Rachel Shabi gets a rare glimpse of another Israel
Countless falafel kings are doing a healthy trade across Israel and the Palestinian territories – and who wouldn't want the task of researching which is most worthy of the regal label? However, Sara Shilo's first novel contains few references to the fried chickpea balls. Instead, the book uses the death of one falafel king as the shock incident driving a series of four monologues from the family he left behind. They're Moroccan-Jewish, living on the northern edge of Israel and dealing not just with his sudden death but also with regular rocket attacks from nearby Lebanon.
It's not an Israel that shows up very often, this border town, one of Israel's misnamed "development towns" (they never did develop much). Official Israel still denies claims of ethnic discrimination between Jews of European origin and Jews from Arab and Muslim lands. But Middle Eastern migrants, labelled as "Mizrahi" [eastern] Jews were disproportionately dumped in development towns along Israel's borders; north, near Lebanon; south, near the Gaza strip; and east along the Green Line between Israel and the occupied West Bank. These towns – remote, underfunded, characterised by factory lines and vocational schools – were historically disadvantaged, creating a deep-seated resentment for residents. Mizrahim living in development towns today recall arriving in Israel during the 1950s and being bundled off to these remote places, then just tent and shack cities; taken by night, so they wouldn't see where they were going, and told that their new home was "minutes" from Tel Aviv or Haifa.
Shilo's novel is a rare view of this world, sandwiched between two shades of animosity: the Lebanese rockets on one side and European-Israeli scorn on the other. She has lived here herself, during Israel's first war with Lebanon. When this prize-winning debut was published in Israel, as "No Gnomes Shall Appear", one reviewer described it as "untranslatable", since it would first have to be decoded from its Mizrahi border-town vernacular into standard Hebrew. Thankfully, the street style is not entirely lost in translation: it remains in the syntax and phraseology and the peppering of speech with Arabic words.
And the ethnic issue is palpable throughout this account. It's there in the nursery school where the falafel king's widow, Simona, works, whose director tells staff they'd better not talk "Moroccan" (Arabic), since the kids might pick it up. It is there when male characters say they are better off trying to find a wife overseas – because abroad, nobody says "you look Moroccan" or "where in Israel are you from?" It's there in the bleak factory where Simona's son Kobi works, and when he visits a better-heeled part of Israel and sees what a "real" house looks like. And it is painfully present when Simona claims that the only way to secure some dignity for her kids is to be hit by a Katyusha rocket, since "whoever manages to be killed by Arabs is honoured like a king".
When those rocket attacks are described, we see the crowded horror – but there isn't a sense of victimology or justification for Israel's deadly militarism. It is not fumes of hatred that rise up amid the blind fear caused by such attacks – a collective "fear-monster" spawned by the rockets and shame at the screaming and trampling that they cause.
Meanwhile, the few Arab citizens of Israel (Palestinian families who stayed in Israel after its creation in 1948) in this novel are agents of calm and care; when Kobi has an emotional collapse, after years of being a premature adult following his dad's death, he ends up unintentionally seeking refuge with an Israeli Arab colleague, whose home is a haven for the troubled son.
But at its core this story – which so struck the Israeli novelist David Grossman that he mentored it into publication – is a beautifully drawn account of a family collapsing under an unbearable loss, straining against the weight of a perverse secret – a lie that one of the family narrators explains has "itself become a family member . . . no-one made it up; it was just born from itself". Pivoted on a death, this novel becomes a life-affirming story of love – a cluttered, clumsy family love that colours the characters and wills them into keeping on and moving forward. And it is this driving emotion that ultimately makes Shilo's first novel so readable and so engaging.
Rachel Shabi is the author of Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews From Arab Lands.