The End of the World

One day, “after a millennium, a thousand dark years,” an eccentric old woman called Savta—which means ‘grandma’—drops out of the sky into a remote village. Savta has survived an awful disaster that happened on a distant planet, Alienalia, and as a little girl she was smuggled onto Earth in an oven converted into spaceship. Humanity and Israeli-ness are foreign to her. Food is a nuisance to her. Pleasure, love, softness and warmth mean nothing to her. She adopts and raises on her own an abandoned baby named Oncmor, after the first two words she uttered, “once more.” Savta feeds Oncmor blue, burning-hot alien porridge, and hides her from the menacing outside world. Later on, a variety of characters and events are encountered: a bird-lady, Siamese twins, an aristocratic woman with a beard, a fairy, an interstellar journey, a legendary tiger, talking trees, an experiment that goes wrong, to name just some or them.

The story is set against in a typical Israeli reality, enhanced by whacky unrealism: a guru-rabbi conman; ludicrous security agencies; and educational authorities that are incapable of understanding what Savta and Oncor are doing there. A highly imaginative, artistic story that reads like a creative carnival of styles and themes: legends, colorful psychedelic fantasy, family drama in the shadow of trauma, realism and surrealism, tension between individuality and collectiveness, and between alienation and belonging. A funny, mischievous tale that is also at times disturbing.