by Lavie Tidhar
As for me, I live in Israel now, in a town called Tel Aviv. It isn’t so bad—the beach is nice if often dirty, and it gets too hot in the summer to breathe, but that makes it feel a little like home. I miss the high altitude, though, and the tropical rains. Sometimes I lie awake at night, imagining I hear the call of elephants far away, but it is only a bus going round the corner.
It’s out there somewhere, though, I’m sure of that. Last summer I went on a holiday to Kenya, searching for the place it could have been. I found nothing but a peaceful backwater, where the hills I once knew still roll, endlessly, and on a clear day you can see the ocean. In this place, in this time, it was just a footnote to history, a might-have-been, a fantasy. But I am sure it’s real, and I think I can find it again. I think I am getting close. Sometimes I turn on the radio, listening to the news of another car bomb or rocket attack, and I add up the tally of the living and the dead.
Sometimes I can’t even tell which Palestine it is: their one or ours.
HISTORICAL AFTERWORD
If you go to the city of Haifa today, you may come across Nahum Wilbusch Street down by the harbour. Of the three men who went on that long ago expedition in 1904 he lived the longest, dying of a ripe old age in modern Israel in 1971. An engineer by trade and inclination, he no doubt had little time for the futile exercise of What-If or What-Could-Have-Been.
Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, on the other hand, saw the value in imagining impossible futures. In 1902 he published a curious utopian novel: Altneuland envisioned a prosperous, idyllic Jewish state in Palestine. In Herzl’s vision of the future, an Arab minority exist as full citizens in this land, though even in the novel a politician attempts (yet fails) to take away their rights. The novel was translated into Hebrew as Tel Aviv , and subsequently gave its name to the Jewish suburb of Jaffa established in 1909, now the largest metropolitan area in the State of Israel.
Herzl himself never got to see fiction become reality. He died in 1904, having spent much of his adult life searching for a homeland for the Jews. Other proposed settlements included El-Arish in Egypt; Cyprus; Anatolia and Argentina, though none came to fruition. Herzl’s sole surviving daughter, Trude, died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. For the Herzl family there hadn’t been a happy ending. Perhaps happy endings are harder in reality than in works of fiction.
Israel and Palestine are two lands in one, a single geography divided by competing stories. I myself grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, next to an Arab village whose residents fled in the 1948 War—or the War for Independence, depending on your point of view: their houses had been razed to the ground shortly thereafter, and it remained a curious, empty place for us children to visit. Though I was often told that the residents “fled,” it never occurred to me to ask why they didn’t simply return.
Many of the Palestinian refugees from that time escaped to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as to Lebanon and Syria, where permanent refugee camps now stand. At the turn of the twenty-first century a massive, seven-hundred-kilometre-long “barrier wall” began to be erected between the West Bank and Israel; it is called a “security fence” in Hebrew, and “the Apartheid Wall” in Arabic. Sporadic peace talks take place every so often, with much fanfare, much as they are briefly mentioned in this novel; as in the novel, they have never amounted to more than a public relations display. But someone must have made a fortune in construction in the meantime, much like Mr. Gross in this book.
Like Bloom in this novel, no one sees themselves as a villain. And the bumbling, ineffective Tiroshes of this world can do nothing much more than write their little flights of fantasy and get on with life as best they can.
I grew up in Israel and remember much of the euphoric sense of coming peace that characterised the early 1990s. I also grew up in the immediate post-apartheid South Africa, and remember both the white terrorism of the AWB and the sense of excitement of the first democratic elections in that country. I was fortunate enough to travel through and live for a time in East Africa, and to love—much as Tirosh and Bloom do in this novel—that beautiful land.
Like Tirosh, I often think I am merely a pulp writer with delusions of grandeur. Like Tirosh, too, I feel eternally displaced. I, too, would like to escape into fantasy—I would have liked to see the white towers of Kang Diz Huxt rise into the yellow sky under the broken moon, and to have navigated the green gaseous swamps of Samaria where the Awful Ones live . . . whoever they may be.
But there is only one world we live in, as imperfect as it may be, and fantasy provides no escape. That is, perhaps, the harshest lesson we learn as children; though some of us, like Tirosh, keep chafing at the restraints that reality imposes.
—Lavie Tidhar, 2018
AFTERWORD
WARREN ELLIS
Unholy Land is one of those lovely books that starts out presenting itself as one thing, and mutates into another almost without you seeing it.
It begins with a minor pulp detective-fiction writer leaving his home in Berlin to revisit the land of his birth—a Jewish state in Africa. Right away, we’re in alternate-history space—this was actually a floated idea around 1900, the British Uganda Program, also referred to as the Uganda Scheme, in the wake of Russian pogroms against the Jewish people. So far, an African take on The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
But. The writer’s name is Lior Tirosh. Compare that to Lavie Tidhar. Partway through, Tidhar ascribes the authorship of one of his own books to Tirosh. Osama. An alternate-history novel featuring a detective and a series of pulp novels. One detects the wake of the grand galleon of Michael Moorcock sailing by on the way to Tanelorn. Tidhar, as most recently evidenced by Central Station , is a game-player of a writer who uses the spectrum of science fiction canon for his pieces.
And then the book turns into what it’s really about, a grand game of alternate worlds cast like jewels on the sand. The long second act is all dust and blood and madness and glory, and the fast third act comes down on you like a sharpened spade.
Lavie Tidhar is a clever bastard, and this book is a box of little miracles.
—Warren Ellis, 2018
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Multi-award-winning author Lavie Tidhar was born in Israel. He grew up on a kibbutz and has lived all over the world, including Vanuatu, Laos, and South Africa.
Tidhar won the 2012 World Fantasy Award for his novel Osama, a complex tale about the war on terror. That same year, he also won a British Fantasy Award for Best Novella and a British Science Fiction Award for Best Non-Fiction. His next novel, The Violent Century, came out in 2013 to rapturous reviews. It was followed by the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize–winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming, a tour de force parable about the Holocaust. The British newspaper the Independent has referred to both novels as masterpieces. Tidhar has, further, been compared to Philip K. Dick by the Guardian, and to Kurt Vonnegut by Locus.
Tidhar’s most recent novel, Central Station, received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Locus Award. It has been published in ten languages.
Lavie Tidhar currently lives in London.
