Oren is a master of the short story. He grabs your attention and carries you along to a conclusion that is often an emotional shock.
By NEVILLE TELLERMICHAEL OREN, in his role as ambassador to the US, speaks at a Holocaust event in Washington’s Capitol Rotunda in 2012(photo credit: BENJAMIN MYERS/REUTERS)
When I had finished reading “Prodigal Son,” the 20th of the 51 short stories in Michael Oren’s new book, The Night Archer, I turned back and read it again with even greater pleasure. It was at that moment I realized that I had done precisely the same with a good few of the tales that I had already read.Oren is a master of the short story. He grabs your attention and carries you along to a conclusion that is often an emotional shock – a shock so profound that, knowing the outcome, you simply have to go back to rediscover the clues lodged in the text that led to it. Without giving the game away, “Prodigal Son” is, on the face of it, a story about a father and son speaking together about a troubled past. But there’s a twist to the tale.American-born Oren has had a distinguished political career. He was a member of the Knesset, a former deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, and ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013. At the same time, he is an award-winning historian and author − a stylish writer with a gift for the telling phrase, the vivid word picture, the sudden tug at the emotions. In “Liberation,” a gaunt Holocaust survivor stumbles out of the camp into “a mortally wounded world, it oozed with people much like him.”Oren’s canvas is very broad. He writes with conviction about a wide variety of circumstances and an extensive range of individuals – even, as in “Pray, Prey,” from the point of view of a jungle beast. A strange little tale, that, in which Oren illustrates that human beings defy the natural law at their peril.He has a special talent for objectivity, for examining people and events as if from a remote viewpoint. In “Nuevo Mundo” he imagines a medieval explorer stumbling on the modern world – a world in which Oren perceives humanity as metaphorically devouring itself, and which he translates into a horrendous reality.In “Alien Report” he takes an equally jaundiced view of the human race. From the perspective of alien space travelers, Earth contains creatures (which they dub “species 605431”) that are, as he puts it, “gratuitously violent.” The species “fights for pleasure and pride.... Conflicts can be justified by the different sounds used to describe the same object.... Combatants battle under a colored square of cloth for which they will both kill and die. Though the organs inside 605431 are identical, the membrane containing them are variously shaded. Such diversity, however superficial, also causes strife.” In the final analysis, the space travelers consider that the rivalries, jealousies and vicious beliefs of species 605431 – and, above all, its impenetrable focus on self – “render it unsuitable for even the briefest visitation. The species, we determined, was simply too alien.”In “My Little Whiffle,” too, Oren portrays the depths of betrayal and cruelty that human beings can descend to. That story also illustrates a device that he uses to great effect on a number of occasions – revealing, toward the climax of a tale, that things are not what the reader has been led to believe.“The Man in the Deerstalker Hat” is a prime example, as, in the last few words, we are told who the man in question is. Another is “An Agent of Unit 40,” and the device is used to even more startling effect in “Crime Scene.” You will enjoy also the story about “Noah Simkin.” Bear these titles in mind as you open the book for the first time.In “Aniksht,” one of the longer stories, Oren weaves together a tale that epitomizes the Jewish experience across four or five generations. It shines a light briefly on shtetl life and the occasional Cossack pogrom, on the early mass slaughters of the Holocaust, on the compromises of Israeli politics and on Israel’s national service generation.Oren remembers his Jewish background more than once in this collection of stories. In “Afikomen” a young boy makes a valuable discovery during the Passover Seder, and it’s not a slice of matzah. In “Day 8” it becomes debatable who has the upper hand – God or Satan – when it comes to creating the first human. “The Reenactor” is a bittersweet tale of how one Jew earned a living. A long and passionate debate between a wild prophet and the Almighty forms the theme of “The Book of Jakiriah.”The author saves to the very last the story “The Night Archer,” which he uses as the title for the collection as a whole. In it the insomniac narrator finds that identifying with one of the English archers at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 is a sure way to get to sleep.If Oren, by giving his whole volume that title, is trying to draw some sort of parallel, then I must respectfully disagree. This collection of stories repays slow and appreciative consumption. Treat it like a rare malt whisky. The range of subject matter, the variety of literary genres, the spectrum of experiences and the sweep of emotions explored, above all the skill and luminosity of the writing, make The Night Archer a literary experience to savor.THE NIGHT ARCHER AND OTHER STORIESBy Michael OrenWicked Son336 Pages; $27
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