Violence In Ayelet Tsabari's The Best Place On Earth

Within all the short stories compiled to make up Ayelet Tsabari’s collected work, The Best Place on Earth, violence is consistently present. Naturally, the conflict which has, and currently still creates strife in Israel leads to the inclusion of violence in her stories. Whether the characters presently live in Israel, or have moved on from the region, the chaos from the country is incorporated into their lives. Tsabari was born in Israel, and is all too familiar with the horrors the wars have created. However, she has remained authentic with the presentation of her homeland in The Best Place on Earth, and by including violent aspects they help to carry her message through to her readers. She does not go overboard to create gory stories that will deter readers. Rather, she shows how violence, although a tragedy, is necessary to include because of the importance it has in shaping her Israeli characters into who they are in both positive and negative ways, and how a person can become desensitized …show more content…
This is essential to creating the complex dynamic of feelings her characters express. In “The Poets in the Kitchen Window,” the violence Uri is exposed to creates an internal conflict of what exactly is a man? He gives up his affection for poetry, and begins working out, trying to live up to the masculine image of a war hero that he associates with how a man is supposed to act. He remarks, he did not want to be known “as the nerdy poet boy,” but rather be like the “heroic men in uniform” (“The Poets, 71”). In this scenario, although not actually taking part in the violence himself, Uri still feels its related pressures from growing up during a period of war. The violence from Israel, is necessary to include in her stories, because it is accountable for creating the realistic problems people would have living through such traumatic