If Hemingway had been Israeli, his stories may have sounded something like Avner Mandelman’s. Talking to the Enemy, Mandelman’s first short story collection to be published in America, leads the reader through a labyrinth of moral dilemmas and psychological conflict in nine stories that stretch from Paris to Israel.
While many of the stories, such as “Pity, Test,” and the book’s title story share military themes and lay bare ethical complexity without providing pat answers, Mandelman also explores other facets of life in Israel. “Mish-mash,” the only light story in the collection, affectionately pokes fun at some of the country’s religious tensions. “Black” recounts an Ashkenazi family’s parochial disgust when one child marries a Black Moroccan Jew, laying bare some cultural and racial divisions that run through Israeli society.
Mandelman’s stories generally pick up in the middle of the action, fill in background details along the way, and end without resolution. He writes tersely and casts sharp characters, and the choppiness of his writing, though awkward, effectively creates a sense of real-time movement, a stark taste of a world that doesn’t always flow smoothly.
Underlying each varied story is despair, accentuated by his frequent use of profanity, his unflinching descriptions of violence, and characters’ defeatist turns to sexual release in their moments of intractable despair. Again and again, Mandelman expresses profound doubt in humanity’s moral legitimacy, and in whether the ideology of “homeland” is really worth fighting for.
The desolate character of most of Mandelman’s stories find roots in the author’s own life. Born in Israel in 1947, the author is an expatriate who has spent the last forty years dividing his time between Paris, California, and Canada. He told The Jerusalem Post, that he left his birthplace because, “Israel is an enormous play built on an ancient fiction. You’re basically living a role that someone else wrote” and he “wanted to live in a story of [his] own.”
He does not write stories in Hebrew, he said, not only because it is “inconvenient,” but because “it has so many ancient allusions that they jump on your back.” Though he feels trapped by Jewish history, Mandelman can’t leave it alone. Dealing exclusively with Israel, Talking to the Enemy, is laced with the very Biblical and Talmudic allusions he attempts to escape by writing in English.
Rife with despair and doubt over nationalist ideology and identity, the stories in Talking to the Enemy, reflect the author’s own uneasy relationship with his homeland and its history. The volume deals as much with enemies of flesh and blood as with the enemies we make of our own history and ourselves.
