Take the first sentence of the first story, The Fortune teller, and you will get a feel for how this collection of stories from the 1960s and early 1970s by the Israeli David Shahar treats the reader: ’As will become readily apparent, it’s not the fortune teller that I want to talk about here, but my uncle Kalman’. Even that is disingenuous, though, since nothing in these deceptively simple and calm stories is ’readily apparent’.

Shahar’s stories look at first sight like memoirs, told in the first person, often involving tales of life in Jerusalem either from childhood or as a young man, tales of family and neighbourhood, departure and return: pharmacists, plumbers, Arab, Jewish and British government officials, doctors, mediums and (maybe) fortune tellers. Take a closer look and you see that the main theme or character seems to slip away (as above, where the fortune teller in fact plays a trifling role), moves into something completely different. At the same time you notice that the chain of apparently accidental events has a pattern to it, not psychological but mythical or mystical, involving curious coincidences, doubles, repetitions, strange workings of destiny...

The story Uncle Zemach is a case in point. It is actually about Uncle Zemach who, like many characters in Shahar’s stories, has shunned the world of work in favour of less straightforward paths (painter, musician or simply lethargic advocate of ’philosophical laziness’). But then Uncle Zemach reforms and studies law abroad, returning to Jerusalem with a wife and a sober attitude, unlike his oddball brother Lippa who earns his living playing violin in a cafe. Gradually though, something happens to Zemach: a prestigious and hard-working lawyer, he resigns from his job over a petty quarrel, begins teaching his nephew to draw, sees ghosts, and busies round his sister helping her choose her dress and sort out the lunch menu.... Uncle Zemach is shown to revert to eccentric family ways for reasons which neither he nor the reader readily understands...

So alongside realistic descriptions of life in Jerusalem we find a world of spirits, phenomena belonging to the ’fourth dimension’ and surreal transformations: we read of a perfect water droplet incarnating ’the great calm of life in its essence and its nothingness’, out-of-body experiences, ’double doorways’ into the past and the future, and reincarnated Knights Templars or Christian Crusaders. In relation to this strange world, Jerusalem takes on the role of a stage set, ’the permanent reassuring decor of an old, familiar play into which a man sinks in order to exorcise his own being’.

The mythical, spiritualist aspect of Shahar’s stories contributes forcefully to the uncanny feel of these tales, their seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable unfolding (the woman in the title The woman with the familiar spirit is introduced only at the end of the story), their unemphatic tone — to the point of flatness — and their uncertain genre (memoir, autobiography, fiction?). But this is also why they are so intriguing, retaining a quiet power to dwell in the mind and, literally, to enchant.

’I push back the chair, propel myself toward the door, and peep through the slit in the blind. The plants are silent in their pots. I don’t return to the table, but walk up and down the room with tense, jerky steps before sitting down in an armchair. Now it fills the whole room. The tension in the air is freezing the room into a motionless silence. All solid substances are solid only because of a supreme tension. The floor of the room and its ceiling, the walls and the bookshelves and the books themselves and the table and chairs and copper utensils are solid and firmly fixed in their places only by virtue of this supreme tension. If it should slacken even for a second they would all melt and begin to drip and soon evaporate in whitish tongues of steam. I must fight to the end. If I allow it to reveal itself I’ll be sucked out of this solid substantiality like water swallowed into a pipe or air sucked up into the mouth of a pump.’ p113