City of Blok
William Collins & Sons 1988
Flamingo paperback 1989

Madness Now and to Come –
Bryan Cheyette, The Times Literary Supplement, October 14-20 1988:

Simon Louvish was born in Glasgow but was taken to West Jerusalem at the age of two, where he spent his next nineteen years, serving as an army cameraman during the Six Day War. Since leaving Israel in 1968, Louvish has co-produced a series of controversial political documentaries about South Africa, Greece and the occupied West Bank and has written an autobiographical work and two novels, The Therapy of Avram Blok (1985) and The Death of Moishe Ganef (1986). City of Blok is the sequel to Louvish's first novel and is a far better work of fiction. All three of his novels juxtapose recent Israeli history with grotesque fantasy, rather like a Jewish One Hundred Years of Solitude, but City of Blok is the most clearly focused, primarily because it concentrates specifically on the heady years of Israeli nationalism which reached a new peak with the election of Menachem Begin in 1977 and the Lebanon War in 1982.

City of Blok is set during these fateful five years and opens with Avram Blok- "The Man with No Past" - leaving his Jerusalem asylum (his place of refuge in The Therapy of Avram Blok). Forced into the maelstrom of Levantine politics, Blok encounters Jewish fascists, Palestinian resistance, and Israeli Peaceniks - in short a world "composed of a thousand splinters". Rather like Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth's alter ego in his recent series of novels, Blok illustrates the dangerous blurring of fiction and reality which occurs in a city like Jerusalem-or, even, Newark, where, in Louvish's words, "the past has taken over the present". Louvish is rather more frenzied than Roth - though no less humorous - but, unlike Roth, he excels as a political satirist in the school of Heller and Vonnegut. The form of City of Blok, moreover, imitates the "fractured" society into which Louvish's persona is plunged. A consistently developing narrative is replaced with a random collection of stories, anecdotes and unconpected episodes (which even include the adventures of a ferocious pet cat). "Babel" is the title of one of Louvish's chapters reflecting an absurd world where all voices - meaningful and meaningless - are equally valid.

What the nihilism of City of Blok deliberately obfuscates, however, is that many of the episodes and stories in it are, in fact, true. Louvish invents the newspaper headlines dotted throughout the novel, but the newspaper cuttings, taken from his "Blokbook", are real enough. Louvish's Jerusalem - Blok's city - is unlike the mythologized Jerusalem of Amos Oz or A. B. Yehoshua. No writer has captured better - in city walks and bus routes - the minutiae of present-day Jerusalem and, at the same time, illustrated the Unreal qualities of the city to confirm Jonathan Miller's description of it as a "Jewish Disney Land". Louvish's intention, clearly, is to reproduce contemporary history as if it were pure fantasy. Was there really a televised State burial of martyred skeletons, many thousands of years old, found recently in caves in the Judaean desert? And, if this were true - and it is - then perhaps there was a secret assignment by the Department of Apocalyptic Affairs to track down a sheep made radioactive by Palestinian guerrillas. Yet, if all viewpoints are equally absurd in this
novel, then Louvish merely reinforces what one of his characters calls the "deification of the irrational", or, citing Bunuel, he accepts "as real" the "world of the imagination".

City of Blok is especially powerful when it finally differentiates between its proliferating Babel of voices. The Palestinian episodes are particularly convincing in this regard and the novel makes out a passionate case - based on what look like actual soldiers' letters home - against the horrific Lebanon incursion. A biblical mock-mythology, underpinning the novel, is hardly distinguishable from the various historical and political mythologies woven into the narrative of City of Blok. At one point, Blok is accused by his German girlfriend, Ilse, of "absolute moral neutrality . . . a general negation of all values". This amorality is, I think, a problem for Louvish. His commitment to a saner world is clear but his fiction is in danger of becoming an unmediated reflection of the irrationality it condemns.'On one level, this makes reading Louvish particularly terrifying. For he has probably anticipated - better than anyone outside Israel - further madness to come.

The Daily Telegraph, Julia Neuberger, April 1, 1989:

… There is Simon Louvish’s hysterical City of Blok. It is outrageous, it will offend the religious, it will cause trouble among Zionists and anti-Zionists and particularly among psycotherapists, and it is full of passages in extremely bad taste, which still – albeit gruesomely – make one smile.
The writing is very self-confident, very sharp and full of bad language. This is not for the delicatelt stomached, nor for those who cannot bear the Jewish novel. But if Roth makes you laugh, Louvish will make you clutch your belly in hysterics. It’s very, very funny.

The Sunday Times, Colin Greenland, 30 October 1988:

In Simon Louvish’s City of Blok history obtrudes and intrudes. History roams the streets of Jerusalem shouting at the top of its voice. The second volume of Louvish’s projected trilogy about the stolid nobody Avram Blok is a panorama in collage of the city at the end of the 1970’s, between the Camp David Peace Treaty and the resumption of the war with Lebanon. While all around him are sweltering and yammering, Blok remains taciturn and vague. Released from mental hospital, he does nothing for 370 pages but read screenplays for films that will never be made, permit amorous attentions from a German anarchist and a Jewish policewoman, and appear briefly on stage (where he reads a newspaper and pretends to sleep).
City of Blok is rich, one might say bloated, with incidentals; with what Louvish, typically, calls “the ooze of the world.” It is full of puns and epigrams, lists, routes, menus, obsessions and monologues and catenaries of word association. Blok occupies the centre of it like a kind of moral vacuum, into which his country energetically crams itself.

The Literary Review, Alexander Games, November 1989 (Paperbacks):

‘ Scribble, scribble, scribble.’ ‘Clump, clump, clump.’ ‘Asargelusha! Trojan fizzigigs!’ It can’t be easy to be inside Simon Louvish’s head when all you wanted was a quiet Sunday afternoon nap and a cup of tea. This, the third (sic) mono-tirade in the Blok series, is the literary equivalent of a double-espresso. Avram Blok is released from the State Mental Hospital, back into a red-eyed, hoarse-throated Israeli landscape filled with lunatic rabbis, corrupt politicians and a constant stream of refugee story-lines. Read it with pleasure and enjoy Louvish’s screwball humour and brimming imagination.

From the Jewish Gazette, Arthur Sutherland, 2 December 1988:

All Mediterranean life is here – muddled by satirical crudity, wry wit and outrageous obscenities more suited to an Army barrack room.
Descriptive passages read like a Thesaurus, yet the author achieves am articulate account with commedable prose.
I enjoyed most of this book, but not the repetitive heretic verbiage.
By all means buy the book and enjoy – but then place it on a high bookshelf out of reach of your children – unless they are studying for a degree in obscene expletives.

From the Jewish Quarterly, spring 1989, essay by Moris Farhi on Israeli Writers:
MAPPING PATHS TO REDEMPTION
Recent Books by Yoram Kaniuk and Simon Louvish.

… Most of those who have read The Therapy of Avram Blok, Louvish’s first novel, must have rejoiced at the emergence of a new voice which was both original and anarchic. City of Blok, its sequel, again gives us the pleasure of those same gifts. In fact, this second volume, written with anger in preference to hysteria, is clearer in its message and, therefore, a more mature work.

Anarchism demands total commitment to truth and freedom. As such, it is often the vital constituent which makes a writer noteworthy. It takes great courage to be anarchic. Traditions, institutions and ruling bodies which abuse or misuse authority, armed as they are with that self-righteousness which has brought mankind to the brink of extinction, are formidable forces. Should they fail to crush the anarchist, they still manage to reduce his valour to quixotry or to banish him into the wilderness where, they assume, few, if any, can hear him. In the present political climate where the pendulum has swung to the right, where, in the West, brutal economic feudalism and, in Israel, a Zionism dispossessed of its humanistic ethos, arc the paradignts, the anarchist's struggle becomes all the more Sisyphean.
Fortunately for us, these brave voices, because they carry man's highest aspirations, are heard even from the wilderness. Louvish's voice is one such.
Louvish writes primarily about Israel. His hero, Avram Blok, born on an illegal immigrant ship to a Hungarian couple who have survived the Holocaust, is the same age as the Jewish state. He is a remarkable creation: one part impassively recording, as if it were a camera, the life around him; another, judging and interpreting the behaviour of the nation to events and forces within and without; a third, like an inverted Dorian Gray, succeeding in remaining pure and innocent whilst all things evil contaminatc all things good; a fourth which, this reader suspects, will gain ascendancy in Louvrish's planned third book on Blok, taking on the mantle of Isaiah's Suffering Servant.

City of Blok starts in 1977, when Avram Blok, institutionalized since the end of the Yom Kippur War, is released from the State Mental Hospital: "A man without a past", he settles in Jerusalem, the city of the title, "which lives only in the past". The book ends in 1982, by which time Blok has witnessed the rise o€ Begin, the Camp David Accord, the assassination of Sadat, the growth of Palestinian nationalism and resistance, the Lebanon War and the maturation of the Peace Now movement. Ostensibly, Blok lives through these events with a detachment which a German girl-friend indicts as "too close to nihilism – a general negation of all values". Yet the reader perceives that the accusation is unjust, that Blok’s apparent dispassion is the paralysis of perpetual shock, that, on a deeper plane, he is evaluating all moral issues. This other plane – more a sixth sense than psychological-is represented by a host of 'phantasmal happenings which run parallel to the historic events and involve such "characters" as a fiendish cat, a rabid sheep, a resurrected Theodor Herzl, an ever-watchful Saladin and a sinister institution called the "Department of Apocalyptic Affairs". Thus when Blok does the "right thing" by throwing himself on a grenade flung at a crowd during a demonstration against the Lebanon War, it is, one feels, this other plane which has motivated his otherwise inexplicable heroism. Mercifully, the grenade fails to detonate and Blok leaves Israel. He will return, we presume, in the next volume, to chart the post-1982 events which have so damaged Israel and which now, in the harsh, visionless diplomacy of Shamir and company, augur even worse.

City of Blok is an ambitious book. It would not have achieved its objectives, as it does, had its anarchic purposefulness not been supported by literary skills.

The fabric of the prose is admirable; the way, in particular, Louvish weaves into the text the very substance of Jerusalem is exceptional: you can see the sacred city's colours, sniff its smells, breathe its dust and air, walk round its antiquities and high-rises and, all the while, absorb a great deal of its long and chequered past. Louvish is also adept at juxtaposing surreality with reality. Though the surreality, in this reader's opinion, is often laboured, there are times when it attains the quality of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Jaroslav Hacek's The Good Soldier Svejk or Edward Whittemore's majestic quartet, Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows and Jericho Mosaic.

Above all, it is Louvish's passion--his fulminating anger-that elevates City of Blok to excellence. The sections condemning the martial spirit and, in particular, the last part of the book which bewails that abominable and criminal adventure, the Lebanon War, are no less than brilliant. Take this excerpt from a letter a friend of Blok's writes from the front:
A mass of people like some apocalyptic movie of the damned. Clustering about us, clamouring for food and water. Some of the men give them their K-rations. Others sneer and wave them away, shouting "Go to Arafat!" I see men who at winter manoeuvres gave their last blanket to a friend who was caught short, acting like insane hyenas. I see the unit gathering prisoners, marking their arms with black spots… I see high-ranking officers, in charge of water carriers, standing over their closed taps smiling above the thirst-crazed throng. I hear expressions of contempt that raise goose pimples: "They are less than animals." "They should be poisoned, like vermin." I can't believe my cars. Wasn't it all so fucking predictable? Didn't we foresee the whole thing?
This is the Jewish soul shouting warnings from the wilderness.

 

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