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Nissim Aloni, Burning Tiger:
unveiling a tormented soul

Sarit Fuchs

As an individual who wrote with the invisible ink used by spies, Nissim
Aloni – one of the greatest Israeli playwrights, who has been a fighter in
the War of Independence (1948) – encrypted his very personal emotional
and mental battle. Company Sergeant Major Nissim Aloni had started to
document his war experiences which, in fact, have been reflected in the
hardships described in his stories published in magazines and
newspapers. They recorded his fear of dying, the embittered shock at the
brutality displayed by some of his comrades-at-arms, the traumatized
soldiers - himself included - the mysterious passion for war. "Fears," a
long and heartbreaking story, recounts the story of a battle-wounded
soldier evacuated to hospital, with a chilling penetration into his
consciousness: "I was not a human being anymore." The trauma occurred
after he needed to collect his friend's severed head, together with his
other organs, and bring them to a safe place. In the book Burning Tiger,
I cross-referenced the testimonies of his comrades in battle with Aloni’s
short stories, and they were revealed as being factual.

Aloni is considered to be a fantastic playwright in the ethos of Israeli
theater – lyrically transporting us, like a magician, to distant worlds of
kings, circuses, gypsies, imaginary countries, fireworks and confetti.
Eight years of research and writing preceded the publication of Burning
Tiger, during which I followed, among other things, the reverberations of
those war stories in Aloni’s plays. I followed the characters, including he
himself, in all kinds of disguises and reincarnations. "The war killed
him," they say in the play Eddie King, about a resident in a particular
mental hospital, "he puts on plays here ... old plays ... from the history of
kings ... love ... intrigues".

Aloni's close friends – who even during his lifetime elevated him to the
level of a god – tried to silence my voice and the voice in my book
because as far as they were concerned, we were talking about a divine
individual. But I wrote the book out of love and identification. This did
not detract from the magic of his plays. And the main thing is: I'm not an
idolater.

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