Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing.

Ben-Chaim, Michael

Keys to the Garden is an anthology of vibrant prose literature, of short stories and self-contained novel excerpts as well as autobiographical commentaries and interviews, recently written by twenty-four Israeli authors. The common denominator of all the works in this volume is the descent of their authors, who were either born in, or born to families who emigrated from, the Levant, Turkey, Iran, India, and the Arab world. Their literary endeavors are part of a burst of creativity which has emerged since the 1970s from mizrahi (Oriental Jewry,) consciousness - in writing, music, theater, art, and humanistic scholarship.

Ammiel Alcalay has established himself as a keen observer of the Jewish-Arab Mediterranean past and its present within Israeli society, and the anthology he has compiled is a highly original attempt of its kind not only in English but in the Hebrew language as well. The garden to which Alcalay invites the reader comprises an extremely rich environment of heterogeneous cultural and social ecologies. Like the small garden attached to households in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern village or town, this garden is a domain of privacy and intimacy, despite its location outside the inner rooms of one's habitat. The concerns of the different literary pieces in the anthology pertain to class status, gender, and political allegiance and conflict. They are, moreover, characterized by an imaginative introspection that brings forth a rich web of personal and idiosyncratic experiences and sensibilities, out of which human characters are created. The reader, like a tourist in a foreign and exotic country, is likely to experience the other, in its variety of forms, in each of these literary gardens of intimate reflection and recollection.

The anthology comprises an extremely important political documentary as well. Zionism, as a national ideology, was always predicated on the assumption that the land of Israel was a distinctive national entity. on its own. The character of the place as part of a larger geographic, social, and cultural landscape was often overlooked. National identity was expected to be constituted by hardly permeable boundaries, demarcating members from outsiders. These boundaries are abrogated by all the writers of Keys to the Garden. The Israeli identity of their characters is always defined within a broad historical and cultural frame which recognizes conflicts and boundaries yet is nevertheless able to come to terms with the human condition which underlies and transcends them. As one author, Shimon Ballas, points out: "I am not in conflict with the environment, I came from the Arab environment and . . . I also did not change [it]. I just moved from one place to another within it." In more or less explicit fashions, this anthology represents a variety of cultural experiences of change in continuity, tension within affinity. This is a lesson of fundamental importance which every person who is concerned with the future of the Middle East ought to consider deeply.

Michael Ben-Chaim Israeli Institute of Technology