The Ascent of Eli Israel and Other Stories

Introduction

By Dara Horn

You are holding in your hands a rare thing: an act of literary courage.

What is courage in American literature — a culture where either anything goes, or nothing goes anywhere? Too often we are led to believe that the courageous writer is the provocative one. But in a world where there are no more sacred cows, the provocative has become cowardly, obvious. Today, literary courage is something quite different: not a writer’s willingness to attack the sacred but to create it.

It would be enough to tell you that Papernick brilliantly captures the Israel of recent years, down to the pictures certain bartenders tape to the mirrors behind them, with an accuracy and depth that few other American writers have shown before or since. It would be enough to tell you that Papernick is provocative in the way that is often shallowly praised — his writing is honest, blunt, sometimes even graphic. But the stories you are about to read offer far more than history, far more than travelogue, far more than provocation. He has built something entirely new here, and also entirely ancient. Readers who have been conditioned by contemporary American short stories — whose moral centers are often predetermined either by history or by the groupthink of the politically correct — should prepare to be stunned.

In An Unwelcome Guest, the masterstroke of this brilliant collection, Papernick at first lulls us into thinking that we are reading an anti-Zionist allegory. A Jewish man from New York gets out of bed in his Jerusalem apartment in the middle of the night to make himself a cup of tea, only to find an elderly Arab man sitting at his kitchen table, claiming that this apartment was once his home and now he has come to take it back. It’s a scenario that feels easy and reductive, almost cheap. But by the end of the next page, when the unwelcome guest pulls out a backgammon board and offers to play the Jewish man for the right to speak — and when the apartment’s owner, sensing a trap, feels compelled to accept — the situation shifts, first subtly and then less so, from the allegorical to the unbearably surreal.You are not sure where the story stands until the end, at which point you feel as though you’ve been flimflammed in the most ingenious way — not by Papernick exactly, but by everything you have been told your whole life that this story was going to be. This is not a story about the Israeli-Arab conflict like any you’ve read before; in fact, it isn’t really a story about the Israeli-Arab conflict at all, except as an example of a much larger problem. It is a story about a historical and psychological illness that has long afflicted the Jewish people and many other people around the world: the deep disease of assuming others to be rational, of accepting someone else’s terms for one’s own existence, and of forfeiting one’s destiny by choosing to live by the rules of someone else’s game.

Papernick loves to play this game of three-card monte with the reader, and he lures us in again and again as we keep trying to figure out what he might do next. The Ascent of Eli Israel, a novella of sorts, fools us as well. Eli Haller, a formerly successful television producer spiraling deep into personal and psychological ruin, receives a prophetic call telling him to Go to the house of Israel — an apparently divine message received while Eli is astoundingly drunk. Heeding this call, Eli goes to Israel and moves in with his last friend in the world, a newly-religious ex-convict who lives in what he calls the Wild,Wild West Bank . . . and a wreck of a man is inexorably drawn into a full-blown psychosis. In the age of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by an extremist rabbinical student, this sort of narrative would have been enough.

But not for someone of Papernick’s caliber.The tale of the newly-religious nutcase is only the outermost layer of Papernick’s work. The story’s depth and darkness come from the ancient figures Papernick places in the shadows behind his characters: Ezekiel heeding a beautifully bizarre and divine call, David unapologetically hurling a stone at his thoughtless opponent’s head, Abraham armed on a mountaintop, ready to sacrifice a precious child to an unfathomable God. As Eli becomes a shepherd and literally sacrifices animals to the God of his own delusions, Papernick tells us, He thought of the binding of Isaac, the ultimate act of faith . . . . He could not imagine tying up his son, prepared to slash his throat. What if God did not stop him?The wife and child whom Eli viciously abandoned stand silently behind this question, but so do thousands of other wives and children over thousands of years. When the story concludes with the words God forgives you for what you do, one can hear the obvious and terrible irony of a man who confuses divine forgiveness with his own weakness. That much many writers might have given us. But because this is Papernick’s story, one also hears the echo of an earlier scene, when a thirteen-year-old Eli attacked a taunting anti-Semitic classmate and his own father crossed his arms to cover his tattoo, and said in his thick accent, ‘Apolochize.’ Papernick’s architectural storytelling forces us at every moment to confront both the divine and human limits of forgiveness

Papernick has every opportunity to do things easily — that is, to thoughtlessly satisfy the reader’s expectations. He never does. In For As Long as the Lamp is Burning, about an elderly, demented Holocaust survivor and her son, Papernick could have exploited the tired trope of the victim, or the equally tired trope of the victim who victimizes others. Instead he surprises us with an utterly unsentimental ending that exposes the light of the story’s title — not the expected admonition to never forget, but a revelation of a flame of compassion that exists and persists independent of history. In the hilarious King of the King of Falafel, a less talented writer would have derived the humor from stereotypes; the title character is a Yemenite falafel stand owner, a Jerusalem type as familiar as a South Asian cab driver in New York. Instead, the story is told from the point of view of another Yemenite falafel stand owner — and instead of exploiting these characters, Papernick invites us into their minds, with candor. The hijinks that inevitably ensue are earned, and the story’s broad messianic overtones are not a skewering of sacred cows, except in the most literal sense. Instead, they are reminders of the many forms redemption can take here on earth. In Lucky Eighteen, when a secular photographer takes a scantily-clad girl into the religious neighborhood of Mea Shearim in order to provoke the locals, his equally secular escort tells us what he cannot tell his photographer friend: At that moment, Kravetz hated Shawn, as he had hated him a thousand times before . . . . [Shawn] really didn’t understand, he hadn’t seen the anger in the eyes of those men. The moment of seeing that anger — and the delicate interplay between two secular men, one who can see it and one who can’t, even when he captures it on camera — is far more than an awkward moment between friends. It is also far more than the centuries-old tension between the secular and the religious. It is an encapsulation, in a single and deceptively simple paragraph, of the eternal pull of human dignity, of how some people will always feel that pull while others never will, of how the feel of that tug on the soul, no matter who feels it, is itself the sensation of the holy.

When Papernick first published this collection nearly ten years ago, these stories were contemporary. Today, they are prophetic. Readers familiar with Israel can see the minor points where the world of the book differs from the reality a decade later, but they can also see how astonishingly similar it is, how events have proceeded exactly along the trajectory that Papernick so incisively foresaw and described ten years earlier. The limits of human and divine forgiveness have been drawn in the sand, as they have been for thousands of years. In the space within them, in this artist’s vision, one discovers the sacred.

Malchyk

On the Fifth Day of Iyar, in the Jewish Year of 5709 (May 4th, 1949, by our calendar), which was the first anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence and attainment of statehood, a rabbi in Jerusalem suggested that women who bore children . . . should name their infants Teshua (Redemption) if they were girls, and Herut (Freedom) if they were boys . . . . Later on the semantics of maturity may cast a shadow across the word(s), but on the Fifth Day of Iyar, 5709, it meant only one thing to every man, woman and child in Israel, and they thronged the roads, filled the cities, shot fireworks into the air, paraded, applauded, cheered and sang in freedom’s honor.

Irwin Shaw, Report on Israel

Pirkl slept an uneasy sleep and dreamed again of his father’s death.

A dark legionnaire appeared at the head of his mattress, whispering in his ear between machine-gun fire and the incessant boom of the big guns sounding off throughout the city. The Grand Mufti himself sent me. Flares and tracers from the sky flashed across the stranger’s beard, his black eyes burned electric green. The quarter has been sacked, the Arab said.

Pirkl closed his eyes tight, go a-way, go a-way, don’t come back ’til Judgment Day.

Beautiful boy, the stranger said, stroking Pirkl’s cheek with an empty shell casing. There was blood on the legionnaire’s chest, and Pirkl touched a deep stain on his uniform shaped like the Shield of David. His brave blood, the stranger answered and a tear rolled from his cheek. Pirkl drank the tears down as they poured from the stranger’s face and the Ras el ’Ain pipeline was flowing again with cool springwater.

He awoke to his mother stroking his hair. Shhh, she said, mopping sweat from his brow. Only a small kerosene lamp burned against the early morning darkness. Her eyes were ringed in black. She was as gaunt as a baby bird and wore a blue bandanna around her neck. A soldier with a bandaged head groaned from a stretcher not five feet away. Shhh, she repeated, holding a small tin cup to Pirkl’s lips. Drink.

He sat up in bed as a whistling shell fired from the Katamon neighborhood crashed in a nearby street. I’m going to find Abba, Pirkl said.

When the Jewish state was declared two weeks earlier, Pirkl had followed his mother to the sixth floor of their apartment house, where an Arab Legion shell had crashed through the roof of a neighbor’s flat. The shell did not explode but had smashed a large jagged hole in the ceiling. White moonlight poured in through the opening, lighting the room with a silvery glow. Pirkl watched his mother step through the shattered glass and plaster and thought she looked like an angel. The air was thick and hot and smelled of crushed stone as Pirkl kicked up the white dust into clouds, imagining heaven.

Someone’s wireless set crackled loudly from a lower floor and echoed through the darkened stairwell and the now-abandoned apartment. "This is Kol Hamagen HaIvri, the broadcasting service of the Haganah, calling on a wavelength of thirty-five to thirty-eight meters or seven to seven-point-five megacycles. Here is our English transmission. . . . His mother pulled a bookshelf up to the hole and climbed the shelves, disappearing a moment later through the twisted steel into the hot night air. Come, Malchyk, she called. Pirkl bristled at the childish nickname that had been his since he was six years old, and began to climb, careful not to step on the leather-bound commentaries. The broadcaster read from David Ben-Gurion’s Declaration of Independence, his voice catching on the words, . . . by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and on the strength of the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, hereby declares the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel. . . . Pirkl repeated the word Israel" as he pulled himself out onto the rooftop.

His mother took his hand, and he wanted to pull away and say, I don’t need to hold your hand anymore, but realized for the first time as she squeezed him tightly that she needed his hand. The bombing that had gone on nightly for weeks continued ; incandescent blood streaks across the sky, the east flickering like an undecided sunrise, gray plumes of smoke climbing into the night. Do you think we will have a king at last?

I don’t know, she said wearily.

Father is there? Pirkl asked, pointing to the smoke seething from within the besieged Old City. Only the Arab Legion’s artillery answered.

He had not seen his father since the hamsiin began, when the hot sirocco wind blew from the desert at the start of May draining the life and color out of everything.

"How can they fight during the hamsiin?" Pirkl had asked his mother.

Yihye tov, his mother answered, It will be all right.

Pirkl knew his father was there within the twisting rabbit warren streets defending the ancient Jewish Quarter. He had heard rumors of a Haganah unit disguised as an Arab Legion marching band who arrived at Damascus Gate blasting their trumpets. When the gates opened Pirkl imagined his father’s kaffiyeh dropping to the ground, his trumpet magically transformed into a Sten gun, his voice raised singing, Rifle on rifle our guns will salute / Bullet on bullet our guns will shoot. His father had taught Pirkl the Song of the Barricades, how to hurl stones at the British, and how to fashion a grenade out of an empty jam tin with bits of broken glass, shrapnel, matches, and gunpowder. It seemed like years since Pirkl had helped his father to sandbag windows on Gaza Road.

Father is there, Pirkl said, I know he is there.

A half-dozen smoke rockets blasted up into the sky from the Old City just two kilometers away. His mother turned her back on the distress signals and did not answer.

The wireless continued to echo throughout the dark stairwell, All laws enacted under the Palestine White Paper of the British government, and all laws deriving from it are declared null and void. . . . Pirkl felt his way down the stairs, following his mother’s breathing. And then someone was jamming the wireless transmission and a voice cut in laughing, We will drink blood from your skulls. Into the sea, Jews!