Terrorism, Seen From Two Sides

“Almost Dead” by Assaf Gavron (Harper Perennial, $14.99) is artfully constructed as a kind of literary time bomb, an object of irresistible fascination even as we dread the explosion that will surely come. 

At the same time, it is a tense psychological thriller played out in parallel narratives, one seen through the eyes of an Arab militant in a deep coma and the other taking place on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as told by the young Israeli nicknamed “The Croc,” who is his intended target.

Gavron is the author of four novels, and he is the Hebrew translator of work by Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger and Jonathan Safran Foer. “Almost Dead,” however, is his first book to be published in the United States, where he deserves an appreciative American readership.

The Croc, the hero of “Almost Dead,” is a charming shlimazel in his early 30s who is luckless in love and work, and whom fate has contrived to place at a series of unrelated terrorist incidents, all of which he has miraculously survived. The Croc is embraced as a national hero in Israel and, for that reason, a target for assassination by Arab terrorists.

The anti-hero is a young Palestinian Arab named Fahmi, whose frustration over life in the West Bank — along with the urgings of his older brother — have inspired him to pick up the gun and the bomb. But something has gone wrong along the way, because we know from the outset of the book that Fahmi has been cast into a hopeless coma by some undisclosed mishap.

“Almost Dead” turns out to be a kind of three-dimensional chess game played by the Croc and Fahmi, the prey and the predator, as they each move toward a final confrontation without ever quite grasping the linkages between them. And there’s yet another mystery to be unraveled in “Almost Dead” — the Croc meets and falls in love with the girlfriend of a victim of the bus bombing that he survived, and he devotes himself to finding out exactly why that unlucky man was on that doomed bus.

If we ponder the terror attacks of recent years in Israel as they are depicted in the news, both the terrorists and their victims are always anonymous. Gavron, however, insists on giving them names and faces, fears and desires, histories and destinies. And he confronts us with the reality of a terrorist attack in a way that headlines and news footage can never really capture.

“I was beginning to feel the adrenalin of the survivor, the euphoria of the saved,” the Croc recalls after a highway shooting. “We were alive! The bodies spread around us, the groans of the wounded, the medics working, the smell of cordite, the ringing in our ears — and we were alive! More alive than we’d ever been.”

To his credit, Gavron also allows us to look into the heart and mind of the young Arab who turns to terrorism.

“Me, I preferred to think about something else,” muses Fahmi. “Until the army erected a dirt ramp around Murair for a week and I moved to Al-Amari, where a quarter of the families managed to stay alive only thanks to the rations of rice, flour, powdered milk, sugar and oil from the UNRWA. How long could I sit around on my arse watching TV [or] walking the same streets and alleys between grey breeze blocks and open sewers, hoping that the wind would cover the stench with the smell of cooking or cumin?”

Gavron’s story offers an intimate perspective on life in contemporary Israel. The Croc works in a struggling high-tech start-up company that is forced to relocate from posh quarters in Tel Aviv to a remote industrial park, a move that turns out to have fateful implications. He has a fondness for falafel, hardly surprising in light of the fact that the author himself has published a collection of falafel reviews. And Gavron lampoons the way Israeli television, not unlike our own, packages and sells even the most frightful incidents in the news.

But the author never strays very far from the theme of terror as a fact of life. “Every time there was an attack in Jerusalem she added its location to her map,” he writes of one of the Croc’s co-workers. “She had a theory she repeated every week, which explained in almost credible scientific detail why it was her destiny to die in an attack. She’d become accustomed to living with the fear. Her radar was permanently on: Every five minutes she was compulsively checking out what was behind her.”

The same tight focus on the telling detail is directed at the acts of terrorism. Gavron describes, for example, exactly how a suicide bomber’s explosive belt is constructed and how it is triggered. He even shows us the stray fragment of metal from an exploding bomb that put Fahmi into a hopeless coma: “The size of a spectacle screw.” And he allows us to eavesdrop on the innermost thoughts in Fahmi’s mind as he finds himself riding in a car with the Croc.

“So what is going through your head when you are sitting in a green Polo on a clear night, a hand grenade in your lap?” Fahmi thinks to himself. “Your finger in its ring, like the wedding ring you never had, like the wedding ring he never had, bringing you together in holy matrimony, you and the grenade — the pomegranate, the apple of knowledge. What is going through your head?”

I will not spoil the reader’s pleasure by giving away too much about Gavron’s debut American novel, except to say that no matter how you parse the story in progress, the novel ends in a way that you will never quite anticipate. That’s the sure sign of a master storyteller at work and one of the reasons why “Almost Dead” is such a compelling and rewarding book.

Jonathan Kirsch, author of 13 books, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal and blogs at