Emblems of Diasporic (Re)turns: Introduction

Abstract

Emblems of Diasporic (Re)turns:Introduction Assaf Shelleg In the thick corm of causal, contingent, and incidental memories that animate Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous (),1 one finds his older characters reverting to their previous, diasporic spaces. Regina, who lost her husband ("one of the happiest days of her life," the all-knowing narrator comments), reverts to her Polish name, Stefana, and turns "her back on forty-five years of living in Eretz Yisrael." She recedes to the days of her youth in "a Poland which she re-created in her imagination." "Proudly and punctiliously observing certain airs and graces, dressed in splendid clothes," she begins to speak "Polish almost exclusively and reading only Polish books and newspapers and behaving as if she lived in Poland."2 Having detached herself from the "stream of time" Stefana sinks into a "wintry silence and an obscure happiness," uttering only a few necessary sentences, and usually in Polish.3 And when alone, she would "sing to herself one of the Polish songs she used to sing to Naomi and Goldman when they were children."4 Stefana's mother-in-law, too, we are told in another stream of recollections, was always "ready to pack up and return to Poland."5 But she had nevertheless succeeded in "scrupulously observing the laws of God, and even in imposing certain customs on her sons…and she went on praying in a secret language whose words, which were printed in very black letters in the old prayer book, she tore to shreds and mutilated with an easy heart, in complete indifference, to the sorrow of her husband."6 In another torrent of memories, Klara, Caesar's grandmother, becomes disillusioned with her love of Zion: because it was not the country she had imagined in her dreams and among the square white houses and glaring wastes of sand which got into her shoes, and sometimes into her food, in the harsh light of the sun, in the [End Page 191] dusty, fly-filled heat, she felt alien and deceived. … She expressed her disappointment in a stream of Yiddish and Polish and Russian curses and a flood of abuse and angry, indignant complaints, which she flung loudly."7 Prior to her death, Klara recalled only fragments of her Jewish past through unattainable bygone sounds: "'There's a lovely song in Polish,' and [she] fell silent as if she were trying to remember it. … 'My father used to blow the shofar on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. He was the best shofar blower in town." "It's a pity you never heard him," she tells her flabbergasted grandson, Caesar, whom we find repulsed by the touch of her hand and the smell of her body, oblivious to the fact that these broken recollections filled his grandmother with light and sweetness.8 Caesar, the narrator adds poignantly, would forget his Grandmother's Yahrzeit and would never visit her grave.9 Through a syntactic flux that marries all tenses amid critical, elegiac, and nostalgic torrents, the road from Eastern Europe to Tel Aviv does not withstand the partitions erected by Zionist rhetoric, particularly its repression of Jewish diasporic cultures. Shabtai may have preserved both stereotypical and astereotypical imagery of Eastern European Jews—and all the more while meticulously depicting their physical decay in Israel of the 1970s—yet these earmarks of national Diasporism and their ethnic qualities were suppressed by their children in the name of Hebrew territorial nationalism (even if only by means of rhetoric). But then the grandchildren cohort, which Shabtai personifies through Goldman, Caesar, and Israel, disengages itself from Zionist ideology, yet the patrimony of denials and repressions obstructs its connection with their grandparents who offer tolerance, openness, and intimacy with "old age" (the latter being the very contrast to the Zionist myth of eternal youth).10 The ruins of both of these cohorts (grandparents and grandchildren) are brought to their surreal polyphonization when Goldman reaches the expanse of sand which was once populated with the old shacks "to which he was bound by many threads of memory and longing," an area now mostly demolished with only few "solitary survivors standing blackened and dilapidated, looking like a little flock...