Israeli Fiction Research Articles

Finding Work in Israeli Fiction

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that contemporary Israeli literary criticism posits the nation as its horizon of interpretation, which has eroded Israeli literary criticism’s ability to detect newness in its objects of inquiry, and to present Israeli literary history as advancing through engagement with new social problems. I examine three literary works: A.B. Yehoshua’s 1963 novella “Facing the Forests,” Etgar Keret’s Missing Kissinger (1994), and Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds (2007). For each, I show how critical commentary puts the nation as the center of interpretation. I then elaborate a critical position that sees the nation not as the point of critique’s termination,but as means toward trying to solve, in imagination, real social contradictions of its time. Thus, I argue that the fire in “Facing the Forests” is a figure for the threat of proletarian revolution under welfare-state capitalism; and that the fusion of realist narrative and its interpretive code in Keret’s Missing Kissinger signals a crisis of historicity whose origin is the proletarianization of Palestinians after the 1967; and lastly that Exit Wounds reestablishes Israeli historicity, using events of national significance – such as Palestinian suicide bombings – to represent the experience of precarious labor under neoliberal capitalism.

Tragedies of Jewish Liberation: Mapping Hebrew Literature Between the Occupied Territories and Global Capital

Tragedies of Jewish LiberationMapping Hebrew Literature Between the Occupied Territories and Global Capital Rachel Green A review of: Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz. Pp. xxiv + 242. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2018. Paper: $39.95. Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivty in Israeli Fiction. By Oded Nir. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Paper: $32.95. On the surface, Oded Nir's Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction and Adia Mendelson-Maoz's Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada may seem to have little in common. Nir's monograph is a comprehensive and exceedingly bold re-conceptualization of Hebrew literary history from the "totalizing" vantage point of the historical materialism of Fredric Jameson, and the World-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, Robert Brenner, and the Warwick Research Collective. Mendelson-Maoz's, on the other hand, is an artfully crafted, theoretically eclectic, spatio-ethical reading of select Hebrew texts published primarily between 1987–2007 that thematize Israeli experience, both military and civilian, during the period of the two Intifadas. Beyond sharing a partial chronological focus (the timeline of Mendelson-Maoz's book corresponds to roughly chapters four through seven of Nir's), each monograph articulates important aspects of the "tragedy"1 of Zionism and the State of Israel as vehicles for Jewish liberation. It is a tragedy that emerges in these studies as a set of seemingly unrelated failures, each socially repressed to different degrees. One tragic failure – Nir's focus, although he does not use the [End Page 259] word "tragedy" – is economic: despite its early socialist ideals, he posits, the Yishuv and its successor state became thoroughly capitalist and unequal, raising some Jewish boats while submerging many others. The other tragic failure – Mendelson-Maoz's focus, although she does not use the word "failure" – is political and sociocultural: that the project of Jewish liberation has morphed into the oppressor of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, a state of affairs which Israeli culture has struggled to address, much less acknowledge. Analyzing literary excavations of these failures and of their implications, the two monographs under discussion here craft timely, and as I will argue, implicitly interrelated interventions that thoroughly reinvigorate Hebrew literature and Hebrew literary studies. Borders, Territories, and Ethics brings the spatio-ethical to longstanding ethical discourse in Israeli literature and culture, echoing most immediately Yochai Oppenheimer's Me'ever la-gader: yitzug ha-'aravim ba-siporet ha-'ivrit 1906–2005 (Barriers: The Representation of the Arab in Hebrew and Israeli Fiction 1906–2005; 2008). Signatures of Struggle, on the other hand, marks the beginning of a wholly new economic turn in Hebrew literary criticism, evidenced in rising interest in neoliberalism, histories of capital, and economic precarity. Recently published complementary works include Kfir Cohen-Lustig's Maker of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary (Verso, 2019), which considers the impact of shifts in material production upon both Israeli and Palestinian literatures. Nir and Mendelson-Maoz's monographs share many strengths. In addition to their novel theoretical frameworks, both bring to the attention of an English language readership myriad works not yet available in translation. Signatures of Struggle, in particular, must be credited with reinvigorating decades of Hebrew literature, making long forgotten, maligned, and in some cases, seemingly uninteresting texts sparkle anew with energy and immediacy. Nir even reveals that he has selected some texts, such as Natan Shaham's Tamid anaḥnu, (Always We), precisely because of the scorn visited upon it by established critics (p. 78). Borders, Territories, and Ethics in turn excels at historicizing complicity and liberal guilt in the Israeli cultural sphere; its account of "yorim u-bokhim" (shooting and crying) in the second chapter should be of particular interest to scholars working on these issues. [End Page 260] ________ Signatures of Struggle advances the intellectually audacious idea that the State of Israel as represented in Modern Hebrew literature represents not the triumph, but rather, the failure of the Zionist collective project. It is comprised of a theoretical introduction and seven body chapters, each...

Does the Ideology of the Melting Pot Have a Future? Russian American and Russian Israeli Fiction of the 21st Century: Comparative Analysis

Artykuł zawiera porównanie koncepcji twórczych amerykańskich i izraelskich pisarzy rosyjskojęzycznych. Jego autorka poddaje analizie hybrydyczność egzystencji twórcy poza krajem urodzenia. Chociaż literatura amerykańska tworzona przez imigrantów z byłego ZSRR w pierwszej dekadzie obecnego wieku zasadza się na odrzuceniu przez twórców wszelkich definicji klasyfikujących i istnieniu w przestrzeni pośredniej, to skierowana jest do czytelników anglojęzycznych. Tymczasem rosyjskojęzyczni pisarze Izraela chociaż akcentują swoją społeczną przynależność do tego kraju, to kierują swoją twórczość do czytelnika rosyjskojęzycznego, mieszkańca zarówno rosyjskojęzycznej diaspory, jak i Federacji Rosyjskiej. Zaledwie niewielka część rosyjskojęzycznych twórców izraelskich, którzy przedkładają odbiorców hebrajskojęzycznych nad rosyjskojęzycznych, buduje swoją narrację na tych samych zasadach nieprzynależności, co rosyjskojęzyczni autorzy w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Autorka artykułu przekonuje, że w przeciwieństwie do forowanej w XX wieku koncepcji „tygla narodów”, w czasach współczesnych o sukcesie prozy imigrantów decydują teksty korzystające z literacko-kulturowej hybrydyczności.

Lives of Wars and Trauma

Lives of Wars and Trauma Adia Mendelson-Maoz (War lives: On the army, revenge, grief and the consciousness of war in Israeli fiction). By Nitza Ben-Dov. Pp. 396. Tel Aviv: Shoken, 2016. (We are broken rhymes: A politics of trauma in Israeli literature). By Hannan Hever. Pp. 299. Jerusalem: Magnes, 2017. "Of arms and the man I sing": these famous opening words from Virgil's Aeneid (Book 1) enshrine the theme of war as a source of literary creation. From antiquity to the present day, authors have depicted wars in poetry, drama and prose, in biographies, historical accounts, and novels. Wars have been described in rhyme, and figurative language, as well as in narratives, through complex characters, as well as through realistic and fictional portrayals. Many theories of drama and prose, as well as the development of the concept of the literary hero, have been shaped by the literature of war. The universality of war as a social phenomenon raises moral, psychological, and social issues all of which can be presented powerfully in literature. The cruelty of conflict engenders traumatic experiences, which are reflected in many ways in literary texts. The concept of trauma was initially formulated by Sigmund Freud in his studies on hysteria at the turn of the twentieth century while treating mostly female patients. Yet clearly trauma has existed as long as human-kind has walked the earth. After World War I, and with a greater intensity since World War II and specifically in the last few decades, the theory of trauma has become a key part of literary studies. The confrontation with extreme situations and the contemporary awareness of trauma has led to a rethinking of the concept of representation, and prompted literary scholars (mainly as of the early 1990s) such as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Judith Herman, along with theorists from other fields such [End Page 421] as Dominick LaCapra, to develop literary trauma theories.1 In these theories, trauma is not only a disaster but also a mode of experience associated with the notions of retrospection, deconstruction, and reconstruction of memory, repetitions, and fragmentation. Thus it is not surprising that the literary theory of trauma has evolved through the writings of post-structuralists and deconstructionalist scholars (such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard). Today, trauma theory is a critical category of literary studies promoted by such scholarly voices as Anne Whitehead, Ann Kaplan, and Deborah Horvitz, to name a few.2 The non-linearity, arbitrariness and incomprehensibility of trauma challenge traditional concepts of representation, but its non-representability provides a rare opportunity to depart from concepts of the true or the real to better reveal underlying socio-political situations, cultural and historical contexts, and ethical issues. Thus, literature, unlike other disciplines such as history, psychology, and sciences, can create what Iris Murdoch (in the context of ethical criticism) called not only facts but a "new vocabulary of attention" when dealing with war and other extreme situations of suffering.3 This problematization of the representation of war and trauma associated with the power of literature is a key concern in Modern Hebrew literature. Hebrew literature, and Israeli literature in its wake, was fused with the history of Jewish people in the twentieth century and the Zionist ideological mission. Literature played an active role in the educational system and the creation of Israel. Literary texts from the start mirrored ideological complexities, ethical issues, and traumatic lapses. For instance, debates on Jewish masculinity were major components of Hebrew literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from Peretz Smolenskin, through the works of Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Uri Nissan Gnessin to Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Uri Zvi Greenberg. Later, major canonical Israeli writers continued to grapple with the Zionist national ideological myths and their relationship to questions of masculinity, [End Page 422] military conduct, trauma, and bereavement (Moshe Shamir, S. Yizhar, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz to name a few). The urge to tell a story that cannot easily be told has prompted many authors to find different literary venues, both in prose and poetry to walk the narrow path between the personal, intimate, empathetic narrative, and retrospective...

On the Historical Imaginary of Contemporary Israeli Fiction, or, Postmodernism's Aftermath in Novels by Lilach Netanel and Yiftach Ashkenazi

On the Historical Imaginary of Contemporary Israeli Fiction, or, Postmodernism's Aftermath in Novels by Lilach Netanel and Yiftach Ashkenazi

Space and Place in Jewish Studies

Space and Place in Jewish Studies

“Count him a human being”: David Grossman's <em>See Under: Love</em> and Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction

This paper engages David Grossman’s See Under: Love through an aspect usually left under-examined: the characterization of Holocaust perpetrators. Grossman imagines Herr Neigel, the death-camp commandant, as a vulnerable and multidimensional individual, who—compared to the flat and stereotypical Nazi characters common in earlier Israeli fiction—is humanized to the point of blurring the divide between victim and victimizer. This characterization is considered here in the context of Grossman’s more political writing (The Yellow Wind; The Smile of the Lamb) as an expression of the author’s wider humanistic vision, and in the context of the fundamental changes Israeli society and literature underwent in the 1970s and 1980s. As revealed in a brief discussion of later literary responses to the Holocaust (Itamar Levy’s The Legend of the Sad Lakes; Savyon Liebrecht’s the “Strawberry Girl”; Amir Gutfreund’s Our Holocaust), Grossman’s perpetrator characterization holds a formative and lasting impact on Israeli writers.

Guests and Hosts in A. B. Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride

More than any other recent work of Israeli fiction, Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride presents readers with the reality of the dissimilar status between Israeli Arab citizens and the stateless Palestinians of the occupied territories, the severe consequences that result from legal prohibitions that prevent Palestinians from the territories from residing in Israel, and other factors that divide Arabs and Israelis (including both racial bias and terrorism). Underscoring the impossibility of ever reconciling the incompatibilities of Zionist ideals with the tragic outcomes of decades of occupation, the novel also raises disquieting questions about the fate of Israel’s own Arab citizens and their sense of estrangement. Though there are famous instances of Arab characters earlier in Hebrew literature, few writers before Yehoshua really plunged their Jewish protagonists directly into the society and culture of Palestinians themselves; though the novel refuses to console the reader with any prospect of easy remedies on the horizon, the empathic worldview displayed by his imagined community of scholars affirms the essential at-homeness of the Jew in the Arab world in historical and contemporary contexts.

Ruins of the Present: Yaakov Shabtai's Anti-Nostalgia

Yaakov Shabtai’s novel Past Continuous is often considered one of the greatest achievements of Israeli fiction, earning Shabtai a prominent place in Hebrew literature and potential canonization as part of world literature. Often compared to the work of Marcel Proust, the novel, with its difficult style and sentence structure, is viewed as a work of complex reflective nostalgia, articulating a post-Zionist lament for a society that did not live up to its original ideological goals. Past Continuous has been read as a positive contribution to the wave of nostalgia that many argue characterizes Israeli culture of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the comparison to Proust allowed such a project also to appear universal to world audiences. However, as compelling as this nostalgic reading is and as much as it reflects the novel’s reception history, it greatly simplifies the politics of memory that determine the very building blocks of Shabtai’s prose. The associative leaps and breathless rhythm of Shabtai’s writing do not merely lead the reader into a reconstructed past, but also compel the reader to never dwell there and, in anticipation of the next comma or period, to be pushed ever-forward into the present. This article argues that a reexamination of Shabtai’s prose style in Past Continuous can reveal a current in the text that is antipodal to a nostalgic reading. In opposition to an idealized return to a forgotten past, the novel also demonstrates how the past, with all its monumental and ineluctable traumas, constantly presses into the living present.

“How Bound the Arab Is to His Land”: <em>The House of Rajani</em> and the Limits of Zionist Discourse

This article examines the ways in which Alon Hilu undermines conventional literary representations of the Arab in The House of Rajani , offering alternative possibilities for contact and communication between Jews and Arabs. The division of the text between two narrators, each of whom reflects a distinct viewpoint, represents the contrast between the Zionist world of the First Aliyah and the Arab world of people who had dwelled in Palestine for generations. Hilu returns to Palestinian history in order to situate the experience of Arab exile center stage. Not only does Hilu read national history and the place of the Arab within it anew, but he signals the instability of national categories, their tendency to merge and thereby to create an intermediate space. The Arab in Hilu’s novel is immeasurably more complex and interesting than the familiar Arab as imagined by Hebrew and Israeli fiction in the past. He is understood through a lens of post-colonialism inconsistent with the dominant Israeli historiography and his human and collective experiences are presented with unprecedented power. A RE T URN TO PALESTINIAN HISTORY? The many novels about Arabs and Jews published in Hebrew since the Oslo Accords (1993) demonstrate an ever increasing awareness of the need to acknowledge the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the major political ques tions arising in the wake of the stalled peace process. The Palestinian refugees’ right of return and Israel’s responsibility for the aftermath of the War of Independence have become the stuff of Israeli fiction in recent years, more than five decades

More Real Than Reality Israeli Cultural Texts of the 1980s and the Israeli-Arab Conflict

Changes in Israeli politics, diplomacy, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, changes in Israeli cultural texts dealing with the conflict, and changes in Israeli writing of fiction—all led to significant changes in how the Israeli-Arab conflict is portrayed in Israeli fiction written in the 1980s. Comprising fictional texts about the conflict, the novels and films examined in this article actually deal with the inability to tell the story. The conflict is portrayed as too deep-rooted and complicated, to the extent that it is impossible to recount it and construct a dialogue or to find common grounds for comprehending it. The texts almost always end up in death, no Jewish-Arab personal relation prevails, and most of the interactions are through the military. According to the texts examined here, these two societies appear to need the conflict in order to overcome bitter conflicts within themselves; and Arab-Palestinian Israeli citizens feel that they cannot live in Israel.

Beyond Martyrdom: Rereading Shamir's With His Own Hands

Earlier criticism has used Moshe Shamir's novel Bemo yadav: pirkei Elik (With his own hands: The Elik chapters; 1951) and the death of its protagonist Elik to argue that literature of the so-called Palmach generation sacrificed aesthetics to advance Zionist aims. Rather than accepting this view and its implicit preference for New Wave fiction, this paper reexamines Shamir's novel. It will argue that the novel reveals the difficult and unresolved struggles of an individual incapable of resolving the seeming contradiction between the heavy societal burdens placed upon him and his place within that society. As a result, one can read Elik's eventual death not as the result of his uncontested belief in collective aims, but as an effort to escape unresolved psychological issues. Read in this manner, the purported programmatic aims of the novel come into question together with generalizations about Palmach Generation literature and its ideological differences with later Israeli fiction.

Some Thoughts on Russian-Language Israeli Fiction: Introducing Dina Rubina

The article seeks to introduce Russian-language Israeli literature, specifically focusing on the works of one of its best-known representatives, Dina Rubina. The article traces the three most prominent themes in her works: the theater, the autobiography, and the cultural synthesis between post-Soviet and Israeli Jewish cultures accompanied by the complex linguistic relationships between Russian and Hebrew. Drawing on the Bakhtinian theories of the carnivalesque and of the humor associated with the lower bodily stratum, as well as on the topos of teatrum mundi and the legacy of Russian drama, the article examines Rubina’s commentary on Israeli society and culture. Her focus on the ridiculous and the absurd, on the permutations of masks and identities in Israel, and on the multifaceted immigrant experience is essential for understanding her writing.

The Postcolonial Function of Television's Virtual Space in '90s Israeli Cinema

The reflexive mode of our postmodern era has demonstrated that a combination of the media in films can sometimes be critical in turning a seemingly innocent text into a subversive one. This essay examines the postcolonial role of television in Israeli fiction films made in the last decade of the twentieth century, arguing that the content of the television screen as it appears in these films functions as a Deleuzian ligne de fuite (line of flight) to the narrative. According to Deleuze these lignes de fuite enable their displaced heroes to escape the more rigid frames that circumscribe all the necessary formal stations in one's life such as school or university, as well as the more flexible frames that encompass those stations embedded in one's subjectivity such as love, longing, and daydreams.1 An analysis of these television texts as juxtaposed to their respective narrative context seems to confirm the existence of a latent imaginary undermining the State's dominant culture, an imaginary related to the denied space of the Diaspora, which to date, has not been given the opportunity to appear due to the Zionist policy of negation of exile.2 As mentioned above, this essay's theoretical approach is a postcolonial one. However, as Ella Shohat contends: Israel is not a Third World country by any simple or conventional definition [but] it does have some affinities and structural analogies to the Third World, analogies that often go unrecognized even, and perhaps especially, within Israel itself [. . .] European hegemony in Israel [. . .] is the product of a numerical minority in whose interest it is to downplay Israel's Easternness, as well as its Third Worldness. 3 This specific conjuncture creates a certain form of internal colonialism for Oriental Jews,4 as they see themselves doomed to an internal exile in their own country. The post-Zionist critical discourse that appeared in Israel in the mid-eighties, deconstructs the Zionist into its distinctive components, tending to relate to the several individual ethnic groups living within the State of Israel as imagined communities, bearing little or no relation to the existing hegemony.5 This tendency was well demonstrated in Israeli cinema in the 1990s, a decade clearly delimited by the end of the first Palestinian uprising (Intifada) in 1989 and the beginning of the second one (known as Intifadat El Aksa) in 2000.6 During this decade a number of Israeli films related to the television screen in an unusual way. Not only did the television's contents oppose the situation existing outside the film diegesis at a given time, but it also provided a space for the screening of the protagonists' subjectivity, sometimes offering enigmatic visions that were in fact his own encoded version of his critique of the surrounding reality. Finally, the television screen offered these imagined communities a glimpse into what is culturally referred to as immoral or abject, being either the forgotten past in the Diaspora or imagined visions of an alternative political order in their new country. In fact, the films analyzed in this essay succeed in realizing their wish to invert this apparently official information channel and use it for their own purpose, converting it into a path of resistance to hegemonic oppression. Through the figuration of television in the films, the communities disengage from the State's official policy and establish the delineation of their new relationship to the State, a relationship limited only to their sharing of the same geographical territory. The Micro-Politics of Television The traditional function of television had been to serve as an organizing feature in homes, cities, and nations.7 However, by the end of the twentieth century, television had become a synonym of ambivalence. On the one hand, it brings the world into our most intimate spaces, but at the same time it also invites us to peep into other people's intimate worlds. …

Mandrakes from the Holy Land (review)

Reviewed by: Mandrakes from the Holy Land Lincoln Shlensky Mandrakes from the Holy Land, by Aharon Megged, translated by Sondra Silverston. New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2005. 205 pp. $22.95. Aharon Megged's recently translated novel, Mandrakes from the Holy Land, at once elegantly wrought and erudite, offers an unusual portrait of Palestine in the early years of the twentieth century. His protagonist, Beatrice Campbell-Bennett, is a disconsolate member of the English social elite whose unfashionable spiritual yearnings and unrequited love for Vanessa Stephen, Virginia Woolf's less famous sister, impel her to embark for Turkish-ruled Palestine in 1906, where she intends to paint the flowers of the Bible. Beatrice conceives of her spiritual and artistic pilgrimage as a return to the roots of Christianity and an escape from the repressive morality of Edwardian England. The novel's conceit is that we learn of the fictional Beatrice's adventures in the Holy Land, and of her earlier experiences as a participant in bohemian London's Bloomsbury Group, through a series of letters she writes to Vanessa Stephen and through passages from her private diary. These writings have been surreptitiously collected and commented upon, in turn, by Dr. P. D. Morrison, a paragon of Victorian pedantry sent by Beatrice's family to investigate her apparent mental breakdown and refusal to return to England. The perspective afforded by Beatrice's intimate letters and her diary allows Megged to describe pre-state Palestine and the establishment of Jewish settlements there—an enterprise in which the author himself played a role after his emigration from Poland as a child in 1926—from the perspective of a religious and ideological [End Page 196] outsider. Megged also devotes considerable energies to examining the aesthetic and philosophical challenge to Victorianism posed by the Bloomsbury Group's zealous iconoclasm. That stance is made to seem superficial or even hypocritical when juxtaposed against Beatrice's earnest Christian spirituality and her passion (presumably also Megged's) for the classics of Christian art: she makes reference to Dante (but not explicitly to his Beatrice), Giotto, Titian, El Greco, Milton, Bach, and others. Megged's depiction of Beatrice as simultaneously attracted to European Christian iconography and the utopian political impulse of the Palestinian Jewish yishuv is a daring stroke of artistic creativity. It is also a subversive one. A fat woman (Beatrice repeatedly alludes to her ample body shape) who is a devout Christian pilgrim and a repressed lesbian counts as a pronounced antihero in Israeli fiction and hardly a typical champion of the Zionist credo, as Stanley Nash has pointed out. 1 Beatrice's ideological commitments are surprising in another way as well. Her rejection of Bloomsbury bohemianism would be utterly puzzling, particularly given the group's notable tolerance of homosexuality, were it not that she has another, more complicated, aesthetic agenda. Her declared artistic ideals hark back to the work of the British religious painter William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), co-founder in 1849 of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Hunt, who visited Palestine four times to paint biblical scenes in a style that came to be known as "religious realism," was influenced by the concept of typological symbolism put forward by the critic John Ruskin (1819–1900). In essence, Hunt's ideas promoted a style at once realistic and symbolically prefigurative, so that a solitary goat on the shore of the Dead Sea in his 1856 painting The Scapegoat was meant convey the desolation of the landscape realistically while symbolizing the suffering of Christ. Beatrice likewise says she will paint the Palestinian flowers, including the purportedly aphrodisiac mandrake flower, "as holy flowers, flowers of the soul" (p. 36), but her paintings and sketches are also intended to be botanically accurate. Megged's preoccupation with aesthetics may be merely a matter of attention to historical verisimilitude, but it is not hard to imagine that he is slyly encouraging his readers to adopt an analogous aesthetic attitude. As Beatrice criss-crosses the countryside with her Arab dragoman, Aziz, in search of flowers, her visits to biblical sites provide the opportunity for Megged to meditate [End Page 197] on the long and tortuous history of that ancient land—a...

<strong>The “Double Triangle” Paradigm:</strong> National Redemption in Bi-generational Love Triangles from Agnon to Oz

This paper examines a dominant plot structure in Israeli fiction, where two generations mired in dysfunctional love triangles are historicized in relation to each other through a shared lover. Suggesting that this plot pattern is so prominent in Hebrew fiction that we can approach it as a distinctive national paradigm, this study argues that the paradigm's significance has less to do with oedipalized representations of neurotic youth seeking parent substitutes than with a negotiation of national redemption staged between two generations who vie for the interpretat tion and control of historical processes. Through the figure of the shared lover, second-generation characters evaluate their options in light of past expectations, tracing a nutshell history of modern Zionism from its initial rejection of messianic yearnings to an ongoing reassessment of the demands of statehood. The paradigm's capacity to encapsulate such a vital history-in-the-making explains why this specific plot structure has been so attractive to Hebrew writers during an extended period of national formation and consolidation.

How to mend love? Wrestling with the legacy of the holocaust in recent Israeli fiction

The children of Holocaust survivors struggle with the legacy of parental trauma, which occurred before they were born. In three recent Israeli novels the nature of this struggle departs from the normative Zionist attitude to the Holocaust, which has affirmed the triumph of the national rebirth. Rather than subscribing to the Zionist orientation, which looks at the catastrophe from the standpoint of the “new” Jew, the protagonists in the novels – children who replace the dead – turn to the unknown and unknowable past in an attempt to mend the parental love that was irreparably damaged in the destruction. Their attempts to reenter the world of parental terror reveal their predicament: they feel obligated to tell the story of suffering, which they find impossible to tell. My discussion shows how in these novels the moral obligation toward the parental story takes the form of a struggle to both reaffirm and reassess moral values in the face of the Holocaust dehumanizing destruction. David Grossman's See Under: Love explores the viability of the ideals of the Enlightenment; Michal Govrin's The Name confronts the idea of the Divine; Ruth Almog's The Inner Lake explores the possibilities of artistic creativity in face of terror. Paradoxically, the struggle to penetrate the parental experience signals a hope of repair. The daring to face the terrifying echoes and phantoms in an attempt to reconstruct the destroyed parental world becomes the act of mending because it reaffirms the relevance of humanistic values.

Motherhood under Zionism

This paper attempts to portray Israeli Motherhood as reflected in Israeli fiction of the 1990s, especially in the novels of David Grossman and Orly Castel-Bloom. Formed under conditions of permanent military and existential tensions. Israeli Jewish Mothers, and the cultural institution of Motherhood, tend to paradoxically combine two contradictory aspects: on the one hand, the Mother is the familiar, well known Jewish Mother, nurturing, caring, self-effacing and adoring; on the other hand, Israeli Jewish Mothers are harnessed to the national effort. Like so many other mothers in nations undergoing birth throes, they heroically raise their adored sons to be sacrificed to the needs of the nation. The paper demonstrates the results of the paradoxical demands imposed on Israeli Jewish Mothers in mother-son relationships, and argues that it takes a woman writer to fully uncover, from the mother's perspective, the cruel implications of these demands and relations. Both Grossman and Castel-Bloom present Motherhood, an institution ostensibly belonging to the "private" sphere of life, as dictated by and constructed in the "public" domain. The insoluble paradox created by the conflicting cultural demands facing Jewish Zionist Mothers is reflected clearly in recent fiction, whether written by men or women. It seems, however, that women are more keenly aware of the crazed consequences of these conflicting cultural demands. It takes a female writer to portray the dreadful relationships between Politics and Motherhood, between the social expectations from a mother and the madness it takes to raise sons in our part of the world.

The Return of the Past: The Intergenerational Transmission of Holocaust Memory in Israeli Fiction

Recent Israeli fiction has included an incredibly large number of works which reflect the intergenerational transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust. Some of the authors are well-known or newer talents, but not all are themselves children of survivors, for example David Grossman, author of See Under: Love , the most successful account so far of growing up in Israel under the shadow of the Holocaust and the repercussions for a young writer. This essay examines the reasons for the apparent turn-about in Israeli discourse on the Holocaust and discusses ways in which these changes are inscribed in contemporary novels and short stories. The emergence of a "second generation" of survivors in the mid-1980s is a phenomenon not unconnected with transformations of Israeli society, the peace process, and rethinking of the past. In particular, the issues raised by these writers confront the tensions between personal and collective identity, between memory and history, which underlie the turmoil of public debate in contemporary Israel.

The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction (review)

The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction (review)