Dolly City     by Orly Castel-Bloom, Translated by Dalya Bilu Original title: Dolly City Original language: Hebrew Country: Israel   Published by UNESCO Pub. Date: May 1997 Format: Paperback, 182 pages ISBN: 923103362X List Price: $16.50, £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $16.50 Published by Loki Books: London c/o WWW.lokibooks.u-net.com List Price: £7.99 Not available for ordering

Orly Castel-Bloom is one of a lively generation of younger Israeli women writers. Born in Tel Aviv in 1960 to French-speaking Jewish Egyptian parents, this is her first major work published in English, translated on the initiative of a small British publisher (Loki Books) dedicated to international women’s writing.

Dolly City is a controversial novel, executed using the flat and violent language of the cartoon or the world of punk, not expecting to understand or interpret the world, but looking on, to quote David Gurevitch (in Modern Hebrew Literature 15/1995) with ’anxiety and wonder’ at the inhuman, indefinable and inexpressible’, at a world, which like Alice in Wonderland’s, exists in a no-man’s land outside time and space.

Yet, even though Dolly City aims at times to offend, forcing us to react to the contemporary issues of child abuse, to the horror of city life (Tel Aviv is shown as an alienating ’cancerous city’), the style remains light and witty and laughter is mixed with the horror.

Eventually the reader realises that the book’s main characters, Doctor Dolly and her son ’Son’ are a joint metaphor for Israel itself, and the novel is also a satirical parable on the ’Yiddishe-mamma’ complex. On this point the Israeli critic Ariana Melamed wrote; ’I do not know of any other attempt in literature so persistent and determined to expose the terrifying epic of motherhood to its core, with no compromises, restraint or clichés’.

The story concerns a half-crazy woman doctor, Doctor Dolly, who has a laboratory in Tel Aviv where she slices up various animals for investigation. Into this charming scenario she brings an abandoned, shivering infant boy she happens on by the roadside. As ’Son’ grows, she treats him, in her deluded self-involved state, as one of her experiments. She even carves the map of Israel into his back, the borders enlarging as he grows. Miraculously, with the help of a saintly aunt and an earthy grandmother, the boy manages to survive into adulthood despite everything done to him by his mother. He even manages to save her from a suicide attempt by fishing her out of the sea. He joins the navy, then the army, tries to highjack an aeroplane to escape, fails, and we last see him disappearing into the desert, chased by police.

With this futuristic fantasy-satire Orly Castel-Bloom is suggesting that perhaps Israel can be cured of the obsessive need to control (and kill for) its borders. ’Madness is a predator’, she writes in the novel, ’It eats the soul. It takes over the soul as fast as our army occupied all of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District in ’67.’ The writer is strongly critical of Israeli ’Arabo-phobia’, of the ultra-Orthodox and the bureaucracy of Israeli politics.

Adrift in a hostile city, Mother Dolly (Israel) doctors her son with a love that destroys, until she learns the meaning of compassion.

’One night I woke up at three o’clock in the morning with an intense desire to operate. Once upon a time, when the urge took me, I would find myself in my laboratory, opening and closing animals, but now that research was shelved and the lab was taboo, there was nothing for me to do, and, in any case, there was nothing left for me to operate on since dissecting dead bodies bored me stiff.

At the bottom of my heart, I knew I must not, must not go into the baby’s room. He was sleeping soundly. I advanced on him wearing my green surgeon’s uniform, undressed him and laid him on his belly on the cold metal table. He shivered with cold. I counted his vertebrae. It seemed to me that there was one missing. I counted them again and again, and after I was one hundred per cent, two hundred per cent — and so in arithmetical progression up to a million per cent — sure, I started feeding all kinds of data on my child into the computer, until it began to groan like a woman in labour.

The baby was still lying on his stomach. I put him to sleep, even though I still didn’t know where I was going to cut. I tried desperately to suppress this drive of mine to mess with the child, I tried to fob it off with a simple enema, but to no avail.

I took a knife and began cutting here and there. I drew a map of the Land of Israel — as I remembered it from the biblical period — on his back, and marked in all those Philistine towns like Gath and Ashkelon, and with the blade of the knife I etched the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River which empties out into the Dead Sea that goes on evaporating for ever.

Drops of blood began welling up in the river beds cutting across the country. The sight of the map of the Land of Israel amateurishly sketched on my son’s back gave me a frisson of delight. At long last I felt that I was cutting into the living flesh. My baby screamed in pain but I stood firm. When I had finished marking all the points my neglected education succeeded in pulling out of the creaking drawers of my mind, I went back to being what I am — a doctor — and I disinfected and dressed the cuts, and sewed them up where necessary.

I contemplated the carved-up back: it was the map of the Land of Israel; nobody could mistake it.’ p43-4