Michael Oren is certainly a Jewish renaissance man. He’s a respected historian who wrote the definitive history of the Six-Day War. He’s an accomplished diplomat, serving as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States from 2009-2013. He has been a widely admired political leader, representing the centrist Kulanu party in the Knesset from 2015-2019 and serving as a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s cabinet.
To that list of accomplishments, add that he’s a terrific and provocative storyteller, as we discover in his new collection of short fiction The Night Archer and Other Stories.
Oren’s imaginative GPS is set to a place where the paths of Delmore Schwartz, Stephen King, O. Henry, Etgar Keret, I. B. Singer, and episodes of The Twilight Zone all intersect. This collection of stories—most of them are quite short, just three to six pages—reveal a vigorous and wide-ranging imagination. And underneath it all is a freewheeling and slightly wicked Jewish sensibility, even in the tales that have no obvious Jewish referents.
In the Introduction, Oren reveals that many of these stories were written and stored away during his years as a diplomat. No wonder: not only are Israeli political leaders expected not to publish books during their tenures, but these stories also unveil a dark, romantic imagination of the sort that politicians prefer to keep tamped down.
And many of these stories are quite haunting—and haunted.
Ghosts abound in Oren’s fiction. “Ruin,” the story that opens the collection, is a sort of ghost-story-in-reverse, with a clever moral at its climax. In “The Reenactor,” a Polish actor has a job at a local Jewish museum (that is, a museum to Judaism; the Jews are gone from this place)—until he drunkenly stumbles into the forest, where the ghosts of Jewish martyrs are everywhere. Likewise in “Aniksht,” which also features an Eastern European forest which becomes a place of flight during the Holocaust—and many years later as well.
Some stories seem to draw inspiration from Stephen King. (A compliment: I think King is one of our greatest living storytellers, who knows the economy of words and whose oeuvre is much broader than he receives credit for.) Like King, in some of these stories you can viscerally feel the writer’s glee in taking an idea—sometimes a genuinely twisted one—and riding it home. “The Betsybob” is the most overtly King-ish story, concerning four women who, as childhood friends, once had a shared mystical encounter in the woods near their summer camp. In adulthood, they return, looking for one more connection with one more desperate wish. Oren knows how to stick the landing, too: some of the tales build to a witty and occasionally shocking punchline.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. These short stories also include: would-be political power couples, parents and children, love found and love lost, medieval conquistadors sojourning to the New World, lachrymose novelists, Civil War reenactors, outsider suburban schoolkids, and much more. Oren writes science fiction, mystery, romance, tragedy, animal fables, detective stories, some elaborate allegories, and many sober reflections on human absurdity. It’s all a lot of fun, and written with such economy of language that none of the chapters overstays its welcome.
Oren wears his Jewish sensibility comfortably; that is to say, it’s never heavy-handed or pandering. Two of the stories here—“Day Eight” and “The Book of Jakiriah”—are outright midrashim, told through a comedic lens. And “The Betsybob,” too, is self-aware enough to make reference to the famous Talmudic legend of the Four Sages Who Entered the Orchard (of mystical speculation). Still, Oren’s grasp is much larger than the narrow niche of “Jewish literature.”
In his Introduction, Oren makes the case for a Jewish sensibility that underlies everything that he writes. In particular, he reflects on the paradoxical relationship that Judaism has with freedom: namely, that true freedom is framed by responsibilities and statutes. As it says in Pirkei Avot:
The tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing, incised [חָרוּת] upon the tablets (Exodus 32:16).
Don’t read “חָרוּת/incised on the tablets,” but rather “חֵרוּת/freedom was on the tablets.”
Michael Oren’s freedom—after years of serving the Jewish people in a public capacity—has been well-earned. Here’s hoping there are many more wonders to be drawn from his prolific literary imagination.
I’ll be hosting Ambassador Michael Oren in conversation about The Night Archer on my online platform on Thursday, November 12, at 12:00 noon Eastern time. Register here to receive the Zoom link and passcode.