The Dollar and the Gun     by Shlomo Kalo, Translated by Philip Simpson Original year: 1999 Country: Israel   Published by Calder Pub. Date: June 26, 2003 Format: Paperback, 166 pages ISBN: 0714543241 List Price: $16.95, £8.99 Not available for ordering

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A book of thematically-related shorts mainly witten in abbreviated telegramese — ‘The Swiss

Powerful jaws

To pontificate as to chew...

A small race

A small country

Three languages

No wars

Banks, chocolate, watches, medicines, tourism

Revenues overt and covert’ — and all as highly barbed as this quote shows. Kalo presents us with a hardboiled and ironic account of world geo-politics and geo-economics, often played out at the level of their consequences for the individual, as in the first piece here ‘Manuel‘, a story with a strong ‘Anti-Globalisation’ line. ‘The Vine Grower’, set in Greece, has a biblical tone in its harsh tale of of a war-time episode while ‘Daoud’ is an angry meditation on the cult of (murderous) heroes... ‘Maginot’ is an attack on the 1930s philosophy of appeasement of Fascism set in France while ‘Latitude 141’ is another ‘no-global’ story that, while leaning towards the simplistically propagandistic, has at its kernel a hard-to-disallow account of the ruination of Native Americans.... ‘National Hero’ is a predictably aciduluous Vietnam War story while ‘Bullseye’ questions the imperfect justice that tackled (finally) the Serbs’ attempted ethnocide in Bosnia-Herzogovina but doesn’t contemplate hindering the Chinese colonial regime in Tibet. ‘Electric Motors’ can be taken as a rather good critique of the dynamics of tourism; the production of a temporary holiday-utopia for the tourist by people who depend on him or her for their very living. In the ‘Last Oasis’ Kalo takes a look at the oil business, alluding to its overwhelming power while ‘Alyosha’ finds the subsequent dark corruption of ‘October’ (the Russian Revolution of 1917) in almost its very beginning.

Shlomo Kalo’s sardonic vision of global political realities seems to come out of a classic Israeli mentality, at the same time infused with the idealism of the land pioneers and the Left but also, caught between Hitler’s war of extermination and incessant wars of survival fought by the post-holocaust fragment of Jewry in the State of Israel, a kind of toughened realism that transcends the sentimentality of the Left in places with a softer history and present.

One might like to live in a gentler world than the one this book sets out but in the matters that Kalo discusses its hard to see where it is...

A new radiance over the Baltic Sea, a new radiance over the Black Sea, a new radiance overthe Caspian, a new radiance over the Russian steppe. A new radiance over the Volga, the Dnieper, the Don, the Visla, the Bock.

New radiance over Siberia, wreathed in

flames.

Russian-style depressive boredom gave the

world Russian Roulette.

English-style depressive boredom gave the

world cricket. p148 ‘Aloysha’

 

Swiss attractions. There is a price and it is fixed and clear. No place here for disorderly and uncouth oriental-style haggling.

A session with a prostitute of thirty years old or under is charged at a rate of 1.25 Swiss francs per minute; between thirty and forty-five1.1 0 Swiss francs per minute; forty-live and over: 0.80 Swiss francs per minute. For an Ausländer prostitute, there is a 10% supplement.

Ba h n ho f.

Business as usual. p14 ‘Manuel’