Maxim Biller’s first radio show: “He stared at the golden May sky with empty eyes”

2024-10-07 08:43:00

In his radio debut the writer Maxim Biller tells the story of the Jewish translator Josef Chaim Brenner, who was lynched by Arabs in the early summer of 1921. The case has striking parallels to the present.

When the writer and translator Josef Chaim Brenner set foot for the first time in his life on Palestinian soil in the port of Haifa in February 1909, he hoped that the Turkish official who checked his false Austrian passport in the “large and dilapidated port building”., they would “throw him back onto the ship”. Brenner’s hope not fulfilled, the officer lets him pass with a weary smile – and soon, “watching the city spiral up towards Mount Carmel,” Brenner notes “how suddenly everything is easy and carefree:” They too The soft, foreign The Phoenician air that we breathed here weighed a few grams less than in Russia”.

In this scene of the arrival of the young Zionist Brenner on the coast of the country that will one day be the State of Israel, everything that characterizes Maxim Biller’s latest story is preserved: melancholy and brutality, joy and always broken hope. Writer Biller makes his debut as a radio playwright with the story “No King in Israel” – directed by renowned director Dominik Graf, and the result is a listening experience not to be missed. One might add: “…even if it’s not an easy thing on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre” – but that’s not entirely true, because Biller’s story is in a strange way, multi-voiced, full of hope , even if it is of that blood with which the land of Palestine is soaked.

Josef Chaim Brenner, who actually existed and who Biller describes as an emotional, obsessive, neurotically loving man, who, as is typical of Biller, always walks on the edge of ridicule but is never fully exposed to it, dies only “12 years, two months and 22 days” later, brutally murdered by an Arab mob: the “handsome, ugly Jossl Brenner” now lies, 100 kilometers south of his arrival in Haifa, “in a fragrant orange grove” and gazes “with empty eyes into the golden May .” “His tangled black hair,” the story continues, “was even more disheveled than usual.” “His killers had torn off his long, dramatic Jesus beard in many places.” their saliva, their urine, etc. his own blood.

The narrators of this Middle Eastern episode, a man (Samuel Finzi) and a woman (Adriana Altaras), tell and fantasize about the abyss of what happened, in a hesitant, sober way, with warm and dry voices, touched and yet at times almost cheerful. They say that after Brenner “fired several bullets into his stomach and face,” the Arabs took off his pants, cut off his genitals and stuffed them into “Jossl’s worn black calfskin satchel with the shoe sole,” in which he “still escaped”. the manuscript of the Trumpeldor letters, the manuscript of the history of London and the great essay on the Arab question.

Here, at the latest, with this description of genital violence difficult to bear, we arrive at the massacre of October 7th – and the violent acts that followed. The site of Brenner’s death is believed to be not far from the Jaffa bus stop where Inbar Segev Vigder, 33, was murdered last week, along with six other civilians, carrying their nine-month-old son in their arms. Biller’s text was finished a few months before October 2023, and these different layers of time and truth inscribed in the listening event help make these nearly 80 minutes so existential.

Beginning with Jossl’s murder in May 1921 (the so-called “Jaffa riots,” a series of pogroms that killed both Jews and Arabs), the narrators tell a delicate and grand narrative of this man’s short and unhappy life. Relationship with his wife Chaya (Deleila Piasko), about his boundless, perhaps senseless, love for his little son Uri, whom Chaya considers so “dangerous” that he flees from her to Berlin – to find there a German neighbor who constantly mutters to himself that he is such a “shame” on such “kind” people like Chaya and her little son. The piece works very much with such temporal permeability, which gives it a surreal, almost feverish force despite its calm, in which the current Israeli and Jewish tragedy seems entwined in a web of decades, if not centuries, of violence – which therefore shows the truth.

But Biller does not stop at this truth, of course he does not simply say “It was like that then”, but rather tells the story of Jossl’s life and death, to which in the final scene a nuance of free will of the radio drama is added, it evokes that feverish spirit of utopia that must have prevailed in those first years of Jewish immigration. The physical discomfort of this impassable and heterogeneous place, with its heat and its fertility, its poisonous snakes and its dirt. With its presence of shtetl, poetry and revolution.

In one iconic scene, Jossl (wonderfully irritable but clearly spoken by Kafka’s Joel Basman), bitten by a snake, is healed by an old Arab. The man wears “a little dented brass tong on his trembling seagull nose”; he seems “in his long gray robe and his snow-white Kafiya” almost a bit like “Elohim” (i.e. like God). The old man heals Jossl by quickly putting a cast on him made of sweet sesame paste, after which Jossl gains two pounds because he can’t keep from snacking on his bandage. All this does not prevent him from writing controversial things on the Arab question in various publications.

Much of the brilliant grandeur of this radio show comes from its acoustic design (Michael Stecher, Florian van Volxem, Sven Rossenbach), the buzzing of flies, the breathing of those sleeping in a settlement on the Sea of ​​Galilee – all this evokes Palestine , lovingly evokes Israel physically, makes you feel the story more intensely every minute. And paradoxically it brings home the profoundly European dimension of the Israeli drama.