The Artist as a Mother and the Birth of Terrible Beauty in the Post-Holocaust World: Ruth Almog's The Inner Lake

Abstract

In her path-breaking study of Israeli women's fiction, Yael Feldman concludes her analysis of Ruth Almog's Roots of Air (1987) with an insightful observation. In this major work, Feldman claims, Almog trespassed into the male writers' territory and became the first among Israeli woman writers to produce an autobiographical fiction of the “portrait of an artist as a young girl.” Feldman concludes that, once the stage of “therapeutic” self-examination, which encompasses “both the oedipal fixation and the daughter–mother identification,” has been completed, “Almog has now embraced the mother in herself.” Indeed, Feldman identifies the next stage in Almog's artistic evolution in her collection of stories, Artistic Mending (1993), suggesting that now the story of another has become the focus of Almog's artistic concern. In Artistic Mending the writer turns her “motherly” attention to life stories of children, mainly second-generation Holocaust survivors, seeking ways to understand, but also “mend” the damaging effects of the tragic historical legacy.