Heroes Large And Small

Deconstructing Israel’s national narrative, through the plotlines and characters of its leading novelists.

The stories that bind: Amos Oz, top, A.B. Yehoshua,Etgar Keret and Orly Castel-Bloom,

by Rochelle Furstenberg
Special To The Jewish Week

This spring, Israel was the guest of honor at the French Book Fair, celebrating 60 years of Israeli literature. Dozens of Israeli writers were invited, interviewed, celebrated, by French booklovers. “Books were snatched up. It was a heady experience,” says author Michal Govrin. At the same time, a group of French-Arab writers boycotted the fair, perhaps symbolizing the burden of disdain and duress, tension and terrorism that, amazingly, has not suppressed the creativity of contemporary Israeli literature.

“Israeli literature is flourishing,” says Dan Laor, professor of Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. “In the last 25 years Israeli literature has become international. The Nobel Prize award to S.Y. Agnon, in 1966, demonstrated that Hebrew literature is not only part of the culture of Judaism,

but a part of modern culture in general.”

During the early days of the state, Israelis sought fiction shaped by the Zionist narrative, the secular ethos of return and renewal of ancient Jewish sovereignty. This visceral identification with the collective fate was poignantly recorded in Amos Oz’s recent autobiography, “Tale of Love and Darkness,” which describes the night of Nov. 29,1947 when the United Nations voted for the Palestinian partition. Oz, then a child of 8, woke at midnight and saw his whole Jerusalem neighborhood standing under the yellow street light, “like a giant meeting of silent spirits in the pale light ... hundreds of men and women frozen; neighbors and acquaintances and strangers, some in night clothes, and some in jackets and ties.”

He describes the cry that went up, “an animal-like cry that made the rocks tremble; a cry that froze the blood ... as if all those that had been killed or yet would be killed let out a cry, which passed in a moment.” The child Amos was passed from one person to another until he landed on his father’s shoulders. “My mother and father stood in an embrace, caressing one another like two children lost in the woods, as I had never seen them before that evening or afterwards.”

In light of this and other earthshaking, historical moments, it is not surprising that Haim Hazaz, one of the great pre-state writers, wrote that “Hebrew literature’s only hero is the Jewish people, the Jewish collective.”

And yet Israeli literature since 1948 might be characterized by the desire to escape the heroic mode, the large, collective myth, to find one’s own small, still voice. Writers began to qualify the Socialist Zionist myth of the sabra, the “New Jew,” already in the 1948 generation of Moshe Shamir, Aharon Megged and S. Yizhar.

S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky), writer and Labor Party Knesset member, challenged the accepted truths about heroism. In stories like “Hirbat Hizzam” and “The Captive,” he questioned the morality of Israeli soldiers’ treatment of the Arabs in the 1948 War, long before the post-Zionist historians began their research. His high moral position echoed down the corridors of Israeli literature, contributing to the political consciousness of generations of writers from Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua to David Grossman.

The Yizhar-like sympathy for the Arab dovetailed with an anti-Establishment trend that emerged in the 1950s and ’60s. The writers of the early ’60s, including Oz, Yehoshua and Aharon Appelfeld, who were known as the “Generation of the State,” took sovereignty for granted. Influenced by Agnon, they wrote about lonely, existential individuals. But they couldn’t ignore the national situation entirely. And individual characters often became symbolic of national concerns.

Literary theorist Mordechai Shalev has claimed that the anti-Establishment tone of these writers stemmed from the Oedipal impulse to bury the “collective father.” They were resentful of the fathers who harnessed all personal feelings to the collective myth. They were anxious to “bury” the earlier generation and get on with a “normal life,” unshackled by heroic expectations. The Oedipal impulse was particularly vengeful because of the “Binding of Isaac” association, the father willing to sacrifice his sons for the national god.
Shalev’s theory is supported by Yeshoshua’s allegorical story, “Early in the Summer of 1970,” in which an old man, a teacher of Bible whose whole life has been devoted to furthering the national myth, receives word that his son has been killed during the War of Attrition. As the old teacher goes out to the battlefront to identify the body, he is already planning how to memorialize his son. News of the death turns out to be a mistake and his son is alive after all, but he has enjoyed the self-dramatization of living the national myth.
Much of the disillusionment with the founding Labor Party establishment came to a head in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, which revealed the corruption and hubris of Israel’s leadership. On May 17, 1977, Likud won the national elections. Menachem Begin, head of the Likud Party, became the prime minister of Israel, bringing Labor Party hegemony in the political sphere to an end. The Likud victory also marked the end of the secular, male, Ashkenazic centrality in Israeli fiction.

The novel that depicted the collapse of the Labor establishment was Yaakov Shabtai’s 1977 work “Zichron Devarim” (“Past Continuous”). Critic Dan Meron has written, “Shabtai depicted the social and moral disintegration of the ... Old Guard of Israeli society ... the Histadrut class whose pioneering roots went back to the Third Aliya.” In a detailed stream-of-consciousness mode, Shabtai depicts the ideological, moral and aesthetic dead end of the second generation. Goldman, the novel’s central character, commits suicide nine months after the death of his father Ephraim, who was the paradigm of the worker class, idealistic in his self-sacrifice, but also a hard, even sadistic person. Goldman’s friend Caesar is appallingly hedonistic and the artist Israel is weak and self-destructive, unable to take on responsibility. Tel Aviv becomes a vivid purgatory of Zionism.
The debunking of Zionism took on increasing force in the ‘80s. In “Roman Russi” (“Blue Mountain”), Meir Shalev published a whimsical parody on the Zionist myth, in which the narrator Baruch creates a cemetery for settlers who left the country but still wanted to be buried in their original idealistic home. Instead of a flourishing agricultural life, Zionism has produced a burial place for the dead.

It was not only the pioneering myths that were put to the test. The myth of the Israeli army was shattered in Yehoshua Knaz’s novel “Hitnagvut Yehidim” (“Infiltration,” previously entitled “Heart Murmur” in English). It is a realistically written story of a platoon of young recruits in basic training during the ’50s. Young men from different social and ethnic backgrounds are confronted with the often heartless discipline of the Army, yet they yearn for purity and beauty.

As the power of the Old Guard diminished, other groups became more important in the cultural dialogue. In the ‘80s, fiction writers from what had been peripheral groups — immigrants, women, Sephardim, Holocaust survivors — began to tell their stories.
Israelis began to grapple with the memory of the Holocaust. Appelfeld, himself a survivor, had already begun writing his sensitive, impressionistic works about the Holocaust in the late ‘50s. Recognizing the limitation of language to convey the horror, he avoided dealing with the Holocaust directly but evoked the atmosphere of attenuated catastrophe that hovered over the Jews before World-War ll. In recent years his novels have come to encompass the whole sweep of Jewish-Christians relations in the 20th century, often indicating how Judaism infused Christian Europe with Christian love.
Perhaps more surprising is the younger generation of writers who have written about the Holocaust. In the “Momik” section of the novel, “See Under: Love,” David Grossman describes the anxieties experienced by a child of survivors who attempts to translate stories about his family’s concentration camp experience. Making sense of “that place” and “the Nazi animal,” Momik brings small animals together in his basement to confront the survivors from the neighborhood. Grossman was not a child of survivors but his work initiated a wave of writing about the Holocaust by second-generation children of survivors.

Most recently, Amir Gutfreund’s novel, “Hashoah Shelanu” (“Our Holocaust”) depicts the involvement of Israeli children in the Holocaust and how they return to that dark world through survivor figures.

The new ethnic pluralism of the ‘80s brought greater centrality to Sephardic voices. Veteran writer Sami Michael’s best selling “Victoria” portrayed the spirit of the ethnic woman and the hardships she encountered in the new state. In her novel “Persian Brides,” Dorit Rabinyan depicted strong, feisty Persian-Jewish women in the face of harsh, sexist patterns.

In the ‘80s, Israelis sought lighter works. They didn’t only want to read about the fate of the Jews and the Israel-Arab conflict. They wanted to relax. The late Batya Gur popularized the Hebrew detective story by writing intellectual whodunits. Shulamit Lapid created a detective series featuring a Sephardic, flat-footed Beersheba journalist Lizi Badichi, who exposes corruption in the desert town.

Most popular are women’s novels about personal relationships. Zeruya Shalev, Alona Kimche, Yael Hedaya and Avirama Golan have written fine psychological novels, which indicate that the Israeli woman is wired not by her relationship with men but by her love for her children.

Orly Castel-Bloom’s frenetic, postmodern Tel Aviv stories plumb the existential depths of Israeli society, revealing “Jewish mother” madness. In “Dolly City,” the protagonist, who has studied medicine in Katmandu, pathologically perceives cancerous growths all over her child. She subjects him to regiments of chemotherapy. Critic Nancy Azar perceives Dolly’s messianism as biological — survival at all costs. In contrast to Yaakov Shabtai’s Goldman, who cannot live in a world that lacks purpose, Dolly pursues physical life itself as purpose.

Abjuring Zionist earnestness, much of today’s writing is written in a postmodern mode that is playful and fractured. It highlights the absurdity of people’s actions, such as unmotivated violence.

In Aner Shalev’s novel, “Dark Matter,” the protagonist Adam falls asleep for many hours while his lover hemorrhages after an abortion. He wakes to find her unconscious.
Etgar Keret, one of Israel’s favorite postmodern figures, echoes American writer Raymond Carver, writing short, pithy sentences in flat prose. He plays with clichés and biblical allusions in a casual, ironic way. In his novella “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” a man who commits suicide ends up in a world similar to the one we know, where he works in a pizzeria and looks for his loved one. In spite of his “cool” stance the author’s heroes seek love.

Having proven its normalcy, Israeli fiction is no longer threatened by the expectations of the founding fathers. There are signs of writers returning to early Zionist themes. In “Hevzekim” (“Snapshots”) Michal Govrin, one of the most conceptual Israeli writers, depicts Ilana Tsuriel, a left-wing architect determined to create for herself a more universalist worldview than that of the Zionism of the father she adores. The Gulf War grounds her again in Israel.

“In 60 years Israeli fiction has achieved amazing competence, variety,” says Hebrew University’s Dan Laor. “A new polyphony of voices has arisen.” But he also sees Amos Oz’s recent novel, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” as symbolic of an attempt of Israelis to heal the rift with the earlier generations. “There is a certain reaffirmation of Zionism, and a return to Jewish sources,” says Laor. “In the novel Oz realized that changing his name from Klausner to Oz symbolized his generation’s rebellion against the fathers, the need for the Israeli-born generation to create a new world.” Laor interprets Oz today as having come to feel empathy for his parents’ lot as immigrants. He also feels that Oz’s search for “roots,” tracing the family genealogy back to Odessa, is his way of integrating the Jewish diaspora into his identity.

In a similar manner A.B. Yehoshua, a scion of an aristocratic Sephardic family that came to the Land of Israel in the 19th century, ignored his Sephardic roots in most of his fiction. It was only with his masterpiece “Mr. Mani,” that he plumbed his deepest cultural self in a novel about five generations of a Sephardic family.
Israeli fiction is not only spreading its wings in many directions. It is coming full circle to a recognition of the deepest sources of its being.
Rochelle Furstenberg is a Jersualem-based writer specializing in Israeli literature and culture.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization