Resisting the Father's Narrative: A Study of Lea Aini's <em>Vered ha-Levanon</em>

Abstract

Vered ha-Levanon (Rose of Lebanon; 2008), an autobiographical novel by Lea Aini, suggests a profound and subversive discussion on issues that constitute the foundation of cultural and social identity in Israel. The novel includes several narratives belonging to various literary genres but also deviating from them, including personal testimony, the story of second-generation Holocaust survivors, and a Bildungsroman. Each of these narratives is substantially deconstructed, and its components and contents reorganized. Two plots are interwoven in the novel: that of the narrator childhood as a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and that of her meetings with Yonatan the wounded soldier. Each narrative represents a different father—the private one and the national one. The narrator, trapped between these fathers, is struggling to find her authentic voice. In doing so, she rejects both narratives, but at the same time she uses her personal story in order to stress some essential insights about the sociopolitical situation in Israel. INTROduc TION Lea Aini’s autobiographical novel Vered ha-Levanon (Rose of Lebanon), 1 is a groundbreaking study of a range of national, social, and personal topics. Aini deconstructs categories that constitute the foundation of cultural and social identity in Israel. Most important of these are representations of the Holocaust, its status in Israel as a mega-narrative, and its role in constructing self- and national identities. The essence of the novel’s critical contribution is in its exposure of themes that had been previously almost entirely overlooked in Hebrew literature. These topics include the silenced history of Greek Jews and the story of the Shapira