Down and out in Rotterdam

Ideas, meaning and a mind in motion

Tag: Israel

  • Writing my first novel with NANOWRIMO

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    It is with great joy that I can update this blog with an uplifting post and the news that I am well on my way with writing my first novel (20.000 words and counting) and I couldn’t have done it without ‘nanowrimo’, the national novel writing month event which supports and motivates writers.

    To be honest many work has been done before november started, but it stagnated and it is with nanowrimo backing me that I am finally pushing myself further than I ever did, regularly updating my word count and seeing my novel grow day by day.

    I had an aborted attempt on a novel last year when I discovered nanowrimo for the first time. That time I had an idea for a coming-of-age novel based on actual biographical events during my exploratory years as a undergrad and graduate student in Leiden featuring many of my ex-girlfriends, friends, lost dreams, failures and successes and still remains shelved for a future attempt.

    No, this time my first 50.000 word draft will precede the Leiden years, and it will be more fundamental and dramatic and deal with my years in Israel. Talk – again – about coming of age. It was more falling from grace, or waking up from a pleasant dream after a car crash. Well that’s a bit over dramatic. The words are coming, it’s biography, fiction and non fiction all in one. I had the opportunity of growing up in Israel during the roaring ’90’s, roaring meaning a decade combining hope, peace, assassinations and suicide attacks. These roaring 90’s will provide the background to my personal story and army experiences.

    For now I have no illusion of publishing it. It’s foremost a personal story, but it has an ambitious scope. It starts with a foreword about my Jewish ancestors and their Zionism which led them to leave Europe for Palestine, and an afterword/conclusion about my experience and the future of Zionism in general based on my growing political thoughts about the matter and my experiences post-Israel, ever since I’ve come back to live in Europe, and witnessing Europe changed and ever changing and with it the European views on Israel.

    I discovered a great novel writing tool which has a free 30 day trial period for the nanowrimo period of november, which I will definitely purchase afterwards because it has already been of great help, it’s called ‘Scrivener’. It helped me bring structure into my story, which helps me focus on specific parts of the story I want to have told.

    The writing is keeping the creative juices flowing that much that I felt like posting this update on my blog. I had to take a pause from my novel for a moment seeing I was writing about the murder of Jitzhak Rabin (1 march 1922 – 4 november 1995) which was probably the single biggest tragedy I experienced growing up in those years.

    But writing is always therapeutic and thank god I am writing!

    This novel will be the novel for which I can use my favorite Hemingway quote as an opening motto;

    Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

  • Back from the future

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    Before I left Holland for Israel in 1993 I knew little of Islam. I was a Jewish boy in a Christian primary school and Catholic High School and I learned Christian songs. I simply can’t remember anything about Islam in Holland during my childhood years. I got introduced to Islam in Israel. My first introduction to terrorism and suicide bombings was only a year after I moved to Israel when bus line 5 exploded on Dizengoff street Tel-Aviv. It was 1994, I was 14. I didn’t associate the terror directly with Islam. To me it was a rude awakening into Israeli reality, and to what I naively considered enemies of the peace proces, an introduction to Hamas. Eight years onward, after many more terrorism and army service I knew better.

    Then I moved back to Holland in 2001 and I can remember how shocked I was to see that many headscarves, I thought I had left those behind me in the Middle East, only to discover a changed reality in my country of birth. Next, soon to-be Dutch prime minister Fortuyn got assasinated bringing back memories of the murder of Rabin in 1995, who was also killed by one of his own, followed by the murder of Dutch filmmaker Van Gogh by an Islamic extremist.

    Ten years flew by with Islamic terror attacks in London and Madrid, and the brutal terror attacks against Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and the Jewish museum in Brussel, finally culminating in last weeks terror-attacks in Paris and the shootout tonight with terrorists killed in Belgium during a counter terrorism operation.
    I must say it’s one big surreal experience for me. I was used to terrorism in Israel and thought I came back to civilization, only to discover terrorism came back with me, like a virus incubating in my luggage. I feel like a time traveller back from the future living a horror déjà vu.

    The good thing is I can’t be bothered by the attacks. I survived worse and I’ve got eyes in my back and a nose for suspicious situations. Still, if it’s my time so be it. The bad is to see Europe going to pieces with a leadership and population still naively thinking everything is gonna be alright. I know better, just consider my personal story. This much has already changed in twenty years.

  • How I wept and why I write

    424552_10150642580756098_1718214860_nAs a teenager growing up in Israel I had it hard. I felt isolated and lonely and I didn’t belong. I felt trapped with nowhere to run or hide. And after high-school I got enlisted in the army when I wasn’t up for it.

    The worst part was the frustration of lacking a means to express myself. All I had going for me in those days was a terrible anger. You can ask my parents.

    I can remember how I longed for a means to release my anger. I was without talent for music, I didn’t play an instrument and all I could do was listen to other peoples music; angry music, sad music, teenage music. ‘If I could only play the guitar’ I thought. Listening to other people expressing themselves didn’t help. Besides, the same music was often the soundtrack to parties to which I felt an uninvited guest. It made me feel even more inadequate. I hated sports because before I enlisted I didn’t have the physique so I hated the guts of those who had, because it got them girls.

    Had I then known the comfort of reading, it might have spared me a lot of sorrow. But I didn’t read and when I tried to write it was immature and angry and full of cliché’s, so much I understood.

    —

    It was sometime during my early twenties – back in Holland with Israel behind me – when I first read Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and I remember immediately rereading it for a second and third time. It was an immense experience. I carried the book with me for days as a close friend. I felt deeply for the main protagonist Holden Caulfield. Holden was from a wealthy family living in Manhattan and couldn’t have been farther away from my family background, but it felt as if I understood him completely. It felt as if I wandered with him through Manhattan with no place to go like the ducks in Central Park during the winter. His little sister Phoebe was like my twin sisters, young and untarnished and with a bond which was unconditional.

    I long wondered about my connection with Holden. I knew I was one of many millions who felt the same. Yet the feeling was sincere and immediate. Then I thought that what we shared was an anger and frustration and difficulty coping with the real world. I shared his concern with phonies and hypocrisy. I shared his concern with change. I didn’t think him crazy. The thought never once occurred to me. Was anger and dissatisfaction with the world the reason I felt so close to Holden? It sounded like an awful cliché, not that I cared, he was my friend.

    It was only much later that I read Salinger’s other works and it was only when I read Kenneth Slawenski’s biography about the writer J.D. Salinger that many pieces fell together. I learned to appreciate the man who created Holden. I learned about his life and what an extraordinary talented person he was. And I learned about his role in WWII. I discovered that the man who gave life to Holden was a sensitive and fragile man scarred by terrible experiences. When he couldn’t handle the fame after publishing ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ he retreated from society and lived the remainder of his life as a recluse. It left me with a tremendous admiration for the person that was J.D. Salinger.

    It was when I read his latest biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno (2013) that I found the answer to my question about what I shared with Holden. It was in a chapter titled ‘Is the Kid in this book Crazy?’. Here the biographers quote writer Andy Rogers who offers his theory about ‘The Catcher’. According to Rogers it was a war novel:

    Holden Caulfield, has more in common with a traumatized soldier than an alienated teenager. His prematurely gray hair serves as fodder for teasing and insecurity, but it also symbolizes something rather obvious: Holden is an old man in a young man’s body. This places Holden in an estimable literary lineage of characters who feel that their youth has been lost in the war.

    and further on:

    Salinger will never be the boy who went to prep school again, thus Holden is Salinger and the Salinger who will never be again.

    It hit me. Holden was angry and seemed frustrated and misunderstood and I felt the same. But what we really shared and what I recognized was the underlying trauma. The anger and frustration was just a result of the trauma, a cover for the pain and sadness. Suddenly I wept.

    And it was then that I made the decision to write no matter what. The biographers quoted psychologist Jay Martin:

    One of the processes we see in creativity is that the creative person solves a problem, That is, he’s depressed, he’s anxious, he’s uncertain, he’s mourning, he’s grieving. He writes, and in the process of writing, he doesn’t necessarily cure himself, but he gets some perspective by writing. By putting one sentence down after another, you get a perspective on your own disorder… I would guess that if Salinger was depressed, he found a way to rid himself of his depression by giving it to someone else. It’s almost like black magic, in which you put your anger or hatred into a character and discharge it there.

    It really does help.

  • The one perfect novel that might never be written

    degel hadio compericmant copySomeone once said; ‘Everyone has one great novel in them’. I tried to find the origin of this quote on google, but I couldn’t trace it to the original author.

    I tend to agree. Every person living to old age is in a way a succesful survivor against the odds and has a black box full of memories and experiences locked up inside of him. Years of thoughts, insights and reflections can – if succesfully distilled – form a beautiful narrative account and story about what it means to be human and to be alive.

    I would argue that indeed the best literature are those realistic stories about average people leading average lives. Stories and characters with which we can all identify. Emotions of happiness and tragedy we have all felt.

    What changes is the perspective. And we all have our own unique perspective and historical personal narrative. Reading someone else’s unique perspective can be very rewarding.

    This is not to say that I think everybody should be able to publish his story. Indeed I deplore the vast amount of crap books written and published nowadays. Most attempts at distillation are a mess and like badly distilled alcohol, can seriously damage public health.

    I am talking literature here. And publishers and critics should remain critical of what they publish or promote.

    —

    I have often thought about my one perfect novel and the form it should adopt. My favourite literary genre is the coming-of-age novel, or bildungsroman. I like the concept because it offers a very personal and psychological glimpse on the development of characters. My favourite character Always was Holden Caulfield from ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, which to me is the most perfect psychological coming of age novel ever written. Other good examples on my all time list must include ‘A portrait of the Artist as a young man’ by Joyce which is interesting because of Joyce’s struggle with his deeply Catholic upbringing and ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ by Remarque because the main character grows up in the trenches of WWI.

    The one perfect novel I have in mind is also a coming of age novel. But like Roth’s ‘Radetzky march’ it will span a couple of generations. It might be considered a generational coming of age novel. It will follow the lives of four, maybe five generations of Jews and be partly autobiographical. It will be based on the lives of my Jewish ancestors, my father and finally me. Besides a personal coming of age of the characters, it will also be a coming of age of political Judaïsm or Zionism.

    It will start at the beginning of Zionism with my ancestors in the Ukraine and the Habsburg empire and their struggle, through my grandparents and their pioneering work in Palestine and the building of the state of Israel and it will end with my father and me back in the diaspora with desillusion about the Zionist dream in its purest form.

    That would be a hell of a narrative. But only God knows if I will ever manage to distill it into a work of art.

  • Teenage angst in an agricultural setting

    Kibbutz Hamadia
    Kibbutz Hamadia

    I frequently think back of my teenage years in Israel living in a kibbutz near the Jordanian border. It was a small community my kibbutz, enclosed by a fence meant to keep certain people out and keep certain people in. With a population of no more than 200-300 people everybody knew everyone. As a collective community everything was shared; main meals were consumed in a large central dining hall, – we usually only consumed meals at home during the weekends – the laundy was done in the communal laundry house and nobody had a privately owned car; we had about 20 cars mostly Mazda’s and Subaru’s, and you had to order one if needed. Children were raised from infancy well into adult life in ‘children home’s’ by nanny’s, while the parents worked the land. This was how my father spent his childhood.

    I had a hard time adjusting. Coming from Holland as a thirteen year old, I had to try and fit in with peers who had been raised from infancy together. It didn’t quite work out. After a while, the sunny weather and the private pool offered little comfort and soon this little secure paradise became a teenage hell. Now thinking back, I try to remember mostly the good stuff, stuff I frankly miss in Holland.

    I loved the land, the environment and the work. Our kibbutz was located beautifully on a hill overlooking the Jordan valley. To the south you could see the old city of Beit Shean, with in the background the Gilboa mountains, a setting for many biblical scenes. It was here where King Saul lost his life after losing battle with the Philistines, after which his body was hung on the walls of Beit Shean.

    Hamadia had two factories, one manufacturing doors and the other producing fiberglass, but the majority of our shared income was made by Agricultural products. We grew olives, mango’s, avocados, watermelons and dates and many vegetables. In the surrounding hills we had large herds of cattle and down in the valley we grew fish in fishponds, and we also had a chickenfarm raising chickens.

    We went to school four days a week and the fifth day was reserved for work. I started working immediately at thirteen. My first job was on the chicken farm, it was a dirty job which caused me to stop eating chickens for a long time. The coops were hot and stuffy, crowded with panic stricken chickens flapping their wings, the air dense with the smell of chicken poo and feathers.The dead chickens were buried in a mass grave for chickens. I liked to collect them because I often got to drive the tractor to the burial site, a big thing when you’re thirteen. Driving the tractor was actually the main attraction of many jobs in the kibbutz.

    The job I held longest and loved most was working with cattle. Often we travelled on horseback across the hills from early Sunrise till sundown. We spread out with our horses and sometimes on foot to retrieve the many cows from their hiding places and guide the herd to their pens for periodical checkups or to round them up for winter quarters. The immense feeling of freedom and a oneness with nature experienced while on horseback surrounded by the hills and valleys under a burning sun has been unrivaled since.

    These are the moments I miss most living the city life in the flat domesticated land of the Netherlands.