Upside down trees
Israel Hameiri / Pardes
Yaki is a veteran biology teacher on a sabbatical, spending part of his academic training in a writing workshop. His wife Noa, a nurse by profession, is busy traveling south, to a rehabilitation village in the Negev, and trying to direct the fate of the boy Gal – who remained there as a result of the upheavals in the life of his father Ido, her husband’s son from a previous marriage – so that she can win him over.
The couple's dreary routine of existence in their home on a moshav in the north of the country – just before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic – is shrouded in a layer of darkness and mystery, which is gradually revealed through their engagement with the oppressive past: the dissolution of the child's traumatic family ties and connections, and Yaki's participation in the writing workshop. This is revealed as an act of demandingness and revenge, both towards himself and towards the workshop host, who had previously participated in a dark event that led to the death of his first wife. In virtuoso and intense writing, which moves easily between phases and times, the abysses of life and the life of the soul are revealed through flashes of the past, flashbacks and detours that allow us to understand the present. Slowly, the blurred scenes from the past become clearer, until a sharp, gripping and moving image emerges.
Upside Down Trees is the thirteenth book by Israel Hameiri, professor emeritus in the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa, who currently teaches at Safed College. In 1986, he won the Levi Eshkol Prize for Literature. Nathan Zach, who served as chairman of the jury, wrote at the time: "Israel Hameiri sees in his stories what others, including his distinctly Israeli heroes, do not see in themselves. He presents to us the frightening, the hidden, and the prone to shake in what appears outwardly solid and secure. With uncommon sensitivity, he reveals in landscapes that are familiar to us, even the face beneath the face in the dramatic, critical moment on which he focuses, the falling of the mask."
208 pages, 96 NIS.
