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An Interview, Simon Louvish & Matthew Kalman, editor of Jewish magazine, New Moon, London, August 1991:
OUTSIDE STORIES
Novelist Simon Louvish left Israel twenty years ago but his characters
just can't stay away. Matthew Kalman looks at the facts behind the fiction and finds it hard to tell them apart:Simon Louvish is doing what he does best: telling stories. In this one, the hero is a writer, an Israeli exile, whose Palestinian friend is arrested on false charges of spying for an Arab dictator. As war breaks out, the writer determines to save his friend against a tide of jingoistic public opinion. Unmarked vans watch his house. He uncovers rifts between the different arms of the security services. The government reels, then buckles, and finally releases his friend. Their tentative work for Israeli-Palestinian peace can begin again.
A fine plot, and a natural sequel to his latest novel The Silencer. Except this is not the storyline for Louvish's next book - it is the true account of his efforts to prevent the deportation of Palestinian-born writer Abbas Schiblak during the Gulf War.
The lines of Louvish's life story lend themselves to fiction. His broad Scots accent was nurtured in Jerusalem, in a card-carrying socialist-Zionist household wafted East on the winds of idealism when young Simon was still in nappies and the Jewish State a struggling infant. Since leaving Israel, Louvish has pursued a tripartite career as filmmaker (he teaches at the London International Film School), novelist and peace campaigner. When the Gulf War broke out, he found himself thrown into a major confrontation with the British authorities.
" My involvement wasn't a matter of choice," says Louvish. "Suddenly the British Government in its wisdom decided it had to show itself to be doing something about the threat of terrorism in Britain and started picking people up. When I heard it on the radio the first time, it flashed through my mind 'I bet you they'll arrest Shiblak' because it was the most inappropriate and dumb thing they could do. Then I found out three days later that they had."
"Shiblak is the last person to be what was alleged, a kind of sleeper agent.
His wife told the tribunal 'this is the last man for action. He invites eight people for dinner, says he'll cook and then doesn't do it.' So on that personal level we knew this was bizarre. I had this little van watching the house, only for the morning shift. If I'd brought in the Iraqi spies in the afternoon, MI5 would have been completely nonplussed."
Louvish has captured this real-life world of intrigue on the pages of his novels. The hero of The Silencer - an Israeli writer whose books are blacklisted by Jewish publishers in the United States - sounds strangely familiar. "My publishing contracts in America never materialise," he says. "This is my only way of striking back. I may even flush out some of my enemies."
Since leaving Israel at the age of twenty-one, Louvish has made a lot of enemies. As a film-maker he adopted a radical approach to major political issues. In 1969 he travelled to South Africa with a Cambridge theatre group and secretly filmed a documentary which provoked protests from the South African Embassy in London when it was screened by the BBC. In 1974 brought the wrath of the Jewish community down on his head with a documentary about the Palestinians called To Live in Freedom.
Since his first book The Therapy of Avram Blok appeared in 1985, five of his novels have centred on Israel, displaying a healthy disregard for the sacred cows of Zionism and a wicked sense of humour. The Silencer is the second time out for Joe Dekel, a maverick neo-orthodox part-timer with a leftist streak and magnetic attraction for trouble. For a man who left Israel more than half a lifetime ago, Louvish seems strangely obsessed.
" Not all my books are about Israel," he protests. "I don't think one can escape from it. It is part of you whether you like it or not. It runs after you. I think that if you're writing fiction seriously you do have to write about those things that are running after you."
"I'm about to go back for the first time for two years. I accept being schizo-phrenic, of being connected to it yet not wanting to actually live there. There is this accusation that as an outsider I shouldn't be dealing with it. But it's fun to do it from the outside. Whatever I feel about it politically, there's never a dull moment, so the material is very rich."
Perhaps it was unlucky that Louvish chose 1982 to try out life in Israel for the second time around.
" My wife and I were there for six months when I was trying to finish the first Blok book. I couldn't write a word of it there, it was impossible. I had to come out in order to write it. I had to look at it from the outside. She went to ulpan and learned the language, then when she left she forgot it all. She isn't Jewish, she's Scottish and was brought up in a small village near Edinburgh so the time we spent in Jerusalem to some extent she found very familiar."
" It was traumatic because the Lebanon War started in the middle of our time there. It was an open question whether we might live there, an attempt to say: England is so disgusting let's try a strategic withdrawal and see what happens. But it didn't work, basically because of the war. I thought that the Lebanon War changed the situation in Israel very considerably."
Among the people left behind in Israel is Louvish's father Misha, a Zionist youth activist from Glasgow who graduated through the ranks of the Labour Zionist establishment to become co-editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica. How does their relationship operate?
" On the level of severe conflict, mitigated by 'my son the writer... but why doesn't he write about something else?' I suppose I've betrayed him. His hope was that he would bring his family up in a new Land of Israel. The problem is that he has three sons and two of them are outside, so he's certainly not happy about that."
"Me curious thing is that whatever basic moral ideas I might have, emanate from him, though I took another interpretation which he would think illegitimate. His notions of fair play, justice and so on are blended with a kind of Mapai socialist Zionist idea - but I found that to be in conflict with reality. There are moments at which we touch, particularly during Lebanon when he was extremely alienated as well."
"He represents a generation which is no longer there, who went to an Israel which was a poor country in which there was a consensus of feeling of people pulling together for something. It was the days before empire, the days when Israel was a struggling, small country. But Israel is not a small country, it's a very powerful regional force."
Having arrived on the political ground which has made Louvish so unpopular among his co-religionists, it comes as some surprise to discover that he is not the doctrinaire antiZionist leftie of popular Jewish paranoia. Aren't all states rotten in his view, and shouldn't Israel be among the first to just wither away?
" I don't think it should have that privilege. Let Albania try first," he laughs. "I have no objection to the existence of the State of Israel, but the point is what sort of country is it going to be?
"We're in the trap of saying that if you criticise the policies of a government, you are choosing to undermine the existence of a society. That's a sign of weakness. A society should be strong enough so that its government can be criticised and if necessary changed by democratic means, but the society and government must be seen as separate. That's the definition that has always eluded Israel."
In search of this definition, Louvish has now devoted two thrillers to the adventures of Joe Dekel within the maelstrom of Middle East spy networks and Israeli peaceniks. The Death of Moishe-Ganef and The Silencer emerge as more than mere entertainment. "The thriller genre has a problem," reflects Louvish. "All the secrets that it has to reveal are uninteresting. So I've tried to use these thrillers to pose moral questions and to some extent as political polemic, and I've tried to chart certain forbidden zones of the conflict."
" That runs into a lot of trouble because in the thriller genre if you're dealing with Israel/Palestine and Arabs there is an accepted way of doing it. You're supposed to have an Israeli hero. You can have a bad Israeli too - you're allowed to have an evil Mossad man these days. There has to be Arab villainy in it, and there's a good Arab, so you balance the Arab side. But the story that I'm dealing with essentially deals with conflicts within the Israeli thing itself and within the Jewish context."
Outside the covers of his books, Louvish has joined this battle as a committed peace campaigner, attempting to forge links between Israeli and Palestinian writers. He is sensitive to the criticism that such contacts taking place between exiles far away from Israel might be seen as irrelevant. Perhaps the most memorable scene in The Silencer is Louvish's wicked satire of the Israel-Palestine peace bandwagon, winding its ineffectual way through the meeting-halls of Europe and America.
" The dialogue taking place in London may have no relevance at all, but it's easier to have the dialogue outside Israel and Palestine than it is inside where it's subject to a whole range of obstacles."
"In the outside world there is a fondness for this image that there are these Arabs and these Jews and they hate each other. That's a good dramatic confrontation. Will A kill B or B kill A, or will they kill each other - which will happen first? Whereas if you actually go into all this network of relationships, particularly the very tentative dialogue which keeps starting and stopping, being screwed by events and fucked up by history, then you begin to get quite a different picture of what's actually going on."
"What bothers me about the discussion within the Jewish sector about Israel, is that it's this kind of closed discussion hovering above it. It's as if there's this special thing, Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and the Arabs, and we discuss it in the context of its specialness and how impossible it is. But it's simply a part of world events. To me there's nothing unique about it. It has its own particular face, but it's similar to a lot of other conflicts which have been going on in the world and which everybody has been saying for years are insoluble, and suddenly certain things have been happening."
But is Louvish the right man to represent Israeli or even Jewish writers in this dialogue? Has he not become so alienated from Israel and from the Jewish community that he has disbarred himself from the process?
"That's a good question," he murmurs, after a long pause. "I'll continue anyway, because at the end of the day somebody has to do it. The serious dialogue is not taking place, so our amateur, unserious dialogue has to continue. I don't see any other way. I'd be quite happy to sit back, write some funny books, make some money, stop annoying powerful people who I think may well be causing me problems and lead a contented life. Maybe I should."
But it seems unlikely. Louvish is now trying to organise a conference of Israeli and Palestinian writers, probably in London, picking up the threads which snapped when Abbas Shiblak was arrested and the PLO declared its support for Saddam Husein. He is sanguine about being the permanent outsider in the issues which affect him most deeply. "I think I'll just have to be happy to be the ultimate pinko-commie-self-hating-Jew-kike-smartass. Besides, no-one's offered me a better job."
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