Bridge Over Troubled Waters: The City of Haifa in Lavie Tidhar's
Stories  By Ehud Maimon  The city of Haifa is the venue of six
stories by Lavie Tidhar. These stories were not written as a
cycle, and only two of them are even directly linked through a
shared character, but they all find an engaged setting in the
ancient city of Haifa on the Eastern Mediterranean. This isn't
to say that they simply take place in a city called "Haifa," a
passive participant to the activity within it. Rather, Tidhar's
Haifa plays a role in all these stories, and through
characteristics common across them, acts as a bridge between its
local culture and the more universal enterprise of speculative
fiction.  Four characteristics appear in one form or another in
all of Lavie Tidhar's Haifa stories: 1) the power of books and
bookstores to shape the reality of the city and the way the
protagonists perceive reality; 2) the city's sanctity
(especially with regard to sun and fire worship); 3) the eternal
nature of the city, its harbor, a