WEST JERUSALEM NOIR

Fifteen tales that capture the magic and mystery of everyday life in West Jerusalem, which has been the main area of Jewish population from the time of Israeli independence in 1948.

No volume about Jerusalem could ignore the occupation. This one kicks off with Yiftach Ashkenazi’s “A Great Bunch of Guys,” set at a checkpoint at the northern border of the city, and Ilana Bernstein’s ironically titled “You Can’t See the Occupation From Here,” which shows that even in the halls of a great university, you can’t ignore political realities. But most of the stories showcase different kinds of tension. In Liat Elkayam’s “Murder at Sam Spiegel,” a Mizrahi Jewish woman tries to find her place at a largely Ashkenazi film school. In Asaf Schurr’s “Chrysanthemums,” a father tries to conceal his daughter’s involvement in a perhaps-fatal traffic accident. Translator Greenspan chronicles an aging writer’s mental decline in “Top of the Stairs.” But in the volume’s longest and most iconic story, “Dos Is Nisht a Khazir,” Emanuel Yitzchak Levi and Guli Dolev-Hashiloni offer a double narrative with a single theme. Just as signs at the Biblical Zoo inform skeptical haredim in ungrammatical Yiddish that the peccary is not a pig and therefore can be included in the zoo’s collection of animals named in scripture, young Be’eri struggles to explain to his hoped-for girlfriend just what kind of synagogue he attends, where the Torah is read on Shabbat but men and women sit together in prayer led by a female cantor. The point of Be’eri’s struggle to define his congregation, like the point of the zoo’s signs, is to determine who belongs here. Whether these stories are peopled by soldiers, students, children, and parents, they keep asking, “Who belongs in Jerusalem?” and its corollary, “Who does Jerusalem belong to?”—the central questions of this volume, which handles them with heartfelt sensitivity.

Pushes the boundaries of noir in a welcome new direction.