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one of the shelves in the bookcase, went to identify the body in the morgue, because Yaffa and Tikva and also Zina, who looked at the mask absentmindedly and said, “Very nice,” couldn’t face it, and the two of them, together with Besh, told Yaffa, who fainted in the living room before they even told her, just as she had fainted when she heard that Tikva’s
Hungarian engineer wasn’t an engineer, knocking over her cup and spilling the coffee, and Caesar made haste to pour cold water over her and the drops splashed onto Besh and Zina, who was trying to comfort her sister with a pale and frightened face but at the same time was filled with anger against her because of the whole business and because of the coffee stains spreading over the carpet and the wall, which Zina tried to clean with a wet cloth as soon as Yaffa had recovered a little, but without any success, and the stains continued to annoy her – until they repainted the whole room, which was already after Aryeh’s funeral…
395:…but Ella ignored her baby, whose head was covered with a fine black down, and the nurse held him helplessly in her hands and pleaded with Ella gently to take him, and then she asked her again, this time impatiently, to take him and feed him like all the other mothers, but Ella went on ignoring her baby, just as she went on ignoring Israel, who remained standing stubbornly by the bed and did not take his eyes off her as they slowly filled with tears and her face grew more and more blurred until it dissolved into the whiteness of the pillows, and behind him he heard the head nurse clapping her hands again, and finally she turned to him and asked him to leave – all the other visitors had already gone – and Israel took two or three steps backward and then he turned around and walked out of the room.
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this process of destruction was inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, as inevitable as the change in the population of the town, which in the course of a few years had been filled with tens of thousands of new people, who in
Goldman’s eyes were invading outsiders who had turned him into a stranger in his own city, but this awareness was powerless to soften the hatred he felt for the new people or the helpless rage which engulfed him at the sight of the destructive plague changing his childhood world and breaking it up…
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The younger generations attempts to replace the ideals of the past with sex, self-obsession, and meaningless routines, but these all fail. The only positive force that exists in the novel is the skillful use of language. The death of
Zionist ideals engenders the birth of linguistic art, “Though words
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Goldman’s father died on the first of April, whereas
Goldman himself committed suicide on the first of January – just when it seemed to him that finally, thanks to the cultivation of detachment and withdrawal, he was about to enter a new era and rehabilitate himself by means of the “Bullworker” and a
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This uncontrollable remembrance of events through the objects and landmarks that surround the characters point to their obsession with the past, neither nostalgic nor inspiring, but menacing, a reminder to the new generation that they could never achieve what past generations have. This theme is also
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From one day to the next, over the space of a few years, the city was rapidly and relentlessly changing its face…and
Goldman, who was attached to these streets and houses because they, together with the sand dunes and virgin fields, were the landscape in which he had been born and grown up, knew that
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The three men, lurching between guilt and depression, lose themselves in sexual adventures, amateur philosophy or compare their lives unfavorably to those of their sometimes heroic, sometime pitiful elders. The older characters can always hold firm to something or other, whether socialism and hatred
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The novel focuses on three friends, Goldman, Caesar, and Israel, in 1970's Tel Aviv, as well as their acquaintances, love interests, and relatives. The story begins with the death of
Goldman's father on April 1 and ends a little after Goldman's suicide on January 1. The past is woven into this short
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shot himself in the mouth with a pistol and was found two days later in his car on a dirt road between orange groves not far from the sea dressed in a leather suit and a floral shirt and a yellow tie, and Erwin and Caesar, who took the wooden mask of the
African god from his mother and placed it on
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The prolonged paragraph replicates the exceptional intimacy of a society whose members are bound together by stronger-than-family ties and can hardly visit their parents or walk along the beach or drive to a funeral or an assignation without recalling who lived where and when or who had done what,
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The stream of collective consciousness
Shabtai uses creates significant juxtapositions between events and produces irony. For example, when Shabtai presents the death of Aryeh, one of Caesar's relatives, the minor details brought up throughout the account puncture the tragic event:
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presented through the occupations of the three main characters: Israel's piano playing, Goldman's translations and Caesar's photography all require a prior model or text - they can only reflect reality, and never create anything original.
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period of nine months, from April 1 to
January 1). In this case, however, there is no triumph of life over death, and the book ends with an image of the world as a grotesque caricature, populated by people who are dead while still alive:
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could be seen as an elegy for the working class which, due to its economic successes, has now become decadent. This decadence touches the younger generation as well, and both young and old are doomed from the first sentence of the novel:
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The central fact of Aryeh's suicide is not as important as the values of
Israeli society revealed through the smaller incidents around it, e.g. Yaffa's identical reactions to all bad news and Zina's greater concern for the coffee stains.
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Shabbtai's three protagonists all feel a fundamental sickness because of their meaningless existence and the absurd world they inhabit, and have no choice but to denounce the world that betrayed them. According to
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The flow of the narrative mixes past and present, thoughts and events, to create a stream of consciousness that moves from one character's mind to another, often through objects and experiences:
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is Shabtai's first, and only completed, novel. It was written as one continuous 280-page paragraph (broken up in the English translation), with some sentences spanning several pages.
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Shabtai expresses the personal loss felt by the main characters, which is echoed by the changing city of Tel Aviv, and infiltrates every narrative perspective:
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betray Shabtai’s hero, the storyteller believes these treacherous words. He believes in their symbolic power to describe his crumbling existence.”
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282:, insights gained in Siberia, or refusal to admit that Israel is not Poland. The younger characters seethe instead in doubt and sweat.
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is considered the first novel ever to be written in truly vernacular Hebrew and in 2005 it was named the best novel written about
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presents a funeral at the beginning and a birth at the end (the 'present' of the story spans a
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was chosen the best Hebrew book written in Israel since the foundation of the state in 1948.
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Postmodernism: Culture and Literature at the End of the 20th Century.
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to name it the greatest novel of the decade in 1989, comparing it to
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Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishing House, 1997. 246. (In Hebrew)
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692:"The Ten Greatest Books", Weekend supplement,
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