Meanwhile...
Jun. 23rd, 2025 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakReal Life (not mine, personally, mine is just very busy) in terms of global politics being a continued horrorshow, I find myself dealing with it in vastly different ways in terms of fandom - either reading/watching/listening to things (almost) entirely unconnected - for example, this YouTube channel by a guy named Elliot Roberts whose reviews of all things Beatles as well as of musical biopics of other folk I can hearitly recommend for their enthusiasm (or scorn, cough, Bohemian Raphsody, cough), wit and charm - , or consuming media that is very much connected to Current Events. For example: about two weeks ago there was a fascinating event here in Munich where an Israeli author, Yishai Sarid, who is currently teaching Hebrew Literature at Munich University was introduced via both readings from several of his novels, many, though not all of which are translated into German, and via conversations. While the excerpts of already published novels (and the conversations around them) certainly were captivating, and led me to reading one of them, Limassol, which is a well written Le Carréan thriller in the Israel of 2009 (when it was published) context), the novel he talked about which I was most curious about hasn't been translated into German yet, though it has been translated into English: The Third Temple.
This was was originally published in 215 and evidently has been translated into English in 2024, with an afterword by Yishai Saraid in which he basically says "people thought I was kidding or writing sci fi in 2015. I wish. I could see where this is going then, and now you can, too". If I tell you that a reviewer back in the day according to google described the novel as "if the staff of Haaretz and Margaret Atwood had a child", you may guess what it's about. I will say that if the staff of Haaretz and Margaret Atwood had a child, I wouild expect it to be a female rather than a male narrator, but yeah, other than this. In the novel, which belongs to the "five minutes into the future" genre (from the 2015 pov), if anything, our narrator is Jonathan, third son of the King of Juda. Because twenty three years before the point of narration, after the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa were hit by atom bombs from an unnamed country, Jonathan's father, until then a simple colonel in the army with some connections to ultra orthodox nationalist rabbis and a dead father who had been killed in a terrorist attack, in the wake of the shock (refered to as the "Evaporation" ) engineered a coup resulting in the transformation of the remaining state of Israel into a theocratic/militaristic kingdom, with himself as King, of course. He lead a "war of redemption" (after which not a single non Jew is left in the state), supposedly found the original arc of the covenant after blowing up the Al Aksa mosque, and built the titular Third Temple around it in Jerusalem. While he was at it, he also abolished the courts in favour of a reinstated Sanhedrin. We find out in the course of the novel what happened to Israelis not on board with this, but Jonathan, our narrator, who was two years old when the "Evaporation" happened and four when during an assassination attempt on his father, he himself- who was present and hit by the grenade meant for his father - ended up permanently handicapped, is a wholehearted believer in the system he's grown up in, which is perhaps the biggest difference to The Handmaid's Tale, where Offred is our narrator who was an adult when Gilead was installed and doesn't believe in it. Jonathan is filled with self loathing for being "blemished" , because in addition to everything else, the Kingdom of Juda iin this novel is obsessed with "whole and healthy", athletic and martial physicality, no matter your station in life, which is people afflicted by the radioactive fallout from Tel Aviv and Haifa are scorned and seen as being punished for their or depending on their age their parents sins, given Tel Aviv and Haifa are deemed dens of sin (and secular thought), and knows he only got to serve in the Third Temple as priest because of who his father is, but he practically does everything to surpress any sign of doubt within himself. (And fully joins into crowd hating on the one surviving Jewish leaders of resistance against his father when the man is publically executed.) Gilead and Margaret Atwood aside, this novel is as much influenced by the monts leading up to the destruction of the Second Temple in the Roman-Judean war and the event itself (something of an ongoing fascination to Yiisha Saraid, as he said in conversation and as can be seen in the contemporary novel Limassol as well; since I did read Flavius Josephus' The Jewish War as well as Feuchtwanger's novel about Josephus, I recognised the allusions) and biblical narratives. The later coming in not just in the form of Abraham (and his son) being namechecked early on (obvious foreshadowing is obvious, but works well) but in the form of an Angel starting to visit Jonathan with a stern message to give to his father - he's supposed to resign the throne before the next Yom Kippur or his kingdom and its people will be destroyed for good. Jonathan tells himself it must be either an hallucination on his part or a demon, and keeps telling himself that when the sacrificial animals (there is a lot of animal sacrificing in the novel, since Jonathan's father really did want to recreate the 2000 years ago state of Judaism in the set up of his kingdom) start to protest and speak, but has to abandon that conviction when the Angel starts to show up on surveillance footage, because the technology of this theocracy is definitely not the one from 2000 years ago, and after one of Jonathan's brothers hightails it out of Juda, anyone is suspect. I was in two minds when it became clear the novel didn't want to present the reality of the appearance of the Angel as up to the reader, though I suppose given Jonathan is narrating all of this while in captivity to the people holding him captive, you could argue it's still possible he's making things up, though I don't think so, he's not that type of character. Unreliable narrator in the sense that what's very clear to the readers about what his adored father is really like and what kind of society this is while Jonathan doesn't want to see it and is a desperate believer, yes, but not on the sense of deliberately making things up for his audience.
The Angel himself is decidedly unbiblical and almost Pratchett like in that he shocks Jonathan by considering the God whose messages he delivers a cruel bastard who doesn't want the Kingdom of Juda to end because it's an abomination of what Judaism used to mean (the Angel points out God had him being witness but not interfer in past horrors like the Shoah) but because he's grown tired of the spectacle and also isn't keen on Jonathan's father with his Kingpriest status being damn near worshipped himself. The way Jonathan's father and the God the Angel describes mirror each other has something of Spinoza; it's not that the teachings about compassion don't exist anymore in this Kingdom, but they are applied to a smaller and smaller circle. Even our narrator reaches his breaking point at which he finally acts not through any witnessed sufferings of the population (who is suffering to begin with, since Juda is under sanctions, even before Jonathan's father starts yet another war to distract from that and things go from bad to worse) but when his Father and/or God demand a deeply personal horror. While this is the big climax of the novel, I found myself even more disturbed by the every day smaller scale horrors leading up to it, with their mixture of biblical and modern totalitarian state resonances. (Oh, and at one point we see a brief recording of Rabin's last speech before he was murdered. Jonathan due to his age doesn't recognize Rabin (who in the Kingdom is reviled as a traitor) at first though he later realises who it must have been, but yours truly realized at once, and not just because I saw a documentary of the Rabin assassination some years ago, and feel sick every time I think of supporters of the assassin now being in government. Yishai Saraid at the presentation said he was actually there at that square and for years and years found himself unable to go there again. Anyway, what's extra chilling is that this glimpse of the past is that the people seeing it (not just Jonathan) receive it in complete silence.)
As with Atwood and Gilead, there is a light at the end of the tunnel via the framing. (The Handmaid's Tale having an afterword written decades after the fall of Gilead which pretends to examine "Offred's" testimony academically.) The novel starts with an introduction looking on Jonathan's narration from an academic pov decades later as well. And in the end, a life is saved by both Jonathan and the man he only refers to as "the Amalekite commander" . (Jonathan who grew up in the Kingdom of Juda refers to all outside enemies as "Amalekites"; only some of the older characters use the term "Arabs".) But overall, it's a chilling and intentionally deeply disturbing story, now more than ever, very effectively told. And I wish I could fast forward to when our era is regarded academically. I really do. Because in so many countries, I fear the Gileads and Judas are still ahead.
This was was originally published in 215 and evidently has been translated into English in 2024, with an afterword by Yishai Saraid in which he basically says "people thought I was kidding or writing sci fi in 2015. I wish. I could see where this is going then, and now you can, too". If I tell you that a reviewer back in the day according to google described the novel as "if the staff of Haaretz and Margaret Atwood had a child", you may guess what it's about. I will say that if the staff of Haaretz and Margaret Atwood had a child, I wouild expect it to be a female rather than a male narrator, but yeah, other than this. In the novel, which belongs to the "five minutes into the future" genre (from the 2015 pov), if anything, our narrator is Jonathan, third son of the King of Juda. Because twenty three years before the point of narration, after the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa were hit by atom bombs from an unnamed country, Jonathan's father, until then a simple colonel in the army with some connections to ultra orthodox nationalist rabbis and a dead father who had been killed in a terrorist attack, in the wake of the shock (refered to as the "Evaporation" ) engineered a coup resulting in the transformation of the remaining state of Israel into a theocratic/militaristic kingdom, with himself as King, of course. He lead a "war of redemption" (after which not a single non Jew is left in the state), supposedly found the original arc of the covenant after blowing up the Al Aksa mosque, and built the titular Third Temple around it in Jerusalem. While he was at it, he also abolished the courts in favour of a reinstated Sanhedrin. We find out in the course of the novel what happened to Israelis not on board with this, but Jonathan, our narrator, who was two years old when the "Evaporation" happened and four when during an assassination attempt on his father, he himself- who was present and hit by the grenade meant for his father - ended up permanently handicapped, is a wholehearted believer in the system he's grown up in, which is perhaps the biggest difference to The Handmaid's Tale, where Offred is our narrator who was an adult when Gilead was installed and doesn't believe in it. Jonathan is filled with self loathing for being "blemished" , because in addition to everything else, the Kingdom of Juda iin this novel is obsessed with "whole and healthy", athletic and martial physicality, no matter your station in life, which is people afflicted by the radioactive fallout from Tel Aviv and Haifa are scorned and seen as being punished for their or depending on their age their parents sins, given Tel Aviv and Haifa are deemed dens of sin (and secular thought), and knows he only got to serve in the Third Temple as priest because of who his father is, but he practically does everything to surpress any sign of doubt within himself. (And fully joins into crowd hating on the one surviving Jewish leaders of resistance against his father when the man is publically executed.) Gilead and Margaret Atwood aside, this novel is as much influenced by the monts leading up to the destruction of the Second Temple in the Roman-Judean war and the event itself (something of an ongoing fascination to Yiisha Saraid, as he said in conversation and as can be seen in the contemporary novel Limassol as well; since I did read Flavius Josephus' The Jewish War as well as Feuchtwanger's novel about Josephus, I recognised the allusions) and biblical narratives. The later coming in not just in the form of Abraham (and his son) being namechecked early on (obvious foreshadowing is obvious, but works well) but in the form of an Angel starting to visit Jonathan with a stern message to give to his father - he's supposed to resign the throne before the next Yom Kippur or his kingdom and its people will be destroyed for good. Jonathan tells himself it must be either an hallucination on his part or a demon, and keeps telling himself that when the sacrificial animals (there is a lot of animal sacrificing in the novel, since Jonathan's father really did want to recreate the 2000 years ago state of Judaism in the set up of his kingdom) start to protest and speak, but has to abandon that conviction when the Angel starts to show up on surveillance footage, because the technology of this theocracy is definitely not the one from 2000 years ago, and after one of Jonathan's brothers hightails it out of Juda, anyone is suspect. I was in two minds when it became clear the novel didn't want to present the reality of the appearance of the Angel as up to the reader, though I suppose given Jonathan is narrating all of this while in captivity to the people holding him captive, you could argue it's still possible he's making things up, though I don't think so, he's not that type of character. Unreliable narrator in the sense that what's very clear to the readers about what his adored father is really like and what kind of society this is while Jonathan doesn't want to see it and is a desperate believer, yes, but not on the sense of deliberately making things up for his audience.
The Angel himself is decidedly unbiblical and almost Pratchett like in that he shocks Jonathan by considering the God whose messages he delivers a cruel bastard who doesn't want the Kingdom of Juda to end because it's an abomination of what Judaism used to mean (the Angel points out God had him being witness but not interfer in past horrors like the Shoah) but because he's grown tired of the spectacle and also isn't keen on Jonathan's father with his Kingpriest status being damn near worshipped himself. The way Jonathan's father and the God the Angel describes mirror each other has something of Spinoza; it's not that the teachings about compassion don't exist anymore in this Kingdom, but they are applied to a smaller and smaller circle. Even our narrator reaches his breaking point at which he finally acts not through any witnessed sufferings of the population (who is suffering to begin with, since Juda is under sanctions, even before Jonathan's father starts yet another war to distract from that and things go from bad to worse) but when his Father and/or God demand a deeply personal horror. While this is the big climax of the novel, I found myself even more disturbed by the every day smaller scale horrors leading up to it, with their mixture of biblical and modern totalitarian state resonances. (Oh, and at one point we see a brief recording of Rabin's last speech before he was murdered. Jonathan due to his age doesn't recognize Rabin (who in the Kingdom is reviled as a traitor) at first though he later realises who it must have been, but yours truly realized at once, and not just because I saw a documentary of the Rabin assassination some years ago, and feel sick every time I think of supporters of the assassin now being in government. Yishai Saraid at the presentation said he was actually there at that square and for years and years found himself unable to go there again. Anyway, what's extra chilling is that this glimpse of the past is that the people seeing it (not just Jonathan) receive it in complete silence.)
As with Atwood and Gilead, there is a light at the end of the tunnel via the framing. (The Handmaid's Tale having an afterword written decades after the fall of Gilead which pretends to examine "Offred's" testimony academically.) The novel starts with an introduction looking on Jonathan's narration from an academic pov decades later as well. And in the end, a life is saved by both Jonathan and the man he only refers to as "the Amalekite commander" . (Jonathan who grew up in the Kingdom of Juda refers to all outside enemies as "Amalekites"; only some of the older characters use the term "Arabs".) But overall, it's a chilling and intentionally deeply disturbing story, now more than ever, very effectively told. And I wish I could fast forward to when our era is regarded academically. I really do. Because in so many countries, I fear the Gileads and Judas are still ahead.
