“There is no such thing as non-fiction,” said novelist David Peace in a recent television interview and I’m inclined to agree. So when the Jewish Book Council’s annual Sami Rohr Prize – a new literary award that has instantly become the most important book prize in the loosely affiliated world of Jewish writing – chose to alternate its annual prize between “Fiction” and “Non-fiction”, I was surprised to say the least.

I was even more surprised when I found out that Lucette Lagnado was the winner of the non-fiction prize – not because of her undoubted ability but because the prize committee has implicitly agreed with my reservations about the genre distinctions by choosing, on the face of it, two extremely similar books for the fiction and non-fiction prizes.

The two highly deserving winners of the prize so far have been Tamar Yellin and Lucette Lagnado, winners of fiction and non-fiction, respectively. The committee is at pains to note that they celebrate writers not books, but in the past two years I have not read two more similar books than the ones that preceded their receipt of the Rohr Prize – The Genizah at the House of Shepher and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.

Both books are archaeologies of their fathers’ culture told through daughter-centric biographies. Both explore the paternal family and its transformation as the father moves from a colorful Levant to the bland, English-speaking West. The crucial, if hairsplitting difference is that, although both are recounted in skillfully literary ways, one is ostensibly a fictional account of her family based on certain key historical facts whereas the other purports to be a historical account of her family based on research and family lore.

So why does the prize split these genre hairs? And, if the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is negligible, what are pertinent distinctions for literature? 2. The Narrative World of Language

We live in an interwoven world that is available to us only through narrative. Quantitative information may appear to be objective (Earth gravity is 10 m/s2), but meaningful knowledge does not exist independently of its context (what is a meter? what is a second?). When the context unfolds diachronously (over time) knowledge is available narratively (putting the “story” in “history”). When the context is synchronous (at one moment in time), knowledge of the immediate situation is available through exposition (literally putting in a place), or through explanation (laying flat).

Either way, describing knowledge is always a matter of double transformation: perceiving and expressing. Although perception can be a gestalt, immediate thing, expression always unfolds through time, through a narrative. We can perceive certain apparent facts instantly; we can only explain significance narratively.

When we describe, or even understand something (i.e. mentally describe it), we translate it into meaning for ourselves. Then, to pass on that understanding, we form an expression that depends on the tools and abilities we have. At one end of the spectrum we have Picasso or Shakespeare whose abilities to express new understandings of the worlds around them seem almost limitless. At the other end we have young children whose abilities to form sentences, opinions, expressions are tightly circumscribed by their stage in development.

Nevertheless the spectrum is continuous, containing everyone who forms an expression: “When you say to give form, you’re giving a shape to something that’s much more nebulous,” Art Spiegelman told the LA Times in October “As soon as you try to tell the truth, you’re always lying.” Language is our pre-eminent meaning-making tool. It is what determines how we view the infinite world around us, but it is a tool of production, not of revelation.

I mean the word “infinite” seriously here. There are literally an infinite number of ways to describe even the simplest of objects or relationships, large or small, wide or narrow scope, single, double, or multiple perspectives. As we absorb and understand the world around us using the creative faculty of our imagination, we enter the world of language. This internal world is not controversial – some Jewish thinkers describe it as the Olam Ha Dimayon (‘the world of imagination’) – however, whether it is organized through language has been in dispute since at least Sapir and Whorf proposed their hypothesis.

Moving from that internal world, though, into human society requires the medium of language. Literature is any work – for the sake of argument – that takes both its imagination and the medium of that imagination seriously. As a finite tool in the face of the infinite, language – even in literature, its most potent form – is partial, subjective, and unavoidably biased.

So, what’s my point? Since descriptions of the world are already figurative and dependent on a representational mode that is totally different from the world it describes, fiction and non-fiction are only contingent products of authorial truth-claims. When Chief Bromden says, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen” he’s explaining Kesey’s truth claim. Kesey ventriloquizes Bromden to elide the messy proof, but his point is that saying something like “the rain came stabbing down” may be less literally true than “it was raining hard.” However, the metaphorical truth of “stabbing down” is much richer and more figuratively true.

Likewise for the whole book, Kesey could have written a scathing expose of the similarities between the social constraints of US capitalist society and other oppressive twentieth century hegemonies, with nods to Native Americans, technology, Foucauldian methods of medical labeling and marginalization and the warping of individual relationships. He could, but not only would it have been much more narrowly read. It would also have been less fully true. 3. The Seduction of Truth

Readers, of course, want escapism from books, but they also want the illusion of both truth (reportage of verifiable facts or the titillation of confessions) and Truth (revelation of the world as it really is).

The current obsession of the English-book buying public with biography, self-help, and non-fiction is a literal failure of the imagination. It is part of the spectrum of public disorders that has led, at the extreme, to fundamentalism: the denial of the subtlety of language and of the necessary situatedness of knowledge. Fundamentalism (and the simplistic streak in us all) believes that scriptures or texts in general can be fully true and simply understood.

The word text comes from the Latin texere meaning “to weave." The combination of vision (we talk about seeing something when we understand it) and a woven tapestry work well as a metaphor to illustrate the fallacy of fundamentalism, of literalism. That tendency exists in us all, but those who embrace it fully see a framed and woven tapestry from a certain angle and think that their anamorphic view of the text is not only a view of the Real through a window, but the ONLY possible view of the Real. Even if an individual does experience a revelation (looks out of the window, rather than just glimpsing the woven representation of it) this revelation can only be explained by weaving together a tapestry of words.

The desperate craving for the Truth and its apparent availability in non-fiction, betrays the desperate desire for there to be a simple window onto the Real world, whereas (and we can see this daily on the Internet) all we can do is produce more and more text explaining what we are understanding. The world is not simple, and it’s not immediately available. We grasp where we are by grasping how we know where we are. Pretending that language is Truth rather than just representation ignores that we live in a narrative world.

A further complication of the metaphor of window/ tapestry is that the “tapestry” is no less our world than the putative Real world outside the putative window. Just as windows, appliances, and decorations form our living space so the windows, tapestries, and language tools form our own perceivable living space.

Our contemporary yearning for “non-fiction” is just the latest distrust in the truth of fiction: Montaigne had to deal with a contemporary attitude that all fiction is lies and Plato even exiled the poets from The Republic for their refusal to adhere to verifiable truths. In our contemporary society, where the life of the collective mind is beginning to rival the life of the collective planet in its interdependence, the strength and sanity of an individual or society is a function of the ability to imagine the possibilities within and beyond the possible.

Within that the category of verifiable facts is a large but extremely limited category and Truth is a chimera. All language lies. The question is only how far is it able to enlighten us about the way that the material and imagined worlds work. 4. Sami Rohr Redux

The lines between categories of books are not set in stone: Franz Kafka once wrote that by taking his diaries and changing the “I” to “he” he instantly became a writer of fiction. As any biographer will tell you, the lines between biography, fiction, and gossip are not so much deserted or even carefully-patrolled border walls as open, crowded and intersecting boulevards. And, although the problem is often more visible in biography and autobiography, fiction, exposition, polemic, memoir, self-help and all our other books are also located in and around the same boulevards. Address, though, is the key to this metaphor – in this bustling commerce of ideas how do we find what we want, and how do we tell others where to look?

Of course one reason that it’s difficult to find what we want is that writers have no real interest in categories. Yes they may identify their work as belonging to a genre or even (pace Jakobson) play games with the accepted rules of genres but writers have books that they want to write, not genres that they want to populate. Philip Roth’s Patrimony is autobiographical but it hardly jumps out of his oeuvre and demands special attention. Likewise, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is diminished by lumping it into either “detective” fiction or “Jewish” fiction. Indeed Chabon’s particular virtuosity seems, like the Coen brothers with films, to be the ability to master and tweak genres so that they are barely themselves.

These two authors are clearly already recognized by both market and critics, but the Sami Rohr Prize is not interested in honoring these already acclaimed types of author. The clues to its interest come in the details. First, although the prize goes mainly to one person and is mainly based on one book, there are significant prize is not a one-shot deal and the runners up each year get significant honorable mentions that sell books and provide ongoing invitations to private literary seminars. Second, the prize goes to the writer, not the specific book. It seems disingenuous in practice because writers are only as good as their latest books, but in theory it’s a significant distinction. Writers are the human sites of production and expression rather than books, which are the products and, sometimes contingently, the commodities they produce.

This year’s honorees included Ilana Blumberg for her Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books and Eric Goldstein for his Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity. They are both excellent books and deserve awards but the authors are also thinking about a set of issues that appeal to a particular type of committee. The former charts in lyrical autobiographical detail the difficulty of being an orthodox Jewish young woman and woman who loves both scripture and literature. The latter is a broad and nuanced history of how Jews have identified and been identified in a country dominated by the black-white racial divide.

Gender, race, ashkenazim to go with Lucette’s sephardi roots, academics to go with the novelists, Americans in the North, South, and Midwest to go with last year’s winners from England, Israel, and the West Coast: men and women, orthodox, progressive, and secular. The Rohr Prize is not like a Nobel Prize, but rather one large grant along with several other tickets to a salon. The tickets come with money for drinks, new clothes, and time to prepare but the real aim is to create in a Jewish milieu an elite conversation in which a diverse group of growing Jewish writers can talk to each other.

The categories used by the Prize are important because they allow us to think about two crucial distinctions: writers as opposed to books; and prize categories as distinct from bookshop categories on the one hand and critical categories on the other. Prizes are designed to encourage a particular type of enterprise rather than either reflect a market or develop a critical approach. In this case however, the enterprise is actually one of diverse reflection on what it is to be a Jewish writer. The body of work presented by these authors is a college application and it remains to be seen what the graduating theses look like.

Even for the Sami Rohr Prize, then, the alternation between fiction and non-fiction is, in the end, not a significant distinction, it’s just a means to the end of a putative diversity in the mixture of the group – like state, race, and income representation at an Ivy League college. Ironically the fiction of the Prize’s alternating genre serves a practical, not a theoretical purpose. It’s a misrepresentation in order to get at a fuller truth – just like non-fiction itself!

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In Skulls , Scalin describes how every day for a full year he posted a new skull crafted from new material, or in a new way, online (arranged pennies, stapled leaves, carved watermelons). For centuries representations of skulls in painting (Holbein’s The Ambassadors, 1533), literature (alas, poor Yorick), and sculpture (most recently in Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, 2007) have reminded us, as the Book of Common Prayer’s Burial Service intones, that “in the midst of life we are in death.” But for a year online, and through more than 365 skulls (readers sent in theirs too), Scalin showed that death can be far from deadly.

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People always ask whether it's too early to make a joke about recent disasters. It's the wrong question. Wars and terrorist events, in themselves, are never funny – 9/11 is not funny per se, now or ever. Yet, at a certain moment-say, the moment of Team America: World Police in the case of 9/11 – the event becomes susceptible to a certain type of comic analysis. You don't want to test the funny bone with a broken arm, but as with a physical trauma, surgery and other interventions are possible and necessary immediately, while rehab and detailed diagnostics of the wound must wait until a certain amount of healing has occurred.

The wound in the case of the Middle East is not borne of a single discrete trauma. You can point to the Declaration of Independence of Israel in 1948 as that moment, as many Palestinians do, but there are a number of other possible starting points. Some would start with Napoleon's 1798 arrival in Egypt from the first European nation state, others to the establishment of the British Mandate separating Palestine and Transjordan from the French Mandate of Syria. Abdelrahman Munif starts Cities of Salt with the arrival of the Americans looking for oil in the 1930s, and it seems to be taken as a given by most commentators that the contemporary era really begins in 1967, with Nasser and the Six Day War. The truth is that the complex of issues that are captured by the phrase "Israel/Palestine" have been created by ongoing racial, cultural, religious, social, ethnic and military conflicts that have served both to fix the general locus of the difficulty and to re-sensitize the affected populations in a continuous way.

None of this makes any simple sense for the citizens of the United States.

In the United States, power relations for the past century have generally been stable. The legacy of genocide and slavery has been relegated to a legal footnote and, with its geographical manifest destiny achieved, it's only Michael Moore who is questioning the border on the 49^th parallel (and his yearning for the north is cultural, not expansionist). For a country in which (perhaps ironically for a former colony) the only real challenges to the seemingly natural centralized power of the state are a tug between states' and federal rights, the real, nuanced, and historically complex conflict happening in the Middle East is unfathomable. Americans wonder why these Middle Easterners can't, their admitted religious and political differences notwithstanding, just make love, make money, and eat hummus in peace?

This is the underlying point of Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan if "point" is not too strong a word. Zohan makes a lot of love, including to his obligatory beautiful Arab wife; he ends up with his own successful store; and there is more hummus in the film than sperm in a porn movie (an instructive parallel for your second viewing of the film). Zohan's American dream is to reverse the macho Zionist transformation of the effete European scholar Jews into laborer soldiers of the thorny Holy Land. Zohan wants to escape his superhero counter-terrorist Israeli persona to come to America and make hair "silky smooth." The number of times he gets called a "feigele" (Yiddish for "homo") for admitting this dream is exactly equal to the number of Jews he tells about it. Only at the end, with his financial and personal success, do his parents accept Zohan.

There's a joke about God failing to get tenure at an Israeli university that sheds some light on the nature of Israeli insecurity. According to the joke, the committee expressed threefold reservations: He only wrote one book, it was in Hebrew, and some people claim that He didn't even write it Himself. Sandler turns that inferiority complex around into a specifically American superiority complex and says "your superhero is good enough to be our superhairdresser." The American's burden is to relieve immigrants of their historical and tribal baggage and transform their faith into belief in consumer culture. Until then, like the native Africans in the eyes of nineteenth century Europeans, you deserve what you get.

Despite certain nods at outrage the film is quintessentially conservative. The plot of the film buys into the "we're all the same" philosophy so clearly that Zohan's arch nemesis, Phantom (John Turturro) has an exactly parallel dream to Zohan's – of opening a shoe shop. And on the level of casting, the color blindness is so strong that Emmanuel Chriqui and Rob Schneider – both Jews – play the two key Arab roles (Dalia and Salim) that aren't played by the Italian American John Turturro. Jokes about homosexuality not being set aside, Zohan establishes his hetero-masculinity through his counter-terrorist exploits and through his flaunted and vaunted sexual prowess. His maturation process is shown by how he replaces the childish craziness of the Middle East with the sanity of the United States (New York serving as cipher for "diverse nation") and his adolescent promiscuity with monogamous marriage. We end up with the bourgeois, monogamous, hetero businessman, the hero of every American dream.

The real conflict in New York is not between Arabs and Israelis but between the rich white Walbridge who wants to knock down the neighborhood and build a mall, and the working middle-class towelhead/kyke coalition of hummus-eating swarthies who currently occupy the real estate. Through a narrative deus ex machina, the coalition is in the end able to appropriate Walbridge's plan but without his ownership – they build their own mall where each can live out his own flavor of the bland American dream. Malls are good, religious and racial difference is illusory or superficial, blanket bigotry is the province of Midwestern white men, and heterosexuality and monogamous marriage are natural parts of growing up.

People born in Israel are known as "sabras." A "sabra" (Heb "tzabar") is literally a cactus, prickly on the outside but sweet and soft in the middle. If the plant didn't live in the desert, logic might follow that it wouldn't need its prickly exterior and it would just be a soft and sweet plant. But then it wouldn't be a sabra. The same is true for the relocated Arab/Israeli conflict. Arabs and Israelis and Jews and Muslims may be able to get on with each other in the United States, and they may even be able to have an effect on the situation in the Middle East, but the model of downtown New York (as seen from Hollywood, California) does not begin to encompass the facts on the ground in the Middle East.

Despite a couple of dialogues between Arabs and Israelis that gesture to complexity – Zohan and the terrorists mention valid disagreements while he is kicking their asses, and the street coalition pays lip service to the difficulties of tolerant co-acculturation when they are provoked by Walbridge's hired thugs – neither Zohan nor its direct antecedent, West Bank Story, escape the blindness or perhaps tone-deafness of California to what is going on in the Middle East. But perhaps it doesn't matter. Zohan (and Adam Sandler) have made a comedic contribution by simply opening the door to more analytic comedies about the conflict.

One such analytic comedy is Avoda Aravit, currently between series on Israel's Channel 2. Written by the comic novelist Sayed Kashua – an Israeli Arab – it is, in format, a fairly traditional family sitcom whose premise, that Israeli Arabs and Jews are constantly interacting, competing, and working with one another, is radical in its simplicity. Kashua has come in for a lot of flak from Arabs for his work as a "collaborator" with the Jewish television station, but that is to be expected when someone works from deep within the conflicted nexus of Israeli and Arab society. More importantly, the show has met with popular success – albeit mostly in Jewish households.

Literally meaning "Arab Labor" the Hebrew phrase "Avoda Aravit" has come to mean "shoddy work" and the multiple meanings of the title include Kashua's desire to reclaim the term from ethnic derogation to an ironic allusion to the daily social, personal, and economic entanglements of Arab/Israeli life. The Jews and the Arabs in the program are all very human and all slightly crazy – nothing they do happens in a vacuum and the context is almost never mono-ethnic. When a tree falls in the wood of Avoda Aravit, it is surrounded by multiple representatives of the major two ethnicities arguing about exactly what damage was done, and whose fault it was that it fell. 

By the end of the first series, the heart of the drama of cohabitation is situated in an Arab-Israeli romance. Amal (Mira Awad), a U.S.-educated feminist lawyer has moved in with Meir (Mariano Idelman), a photographer, but she moves out again because he refuses to tell his mother – "It will kill her!" For the Independence Day / Nakba special Kashua borrows Rushdie's trope of babies born at midnight to symbolize the pressures facing the different communities within the state. The Arab Alayan family (featuring Amjad (Norman Issa)) as a comically Judeophile father) who brought the lovers together are expecting a baby and they think they have a chance of winning a prize offered by a racist Russian-Israeli billionaire (not very loosely based on Ukrainian-Israeli billionaire Arkady Gaydamak) for the first baby born after midnight on Independence Day. At the door of the hospital they bump into a Jewish family also about to give birth and, in racing for the prize, hilarity ensue

Unlike Zohan, the comedy in Avoda Aravit is granular and analytic, taking apart the strands of a life lived and chuckling at the absurd paradoxes and myriad negotiations necessary to get through the day, the month, the year. In both literal and figurative ways different communities speak different languages, and, when they translate themselves into English, Hebrew, and Arabic, they do so with accents and errors. Ceremonies and customs – such as the Seder – are seen through the eyes of the knowingly blasé and the ignorantly excited.

Attitudes to food, names, and clothing are not a shared problem as in Zohan, but a cultural minefield: Amal ditches Meir at their first date because of what he serves and the way he defends it. He makes her a stereotypical Arab spread and she feels treated like a stereotype. Upset by his actions and inability to see his mistake she refers him explicitly to Edward Said's Orientalism – Said's famous critique of western disdain for Arab culture – and Meir asks "Is that a cookbook?" On social and cultural levels both sides fear, emulate and misunderstand the other, but here to comic rather than tragic effect. On a broader level the same political/historical cues (most notably Independence Day itself) also produce widely divergent emotional responses.

As I have written before there are a number of things that comedy can do in the face of prejudice. Avoda Aravit achieves three of the main four. It mitigates the problem by providing a humorous example, it shows how the general culture works, and it decirculates – makes certain words and phrases (like "avoda aravit" itself) unacceptable or useless. Kashua has come in for criticism from the Arab community because he took care to give Arabs as well as Jews equal opportunity to appear foolish. One sitcom is not going to make peace in the Middle East, but Avoda Aravit will make the accommodations and negotiations about daily life more human and more possible by mapping out some of that lived terrain and providing a vocabulary for talking about it.

In countless media offices throughout 2007, executives measured up the public's readiness for Arab/Israeli comedy. Both Zohan and Avoda Aravit indicate that the healing power of comedy is sorely needed – and not just in Israel. It's not too soon. If anything, it's too late.

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The scope of the story is global: it starts in Ethopia, decamps to Israel, leaves for Paris and deals lightly with religious and cultural issues as it travels. To an English-speaking audience tutored on Hollywood films, the plot–a black African has to deal with racial prejudice–also seems pretty universal. The history of the so-called Falashas and their entry to Israel gives the film some local specificity, but it is the internal, secret story of the Christian child hidden as a Jew in Israel that complicates the film in intriguing ways. As one of a black minority whose Judaism is questioned, Schlomo is told, in turn, to be ashamed or have pride in an identity that only he knows is actually a lie. Schlomo is a fascinating cipher for the problem of identity at the level of the individual, the family, and the community for Israel. The issues of identity and persecution are particularly acute for a country dedicated to a people whose persecution is axiomatic but whose sensitivity to prejudice has been, like the curate's egg, good only in parts. For example, from Shimon (Shaike Levi) and Batsheva (Gila Almagor) in Sallah Shabati (1964), to Haled (Saleh Bakri) and Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi) both with Ronit Elkabetz in the aforementioned The Band's Visit and in Late Marriage (2001) respectively and on to Sarah (Roni Hadar) in Live and Become a disquieting trope has emerged. In films about racial or national discrimination cultural acceptance is shown by the protagonist sleeping with a "local" woman. Clearly it's a powerful type of image, and there's nothing wrong with it per se, but even in Israeli film it's a tired figure for a non-comic film. Live and Become is not a profoundly substantial film. It adds little to our understanding of race, culture, or human relationships. It is, however, a film with some claim to effectiveness and artistic success. A complicated story is well told and the framing of the film, at the beginning and end, works surprisingly well for such a potentially open-ended film. The central issues of the film (deracination, prejudice, growing pains) avoid both the cloying and the didactic. Much credit is due to Yael Abecassis who plays Yael, the adoptive mother, and of course to the succession of actors (Moshe Agazai, Mosche Abebe, and Sirak M. Sabahat) who play Schlomo, the lead character. They imbue the central relationship of the film with a convincing depth which rarely draws on stereotypes which keeps the film from the triteness it occasionally threatens. Live and Become is not a film that will shift any paradigms but it is a skilfully spun drama that illustrates some complex difficulties of fitting into a culture that's even set up to absorb multiple cultures. As demonstrated by language, by colour, by culture, by geography and shifting historical prejudices in the film, neither on the level of the general nor on the level of the specific are things really about black and white.

Note: Live and Become premiered in 2005, but only opened in New York in this spring.

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