No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women's Fiction , and: ללא תדר משלהן: מגדר ולאומיות ביצירתן של סופרות ישראליות (review)

Abstract

Hebrew Studies 44 (2003) 287 Reviews NO ROOM OF THEIR OWN: GENDER AND NATION IN ISRAELI WOMEN'S FICTION. By Yael Feldman. Gender and Culture. Pp. xiv + 337. New York: Columbia University, 1999. Paper, $16.50. •m~r,N'ro~ n"£l'C r,ro In'~:ll~~ n""m~r" "10 :lMr,wo "n Nr,r, Translated and edited from the English by Yael Feldman and Michal Sapir. Pp, 304, TelAviv : Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2002. Paper, 74.00 NIS. Yael Feldman's No Room oJTheir Own is best described as an intellectual quest for the "Hebrew Woman" in Israeli women's fiction. It concerns Israeli and Western fiction and theory, feminism and postmodernism, psychoanalysis and postcolonialism. In so doing, it revolutionizes our understanding of recent developments in Hebrew literature and, by application, of Israeli literature since its budding. Setting up the agenda in explicit words, Feldman asks the following basic questions: If Israeli male authors have subscribed to a Zionist enterprise that envisions a "New Hebrew Man," is it possible to identify female writers who have done the same to create an image of a "New Hebrew Woman"? From this problematic junction there follow other investigations , such as the impact of the Western feminist movement on Israeli culture at large, and, specifically, its inscription in women's fiction. In short, if the main contradiction in Zionist ideology is between individual salvation and communal redemption, as Feldman puts it, then, has there been a creative site available for developing female SUbjectivity in confluence with or contradiction to the communal "we" of the meta-Zionist narrative? And, most important, when did it all begin? Why not earlier? To answer these complex, never-asked-before questions, Feldman opens with a review of women authors in Israel since the 1920s. The goal here is to establish a time frame for a diachronic and synchronic analysis of the evolution of Western feminism (in France, England, and America) and its meeting points with the Israeli development of feminist awareness. For historical and cultural reasons, Feldman sets the Israeli temporal genesis in the 1970s, starting with the Yom Kippur war, the fall of the Labor government, and other events that fractured public opinion, thereby opening up a collective , unified discourse to diversified expressions and receptions. In addition, the familiarity of the Israeli intelligentsia with Western feminist writers, among them Virginia Woolf (as the title of this book suggests) and Simone de Beauvoir, has precipitated feminist awakening and, with it, set in motion the dilatory, complicated, and ambiguous passage from traditional, realist and modernist to postmodernist prose fiction written by women. The crucial point Feldman makes is that awareness of the unwelcome cultural atmosphere before the 1970s, when collective ideology controlled and directed a unified national dialogue, prevented women from developing a feminist (minority and Hebrew Studies 44 (2003) 288 Reviews subversive) discourse in the literature of the period. Therefore, when feminist concerns do emerge in early women's writing, they are usually suppressed by undergoing modifications to normative communal values, or simply silenced. As Feldman concludes, in her discussion of Netiva Ben Yehuda's belated memoir of her experience in the 1948 War of Independence, "Could Netiva Ben Yehuda have told her version of the New Hebrew Woman 'then' [thirty years ago]? ..She no doubt could not. Even when she did tell it, three decades later, very few were wiIling to listen" (p. 191). What follows is a literary scrutiny that is concentrated on the thematic and stylistic transformations from traditional meta-narrative, Zionist and modernist (the separation of art and life), to postmodernism (fractured subjectivity, the mixing of realism and metaphor), albeit with no clear-cut transition. Her findings demonstrate that thematically these women writers deal with the antagonism between subjectivity and national concerns in addition to their revealed sensitivity to the problem of the separation and confluence of gender, racial, ethnic, and social boundaries. Moreover, female authors embody collective and subjective psychology in their writing, constructing and deconstructing Western and Jewish deep myths by appropriating them to the Israeli condition. Based on the assumption that only the identification of an innerdevelopmental design may point to the author's involvement with the problem of female subjectivity and...