Losing Israel: Jasmine Donahaye

There's a delightful bird (illustrated on the jacket of this book) called the Palestine sunbird. Or is it? An Israeli twitcher would call it an orange-tufted sunbird.  Even the birds of the air are drawn into the contested space that is Israel/Palestine and it is this world that Jasmine Donahaye explores in this fascinating memoir of her troubled and difficult relationship with modern Israel.

Born in England of parents raised on a very hard line kibbutz (where parents greeted other people's children before their own in order to demonstrate their fealty to collectivism) Donahaye has spent much time in Israel (and California) and now lives in a peaceful but rain-soaked valley in Mid Wales.  This book is the story of her gradual discovery that the narrative of happy enterprising peasant communitarianism promoted by the kibbutz masked another story of the destruction of Arab villages in what is now Israel.  Guided by her mother's revelations, Donahaye returns to Israel with many questions to be answered and the time that interests her is that of the early days of the founding of Israel in the late 1940s when the British Mandate in Palestine was ending.  She learns from historical accounts, archives, maps, that the Arab villages on which the kibbutz-dwellers built were not depopulated by some form of natural wastage or voluntary emigration but their inhabitants were expelled, the names of the villages erased and renamed.

What makes this book so absorbing is the author's unflinching honesty about herself and her Jewish family, its powerful moral clarity never wobbling off into priggish self-righteousness. She simply looks at the evidence and it is unmistakeable. She also has a gift for describing people and places and presenting her conversations in vivid dialogue so what might have been an over-earnest endeavour stays alive and readable. She describes the moment when she first spoke to her mother in Hebrew: "there was a look on her face, in the hesitation before she answered, of nakedness. It felt like a transgression, this entry into who she was not possible except in her first language. It shocked her. It shocked me too. For one unguarded moment her deep past, her buried childhood rushed up in her and responded, and I witnessed it; for a brief moment, before she once again guarded herself, there was an intimacy I had never before known. And then it was gone."  Discovering her family's "culpability in the displacement of Palestinians" she finds eventually that "my sense of who I was came undone".

But it is not a simple matter of going to Israel, finding, on foot, the slight vestiges of the old Arab settlements that were not officially there in the environs of the kibbutz which her grandfather helped to build.  There is a whole family and national history to come to terms with.  Donahaye firmly rebuts the standard charge of "Jewish self-hatred" levelled by the Israeli right when such matters come up. "According to that view, any criticism of Israel is a criticism of your Jewish self, shows a disconnection and corruption in your Jewish core, and yet because I cannot hate my Jewishness, and cannot hate Israel that I feel conflicted." In her lyrical passages about her current Welsh home and about the wonderful richness and variety of Israeli birds which, as a birdwatcher from childhood, she describes so well and so accurately Donahaye is not offering us a 'misery memoir' but she is trying to reverse a process which she calls "telling one story and erasing another".

Has she reached the point suggested by her title?  It is hard to imagine that she would ever, could ever, cut Israel out of her life but: "My country is leaving me because its story is ceasing to exist, and because of what it has strangled out of existence. I grieve the loss, I grieve its departure from me, but it's a grief coloured darkly by shame."

Losing Israel by Jasmine Donahaye is published by Seren (£12.99 hardback).

Square Eyes: Rosie Millard's New Novel

Rosie Millard at the launch

To Soho for the launch of Rosie Millard's highly entertaining new novel The Square at the House of St Barnabas aka The House of Charity as it was known in the Victorian era.  Under the splendid rococo ceilings even the Bibliophilic Blogger who normally doesn't get out much was seen quaffing beakers of wine (thanks to the kindness of Legend Press in inviting me) and applauding this witty and clear-eyed satire on the life of a London square.  It was the same night as the first episode of Life in Squares, the BBC drama on the Bloomsbury set about which the less said the better. Rosie Millard has a very sharply observant eye for the vagaries of London bourgeois behaviour (she said she started writing by looking out of the window and trying to imagine the life that was going on behind those Georgian facades) and this one will be a perfect summer read as the publishers very properly suggested.

I met one of the author's neighbours from, as Thackeray would have written it, Th**********Square, N*, who said he had asked the author whether he should have brought his libel lawyer with him. She assured him it wouldn't be necessary. In spite of the presence of her children and parents beneath the St Barnabas chandeliers Rosie read some of the mildly naughty bits and a great time was had by all.

The Square by Rosie Millard is published by Legend Press in paperback at £8.99

The calm before the book-signing storm

Why Do You Blog?

Looking at the date of my last blog entry this might seem a question over which a little irony has been scattered.  I do find my posts seem to appear at longer and longer intervals.  A question put to me by a fellow writer in all seriousness when I started blogging was: why do you do it? I can't see the point. Presumably his argument was that a writer should, as Dr Johnson enjoined us, be writing only for money as any professional should.  I do write for money.  I publish books and articles and reviews and the quality, I hope, of what I write here is equal to what I write for 'published' occasions.  So why do it if you are not being paid?

I think payment isn't the issue, rather it is the nature of the writing and whether it is making the impact it should or whether one is merely engaged in a refined form of striking one's head against the wall.  By "impact" I mean doing what writing should do, having some sort of resonance or presence in the larger world, rather than being a silent muttering to oneself.  The evidence is that some people do read one's blog because you get feedback, occasional comments, and even solicitations from publishers and publicists who seem to think you might be a useful vehicle for them.  But things have changed since I first started this blog.  The "intelligent internet" as one might call it has exploded and there is an extraordinary amount of material worth reading (we don't need to add that it jostles against the 90 per cent of drivel).  Only this week I discovered a site new to me called Partisan which seems to be worth anyone's while to read: short, sharp, well-written and pertinent.  The original idea of literary blogs, that they would say the unsayable and be a free critical space in a world of whirling, skirling hype, may have become clouded and many are long-winded, self-referential and otiose, but there is still stuff worth reading.  The problem is the amount of it.

It would be very easy to spend all one's day chasing up links provided by Twitter and many links would reward the effort but when would one have the time to read anything else?  I think most of us are too exhausted by all this matter coming at us to read it all (this being one of the reasons why blog comments have declined in numbers, people are just too overwhelmed by the tidal wave of words to be able to swim against it).  I am constantly surprised by certain active minds on Twitter who seem to be tweeting 24/7 yet who are also writers and poets.  When do they find time actually to write anything?

A key element in literary publishing has always been the editor and editors can often be vexing for writers because they have a habit of saying: no, this will not do.  The internet never says no and all doors are wide open. I am currently reading Eileen Simpson's fascinating memoir of the post-war American poets, Poets in Their Youth (she was married to John Berryman) and their struggle to get past editors and get themselves published is a major theme in the story.  But as readers aren't we  glad that there are some gatekeepers?  The true literarybloghead would say very firmly no.  Gatekeepers are censors, partial or biassed establishment police officers who curb and suppress the free flow of thought and opinion (the latter what really counts for many).  Let a thousand flowers bloom even if some of them are rotting on their stalks.  There is a lot in that but in the end the sheer profusion is self-defeating.  We can't keep up and the jam is, in my view, spread too thinly.

So that is why I do not blog daily, or even weekly.  In fact the chance of monthly would be a fine thing.  I will continue to do so, but I still can't answer my friend's question, and I think I never will: why do you do it?