In a minor accident shortly after the end of the Six-Day War, a moped courier hits a cat in Jerusalem. Full of guilt, Eli, the driver, takes the injured animal to the doctor. It turns out that the cat had previously lived with an Arab family who, like many others, had fled East Jerusalem after the end of the war. Hundreds of thousands of stray cats now roam the western part of the city in search of food, where they join up with their local counterparts, indistinguishable from them.
The moped courier becomes the plaything of a very self-confident pet that he has taken in out of sheer remorse, and he can hardly defend himself against the increasingly tricky orders from his boss at the courier service. At the same time, the population of hungry cats grows steadily until they eventually form packs to hunt larger and larger animals together. When they finally start attacking humans too, the Israelis suddenly wake up from their victory after the successful battle against the neighboring countries. Eli, who is now involved in money laundering through his courier trips, has to decide between cats and humans in the flaring war.
Ron Segal is a master at incorporating surreal narrative strands into his story, which reveal a sure sense of humor without ever slipping into the grotesque. A great reading experience – no matter how you feel about cats.
© Secession Publishing House
About the author
Mathias Bothor
RON SEGAL
born in 1980 in Rehovot, Israel, is a graduate of the Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem. His animated and award-winning graduation film The Stain was shown at numerous international festivals. In 2009, he came to Berlin on a DAAD scholarship, where he still lives with his family. Katzenmusik is his second novel and was awarded the Yosef Campus Award in Israel. The work on the book was supported by the Alfred Döblin Scholarship of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the scholarship of the Stuttgart Writers’ House and KulturKontakt Austria.
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