Hemingway and the Dead-Bird Rain

What does Tal Shani, a typical rough-edged, one-of-the-guys youth from the “big city” of Tel Aviv have to do with little Tolik Sneiderman sitting alone in a tiny, empty apartment in a provincial town of the USSR, convinced that the Germans will soon come to take him away, just like they took his grandfather? What does Tal, waiting in line at a post office in a wealthy Tel Aviv neighborhood have to do with the boy waiting for his “adopted” grandfather to return from the frozen Gulag to Rosa’s derelict backyard, outside the old town of Dnestrograd? And what does a huge Soviet placard pointing an accusing finger at a solitary Jewish child have to do with a famous Israeli TV skit about new immigrants?

With a style as finely honed as a laser beam, Boris Zaidman gives us the experience of hundreds of thousands of “Toliks” who live simultaneously in two parallel worlds that will never meet. With his penetrating, skeptical outlook, his sensitivity to the disingenuousness of official language and his powerful writing brimful with images, Zaidman lays before us-perhaps for the first time in Hebrew literature-the dualistic core of what is dubbed “the Russian immigration”.