rather dry and obsessed with b?tes noires...

...In part, it may also reflect the unsuitability of modern Hebrew for sexual description...

...Some 15 percent of those who read books read in Hebrew and at least one foreign language...

...His fictionalized self sleeps with everything on two creamy legs, crisscrosses the Paris-London-New York circuit, and appears to inhabit a world removed from economic, familial or national obligations and commitments...

...Indeed, that is the way of the world...

...I am certainly the only person in Israel who now supports Yitzhak Rabin because of his Hebrew style," concludes Oz...

...Lawrence's The Rainbow have been most successful...

...And translators of good fiction into Hebrew are hard to come by...

...The second volume describes the general's thoughts and actions, almost minute by minute, in the course of the Yom Kippur War...

...Under his command, the IDF's artillery, infantry and engineering arms entered the war ill-equipped and with outmoded combat doctrines...

...It can beautify tragedies and loss and serve, as it were, as a sublime court of appeal...

...Take extra-terrestrial beings...

...Most of these "book-readers" read at least two books a month...

...Bestsellers normally go into two or three editions and sell some 14,000-20,000 copies...

...Dado fails to criticize Elazar's near-fatal over-reliance on the airplane and the tank as an inexorable, war-winning combination...

...Rabin, after a moment's reflection, opted for the unattractive but deft and accurate "gedolim me'od" (very large...

...A world (of concrete apartment blocks) without shadows, without cellars and attics . .. and [with] a language made up half of stone and the other half of wandering sands" cannot be fashioned into great literature...

...The Biblical language of Song of Songs, a major erotic work, is too refined and archaic to strike sexual chords in the average Israeli mind...

...Indeed, he says, "there is almost nothing in Hebrew literature about the reclamation of the wasteland or the ingathering of the i exiles or the feats of the armed forces...

...And Natan Alterman, the great second-generation Hebrew poet, "was severely burned" when he tried to describe the works of Zionism...

...Bartov, a novelist and Ma'ariv newspaper columnist, was commissioned by the general's widow to write a biography of her husband which would serve as both a history of the Yom Kippur War and a refutation of the findings of the Agranat Commission, set up to investigate the IDF follies in the first days of the war...

...Few fully understood him and no one remembered anything he said for very long...

...Some 16 percent of the readers said they read "journalistic" non-fiction works and some 15 percent read "heavy" non-fiction...

...Most Jews in Palestine before 1948 read in their native, European tongues as well as, or rather than, in Hebrew...

...In reflecting upon the Hebrew language, Oz analyzes the language of three former cabinet ministers: Yisrael Galili, Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin...

...In his "keynote" essay, from which the book derives its title, Oz writes, "The greatest works in world literature were by and large written during or about periods of twilight, when a centuries-old culture passed its zenith and began to decline...

...Graham Greene's The Human Factor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarchs, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and D.H...

...When he came to Eretz Yisrael in the 1920s, Bialik was i asked to write about what he saw...

...Only one or two "serious" novels, not always of recent vintage (vide Lawrence and Tolkien), appear in Hebrew each month...

...Elazar died of a heart attack in his Zahala swimming pool in 1976, before he could write his version of the events leading up to and following October 6, 1973...

...their poor performance during October 1973 was, in places, near-catastrophic...

...Our light is "no good for magic," writes Oz...

...Hebraists of a suitable calibre for translating Joyce or Virginia Woolf often prefer to write their own books...

...this summer...

...What can a story-teller do in this light, in such an energetic flux...

...Dado, Hanoch Bartov's two-volume biography of General David Elazar (Dado), IDF Chief of Staff during the Yom Kippur War, has sold some 50,000 copies over the past 18 months...

...True to its title, Ben-Amotz's barely veiled recollection of his youth in Palestine and in young Israel's Bohemian underworld intersperses lengthy, mundane philosophical reflections among even longer, mostly boring accounts of sexual trysts with German nannies, psychology students and assorted mothers and daughters...

...Sales have reached some 10,000 copies since publication six months ago...

...This reflects the public's conservative mores and assumed literary tastes...

...Some 30,000 copies have been sold since publication some nine months ago, no mean feat in view of the book's poor reception by politicians and critics, who thought it revealed too little about events and too much about Rabin...

...The paucity of serious novels in translation is not easily explicable...

...Ben-Amotz is an Israeli echo—albeit pale and belated—of Henry Miller...

...In this sense, Ben-Amotz is inventive and has done something of a service for the language...

...If the Yom Kippur War had a hero," writes Bartov, quoting Golda, "it was Dado...

...An unashamed work of devotion...

...Bartov mercilessly flays Dayan, who is portrayed as vacillating and inconsistent...

...Oz then turns to Rabin, who during the pre-June 1967 crisis corrected a military memo that read, 'Mighty Egyptian military concentrations in the Sinai approach," to "very large Egyptian military concentrations . . . ." Rabin apparently regarded the Biblical "mighty" (adirim) as inaccurate but refused to replace it with what Oz calls a banal "Israelism," such as "retsini'im" (serious...

...The ceaseless fascination with Israel's wars, and especially the Yom Kippur War, also accounts for the relative success of General Avraham (Bren) Adan's memoirs of his Yom Kippur campaigns as a divisional commander on the southern front, entitled Al Shtei G'dot Ha Suez (On Both Banks of the Suez...

...especially Shimon Peres, Defense Minister under Rabin and present Labor Party leader...

...This is not what real writers can or wish to or will do...

...And about one-third of them read at least one book a week...

...The public would find its libertarianism unoriginal, its anti-materialism clich?d, and its implied contempt for nationalism and army service undeserving of mention or praise...

...It is in the context of political concern and rumination that one must also view Be'or Hat'chelet He'aza (Under This Blazing Light), Amos Oz's latest book, a volume that combines literary and cultural criticism with political, ideological and social analysis...

...Galili, says Oz, spoke ornately, in sentences studded with archaisms...

...Sixty-nine percent of Israel's book-readers read mainly "good literature" (meaning good novels and perhaps plays...

...An English translation will appear in the U.S...

...The light in Israel at this time is that of high noon, a light of midsummer, a blazing blue light...

...Oz describes Dayan's style as "original" and "entrancing...

...Oz, who lives in Kibbutz Hulda in the Jiidean foothills, writes essays which delve deep into Zionism's loss of pristine purity and self-confidence, bemoan the decline of the Labor Party and socialist values, and analyze, with great moral force and a measure of implied hopelessness, the Middle East conflict and its prospects...

...When art deals in defeat, it has a chance to create a small miracle, a transformation...

...The time and the place burst in howsoever you attempt to hide from them...

...Still, there is much like the following: "The great surprise waited for me at the end . . . after all our sighs . . . after reaching the gates of the Garden of Benny Morris lives in Israel and writes for the Jerusalem Post...

...Rabin argues fiercely that Peres undermined his leadership between 197477, and insists that this was a major cause of Labor's debacle in the May 1977 general elections...

...But once the shooting starts, he becomes a tower of strength, dog-gedness and rationality...

...And modern Hebrew sexual terminology is largely of the gutter variety, consisting mostly of Arabic and Russian derivatives...

...Screwing is more convincing when it deals with sex...

...Taken together, these facts offer an important insight into the Israeli national psyche, highlighting a dualism which may permeate all walks of life...

...Bartov's first volume deals with Elazar's childhood in Yugoslavia, his service in the pre-State Palmach, and his meteoric rise through the ranks of the IDF...

...Oz contemns the promptings of ideologists to praise and glorify the works of construction, immigration absorption, the greening of the desert and martial victories...

...Adan's book enjoyed nothing like the success of Dado because it appeared later, and because it is limited to one war, to one front, and, basically, to one division's operations...

...But images of death and mortality suffuse Dayan's every spoken and written paragraph, indicating a strongly entrenched "death wish," says Oz...

...But such data may be misleading...

...they chart an itinerary from youthful enthusiasm and unblemished certainty to the doubts, defects and impurities of middle age...

...The book, scheduled to appear in English in 1981, effectively pillories the Agranat Commission for forcing Elazar's resignation from the IDF in 1974 while giving a clean bill of health to his political superiors, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Golda Meir...

...This era is not suited for the blossoming of great literature...

...Here it is sometimes entertaining and occasionally enlightening...

...Dado emerges as wrong-headed about the Arabs' intention to strike and mistaken about their capacity to inflict major losses and defeats...

...Contemporary Israeli writers tend toward prudishness and sexual understatement...

...At the same time, a collection of military and political memoirs, and one seemingly out-of-place volume of critical essays, have dominated the non-fiction ratings...

...The success of foreign titles reflects not so much taste as availability...

...Publishers appear to be uncertain of the commercial prospects, despite the steady, safe and captive audience which is known to exist—inflation or no inflation...

...Books selling in excess of 30,000 copies within a year or two of publication are regarded'as "super-sellers...

...Only four percent of the "book-readers" said they read poetry and eight percent said they read Toranic and Talmudic literature...

...when I rested her head on my shoulder and whispered .. . 'That was divine'—she laughed and said: 'Yes...

...and] speak a language that we do not understand...

...Memoirs of leading politicians enjoy wide sales in every country...

...According to Oz, art deals in defeats and failures — of personality, of relationships, of collectives and of cultures...

...Eden...

...The 1979 survey found that 28 percent of the "book-readers" read science fiction or mysteries...

...Published in paperback editions of 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000, they normally sell out within weeks of publication, scooped up by the "good books" reading crowd...

...But translations do appear, such as poet T. Carmi's recent rendering of Measure for Measure and poet Meir Weiseltir's To the Lighthouse...

...The reason lies in Oz's position as Israel's leading novelist and in his gradual emergence as a guru-type moralist (Albert Camus in France in the 1950s comes to mind) for Israel's educated, left-of-center youngsters...

...But it is perhaps about Israeli literature and the Hebrew language — of which Oz is a master — that he is most authoritative and penetrating...

...But in a wider sense, the two volumes of Dado constitute a biography, as it were, of the State of Israel...

...A man with the sexual savvy of Ben-Amotz cannot help but have a useful thing or two to say about women and copulation...

...That quality is faithfully echoed in the almost exclusively Israeli focus of non-fiction reading tastej...

...A decent editor would cut it by half...

...By and large...

...The book's explicit sex is highly unusual if not unique in Israeli literature...

...Rabin's attemped self-portrayal as a moral, if somewhat naive, politician forever battling man-eating opportunities in the wings falls somewhat flat in the light of the foreign bank account scandal and his oft-proven inability to foster loyalty among his cabinet proteges...