wet cloth as soon as Yaffa had recovered a little, but without any success, and the stains continued to annoy her – until they repainted the whole room, which was already after Aryeh’s funeral… The central fact of Aryeh's suicide is not as important as the values of Israeli society revealed through the smaller incidents around it, e.g. Yaffa's identical reactions to all bad news and Zina's greater concern for the coffee stains. Existentialism Shabbtai's three protagonists all feel a fundamental sickness because of their meaningless existence and the absurd world they inhabit, and have no choice but to denounce the world that betrayed them. According to Gershon Shaked, Shabtai is probably the only Israeli novelist who has “reached a deep understanding of the double meaning of the [Zionist] meta-narrative and the double meaning of the positive heroes.” Past continuous could be seen as an elegy for the working class which, due to its economic successes, has now become decadent. This decadence touches the younger generation as well, and both young and old are doomed from the first sentence of the novel: Goldman’s father died on the first of April, whereas Goldman himself committed suicide on the first of January – just when it seemed to him that finally, thanks to the cultivation of detachment and withdrawal, he was about to enter a new era and rehabilitate himself by means of the “Bullworker” and a disciplined way of life, and especially by means of astronomy and the translation of the Somnium. The younger generations attempts to replace the ideals of the past with sex, self-obsession, and meaningless routines, but these all fail. The only positive force that exists in the novel is the skillful use of language. The death of Zionist ideals engenders the birth of linguistic art, “Though words betray Shabtai’s hero, the storyteller believes these treacherous words. He believes in their symbolic power to describe his crumbling existence.” Somewhat like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Past Continuous presents a funeral at the beginning and a birth at the end (the 'present' of the story spans a gestation period of nine months, from April 1 to January 1). In this case, however, there is no triumph of life over death, and the book ends with an image of the world as a grotesque caricature, populated by people who are dead while still alive: …but Ella ignored her baby, whose head was