Books
A killing in Israel
by Mark Peters
BROKEN PROMISES: Israeli lives, by Igal Sarna (Atlantic, $44.95).
In an interview with the trans-atlantic Jewish paper Aufbau, journalist Igal Sarna compared the ordeal of having to select 14 “real short stories“ for his book Broken Promises with that of a mother forced to choose among her children.
A compilation of columns previously published in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, his book is a collection of personal accounts of Israeli lives. Among these portraits, a veteran is tormented by memories of fallen comrades in the Yom Kippur war; a Bedouin boy kills his abusive father with a stone; a Russian immigrant crashes his car and disappears into the desert; and a senior Israeli army officer discovers that his mother is a Palestinian living in Jordan.
These are voices that deserve to be heard. Unfortunately, they are often drowned out by Sarna’s overblown forays into “literary non-fiction”.
“Ze’ev”, the story of a Holocaust survivor’s son who disappears in New York, opens the collection with an atmospheric scene before descending into cliché (souls are seared, scarred, etc) and hyperbole (“He was swept away like a demon-ravaged refugee ship”). Mired by portentousness and platitude, Broken Promises makes frustrating reading. “There’s an inner silence that goes unheard,” says a Dr Enoch in a voice that sounds suspiciously like Sarna’s, “and it is like the silence of the lambs.”
Other “literary” references don’t even have a context to clunk around in. “His tale of his mother”, reflects Sarna in “The Man Who Fell into a Puddle”, “reminded me of sentences I’d heard from a poet some time before.”
Possibly something is lost in translation; how else to account for this clunker: “There was Braunstein, who lost his mind – and several others.” Still, this curiously elegiac tale – in which a stunted artist is salvaged from a life of mediocrity and alcoholism when he becomes addicted to painting – has enough emotional charge to emerge intact.
Sarna’s stories work best when plainly told. Poetry, the occasional flash of dry observation and even the odd throw-away line appear effortlessly in “The Dead Company”. At the heart of this account of Sarna’s experience as a 21-year-old tank commander in the Yom Kippur war is the singular image of the “canal’s blue stripe of water” in the bleached and blasted Sinai Desert. As an echo of the Israeli flag, it is neither ironic nor patriotic. Rather, it brings to mind the shell-pitted wall that features on the book’s cover.
Sarna’s compassion for his subjects is indisputable. Co-founder of the Peace Now movement, Sarna was also awarded the IBM Tolerance prize for a series of stories on Iranian political prisoners in Israel. With few exceptions, however, his writing in this collection is too often bogged down by empty rhetoric. The tragedy of this collection is that it fails to make good its promise.
