Picnic Grounds is an understated but very powerful collection of short vignettes (the fragments of the title), anywhere from a half page to a page and a half long, about life in Israel, mostly in and around Jerusalem. More specifically, they are about denial and absurdity. The "absurdity" aspect could mostly be about government deception and double-talk anywhere. But the "denial" dimension, much more prevalent overall, are about a very specific Israeli phenomenon, the historic denial of the destruction of Palestinian villages and the uprooting and banishment, sometimes the murder, of their inhabitants around the time of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Here is the book's opening fragment, from which it takes its title:

"A professor of History from Bayit Va-Gan took his family for a picnic in a quiet pinewood near Giv'at Shaul, formerly known as Deir Yassin. It was not too cold to be in the shade and not too warm to build a fire, so the professor passed on to his son camping skills he had acquired in the army. They arranged three square stones in a U, to block the wind, leaving access on the fourth side. They stacked broken branches on top of twigs on top of dry pine needles. He let his son put a match to it. Listening carefully, they heard a faint low hum from the curves of the winding highway, hidden from view by the trees. They professor did not talk of the village, origin of the stones. He did not talk of the village school, now a psychiatric hospital, on the other side of the hill. He imagined that he and his family were having a picnic, unrelated to the village, enjoying its grounds outside history."

This short "fragment" becomes even more powerful if a reader recognizes Deir Yassin as the scene of an infamous massacre of Palestinian villagers by members of the far right terrorist paramilitary groups, Irgun and Lehi, in 1948. Not many of the fragments refer to specific incidents, but more to general historical patterns. A common theme, for example, is the wholesale planting of pine forests, non-indigenous trees that did harm to local ecosystems, to cover over the traces of the villages and farms that Palestinians had been evicted from. The psychic cost to individual Israelis, especially army veterans, is also alluded to.

Shelach was born in West Jerusalem in 1968. He was in the army when the first Intifada broke out. Entirely disillusioned, he left Israel for New York City at the age of thirty. This book was published five years later, in 2003. He became an activist for Palestinian rights and Israeli protest. Or was. I could find no reference to him online any more recent than the interviews he gave in support of this book and the reviews of it. The blog he had set up seems to be inactive.

Here is a very revealing interview Shelach gave in 2003:
https://www.worldpress.org/1012.cfm

But not entirely revealing, for we have to read this approving review:

https://www.haaretz.com/1.5369983

from the Israeli publication, Haaretz, to learn this:

"We live in a small country. If we know who Oz Shelach is, a shiver goes down our spine, because it is difficult to forget what this young storyteller's connection is to Sinai {In October 1985, his entire family was killed in a terrorist attack in Ras Burqa}. But if we do not yet know who Oz Shelach is, let us be patient. No, he will not say a word about Ras Burqa, perhaps because that story has had so many interpretations that he hates, and he is telling the same story, over and over again, about our desire to escape from this country that has no history, and the return to its history, which is not our history. Again and again, nature is subverted; this is 'our' nature."

My wife picked up this slim book the last time we were at City Lights Books in San Francisco, one of my favorite spots on the planet. City Lights is also the book's publisher. ( )