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Reviewed by Christopher Byrd
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Here’s a question in the service of literature that doesn’t come up too often: can you abide dead baby jokes? What if they’re nestled in the Swiftian tradition of A Modest Proposal, but come packaged by way of Israel instead of Ireland?
Orly Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City, is a surrealistic tale (Louis Buñuel is namedropped) that defaces the stereotype of the overbearing, Jewish mother. The narrative also bites its thumb at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it coasts on an absurd plot involving the interloping employees of an airline company that get between a lunatic and her son.
Dolly (or Doctor Dolly to give her the honorific she travesties at every turn), is the unreliable narrator of events. On the verge of thirty, she is deprived of her goldfish and dog. She takes the goldfish’s loss lightly. In her marble appointed kitchen, she spends an inordinate amount of time mincing it up, and munching on it. Alas, the demise of her fourteen-year-old, cocker spaniel initiates a series of occurrences that lead her to harvest the wind.
After euthanizing her dog, Dolly employs the services of a pet undertaker who stipulates that she not accompany him to her dog’s internment. Bucking his injunction, she trails him by hopping on a conveniently available elevator, then descending from the thirty-seventh floor of her four–hundred story apartment building. While he fumbles with his car’s ignition, she conceals herself in the backseat. The bloke merits her suspicion. As he buries her dog, he desecrates its corpse with a pitchfork. Furious, Dolly rushes from her nook and wrests the tool away; she liquidates him promptly. On the drive back to her apartment, she discovers a baby in a black plastic bag, situated on the ledge between the backseat and rear windshield. The only form of identification she locates for the baby is the Health Department diaper that clothes him.
Dolly takes to motherhood like a pedophile to a juvenile detention facility; she wastes no time besmirching her authority. While “Son” is sleeping, she devours a sixteenth-century book devoted to childhood illnesses. “I was sucked,” she says, “into someplace outside of the normal atmosphere. I was terrified, and my terror had a magic, addictive effect.” With her maternal instinct running haywire, Dolly inoculates the child against everything she can think of, all in one go. Naturally, the infant’s immune system is overwhelmed.
After succumbing to another overreaction, Dolly awakens from giving Son a blood transfusion to find her mother in the same room. The elder woman chides her daughter for not inviting her to the baby’s bris—an event of which Dolly has no recollection. The mother rightfully worries about her daughter’s mental fortitude, and then points out some photo albums and a video cassette commemorating the ceremony. Perusing these items, Dolly finds that among the guests she can only make out her sister—whom she rings up to ask about the identity of the mohel. Her sister directs her to the baggage department at Pan-T—the national airline where their father worked for thirty-two years.
When she gets the mohel on the line, he says that he was hired by a man, whom he assumed to be a senior airplane pilot. Here is where the action movie plot kicks it up a notch. Doing a little lock & load, Dolly emerges from her armory and hops a cab to Ben Gurion Airport. In the salaries department of Pan-T, she executes the secretary, “the dwarfish clerk,” and her father’s replacement. She then does a most unpleasant thing to the boss involving a string and “a hungry demented rat.” From there it is but a short distance to needlessly invasive surgery performed on the baby; carving the map of Israel on its back; and decimating a German orphanage—headed by guilt-ridden woman—because she fears incorrectly that Son is missing a kidney:
“Stephanie Poldark,” I said suddenly, because I knew that an open wound was a great doorway to opportunity. “I want free access to the kidneys of all your babies up to the age of six months.”
“Whatever you like,” she said. “Just do me one favor. If you’re already opening them up—open their heads too. See if there’s a screw loose somewhere in our German heads.”
Elsewhere, Dolly equates her derangement with the political situation in Israel:
Beyond any doubt—madness is a predator. Its food is the soul. It takes over the soul as rapidly as our forces occupied Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip in 1967. After madness takes over and settles in the territory of the human mind, the mad cows come into the picture. All they know to do is eat, so they stuff themselves sick and lay the fields to waste. And if a state like the State of Israel can’t control the Arabs in the territories, how can anybody expect me, a private individual, to control the occupied territories inside myself?
In fact, when her sister intervenes on the child’s behalf, Dolly asks her when she will be permitted to regain custody, to which the sister replies, “When you return to the ’67 borders.”
Originally published in 1992, Dolly City is only the second of Castel-Bloom’s numerous books have been published in the United States; Human Parts (2003) is also informed by the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. But the latter book—which is written in a realist style, and composed of interlocking stories that concern life under the threat of the intifada—is a more even work. The problem with Dolly City is a tonal one insofar as the author occasionally seems hemmed in by her cheekiness.
Though it’s simple to appreciate the evocative atmospherics of a description such as, “the sun beat down on the cosmopolitan heads with calm tyranny.” Or the Swiftian orientation of a passage like, “there was nothing left for me to do but confirm his death, pick him up, and throw him down to the hungry Arab workers living on the first floors of the building—let them eat him if they liked.”
Other segments feel ponderous in their inveterate flippancy: “I found a job in the cemetery as an usher, taking the mourners to the grave and showing them the quickest way out. But it bored me stiff, and I gave it up after a week.”
Nonetheless, at only one-hundred-and-fifty-eight pages, these blemishes do not deep-six what is otherwise a jaunty satire on Jewish anxiety, which would make for one hell of a baby-shower gift.
Christopher Byrd is a writer who lives in New York. His reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The American Prospect, The Believer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Wilson Quarterly.