Hello! I couldn’t be happier you found yourself here, at No More Abysses, No More Walls. For this inaugural letter (sorry for the long delay!), I’m going to compare two recent short stories: “Enjoy Your Life, Capo,” by the Palestinian Canadian author Saeed Teebi, and “Shelter,” by Jewish American writer Nicole Krauss. Teebi’s story closes his recent debut story collection Her First Palestinian (which I reviewed at The Literary Review of Canada); Krauss’s was published in The New Yorker this past September. Krauss is in the middle of a highly successful literary career; Teebi is at the beginning of what promises to be one. With these two stories, we’re given two different and opposing ways to write fiction about Israel and about Palestine.
Krauss’s story concerns broken upper-middle class Brooklyn families, the vagaries of having a self, the constant flow of people between New York City and Tel Aviv. For readers of Krauss, these are easily recognizable as the themes she has been mining in this stage of her career, mostly through short fiction. “Shelter” finds the story’s protagonist, Cohen, in Tel Aviv on a work meeting, sent “by the company that had bought his company, to do due diligence on the potential acquisition of another company.” Cohen, once a brilliant coder, has grown complacent and disaffected at his job, where he nonetheless receives steady pay cheques without having to outlay much work, what the narrator refers to as a “golden cage.” Back home, his wife is in the process of leaving him, and Cohen himself is on a smorgasbord of drugs prescribed and not, in particular mushrooms—both micro and macro dosed—which he is tripping on for the majority of the story. Cohen mulls over his life and his choices, walks the beach and Tel Aviv’s winding streets, and, in the story’s climax, helps deliver his Airbnb neighbour’s baby in a Mamak, the building’s bomb shelter, during an air raid siren, a life changing experience for both the Nava, mother, and Cohen.
The writing, as expected from Krauss, is exquisite. Here’s the narrator describing the various romantic and personal distances currently plaguing Cohen: “The space that had unfurled between Cohen and his wife: half a world. And between Cohen and his death: less than half a life. And between Cohen and Cohen something else had slipped in, courtesy of the perspective of middle age: a hand span of ironic distance. From time to time, with enough psychedelics, he even managed to see himself from above.” Describing Nava, Krauss’ narrator nails a specific kind of Israeliness: she was one “of those young Tel Avivian women who looked like they’d learned krav maga at the breast, waited enough tables to be able to size up what you wanted, everything you wanted, with a glance, and never apologized. Nose-ringed. Silver-bangled.” Overall, “Shelter” is a moving portrait of a certain type of American Jewish man, performed in the streets, bomb shelters, and hospital rooms of Tel Aviv.
Teebi’s “Enjoy Your Life, Capo,” is, at least on the surface, a short story of an entirely different timbre, about life in the Palestinian diaspora, the morality of collaboration, and the perennial corrupting influence of money. Salah, the Palestinian Canadian first-person narrator, is a computer coder and inventor who has created a program called BreathCatch, which can monitor every person’s “unique breathing pattern” in order to detect abnormalities and signs of distress. Though Salah and his coding and business partner Romero built BreathCatch for medical uses—Salah was inspired by his daughter, Firdaos, who has cystic fibrosis—the story finds him in the process of selling the technology to the Israeli military, who do not want it for its medical benefits, but in order to track Palestinians: “what attracted us,” one of the Israelis explains, “is that the technology is useful in cases when a person’s face is partially or fully obstructed.” The story follows Salah and Romero as they close the deal with the Israelis, fills in the background of how BreathCatch was conceived and marketed (failing to attract hospital buyers), details Salah’s own crushing guilt on doing business with the Israeli military, and shows the aftermath of Firdaos’ involvement in the Black Live Matter protests sweeping her school. Salah’s conflicting feelings towards Firdaos when she gets put on an internet list of antisemitic activists—for doing nothing but speaking of Palestine—only deepens the disgust he feels for his own actions.
Unlike Krauss’ story, where all the characters are Jewish, the majority of the people in “Enjoy Your Life, Capo” are Palestinian. Salah, in fact, has a lot of trouble dealing with his Israeli interlocutors: “They are bureaucrats and government lawyers and data scientists, but from the beginning, I have had to work hard to not envision them in army fatigues.” Constantly doubting what he is doing with his software, he tells himself that “My code is clean. It is without sins. Let’s remember that. There can be no debate that I created it to help people.” Regardless of wanting to help people or not, it is the money that keeps the negotiations rolling: “The amount we have been promised is immense. It takes my breath away, to put it in romantic terms.” Trying to soothe his conscious, Salah reminds himself that “Romero is right. The market works in mysterious ways. We have the buyer that we have.”
“Enjoy Your Life, Capo” often turns on words and their multiple meanings. When their Israeli counterpart, for example, offhandedly mentions through the Zoom screen something about “our weather,” Salah obsesses over the use of the possessive pronoun “our,” imagines the Israeli is taunting Salah—who, as far as we know, does not know Salah is Palestinian—starts mourning all the renamed towns and villages of Palestine, “And all that for what, a figure of speech?” Most significant is the last word from the title, capo. Romero calls Salah capo in the mafioso sense of boss. It is a constant refrain through the story: “You the capo, me the soldier”; “Why can’t you enjoy your life, capo?”; “Is it our fault the market is stupid, capo?”; “This is not how a capo acts, capo.” However, as any Jewish person alive today knows, kapo (spelled with the all important, differentiating “k”) has a much different, nefarious meaning: those Jewish prisoners of the Nazis who were put in charge of their fellow death camp inmates. As expected, the double meaning of the word comes to a head when, as negotiations for the sale wrap up over Zoom, Romero, accidentally unmuted, calls Salah capo. Yosef, the lead negotiator, is concerned, even after Salah and Romero explain. It’s “a very bad word for the Jews,” Yosef says, “It’s the same as saying traitor.” Even so, what at first looks like a deal-breaking misstep, is something Yosef is able to easily shrug it off: “But, between us, I can’t imagine what it was like to be in the shoes of a kapo back in those times. They had the Nazis at their throats. Who knows what that level of extreme desperation and danger might lead a person to do…I suppose it’s a good reminder of why we’re all here today, isn’t it? To make sure that sort of situation never happens again to the Jewish people. Shall we continue?” (232). Salah, the story ironically suggests, is not under anywhere near the same pressure (or at least, the same kind of pressure), yet still he buckles, submits. The deal done, Salah is now “much, much richer than I ever imagined” (232).
The two stories have a lot in common. Both open with a sentence or two in an abstract mode, introducing the themes (“Enjoy Your Life, Capo”: “What you have to do is silence the world. You have to tell the world to quit wailing, to calm itself, to let you think”; “Shelter”: “The paradox of personal religion: God has abandoned me, so I’ll pray”). Both use “to arrest” as a verb, in regards to the protagonists’ love for their wives. Both have Arabic curse words. Both Cohen and Salah have experienced dissatisfaction at their coding jobs: Cohen in the present of his story, Salah in the past of his, when he quit his well-paying job to go out as an independent coder and inventor.
Most importantly, though, is the fact that Krauss and Teebi both deploy the infamous Israeli tech sector in their stories. Seeing how the Israeli tech sector is often used as an example of Israel’s inherent goodness and benefit to human society by its cheerleaders—even though the reality of weapons manufacturing and surveillance technologies is anything but—this is a major connection between the two stories. Salah, as we know, is in negotiations with Yosef and his team to sell his breath monitoring technology to the Israeli army; Cohen, in a rather shocking coincidental mirroring, is himself in Tel Aviv to do a deal involving face-reading technology. Both stories, therefore, occur during negotiations with either the military or private segments of the Israeli tech sector. Yet where for Krauss, this mostly remains in the background of the story, bringing Cohen to Tel Aviv so he can have his middle-aged, drug-fueled revelations, for Teebi this is very much in the foreground. Cohen, unimpeded by thoughts of oppression or settler colonialism, of betraying his people, not concerned with whose faces his new technology is meant to surveille (and if he is, we don’t know, because Krauss’s narrator never discusses it), is able to focus entirely on his own journey of psilocybic discovery. Salah, conversely, as a Palestinian man in diaspora who has often hid his Palestinianness from the world, is forced to confront what selling his tech to the Israeli military means, especially considering the story takes place during the violent events of the spring and summer of 2021.
Compare the following two moments, both of which are representative of the tone and themes of the stories. Here is Cohen, having a series of beachside realizations: “And there it was, all over again: the bright, pellucid beauty of the world. The sun’s warmth on his skin, as if for the first time. All the anxiety dried up, replaced by the peace that had presupposed everything, which sobriety had obscured. Hours passed. Cohen, feet in the shallow water, lost his intimacy with failure. The red sun began to sink into the sea. Cohen lost himself, too, in reverie; the exquisite, intricate order of things, and the things behind the things, and the non-things, the interconnectedness of it all, the goodness, was so breathtaking that tears filled his eyes. In that vast order he, too, had a place; he was woven into it. No, he was not lost; on the contrary, he would be shown the way if he only opened himself to the signs.”
And here is Salah, doing all he can to drown out the violence that he was about to forever implicate himself in: “Self-preservation is crucial. When I realized things were becoming overwhelming, I asked Firdaos to show me how to mute words on my phone. During this May 2021, the major ones are obvious: Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, Gaza, Sheikh Jarrah. But the seepage was persistent. Soon, I had to mute the names of tiny villages and neighbourhoods, the names of the ones who were killed, the names of the arrestees and detainees, the home defenders, the worshippers, the healers, the reporters, the hunger strikers, the passersby, the children, the babies—one by one, as soon as I found out that they, too, had become part of that distant, deafening inferno” (186). Salah desperately wants to drown out what’s happening in Palestine, but unlike Cohen, unlike Krauss and her narrator—because no matter when in the recent past Cohen was tripping in the shallows, just a little south of him in Gaza horrible, violent oppression would have been taking place—he cannot.
Which isn’t to say the reality of Israel’s violent oppression of Palestine doesn’t occasionally bleed to the surface in “Shelter,” because it does, in vague, almost imperceptible stains. The Mamak where Neva gives birth, lines such as “Here, in a country where every last scrap of space was bitterly contested, room had been made for him” point to the situation that is always just out of frame, though, significantly, the reason why Cohen’s building has a bomb shelter or the bare facts of who and what are doing the contesting for space is not even recognized as something worth considering. There is no room in the story for the past and ongoing violence that allows Cohen to tune into that “peace that had presupposed everything.” The situation is just the situation: intractable, unexplainable, background noise. Settled. For Teebi and Salah, on the other hand, and no matter how hard Salah tries, the reality of the violent oppression of Palestine by the Israeli government and military is painfully present, adding tremendous conflict and pathos to Salah’s actions. Basheer, Salah’s friend at the covid-era backyard prayer sessions they attend, spells out what’s currently happening in Palestine, laying it bare for the complicated moral algebra the story presents: “The families in Sheikh Jarrah standing their ground as seemingly all of Israel, from politicians to courts to soldiers to settlers, tries to expel them from their homes. The thuds of Gazan buildings levelled by retaliatory missiles, the pops of sound bombs as Al-Aqsa is trampled by military boots. The households decimated until only one or two are left carrying the family name. The white phosphorus searing some streets, the skunk water profaning others. The gangs of Israeli citizens running through the streets of Jerusalem, of Lydd, of Haifa, asking people if they are Palestinian, their sticks and guns at the ready.” This, this is the reality of Israel and Palestine that is left off the page in “Shelter” and that Salah is contributing to by selling his breath monitoring technology.
Cohen may find himself “bewitched by the lack of boundaries that still surprised him every time he returned to Tel Aviv,” but this is—does it even need to be said?—a lack of boundaries between Jewish Israelis: for Palestinians living in Israel/Palestine, daily life is a maze of endless boundaries. Meaning is a slippery thing in a Nicole Krauss narrative, fair enough (sometimes too slippery, I’d argue), but if there is something happening in “Shelter” that makes narrative space for Palestine, it is so far underneath the text that I can’t get even a whiff of it. Writers, of course, can write stories about whatever they want (more or less), but when you set fictional narratives in Israel/Palestine they become unavoidably charged with political significance, political significance that comes with certain responsibilities for the author. Or, at least, that should. Reading “Shelter” and “Enjoy Your Life, Capo,” side by side again for this letter, the moral and political failings of Krauss’ story are even more apparent than on my first read: when Israel is just another whitewashed setting for Jewish Americans to look inside themselves, the story’s connection to the real world is all but completely frayed; there is no sense that what is going on in Israel/Palestine is something that should concern the Jewish world, that should—or even could—be changed. For Krauss and other Jewish writers who engage it in similar ways, Israel is settled; it is what it is. It is in Teebi’s supple narrative of diaspora and collaboration, of looking even when you don’t want to, that we find the urgency and violence and defamiliarization that the reality of Israeli apartheid deserves.
Where “Shelter” ends with Cohen in basically one piece, full of revelation and perspective after becoming briefly involved in Nava’s labour, not having done anything that would further compromise his life stateside, Salah’s world is entirely fractured. He has knowingly become a kapo, a muta’awin, a collaborator: “The villas of collaborators like me are raided very infrequently, the hand restraints placed very gently on their wrists, just for show, if at all. Their dossiers are kept in an entirely separate department of Shin Bet.” When Firdaos innocently opens the letter Romero drops off the day after the deal closes, that says “Time to enjoy your life, capo,” she broadcasts what her father did on social media, and Salah’s house gets raided from inside, as it were. In true high literary fashion, Salah ends the story a very rich man, a very rich man who has lost everything.