The two years since October 7, 2023, have seen a tremendous outpouring of works of witness. The National Library of Israel did a survey at the one-year mark and found 169 published volumes dealing with the catastrophe—30 works classed as nonfiction, 29 as testimony, 14 as books of poetry and a handful of other categories, including children’s books and works touching on faith and prayer.
The NLI’s numbers hadn’t been updated as of this writing, but it’s safe to guess they’re still rising. Probably they’ll even accelerate, as writers and readers grope for a way to put a shape to all that’s happened, despite continued uncertainty as to how the story will turn out. Outside Israel, patterns are similar, though over a smaller number of titles. The upcoming second yahrzeit is being marked with major releases by several American publishing houses, including what’s billed as the first book-length account of captivity by a former hostage, already a bestseller in Hebrew, Eli Sharabi’s Hostage. (Dan Raviv reviews that and two other October 7-related books in this issue’s “Literary Moment” section.)
Fiction, at its best, can be “about” a calamity by having a human story play out in its vicinity, absorbing the vibrations it lets off.
A ripple of this literary tsunami lapped against our ankles at Moment this spring when a few editors sat down to one of our favorite tasks of the year, reading entries for the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest. We weren’t surprised, as we worked our way through the pile, to see story after story attempting to wrestle with October 7-related themes. But maybe we should have been surprised—and once I saw the stats, I became increasingly so—because in Hebrew at least, October 7 fiction has been all but missing in action.
“My impression is that little to no fiction regarding October 7 has come out yet in Hebrew—it’s too soon and too raw,” says Reuven Ziegler, editor of Koren Publishers in Jerusalem. Others working in the literary space echo his impression. “The reality of these past few years outstrips the imagination,” says Oriya Mevorach, coauthor of the nonfiction narrative volume One Day In October: Forty Stories, Forty Heroes. “You don’t need to invent anything. Everything that’s happened, if I read it in a novel or a script, I wouldn’t believe it.”
The genres that led the way in responding to the shattering events of that day and their aftermath were, inevitably, journalism, followed by an outpouring of poetry and also a flowering of personal testimony, as much in the therapeutic as the artistic mode. In Israel, the single bestselling book since its appearance in March 2024 has been One Day in October, a collaboration between Mevorach and the documentary filmmaker/journalist Yair Agmon, which drew on in-depth interviews with survivors to craft first-person narratives with a propulsive immediacy. Likewise, in the United States, standouts at the first anniversary included October 7: 100 Stories, a compilation of direct accounts assembled by novelist Lee Yaron, and The Gates of Gaza by Amir Tibon, a haunting personal account interspersed with Israeli history by the Haaretz journalist whose father, a retired general, drove across the country to save him and his family from their beleaguered safe room in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
Yaron, who lives in Israel, has said that collecting first-person testimonies was an essential piece of her own attempts to cope and heal; by all accounts, the process of collecting testimony has been a relief to both tellers and listeners. More immediate relief has come from the copious outpouring of poetry: Poets in Hebrew have a rich vocabulary of suffering, going right back to the prayer book and the psalms. Some of the most gripping and widely embraced poems—read at funerals and at shivas, at hurried military weddings and on the evening news—are adaptations of prayers, such as Asaf Gur’s poem “Kaddish,” or versions of the Book of Lamentations that intersperse references to Kibbutz Be’eri or Nir Oz with the ancient text.
Compared with this waterfall of journalism and personal testimony, Israel’s many novelists have produced barely a trickle. Both in Israel and in the diaspora, some of the most important working novelists seem to have fallen silent. The reasons aren’t hard to intuit: While poetry and nonfiction both take their material directly from the raw unfiltered immediacy of mass tragedy, fiction brings in imagination, distance, shaping. Novels take longer to write, requiring hot emotions to cool and set. More important, perhaps, good fiction writing is an exercise in the kind of radical empathy that can go numb in trauma.
“The thought of working on fiction seems beyond absurd to me right now,” novelist Ruby Namdar told Gal Beckerman in The Atlantic in 2024. Some writers flinched from fiction out of some sense that making things up felt inappropriate, especially in a media environment where the horrific reality of what had happened was being challenged daily; others seemed to be channeling the famous dictum of Theodore Adorno that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbarism. The Israeli novelist Dror Mishani told Le Monde in a March interview that “I simply couldn’t carry on as if nothing had happened. It seemed impossible to go into my office every morning and give life to characters totally disconnected from what was going on around me.”
Mishani set aside the novel he’d been working on—he writes noirish thrillers that feature a troubled policeman called Avraham Avraham—and instead published a war diary, not yet out in English, whose title translates as On the Ground Floor. When he subsequently returned to his novel in progress, he discovered that “the war had affected my characters,” with the policeman in charge of reassembling slaughtered bodies and experiencing other horrors newly familiar in real life.
It was a poet, Emily Dickinson, who advised, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—Success in Circuit lies.”
The impossibility of empathy with which Mishani struggled was not only internal but partly societal. While blocked on his novel, he told the interviewer, he worked on a script for a TV series based on an actual October 7 incident in which a police station in Sderot was stormed by 26 Hamas fighters, who killed all the officers on duty before the IDF arrived and killed the attackers. But when Mishani tried to write the Hamas characters as actual people, he found his imaginative processes not just paralyzed but feeling somehow off limits. “Even if most of them were extremely cruel, I felt it was important to understand their trajectory,” he told Le Monde. “But in Israel, it’s almost forbidden to tell the story of these men. It’s taboo. For example, I never managed to find out their names.” (Other writers also admitted in those early months that they couldn’t find empathy in their hearts for Palestinian suffering, even including Dorit Rabinyan, who’s celebrated for writing a novel that was yanked from high school curricula for depicting an Israeli-Palestinian romance.)
In the absence of new fiction addressing the moment, some literary publishers have made do with books written just before October 7 that nonetheless strike something of the right note of existential despair. For readers of both English and Hebrew, Etgar Keret’s short story collection Autocorrect, which came out in English this summer, meets this need uncannily. The stories read like a direct commentary on the world after October 7, with characters suffering violent deaths as a result of trivial decisions, or dipping in and out of depressing alternate universes and disconcerting afterlives. But that’s just Keret’s signature dark edginess. All but one of the stories were written before October 7, some of them long before.
The story Keret wrote immediately post-October 7 is called “Intention.” First published in The Guardian, it comes last in Autocorrect. In it, the news of what has happened causes Yechiel-Nachman, an ailing and isolated religious introvert, to put all else aside and pray for the mitigation of the catastrophe with true, whole, perfect intention. Keret fans will not be surprised that, despite Yechiel-Nachman’s best efforts, even the purest of intentions does not wring a good result from an uncaring universe.
Perhaps the most significant influence fiction has had on the Israeli literary moment has been indirect. Ziegler, the publisher, notes that the techniques of fiction have proved invaluable to nonfiction narratives. They contributed mightily, for instance, to the power of One Day in October, which, despite the certainty by everyone involved that the book would be too much, too soon, sold out its first printing in a week.Another key aspect of literary fiction, also to do with indirection, may be what ultimately proved redemptive for the entries in the Moment-Karma Fiction Contest. It was a poet, Emily Dickinson, who advised, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—Success in Circuit lies.” Once our part of the contest was over and we’d shipped the finalists on to be judged by novelist Richard Zimler, the stories that proved most successful—two of which appear in this issue—were the ones that approached their throbbing central topic most obliquely. Fiction, at its best, can be “about” a calamity not by describing it—that job is rightly left to others—but by having a human story play out in its vicinity, absorbing the vibrations it lets off.
The authors of both of the winning short stories that appear in this issue live in Israel; they write in English, which may have offered some distance from the intensity of it all, but they also found other ways of achieving that crucial small measure of indirection. Marla Braverman’s “This Is the How the World Ends” appears to be set in the aftermath of October 7 but then pulls a change-up; as its characters take center stage, the background morphs into an imagined post-October 7 scenario featuring a different war in which Israelis are fighting incursions on three fronts. In the other story, Chaya Chernikovsky’s “The Artist,” the Israel-Hamas war’s effect on the characters is profound, but so subtle that I missed the reference on first reading.
The American literature scholar Andrew Delbanco has pointed out how after the American Civil War, the rich metaphorical imagery used by such authors as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne seemed to have drained away, leaving major works about the war composed in the flat, affectless tone of, say, Stephen Crane. The loss of metaphor, he argued, was a spiritual catastrophe, as if saying a thing represented another thing implied more order in the universe than exhausted veterans could muster. Seen that way, we can be glad that our contest winners insist on at least trying to grasp some fragment of our time in fiction. Perhaps, in time, the resurgence of fiction will signal a renewed willingness by writers to shape raw events into stories with meaning.