In a near future scenario, Israel is under the rule of a military dictatorship following a coup d'état. A counter-coup follows and the country is generally in a state of chaos in which it remains unclear who is in charge. Suffice to say, a quasi-fascistic state exists where army death squads summarily execute opposition groups in remote woods and orchards, and lone resistors live in hiding or are on the run. Our narrator Rafi, is one such fugitive who spends two weeks hiding in his own attic before deciding he wants to reach the apparent bastion of dogged resistance, at Ein Harod - an idealistic old kibbutz in the Galilee.

"For some time I had not opened the door for anyone without the little tear-gas canister I had bought in New York. I always had a knife in my pocket too. As soon as I opened the door I realised something was wrong and sprayed tear-gas at the two men who had been standing off to the side of the door where I couldn't see them through the peephole. I killed them on sight, the one who had been aiming a pistol at me. The other one fainted. So did the neighbour's daughter."

On the road to Ein Harod, while hiding in the trees from the various army patrols, Rafi meets a fellow rebel on the run - an Arab named Mahmoud. It appears that all Arab villages or towns have been abandoned or depopulated. (An echo of the 1948 Nakba of Palestinian villages that Kenan himself witnessed as a young soldier?) This all sounds like a good setup for a thrilling read, well so I thought. But something was missing. Or if it wasn't then I missed it, and the story never quite worked for me. Rafi and Mahmoud join forces and somehow manage to kidnap an army general and his driver (who are both called Rafi also...) and proceed to hide with them in an ancient underground system of tunnels and caves while the army helicopters above carry on their search for traces of resistance. Weird dialogue between captors and captives ensues, that I suspect is meant to be either allegorical and/or lost something in translation. Eventually a second commander - the "General of the Northern Command" - leads a force that manages to encircle our party and negotiations begin.

The General of the Northern Command is a paranoid megalomaniac who wants to take Rafi and the group of unlikely associates back on the road to Ein Harod. One passage stood out in this phase of the book, as the story's end approaches, Rafi {the narrator} reflects on the harsh treatment of his Arab rebel brother Mahmoud:

"I was thinking about one happy summer, a summer without bloodshed. There is such a thing, a summer without bloodshed. Once every few years, once every few generations, we have a summer without bloodshed.

We had gone to the vineyard. Mahmoud's vineyard. Not this Mahmoud, but another one, in another time.

Someone had brought along a guitar, someone else an oud. We lay on our backs under the vines, bunches of grapes hanging above us. We had brought a few bottles of arak too. We made coffee, sang and played, laughed and talked, and for a while the country belonged to all of us. For a while Mahmoud's village was my native land, and Tel-Aviv was Mahmoud's native land.

And then the summer passed and that was the one and only, the last summer without bloodshed. So it goes."

This was a bestseller at the time in Israel and won plaudits and prizes locally. I think it is one that almost certainly loses something in translation, but is also rather a product of its time. A dystopian novel for an Israeli audience possibly seeing their own country at an important crossroads on the road to a far from certain future. The Road to Ein Harod wasn't a bad read, but is probably one of interest chiefly for the Israeli literature enthusiasts. I would though gladly read anything else by him if it were available in translation.… (mais)