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Musical Moment: And Other Stories

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Kenaz's Musical Moment is a series of interrelated short stories beginning in the early youth of the narrator and ending in his adolescence. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this collection of stories is the extremely intimate nature of the first person narration, balanced by the ever present social pressure of Israeli society in the early years of the nation, with its smothering demands of collective action and life. Behind the rah-rah optimism of the early Jewish state, still at war with its Arab neighbors, yet sure of its ultimate triumph, was an unsparing pessimism (a pessimism which would become a hallmark of segments of Israeli society by the 1980s). On page 107-8 of my edition, the narrator displays his existential despair without mitigation: "I was overcome by a strange sadness I sometimes felt without knowing where it came from. A sense of the pointlessness of everything and not belonging to anything. I wondered if they felt this too or if it was only my own defect, that every minute of happiness had to be paid for with hours of sadness. Everything around me seemed to be fading, dying, lost... And there was nothing to long for or really believe in." Is this the Israeli predicament or the human? Musical Moment never lets us know, but a close reader must suspect it is both.