Deceptive appearance? Idyllic beach with sunset in Tel Aviv
Foto: picture alliance/Kay Nietfeld
Can the story of a country be told through its organized crime? Or does such a focus only serve prejudices? Colson Whitehead has done this in his last two novels, exploring the history of New York’s Harlem district. The 48-year-old Israeli writer Lavie Tidhar, who lives in London, writes a spotlight-like history of organized crime in his home country in his extraordinary, over 600-page crime novel “Maror.”
The title says it all, as Maror refers to the bitter herbs that lie on the table at the Seder on Passover and are intended to be a reminder of the painful exile in Egypt. And this sometimes very violent story is always bitter. Because Lavie Tidhar puts her finger in the wound, writes about anti-Arab racism, the brutality of right-wing police officers, but also about anti-Semitic violence, which drug dealer Benny has to endure as a prisoner in a cellar in Lebanon, and how all of this is structurally part of Israel’s history .
nd.DieWoche – our weekly newsletter
With our weekly newsletter nd.DieWoche look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get your free subscription here.
“Maror is not so much a crime novel as it is a novel about crime, a way of telling the history and culture of Israel through the lens of normalized crime and systemic corruption,” said Lavie Tidhar in an interview with Hadassah magazine. . Over four decades, Tidhar, who otherwise writes award-winning science fiction and fantasy, tells the story of drug and arms trafficking, real estate speculation, and corrupt police and politicians.
“Maror” is not a black book of Israeli history, but rather, like Charles Dickens, it tells about the otherwise barely visible edges of society – in the spirit of a legendary quote from Ben Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, in a modified form appears again and again in the book. “Only when we have our own Hebrew thief, our own Hebrew whore, and our own Hebrew murderer will we truly have a state.”
The dozen or so intertwined episodes of this novel, which jumps wildly through time, are set against the backdrop of drastic historical events. This ranges from the Lebanon War to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Iran-Contra affair to the dramatic accident during a pop festival in the Israeli desert in the 90s, in which several young people died, very similar to the Love Parade accident 2010 in Duisburg.
The connecting element of these stories is the police officer Cohen, who is on a first-name basis with various mafiosi, is involved in illegal business, walks over a lot of corpses and utters a lot of Bible quotes. »Some things are impossible to prevent. War. Drugs. But you can manage them. And that’s what we do. We’re holding the fort. We keep the peace,” he explains to a soldier during the Lebanon War, whom he recruits for his crooked business.
Around Cohen, Tidhar groups a whole series of actors who, over the years, have been running their illegal businesses over generations from Tel Aviv to the Californian diaspora and also fighting against each other. Real people from politics and contemporary history appear again and again, who are usually less well known in this country. The radical left-wing veteran Uri Avnery also makes a guest appearance in “Maror” and, in his role as editor-in-chief of the investigative magazine “haOlam haZeh”, in the back room collects the scandalous article by an author who, in the 1970s, made illegal real estate deals with high-ranking military officials and politicians in the West Bank The beginning of the Begin era is revealed. The political pressure on him is too great.
Where the fiction begins and the story ends remains unclear. Tidhar tells all of this in an extremely exciting way, without creating boring images of the enemy. It’s also about the nightlife in Tel Aviv in the 70s, about romantic encounters, lots of drug excesses, about pop concerts in the desert, different generations of mafia structures, about life in the kibbutz where Tidhar himself grew up, and about the brutality with which Longings are always being pruned.
The book doesn’t really have a happy ending. But with regard to the Middle East conflict, this is at least found in another novel by Lavie Tidhar, which was also translated into German and is absolutely worth reading. Because in his SF novel “Central Station,” which tells of an interplanetary spaceport in Tel Aviv in the distant future, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is no more than a distant memory.
Lavie Tidhar: Maror. Ad Engl. v. Conny Lösch. Suhrkamp, 639 pp., 22 €.