East Jerusalem Noir

Jerusalem, as Israeli novelist Eitan, editor of West Jerusalem, comments, is a city unlike its biblical image. Life there is rough, tense. No bombs go off in these two volumes of short fiction, but reports of gunfire are frequent, and in Ilana Bernstein’s West Jerusalem story, “You Can’t See the Occupation from Here,” an Arab cleaning woman is shot down by accident and then excuses are made up to cover the death. In East Jerusalem, Rahaf al-Sa’ad’s “In an Extraordinary City” tells of a Palestinian father who loses the house he built for his family to a demolition order: the courts give him a runaround, the soldiers who order him out laugh at his plight. The East Jerusalem stories, edited by Burbara, are tales of everyday oppression, with impersonal government violence thrown in the mix, and the corrosive effects on victims’ psyches. The West Jerusalem stories largely aren’t crime stories either (with one exception, a comic caper by Liat Elkayam) but tales of Israeli angst in a world where meaning is in short supply. The best is Bernstein’s Kafkaesque tale of hiding one’s head to avoid noticing the violence that’s happening all around. In general, the Palestinian tales work better than the Israeli ones, several of which are overwritten. But that’s probably because the Palestinian experiences are more raw.