Arafat's Elephant

by Jonathan Tel

Overview

Set in and around Jerusalem, now, in the past, and in the future, this remarkable collection introduces us to a wide range of complex characters: some extraordinary in their ordinariness; others lifted from the pages of history; still others with lives given significance simply because of where they are or who they're with at a single moment in time. We meet a young religious Jewish woman who loses herself in thought and wanders off en route to her arranged marriage, a would-be Islamic terrorist who offers assistance to American vacationers, an Internet millionaire doing his military service, a torturer who writes children's books, an elderly couple rediscovering their love in a coffee factory, and Moshe Dayan while he's having his glass eye fitted. These are stories that will give you pause, make you think, challenge your preconceptions. Stories that, while deceptively simple and hauntingly beautiful, form a rich and complex portrait of a conflicted land and the glorious variety of its inhabitants.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582431833
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	01/31/2002
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jonathan Tel is the author of Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao, The Beijing of Possibilities, Freud's Alphabet, and Arafat's Elephant Stories. He won the 2015 Commonwealth 2015 Short Story Prize for his story "The Human Phonograph."

Editorial Reviews

The edgy, tenuous nature of modern life in the Middle East gets a thorough but uneven examination in this debut collection, a series of hit-and-miss character studies bringing to life a startling array of protagonists. The most effective story is also the most relevant: "A Story About a Bomb" starts with a narrator who finds a marvelous short story about a terrorist bomber who is asked by two unwitting tourists to take their picture; when the narrator attends a party he encounters the story's author and stumbles into a remarkable real-life rendition of the ending. "Her Hero" captures a similar slice of Middle East life as a woman hunts for her lover, an ordinary man who disappeared after becoming a war hero. "Love and Coffee" delves further into the effects of war on romance and marriage, as an older couple have their affections rekindled after they journey to a coffee factory whose product leaflets have an intriguing amorous effect on the soldiers who receive them. Tel is at his best capturing an unusual character in the framework of a brief vignette, but in several cases he leaves his readers hanging: "Spleen, or the Goy's Tale" does little with a situation in which a rabbi encounters Arafat's chef, while the title tale, though amusing, is little more than a quaint fable. These stories will probably receive more attention than they otherwise would have because of recent events in the Middle East, and Tel has performed an estimable service, intriguingly portraying life in a land where, as he puts it, "whoever tells the best story wins." (Mar. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

From the astonishing "A Story About a Bomb," which burrows inside the minds of an Arab terrorist and his Israeli captor, to the rueful title story about an Arab family presented with the gift of an elephant from a Turkish sultan and the lengths to which they go, after its death, to maintain the illusion that it is alive, this well-crafted collection explores the roots of one of civilization's oldest religious disputes. Told mainly from an Israeli perspective, the stories illuminate key moments in its short history, from the birth of Zionism in "Shaking Hands with Theodor Herzl" about Herzl's visit to Palestine to discuss the possibility of a Jewish homeland with the German Kaiser to the struggle for Independence in the cleverly deceptive "Alte-Zakhen," where nothing is as it seems to be. Characters linger in memory: a woman who restlessly travels the globe in search of a first love whom she believes faked his death in order to escape his army service; a religious young woman who is on her way to an arranged first meeting with her prospective husband when she stops off to buy a scarf and loses her spiritual roadmap; and an Orthodox rabbi out shopping for pork after discovering that his maternal lineage makes him a technical Gentile. Written with assurance and insight, this story collection sheds light on the struggle that lies at the heart of the new global conflict. Recommended for most public libraries. Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A particle physicist debuts with 17 stories, set largely in Israel, that capture something of the elusive quality of human dynamics, with unknown quantities and energies always seeming to play a part. An Arab suicide bomber on the streets of Jerusalem is accosted by tourists to take their picture, in the story told within "A Story about a Bomb," but the narrator's lengthy search for the author of the bomber story leads him to a strange encounter-and the line between reality and fiction in that story becomes impossible to draw. "I May Be a Ghost but I'm Not a Slut" features an aging ambulance driver in a Tel Aviv cafe before his night shift who begins a conversation with a pale young woman in black next to him; she gets him talking about the suicides he's seen, then tells him she is one herself and tries to get him to pass along a note to her lover. In "Mr. Fig and Mr. Pineapple" (the names of adjacent fruit stores), a middle-aged man tries to describe "The Incident," which involved a platonic relationship the man had with a married woman; it began with a basket of strawberries and ended when the man's wife happened to see the two of them on the TV news as they watched Mr. Pineapple burn. Finally, in the title story, a visitor to an Arab home in Nablus, while sipping tea, hears the tale of his host's family: they were once rich and powerful enough to attract the enmity of the Sultan, who sent them the gift of an elephant, which they then had to keep alive; worse, the Sultan then came to see it and them, a visit which brought death and ruin to the family. Tempered emotions and yearnings of the young and old define Tel's stories: a pervasive sense of things gone amiss settles foglike amongsharply defined moments to create some memorable scenes.

Kirkus Reviews