The Bookstore --> Elisha Porat

And Kim Hegerberg, of International Book Reviews, had this to say about it:

Another masterpiece from one of the finest writers in Israel today. "Payback" is a collection of short stories revolving around a variety of complex themes. From war stories to relationship dramas, there is something for everyone in this collection.

What sets Elisha apart from so many other writers is his willingness to expose the rawest emotions with a grace and dignity that honors the memories of the people upon whom his characters are based. Whether he is speaking of a friend who encouraged him to be a writer in "Payback" or the trials and tribulations of a flirtatious long lost love in "The High Glass Wall" Elisha speaks softly, but with a conviction that is palpable.

So often my great disappointment with Israeli writers is they seem to avoid writing about Israel. They seem obsessed with making everything generic. Sure they are great stories, but when I read an Israeli writer I want to feel as if I am sitting in Israel. I want to sense that special something that only Israel has. Just as if I read say a Bolivian writer, I want to feel that special magic that one could truly appreciate only in Bolivia.

That is what I enjoy so much about Elisha's stories. They show the full range of the worries, hope, fears and loves of everyday Israel both in times of war in and its devastating aftermath. There is a brutal honesty in its depiction of relationships between friends and lovers that shows both the fire and the compassion that make Israelis the dynamic nation they are.

Payback can be ordered directly from Wind River Press.

In 1996 Elisha Porat published the English version of The Messiah of La Guardia, translated by Alan Sacks. It was published in 1996, and is a 180-page paperback for $14.95 from Buy.com. Israeli author Moshe Benarroch said this about it:

Elisha Porat is one of the best kept secrets of Israeli literature. He is one of its best poets, dealing with the attrocities of war and the despair and agony of memory, and a very fine storyteller. I hope a publisher will decide to publish his poems in English, so that english readers will be able to read them (in the meantime you can find him all over the web, in ezines and other sites, worth searching). This book is a very good translation of some of his best stories. Read it and spread the word...

And Kim Hegerberg, of International Book Reviews, had this to say about it:

Definitely one of the finest short story collections available by a single writer offered in English translation. I will warn you though, definitely have a huge box of tissues before you start reading this collection. The Messiah of LaGuardia is a series of short stories, many of which are based around characters whose lives are somehow intertwined with various wars. From Ben Niflay, whose subconscious begins to break apart as he faces yet another deployment to the war in Lebanon, to survivors of wars who find their futures entangled with the emptiness and nightmares of their pasts....

What makes Porat's writing so wonderful is his use of emotional imagery. There is little to no concentration on external circumstances or settings as most all settings are on various kibbutzim. He concentrates on the internal conflicts of his characters with such accuracy that the sheer realism of it all will draw you so deeply into these peoples lives that you end up crying with them.

Below you'll find two articles on The Messiah of La Guardia. The first is an interview conducted in 1989 by Lea Snir, writing for the Israeli publication Iton 77. Below that, you'll find a book review by Leonard Deutchman, written for the February/March 1998 issue of Midstream.

I77: The cover of your new book, The Messiah of La Guardia, depicts a soldier, shouting with all his might. What connects this illustration to the book?

EP: That picture is part of the tragic experience in the last story, to which the title of the book refers. It's the protest story of an enlisted man. At the end of the Lebanon War, there were a number of soldiers that refused to serve in Lebanon. Sometimes, the situation ended tragically. In these situations I saw the essence of the tragedy of our time. In a way, this story influenced the other stories in the book. I consider these stories "Little Israeli Tragedies;" half of them end in tragedy of one sort or another.

I77: The protagonists of your six stories are characterized by their deviations and by feelings of failure. Five of them choose to solve these problems through death. What steers them towards such a radical choice?

EP: Unlike Ben Nifley, the frustrated car mechanic who joins the reserves and becomes a "drafted" hero, the other protagonists are not "enlisted". Their humanity gets the better of their ideology. Their lives are sad ones, failed ones. They have big hopes that are shattered by their miserable existence. But at the core, despite their deviation, these protagonists remain captive to their initial beliefs. Their youthful ideals of justice and human warmth are throbbing inside them, along with a peaceful, gentle attitude. With these feelings they leave the world. Some of them leave in ways designed to arouse shudders: one is lost in a fire, another hangs himself and a third one is killed while looking for his wife, etc... One cannot help but ask: what kind of world is this, to be left in such a way...

If you read carefully, you see that each of the characters have messianic tendencies, precisely because the dark world surrounding them arouses in them a desire to redeem and to improve. They hope to make the world around them and their own world change. Somehow it seems to them that they see more and know more about some "hidden God" or a concealed "possibility for happiness" which they need only to light. But reality proves them wrong and apparently their existence cannot stand up to their goals.

I77: The names of the protagonist in the stories have a strange sound and one can easily see that they add some conceptual meaning to your stories. Could you hint at that meaning? Could you decipher a bit of the code in those names?

EP: The names of the characters are modern metamorphoses of all the Messiah's names. Sometimes, I adapted the hero's name especially to the story, like Goel Zichroni in the story "On the Small Bridge under the Uphana." His name was intended to redeem the name of his dead friend, and commemorate his marriage to Ayala. But even in this case, he still basically has one of the names of the future Messiah. The story had to be organized very carefully and exactly, so that the Messiah's name would fit in well with the texture of the story. In the process of writing a strange thing happened to me. The name and the hero had become one entity during the writing, an inseparable one. The name of the Messiah, which should have been conspicuous because of its strangeness, became entirely assimilated to the man's image. For example: Ben Niflay, which is supposed to be one of the strange names of "Our righteous Messiah" (Mashiah Tzidkeinu). But during the writing process I found in it a kind of jumbled modern Jewish name--South American or Anglo-Saxon. The female soldier at the entrance gate of Lebanon was astonished by his name for a moment, but it did not cross her mind that he was a man with a false name.

I77: Would it be true to say that your protagonists are not what they seem to be?

EP: True, and not only because they are too weak to redeem their loved ones, and not only because their oddness is seen as an extreme deviation by those who surround them, but because there is something false in their very existence; and because of blood and flesh trying to enter the image of the Messiah, which is false from its outset and therefore has to end in disaster.

I77: You spoke about a Messianic foundation in the book, but there's also a poetic base in the stories, is there not?

EP: The three poems inserted in the book are from my poetry books. The elegy spoken by the daughter of a committee's head in the story "The Agricultural Guide", was originally a poem called "Humility" from my collection of poems, Hushnia, the Mosque. The poem "The Messiah of La Guardia" was printed at the end of the Lebanon War in the Yediot Ahronot newspaper. It was later included in my poetry collection, Poem, Memory. The third poem, "Variations", was also printed in Hushnia, the Mosque, but not in the same language that is used in The Messiah of La Guardia. All the poems have been changed somewhat to adapt them to the stories.

I needed the poems as a supporting structure. They seemed to me to enlarge and deepen the viewpoint beyond that which is simply told in the stories. For instance, in the poem "The Elegy and the Lament" I think the concept of "the pride of the modest", is extremely important, because in the entire miserable and mocked image of the Agriculture Guide there is a kind of nobility, hovering above the foggy noise of life below him. In the poem I called it the pride of the modest, because we know how sharp such a pride can be.

I77: Explain to us the symbolism in "The Messiah of La Guardia".

EP: Here, the rifle and the red fuses forebode the tragic end of the false Messiah, who brings unhappiness to his widow and orphans. In fact this poem document the cruel persecution of the police-snipers, who have no real choice in what they do, either. There was just no technical possibility for this "Israeli Tragedy" to have a happy ending.

I77: Out of the six stories in this book, "Rashumon" has a distinctly different structure. How did this distinction strengthen your work?

EP: There is no such thing as a perfect story. There are only different versions of various protagonists. Their different way of looking at things sometimes causes different structures. These different structures are often an improvement.

In all of them there is a stirring at the bottom; sometimes by a little deed which is not performed, and determines the fate of the protagonist; sometimes because the redeeming trial is there but only exists in the imagination of the writer/reader. The protagonist is then rescued, or at least a canidate for rescue.

I77: The protagonists of your stories are compelled by some higher power. But it also seems that they struggle against that higher power, knowing that they will eventually have to give up. Is not there a paradox in this?

EP: As it is, a happier life full of salvation and meaning is waiting for them. All of them miss it, either compelled by exterior powers or by a basic tragedy impressed upon their psyches. Sometimes I had the feeling that they in general do not want a different life, and that they went to their sad ends out of free choice, as if there were no other possibilities in the world. This is a feeling which swings me back to the days of my childhood, when as an excited child I ran to the movie-screen to rescue the passengers of the carriage riding into the fire; as if that small deed, that little interference, that small shifting of things, away from evil, could have brought salvation, when in reality there is no such thing. There is no avoiding things predestined...

A World of Violent Definition
Leonard Deutcman

In The Messiah of La Guardia, the first collection of short stories by Israeli writer Elisha Porat to be translated into English, we see men whose lives have been fractured, who have found - in a manner often surprising to themselves - little spiritual fulfillment in helping to build the State of Israel, and little pleasure or comfort in sex, love, or friendship. The narratives themselves, like their characters, are fractured, sewn together by rhetorical, leading questions that suggest, but never supply, answers. For Porat, 1996 Winner of Israel's prestigious Prime Minister's Prize for Literature, "truth" is an illusion of distance, which dissolve into unanswered and, perhaps, unanswerable questions as we approach it. Although this grim paradox is particularly troubling to Jews because it arises out of the idealistic project of building the modern Jewish state, Porat's concerns go beyond the historical.

In the collection's title story, Ben Niflay, an Army reservist called up to Lebanon in 1984, refuses to join his unit at the staging area and winds his way toward the madness of sniping from atop a building on La Guardia Street in Tel Aviv. We enter his thoughts, projections of a dreaded future (a boring bus ride to the front with a fatuous reporter) and memories of the past. We watch him imaging himself speaking from atop the building, leading the Jewish people to peace and to the accomplishment of "everything that could have come in his life but hadn't." We see him drag his young family with him to the roof and set up his arsenal; we watch the police snipers get into position.

But as the story approaches its climax, the narrative is supplanted by a summary of newspaper story. The news story is surprisingly somber, wholly unlike the reporter. It splits into parallel narratives, one which follows Niflay's convoy as it is attacked, while the other, a poem entitled, "The Messiah of La Guardia", describes the police snipers as they overcome Niflay. Neither narrative reveals what finally happens to their protagonists: the convoy take "casualties, it's still not clear how many"; and, as for the Messiah of LaGuardia, "what happened next is unknown". We are left with two incomplete newspaper accounts and come away from them knowing that, despite having been in his thoughts, we have not come to know Ben Niflay.

Porat returns to several of the title story's concerns - whether we can understand the world around us and fashion happiness in such a world - throughout the collection. In "At the Little Bridge Below Ufana", Goel Zikhrony, a 31 year-old bachelor, cannot explain how Kobi, his best friend, was killed in an inconsequential Syrian ambush in 1969, even though Zikhrony fought and was wounded in the same battle. Ayalla, Kobi's widow, who in grief has become Zikhrony's lover, demands an explanation, but he accepts that he will never understand the turns and mistakes of the battle, or how his life changed for the better because of it, or how Kobi will share Ayalla's and his bed despite, and because, of Kobi's death.

In "The Three Stages of Perfection", Zikhri Ben-Yehuda stands between a past he struggles to remember and forget and a present that seems unreal. We enter his thoughts and learn of his childhood in Poland, his alienation from the other members of his Kibbutz, his passion for, or perhaps obsession with, semitic etymology. We learn of his position at the factory, and his eccentric philosophy of work safety through which, he believes, he has found both purity and transcendence. His life, empty of material gain and social standing, is, in his vocabulary, as "spotless" as the factory floor should be. Yet he fails when he tries to explain this to his neighbors, who regard his philosophy as "gibberish"; his perfect language, incomprehensible to others, is no language at all. He sees himself achieving perfection with his suicide, but when we leave him we are again outside, as baffled as to who he was as when we met him.

Porat's protagonists, whether celibate, faithfully married, or adulterers, are all men without women. Yehuda Etrogi, who emigrated to Israel before the Holocaust and was a hero of the elite Palmach during the War of Independence, lives alone guarding distrustful kibbutzim in the "Guardian of the Fields". Clara, a young volunteer, briefly enters and leaves his life without explanation. The title character of "The Farming Instructor", who has dedicated his life to improving farming techniques, marries at age 55, only to see his young wife abandon him and their infant daughter, also without explanation. Yinon Yehudai, title character of "The Aging Poet", escorts his mistress, a young American translator, around Tel Aviv, trying to find a place for a tryst which she will not let take place. Ben Niflay's wife is "poor", "wretched", an object of pity, not passion; Ayalla satisfies Goel Zikhrony's sexual desire but troubles him with questions about her husband's death; Zikhri Ben Yehuda's sexual biography is little more than memories of a flirtation of his youth. In the desert where Porat's characters live, women are, like "truth" as best a mirage of happiness and respite.

Porat's characters are the builders of modern Israel - the farmer, the kibbutz factory worker, the citizen soldier. Yet the world they have helped to build is unconcerned with their existence, indifferent to their happiness. The portrait that Porat paints of this world is disturbing, particularly to American Jews raised on Exodus (the one with Paul Newman, not Moses), the myth of Alyah - that through the heroic struggle of (re)building Israel all personal, political, and spiritual needs unite and are fulfilled.

The Messiah of La Guardia, however, is not simply, or even principally, social commentary. Although his stories are grounded in the history of modern Israel, and particularly, its many wars, Porat, psychologist and historian, has the novelist's eye: like his Czech counterpart, Milan Kundera, he is as interested in how the universal articulate the spiritual, as in how politics fails to articulate the spiritual, as in how politics shapes the individual. If there is any spiritual fulfillment in The Messiah of La Guardia, it comes from the author's respect for the unknowable in a world of violent definitions.