Israeli psycho

Orly Castel-Bloom’s acerbic satire about the country’s identity still resonates.

By AKIN AJAYI
crime scene_521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
crime scene_521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Representations of the Jewish mother in all her guises are a familiar trope in Hebrew literature. Still, one would be hard put to identify a maternal – and I use the word with extreme reservations – figure vested with so many malignant and disturbing characteristics as Dolly, the protagonist of Orly Castel-Bloom’s 1992 novel, recently published in English by the Dalkey Archive as part of its Hebrew Literature series.
Dolly, a doctor trained at the University of Kathmandu – and there is a story behind this – is obsessed with death. In the opening pages of the book, she kills her goldfish; she follows this up by putting her dog to death. Then she trails the man whom she engages to dispose of the carcass to the edges of her city – presumably Tel Aviv, although this is never explicitly stated – and dispatches him too, stabbing him with his pitchfork.
But then something happens; she happens upon an infant in the back of his truck. Surprisingly, she discovers a maternal streak; rather than dispose of the child as she has everything else up until this point, she decides to take the child home and to raise him as her own. Whether this is a good thing for the child or not is another matter.
Castel-Bloom, apparently, found that people were actually afraid of her after Dolly City’s publication in Hebrew. This doesn’t surprise. The book and its antiheroine are vested with such a disturbing, visceral potency that one cannot but wonder at the imagination that created such violent characterizations.
For example Dolly, overbearing and overwrought – despite her seemingly lucid narrative – is convinced that her child is a kidney short. She takes him to Germany and – in typical homicidal fashion – liberates a replacement for him, performing the necessary replacement surgery herself before realizing that he may have had a full complement of organs all along. “I went on opening and closing him like a curtain,” she muses; then she carves a map of Israel on his back. And all this is before she has him surgically attached to her, for her to drag from place to place, at once her bane and her salvation.
Dolly City owes much to the disconcertingly flat, matter-of-fact narration of the principal, captured acutely in translation by Dalya Bilu. Beyond this, one sees a nod to that other masterpiece of delusional narration, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. The Dolly City of the narrator is a grim, almost post-apocalyptic landscape, with snow in the summer and landmarks just as bizarre. Dolly tells us that all the trains in the city rush to Dachau and back again, “although not that Dachau,” she clarifies; in the anti anti-Semitic quarter of the city, she witnesses a Finnish carpenter being crucified. “He begged them to spare him, but after all, their parents didn’t want to die either.” Then suddenly, a sliver of lucidity: “About three years ago, when I lost my marbles...” Not all is what it seems.
Dolly City, essentially, is acerbic satire, playing cruelly on a specific set of Israeli identifiers: the Holocaust, the country’s place in the modern Middle East, even the status of women and motherhood as at once both necessary yet negligible. Castel-Bloom’s writing cuts deeply, but is indiscriminate in its targets; after a while, the satirical edge begins to feel a little blunted from its relentless attacks.
Another thing about Dolly City: How does one engage with a work that was praised as postmodern and visionary almost 20 years later? There are two ways of looking at this. If one chooses to engage with Castel-Bloom’s fiction in narrow political terms, one will easily be side-tracked by arguments about whether she was correct in her prognosis for the future. But this misses the point somewhat; the book does not claim to be didactic in content, after all. In any case, its literary qualities – its sheer unusualness – give one enough room to discern what one will from Dolly, her psychosis and her smothering, suffocating motherhood.
Then again, is it fair to describe mother Dolly? As she puts it, “What kind of a thing is motherhood if you can’t take care of your child 100%?” It depends upon how one defines the phrase “take care.” Unconditional love, after all, is a double-edged sword.