Maror

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Tidhar being Tidhar, of course, he's not going to let himself do anything so plodding as a straight Whither Israel? That theme of betraying the next generation of a corruption that mars everything that Israel stands for, is tough to handle. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. Tidhar draws on his own experience of growing up in Israel and on the nation's turbulent history to tell an authentic story about creating your own identity - Jewish News You may also be interested in.

The threads that hold the whole thing together are crime, corruption, and violence against women, and the easy brutality reminded me a bit of James Ellroy though the style and voice is different. Exposition is achieved by stealth, for example describing three people that walk past to show the diversity of the place. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie. The painstaking attention the author pays to the music of each period is also deeply impressive, as it provides a red thread of the emotional torrent in each period (from nationalistic fervour to individualistic hedonism). There's an ambitious sweep to the history and narrative and each chapter is punctured by the music of the time.The Kohanim were priests of Jerusalem, and Cohen's name is not accidental in this way - of course, Cohen is the most generic Jewish name you could come up with. The constant mentioning of events and cultural references did give the narrative a realistic feel of advancing through history though some of the events 'slipped' to a later date and some events were grouped together when they actually took place over more than one year.

Tidhar does that for Israel and more – it’s especially difficult to read it now, as the awful action in Gaza is taking place. Connections are made through chaos rather than conspiracy, but their consequences follow the grim logic of corruption.

Maror shows us the thieves, the tramps, the prostitutes, the violence, filth and corruption underlying the good behind the Zionist dream. A smart and violent book that tells a history of the State of Israel through fragmented, interconnected chapters that rely on the reader to piece them back together. As Benny, a kidnapped gangster, meditates on his fate, he muses: “Maybe Lebanon was just a turf war that got out of control. The characters in "Maror" are brilliantly crafted, each with their own distinct personalities and motivations that add depth to the narrative.

Yet the real success here comes not in transcendence, but in bringing everything down to its fallen state. I happen to know it, and found the book easy to follow and understand, identifying the real events that inspired the episodes in the book. It was, Tidhar reminds us, the admired poet Hayim Nahman Bialik who first declared in the 1920s that the Jews would know that their dream of a nation state had been fulfilled when there were Jewish prostitutes, Jewish thieves and a Jewish police force. From here Tidhar makes bold leaps in time and space in a broad narrative on the pragmatism of power. A police intelligence officer by name of Cohen — perhaps he is, perhaps not, Cohen the High Priest — is our guide through the convulsive years of the state after the 1967 Six Day War.Cohen is never our viewpoint character, we waft in and out of the stories of other cops, journalists, criminals, and in one notable segment an actress cum drill instructor cum drug dealer. His Howard Hughes is an even sicker, more sexually frustrated figure than the worst depictions of the one-time tech hero. It's about people as ciphers for countries, it's about men and what they do to women and to each other. The author quotes Bialik (a famous Jewish poet) in saying: "We shall only have a true state when we have our own Hebrew thief, our own Hebrew whore, and our own Hebrew murderer", and this, for me, epitomises the purpose of the author in embarking on this journey. For me, the Israelis in the story are not shown in a good light and I worry that in today's climate this may well feed anti-Semites and anti-Zionists, and more hatred of Jews.