"Have You Ever Waited for Someone?": On Yehudit Hendel's Unpublished Novella "Kartisim le-Sammy Davis"

Abstract

Abstract: The article unveils an unpublished novella by Israeli author Yehudit Hendel (1921–2014), "Kartisim le-Sammy Davis" (Tickets to Sammy Davis), which was discovered as part of her literary estate. This shelved novella was written during the early 1970s—following the publication of her second novel Ha-ḥaẓer shel momo ha-gedolah (The Courtyard of Momo the Great, 1969), and before the death of her husband, painter Zvi Meirovich, in 1974, which led to her famous 1984 book Ha-koaḥ ha-'aḥer (The Other Power). Strongly related to Hendel's poetics of melancholia and to her ongoing fascination with grief and bereavement in Israeli culture, "Kartisim le-Sammy Davis" addresses the question of the "endless waiting" for the missing loved one and is revealed as an important text in Hendel's oeuvre. Following Roland Barthes's discussion of the state of waiting for the loved object (which he views as a "minor mourning"), this article seeks to portray the (endless) waiting of the heroine of the novella as a melancholic one, which expresses a "major mourning." It also traces and examines the dominance of the loved one's voice, which becomes even more present after his death, turning him into a "living" specter. As suggested here, Hendel's shelved novella radically explores the melancholic state: not only as the only state possible for her protagonists (as also evidenced in her complete body of work), but also as a violent, consuming state in itself, that depletes both the anticipated (lost) object and the anticipating (living) subject.