Her Glory All Within: Rejecting and Transforming Orthodoxy in Israeli and American Jewish Women's Fiction 9781618111937

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HER GLORY ALL WITHIN: Rejecting and Transforming Orthodoxy in Israeli and American Jewish Women’s Fiction

STUDIES IN ORTHODOX JUDA ISM

Series Editor Marc B. Shapiro (University of Scranton, Scranton, Pennsylvania) Editorial Board: Alan Brill (Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey) Benjamin Brown (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) David Ellenson (Hebrew Union College, New York) Adam S. Ferziger (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan) Mirl Freud-Kandel (University of Oxford, Oxford) Jeffrey Gurock (Yeshiva University, New York) Shlomo Tikoshinski (Jerusalem)

HER GLORY ALL WITHIN: Rejecting and Transforming Orthodoxy in Israeli and American Jewish Women’s Fiction

Barbara Ann Landress

Boston 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press © Barbara Ann Landress All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-171-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61811-193-7 (electronic) Book design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2012 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix

Chapter One

FEMINISM AND ORTHODOXY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. Israeli Feminism and Literary Feminism . . . . . . . . . . . B. Feminism and the Haredi Woman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C. Feminism and the National Religious or Modern Orthodox Sector .

. 1 . 1 . 5 . 12

Chapter Two

REPRESENTING ORTHODOXY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. Female Embodiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. Mother-Daughter Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C. Appropriation of the “Language of the Fathers” [leshon ha’avot] D. The Secular-Religious Gap and Politics in Israel . . . . . . .

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16 16 19 23 25

Chapter Three

THE ORTHODOX ROMANCE: VEILED COMPLAINT AND AMBIVALENCE EXTREME IN HANNA BAT SHAHAR . . . . . . . . . . . A. A Double Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. No Body—The Ice Queen and the Mummy . . . . . . . . . . . C. Jewish Art and Jewish Life: Contesting the Images of the Fathers . . D. Varieties of Pathology: The Mother-Daughter Connection in Bat Shahar and Reisman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31 31 35 40 42

Chapter Four

YEHUDIT ROTEM’S CONSCIOUSNESSRAISING NOVELS . . . . . . . . A. The Consciousness-Raising Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. The Body as Carnal Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C. Ironizing the Language of the Fathers . . . . . . . . . . . . . D. Mothers and Daughters in the Confessional Mode [I Loved So Much] E. Tired Plot or Grand Recit—Is there an Israeli Haredi Audience? . . .

56 56 58 61 64 68 V

TA BLE OF CON T EN T S

Chapter Five

REVALUING THE TRADITIONAL IN AMERICAN JEWISH WOMEN’S WRITING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. Enlightened Orthodoxy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. Reclaiming the Mother—Maternal Intelligence, Maternal Regrets C. American Orthodox Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . D. The Daughters’ Orthodox Romance . . . . . . . . . . . . . E. Translating the Language of the Fathers . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

70 71 76 84 88 97

Chapter Six

POLITICS, NATIONALISM AND THE SECULARRELIGIOUS RIFT . . . . A. Yocheved Brandes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Confrontation of Others—The Pioneer and the Yeshiva Student 2. The Settler as Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Appropriation and Misappropriation of the Language of the Fathers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Mind, Body and the Mother-Daughter Connection . . . . . . B. Mira Kedar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Sacralizing Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Mending Otherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Writing the Language of the Fathers . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Mind, Body and Women in the Vanguard . . . . . . . . . .

101 101 101 109 112 118 122 122 128 132 135

Chapter Seven

INCLUSIVITY AND TRANSFORMATION . . . . . . . . . . . . A. Mira Magen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Fertile Land, Fertile Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Bodily Bonds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Exploiting the Language of the Fathers . . . . . . . B. Lilach Galil El-ami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Imagining Through the Mother: A Lesbian Continuum? 2. Unfettering the Body, Unfettering the Self . . . . . . 3. Through the Body—God . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

140 140 140 146 151 152 152 158 164

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

167

Bibliography . . . . Primary Sources . Secondary Sources Index . . . . . . .

VI

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. 173 . 173 . 176 . . .

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Dr. Yael Feldman for the many ways in which she supported and enriched this project. Professor Feldman’s engaging classes and ability to bring to bear a wide range of theoretical issues to illuminate the text at hand provided me with the background necessary to undertake this research. I am indebted to Professor Feldman’s pioneering scholarship on the foremothers of Israeli women’s literature. I also thank her for suggesting research materials and for her thoughtful comments on my work. I could not have undertaken graduate study without the generous financial support of New York University’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. I thank the faculty of that department for their dedicated teaching and encouragement of scholarship. I could not have continued my research and writing without the support and collegiality of my colleagues at New York University School of Law. I would like to acknowledge the kindness of Margarita Feigin who provided both encouragement and crucial assistance in locating helpful resources in Israel. I also thank the anonymous reader who provided feedback on my manuscript and whose insightful comments were enormously helpful. I hope that I have identified a body of work that others will continue to explore, pursuing avenues of investigation not within the scope of this analysis. I thank my husband, Philip Karmel, my in-house editor and technical advisor, and I thank my parents, Robert and Dorothy Landress for their boundless support of my endeavors.

VII

INTRODUC TION

INTRODUCTION

In both contemporary Israeli and American literature, Jewish Orthodoxy has emerged only recently as a literary subject. Israeli writers raised in a secular Jewish state whose founders defined the “New Hebrew” in opposition to the traditional European Jew tended to distance themselves from the Jewish past, as did well-known American-Jewish writers of the post-World War II generation. Marginalization of the traditional past in the interest of constructing an Israeli secular society or acculturating to America has given way, in more recent decades, to interest in and attempts to reckon with traditional Jewish values and lifestyles. I consider representations of Jewish Orthodoxy in American and Israeli women’s fiction published between 1980 and the present and argue that these two bodies of literature reflect strikingly different attitudes toward Orthodoxy. American women writers who engage with Orthodoxy tend to highlight the close bonds and rich communal life forged by Sabbath observance, the yearly cycle of holiday celebrations, and other shared rituals. They are concerned with the ways in which women’s work is central to preserving and passing along traditions that place family and community at the center and provide structure and meaning in a fragmented and chaotic society. In contrast, Israeli women’s representations of Orthodoxy are varied and complex, featuring narratives that range from novels of complaint to plots that condemn political extremism, express desire for greater participation of women in religious practice, and thematize the rift between secular and Orthodox. In American Jewish women’s writing, Orthodox women are privileged bearers of tradition. In contrast, in Israeli novels that engage traditional Judaism, women are victims of oppression, develop a critical stance toward community norms, or construct complex, fluid identities that refuse narrow definition of religious and cultural affiliation.1 1

The Israeli novels that I analyze, and many to which I refer, are not available in English. All translations herein from Hebrew are my own except where indicated otherwise. All translations of the bible, unless indicated otherwise, are from Tanakh: the New JPS Translation (Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985). IX

I N T RODUC T ION

While this discussion pays attention to aesthetic values, it also accepts the argument that literature performs “cultural work,” in that it both reflects culture and changes it (Burstein 1996: 4). I am skeptical of the association between experimental style and subversive potential, and the value judgment that such an association implies. I consider realist heroines in realist novels (with the exception of Brandes’ magical realism in Lekhabot ’et ha’ahava [Quench Love]) that are not uniformly of high aesthetic value. Yet, each of the writers whose work I address is attuned to a battle between dueling worlds. That similar issues are being addressed by writers whose backgrounds, abilities and audiences vary, establishes that feminism, Judaism and contemporary social contexts intersect to create a group of distinctive issues for Jewish women. I am interested in how literature in which feminist critique of patriarchy is mediated by the felt religious and cultural authority of traditional Judaism reflects and seeks to shape the continuing dialogue between Judaism and feminism. This study seeks to historicize and contextualize a distinctive body of contemporary women’s writing in the social and cultural context within which it emerged—the decades following the height of what is known as 1970's second-wave feminism (discussed in Chapter Two). To that end, I will outline developments in Jewish feminism and draw on feminist and Jewish feminist theory, as well as genre theory, to examine the diverse ways in which the literature is shaped by and answers back to feminism to reflect changing views about feminism itself. Finally, I seek both to highlight national differences, and also a range of ideological interests and attitudes toward women’s subjectivity. Chapter One contextualizes the literature I will discuss within a feminist and Jewish feminist public sphere and within the Israeli sociopolitical context. Chapter Two, in the tradition of Showalter’s gynocritics, discusses and puts in theoretical perspective themes that recur and that I trace throughout the corpus of women’s narratives representing Orthodoxy. Chapters Three and Four explore narratives that represent haredi women’s lives and critique traditional gender roles in haredi communities in a way explicitly allied with the concerns of the women’s movement. Writing from personal experience, Hanna Bat Shahar, Yocheved Reisman, and Yehudit Rotem employ different poetics to represent repression and struggle for agency within a framework in which men exercise absolute religious authority. Bat Shahar models her fiction on Amalya KahanaCarmon’s earlier novels, which highlight women’s passivity by casting X

I N T RODUC T ION

feminist complaint in terms of the “dysphoric” romance.2 Reisman goes further to explode the promise of haredi family life by exposing the thoroughgoingly dysfunctional and unstable relationships between haredi family members who try hard to maintain a facade of social acceptability. In contrast to Bat Shahar and Reisman who fashion passive protagonists, Rotem creates a heroine who strikes out for freedom, explicitly engaging the model of the American feminist consciousness-raising novel. I then show in Chapter Five how American writers revise the consciousness-raising model. For example, Allegra Goodman, Anne Roiphe, Rebecca Goldstein and Naomi Ragen (a novelist who lives in Israel but first published in English in the United States) enlist haredi Orthodoxy to critique American models of feminist emancipation. American Jewish women’s narratives introduce feminist/meliorist plots in which protagonists affirm the value of Orthodoxy but employ various strategies to neutralize its threat to female autonomy. Their novels anticipate Israeli women’s narratives which legitimate, privilege and seek to revise gender roles within Orthodoxy. Chapter Six discusses fiction that addresses social and political conflict in Israel. In analyzing these narratives, I employ concepts drawn from postcolonial theory about the relationship between self and other to explore the ways in which Yochi Brandes and Mira Kedar create or disrupt oppositions between male and female, religious and secular, Jew and Arab. My focus in this chapter is on Brandes’ and Kedar’s intensive engagement with Israeli politics. However, here too, a focus on gender proves a powerful tool, as Brandes renders a gendered critique of Israeli right-wing politics and Kedar’s settlement-building activities place her in the vanguard of a politically and religiously activist group of ultra-nationalist Israeli women. Finally, Chapter Seven discusses the novels of Mira Magen and Lilach Galil El-ami, who problematize female agency to a lesser degree than others, yet engage feminism in their representation of protagonists who affirm Jewish spirituality. These narratives particularly emphasize personal relationships and the body in exploring Orthodox values and Jewish 2

In her study of eighteenth century French and English novels, Miller detected two plots for women, the “euphoric” and the “dysphoric.” The euphoric text concludes with the heroine’s successful marriage, while the dysphoric text ends in her death, usually as a result of a fatal mis-step in the area of sexuality, a liaison dangereuse (Miller 1980: x, xi). DuPlesis and Feldman discuss the efforts of nineteenth and twentieth century women writers to compromise with or transcend the euphoric text (DuPlesis 1985; Feldman 1999: 30-42). XI

I N T RODUC T ION

spirituality. As such, their narratives resonate with French feminist theories that exalt women’s relational capacities and female homoeroticism, and celebrate women’s reproductive powers. Magen portrays protagonists who draw on values central to Orthodoxy to articulate a basis for a universal ethic of connection. More radically, El-ami’s heroine extends the bounds of Jewish spiritual experience to encompass lesbian sexuality and childbirth. Their narratives carry forward on the level of personal consciousness the reformist tendency which other Israeli women writers bring to bear on politics and public religious practice. One further purpose of my analysis is to illuminate the complexity of the ongoing interplay between feminism and Judaism as each evolves. In America, the Jewish religious landscape is varied, and organized alternatives to Orthodox religious practice abound even as sociologists debate the longterm viability of Judaism in America. American women’s narratives about Orthodoxy demonstrate its continuing relevance to the development of Judaism in America. In contrast, Israelis have emphasized national identity over religious heritage, failing to develop vital, religious alternatives to Orthodoxy. El-Or notes: “Unlike Diaspora Jews who strive to reform, adjust, claim, and reclaim their religious and cultural identity, secular Israelis leave this to the state and to orthodoxy” (El-Or 1994: 210). While El-Or’s statement captures the ascendancy of Orthodoxy in Israel’s organized religious life (an ascendancy with broad legal, political and cultural implications), the narratives I discuss form a literary feminist corpus that, in conversation with American and Israeli literary feminisms, registers transformation of Orthodoxy both in private consciousness and public practice.

XII

HER GLORY ALL WITHIN: Rejecting and Transforming Orthodoxy in Israeli and American Jewish Women’s Fiction

CH AP TER ONE

FEMINISM AND ORTHODOXY

A. Israeli Feminism and Literary Feminism Literary representation of the religious sector in Israel is a new phenomenon that has emerged from a more general diversification of Israeli culture beginning in the 1970s. Since that time, Israeli literature has opened up to new subjects and themes, “exposing hidden aspects” of society that “had been formerly repressed, suppressed, or ignored” and often revealing “a certain ideological disorientation” (Feldman 1989b: 49-51). The new diversity is related to the post-1967 psychological and ideological readjustment (52), followed by the breakdown of labor Zionism as the dominant ideological force in Israel, or, as Mintz has described: “the breakdown of a single story into many stories” (Mintz 1997: 8). Yig’al Schwartz (an editor of Bat Shahar’s novels) also refers to the ideological crisis of the 1970’s in accounting for the emergence of writers from the Orthodox sector: For fifty years there was a Zionist bloc in Hebrew literature: it was secular, national, ethnocentric, and looked back in anger, negated the diaspora and religiosity, and dreamed of realization of the ideology of the second aliya. Other than Yehoshua Bar-Yosef and a few isolated others, members of the “old yishuv” had no chance of breaking into the system of Zionist literature. The Zionist center crumbled and Oz began to write a requiem to the sabra, A.B. Yehoshua remembered that he’s sephardic, and tribalism began to rise. Today there is a place for one who writes about his tribal experience and not just about the national aspect (Schwartz 1997).

While women writers had been slow to enter the Hebrew literary canon, a boom in women’s literature beginning in the 1980s continued the trend toward diversity on the Israeli literary scene. Women’s poetry had entered the Hebrew literary canon in the 1920s, but until the past two decades, prose 1

CH A P T ER ONE

fiction remained largely the domain of male writers. The rapid development of women’s fiction since the 1980s was influenced, no doubt, by Israel’s changed ideological landscape with its new focus on the margins, and by the Anglo-American feminism then taking root in Israel. The publication in 1994 of Hakol ha’aher [The Other Voice], a collection of women’s fiction edited by Lily Rattok, demonstrated the substantial and diverse contribution of contemporary women writers to Israeli literature. As Yael Feldman demonstrated in her 1999 study, No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation In Israeli Women’s Fiction, Israeli women’s ambivalent embrace of western feminisms is a crucial factor in understanding both the belated development and trajectory of Israeli women’s writing. The American women’s movement generated a renaissance in women’s fiction beginning in the late 1960s by encouraging writers, legitimating new subject areas for literature, launching new presses and drawing readers (Lauret 1994: 12). The “consciousness raising” novel represented the activities of the feminist consciousness raising group with its emancipatory goals and contributed to an Anglo-American feminist fiction of the 1970s and 1980s that featured “big rambling novels where women were, unashamedly, at large” (Lauret 1994: 1). Writing, analyzing and teaching literature, and formulating theory were considered front-line activities of the women’s movement.1 Israel, however, proved a tougher ground for feminist activism, with implications for both women’s literary activity and the representation of women as literary subjects. Throughout the 1970s, Israel was an inhospitable environment for feminism, despite its long-standing declaration of a socialist adherence to the principle of women’s equality. First, the wave of immigration to Israel from European and Middle Eastern countries following World War II transformed Israel’s demographic and cultural landscape. From that period and onward, a large segment of Israel’s population found alien the founders’ vision of socialist equality, while new forms of feminism were perceived as equally antagonistic to more traditional Middle Eastern and/or Orthodox lifestyles. Second, the state of constant siege, as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict, relegated feminist concerns to the background and contributed to the construction of motherhood as women’s national mission (Feldman 1999: 9; Sered 2000: 22-23). Alice Shalvi (born in Germany and raised in England), 1

2

Prefatory remarks to critical works on women’s writing attest to the important role that female academics believe women’s fiction has played in effecting personal and political change. See, e.g., Greene 1991: ix; Lauret 1994: viii; Showalter 1985b: 5.

FEMI NISM A ND ORT HODOX Y

a leader of the Israeli feminist movement, has described Israeli women’s double bind: the paradoxical situation of a declared ideology of equality in an environment hostile to feminism. Shalvi states (retrospectively) that she founded the Israel Women’s Network in 1984, a key feminist organization, in order to “[combat] a climate of opinion in which feminism was considered irrelevant because Israel was perceived as having already achieved equality between the sexes” (Shalvi 1995). In her investigation of the emergence of the female subject in Israeli women’s fiction, Feldman plumbs the paradox that Shalvi described. Drawing on the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf as paradigms, she traces the hesitant assimilation of western feminism by the foremothers of contemporary Israeli women’s writing, in whose narratives the audacious heroines of American feminist dramas were slow to emerge. She documents the struggle of these writers with feminist aspirations under specific sociohistorical conditions, demonstrating how feminist aspiration struggled with national identification, historical exigency and with a self-doubt generated by the Zionist opposition of masculine strength and feminine weakness. Throughout the 1980s, the literary image of the New Hebrew Woman began finally to develop as Amalya Kahana-Carmon engaged the critique of woman’s alterity begun by de Beauvoir, Shulamith Hareven tested the limits of androgyny, and the writers Netiva Ben Yehuda, Shulamit Lapid and Ruth Almog created new plots for strong female characters. In her Afterword, however, Feldman already notes the waning in the 1990s of the literary feminist protest that had only recently emerged, and ascribes it to postmodernism’s influence on Israeli culture. She notes that in the 1990s, women writers tend to bypass or parody the feminist narrative altogether (Feldman 1999: 226). With the de-centering of the national consensus (discussed below), feminism fell victim to the same debunking of meta-narratives that exposed the bankruptcy of Zionist mythology. Moreover, with movement of those on the cultural margins to the center, women are able to hold the spotlight so that feminism might seem superfluous. Invoking Amalya Kahana-Carmon’s ironic assessment of the nature of this shift, Feldman raises the question of whether the recent proliferation of women’s literature reflects a substantive change in women’s status at the same time as she looks forward to “new modalities of feminist consciousness” (Feldman 1999: 229-231). But if integration of western feminist ideas was a long and difficult process among secular, ashkenazi writers, it would take a decade longer for writers from the religious sector, either openly hostile to or skeptical 3

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of modern ideologies, to emerge and grapple with feminist concerns. The absorption of feminist ideals by Orthodox women is bound up in changes in the education and employment of women; even as Orthodoxy tried to carry forward a relatively unchanged tradition, women’s lives within Orthodoxy were being transformed by broad currents of change. In the following section, I discuss scholarship on the changing roles of Orthodox women and their ambivalent reception of feminism. But before I do this, it is necessary to discuss the general problem of defining Jewish Orthodoxy. Throughout my analysis, I divide Israel’s religious sector, as is customary there, into two groups: haredi (or ultraOrthodox) and national religious (or Modern Orthodox). The haredi segment consists of those Jews who resist modernization and remain determined closely to imitate an idealized, constructed vision of premodern, traditional Jewish Eastern European life (Friedman 1991: 6-8; Danzger 1989: 9). The term haredi includes diverse groups with varying traditions and different attitudes toward modernity, including communities centered around nineteenth century Lithuanian style yeshivas, hasidic sects, a strict Hungarian Orthodoxy, and the old ashkenazi religious of Jerusalem (Friedman 1991: 7). In contrast to haredim, Modern Orthodox Jews embrace modernity and limit their participation in secular society only to the extent that halakha [religious law] may require (Danzger 1989: 9). Consistent with that approach, Israel’s Modern Orthodox are Zionists and are often referred to as dati le’umi [national religious]—a term sometimes associated in the public mind with Gush Emunim, the settlers’ movement, and an ultranationalist stance in which Zionism takes on religious significance (Liebman 1993: 354-5). To further complicate the picture, the polarized terms dati [religious] and hiloni [secular] that Israelis use to describe social sectors is not entirely descriptive. Social scientists have observed that Israelis are far more traditional in their behavior and beliefs than had heretofore been imagined, so that the rhetoric of polarization between observant and nonobservant may be exaggerated, at least from a behavioral point of view (Liebman and Katz 1997:xviii). While many “secular” Israelis would prefer to define themselves as masorti [traditional] (Liebman 1993: 358), the term hiloni is often used in Israel as a catch-all for all non-Orthodox identities. Throughout this book, I employ the terms commonly used in Israel to describe social groups. However, I recognize the inadequacy of these terms to capture the distinctiveness of the various communities the literature describes. I hope that through my discussion of the fiction a more nuanced picture of Orthodoxy emerges. 4

FEMI NISM A ND ORT HODOX Y

B. Feminism and the Haredi Woman Haredi Orthodoxy represents those Jews most hostile to modern ideologies. Studies of haredi women bring into sharp relief conflict between feminism and haredi Judaism and illuminate the ideological contours of the world from which haredi-affiliated writers (Bat Shahar, Reisman, Rotem) draw their themes. Prior to the processes of secularization and modernization that began in the late eighteenth century, Jews in Europe largely adhered to norms that dictated separate spheres for men and women. Haredi Jews resisted modernization and adhered to the belief that ideally haredi sons were to immerse themselves as much as possible in Torah study while daughters were supposed to learn what they needed to know to create a Jewish home by helping their mothers. Friedman gives a detailed historical account of how changes in religious women’s education that began in Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century led to transformation of the haredi woman’s role. Religious education for women within Orthodoxy developed in Europe and later in Israel only as a concession to historical exigency. When education for women became more fashionable and accessible in society at large, some women pursued a general education often denied to men who were obligated to engage in religious studies. Against the background of the European economic crises of the later nineteenth century, women often went out to work and were exposed to the ideas of Jewish political parties and to secular knowledge. Paula Hyman has shown how work and educational patterns among Eastern European Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century facilitated the more rapid assimilation of women than men into the surrounding secular culture (Hyman 1995: 50-92). The fact that women were being exposed to western ideas, and the sense that traditional society was losing ground, lessened resistance to haredi women’s education. Eventually the revered religious authority, the Hafetz Hayim, gave approval to women’s education: because of changed historical circumstances the rabbinic dictum that teaching a daughter Torah is teaching her tiflut [folly] could no longer be valid (Friedman 1995: 279).2 The development of educational institutions 2

The Talmud exempts women from Torah study. Maimonides cites Rabbi Eliezer’s minority opinion that teaching your daughter Torah is teaching her folly to support his contention that women should be prohibited, rather than merely exempt, from Torah study (Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Talmud Torah 1:13 cited by Ner-David 2000: 190-191). Ner-David gives a well-reasoned analysis (or deconstruction) of these sources on women’s Torah study. 5

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for haredi women began in 1917 when Sarah Schenirer founded in Krakow the first of the Bet Ya’akov schools.3 The Bet Ya’akov schools had little time to develop in Europe but laid the foundation for the institutionalization of haredi women’s education in Israel (Friedman 1995: 279-280) where they became the central force in the socialization of haredi women. But as Friedman points out, women’s education within haredi society remains a departure from the ideal, a necessary but undesirable adjustment to the exigencies of the times (Friedman 1991: 16-17). The destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust compelled haredi refugees and survivors to emigrate to Israel, where they were forced into contact with the dominant secular Zionist ideology they had previously perceived as inimical to religious life. In the early years of Israeli statehood, secular society, with its pioneering ethos, radiated an aura of moral superiority that challenged the religious to defend traditional Judaism. From this defensive position, haredim succeeded in constructing in Israel a vital and insular counter-culture with its own neighborhoods and institutions, within which its members developed a society defined in opposition to the secular Zionist vision, including its nominal embrace of women’s equality. Rabbinical authorities invoke the biblical verse “kol kevoda bat melekh penima” [the king’s daughter is all glorious within] (Psalms 45:14)4 to indicate the distinction between the traditional woman, whose ideal position is in the El-Or notes that women’s education is tolerated in haredi society as a concession to and reflection of reality; it is permitted only a posteriori. Even as haredim understand women’s education to be part of their lives, they constantly examine its intentions (ElOr 1994: 75).

6

3

Schenirer was from a traditional family, but had been influenced by neo-Orthodox ideas while living in Vienna. She was disturbed by the failure of the religious leadership to speak to women. While remaining part of traditional society, Schenirer managed to break down the barriers to women’s education. She established the first Bet Ya’akov school for women, and later a teacher’s seminary around which literary, cultural, and creative educational activities developed. The Bet Ya’akov schools were taken over by Agudat Yisrael (at that time an ecumenical organization comprised of the neo-Orthodox, hasidic and mitnagic streams of European Orthodox Judaism). The schools pursued an educational program broader than some might have been aware, and through it modern culture flowed to traditional women, carrying with it, Friedman contends, a sense of dividedness and ambivalence (Friedman 1995: 276-80).

4

Translation from Grossman and Haut eds. 1992: xxi cited by Ner-David 2000: 63, 251n48. The JPS translation, stating that the Hebrew is uncertain, translates the passage: “The royal princess, her dress embroidered with golden mountings, is led inside to the king . . . ”

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private sphere “within” the home, and the modern secular woman, who seeks equality on all fronts, including public life (Ner-David 2000: 63; Friedman 1995: 273). Paradoxically, in Friedman’s analysis, it was the impulse to insulate the community from secular influence that laid the groundwork for development of feminist perspectives within haredi life. Separate haredi institutions, supported by state funds, developed and expanded to accommodate new immigrants. These provided not only a relatively closed counter-culture but also employment opportunities for women. Going to Bet Ya’akov and then to a teacher’s seminary became a norm for haredi girls who, then, at a relatively young age, could expect to earn a government-provided teacher’s salary. Women’s central role in the economic life of the haredi family expanded as, in the 1950s, prominent haredi rabbis urged women to assume the demands of household management and paid work so that they might support a husband’s quest for spiritual completeness through extended study.5 Such study was consistent with the desire of haredim to shield the younger generation from their secular surroundings by helping young men to postpone or to avoid entirely military duty (Ben Gurion had agreed to draft deferral for yeshiva students). Leading haredi rabbis called upon young women to eschew the values of their “modern mothers,” who might be versed in European culture, in order to imitate their grandmothers. Yet as Friedman points out, women’s employment in the public sphere and important economic role sharpens the contradiction between traditional concepts of women’s ideal role and their actual activities within and without the haredi community. On the one hand, women’s financial role in supporting the family has allowed haredi society to become even more insular as men spend extended periods of time in the kollel [school for advanced religious study], but on the other hand, current economic arrangements have transformed gender roles within the haredi family and community. Friedman questions the 5

Friedman cites a midrashic prooftext (Midrash Tanhuma, Pinhas 5) for division of labor, so that, within a family, both earthly needs and spiritual goals can be met. Jacob’s son Yissakhar was the scholar, while his brother Zebulun provided the scholar’s material support, but the profits of Torah study would be shared equally between them (Friedman 1995: 283-4, 289n15). He notes how yeshivot in Europe and Israel had used the principle of division of labor to explain their relationship to and gain support from non-Orthodox Jewish donors (Friedman 1991: 14, 48). Friedman directly attacks the “learners society”—the system of extended yeshiva study by men—as unviable economically in the long-term (Friedman 1991: viii). 7

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ability of haredi culture to resist change flowing from this contradiction and views women as a “provocative factor” that will bring about radical change in the community’s negotiation with modernity (Friedman 1995: 284-288). Kimmy Caplan notes that popular discourse within haredi society calls for a new sensitivity toward women, and appeals to women to put work outside the home in proper perspective (Caplan 2007: 211-213, 220-222). Similarly, Stadler discovers among the haredi a new discourse that “promotes a model of unity and companionship between the sexes” (Stadler 2009: 33). As we shall see, Yehudit Rotem’s Keri’a [Mourning] engages exactly the paradox that Friedman describes and to which these new developments in haredi discourse respond, and places it in the context of a feminist attack on the separation in Orthodox Judaism between male and female spheres. Friedman’s assertion that women’s education and employment is transforming haredi society is in tension with accounts of the limited effects that education has had on haredi women’s lives. Tamar El-Or’s Maskilot veburot (1992) [Educated and Ignorant (1994)] focuses upon haredi women’s education as a key to understanding gender consciousness in Israeli haredi women’s lives. She finds the paradox of haredi women’s education implicit in a much-quoted statement by prominent educator Rabbi Avraham Yosef Wolf: “‘If we succeed in instilling in our girl students that the purpose of their studies is to aspire to emulate our matriarchs, who did not study, then we have succeeded in educating our daughters”’ (El-Or 1994: 65). This statement reflects the fear that women’s education will prove to be a catalyst for change, a fear particularly relevant to a community in which new educational and employment opportunities for women are greatly needed from an economic standpoint. El-Or sought to discover, through observation of adult education classes attended by women in the Gur hasidic community, the results of an “education” intended to inculcate ignorance instead of to stimulate intellectual development or to expand opportunity. Would women’s education bear out or transcend Wolf’s expectation of reproducing the non-literacy of an earlier generation? (74) El-Or found that her subjects both limited the scope of their intellectual inquiry and constantly tested the boundaries of these limitations, reflecting a certain gender consciousness. The women tended to direct their study toward action and not thought, and to focus on behavior rather than inquiry and speculation: they would discuss those same laws and familiar interpretations that would strengthen their ability to uphold community 8

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ideals (El-Or 1994: 27).6 El-Or identified two types of literacy that permeated the women’s discussion: “know-how literacy,” which relates to practical matters in an authoritative framework, such as the particular practices relating to Sabbath observance. She noticed that within discussions relating to “know-how literacy,” another conversation would emerge that included questions of “knowledge literacy,” questions such as: “Why should I think?; What kind of logic am I permitted to use, and what kind am I capable of using?” (132). This is as close as the women come to expressing confusion or doubt about gender roles. El-Or interprets this questioning as evidence of a pervasive gender-consciousness among haredi women so that they, like members of the secular society around them, are testing gender boundaries (187). She observes: The haredi education of women strives to make education possible because of a “historical condition,” but also to assure that this education will create new haredi women similar to their mothers. My study of haredi society showed that this is a paradoxical goal, and that women who study develop a reflexive position, that allows them to think of themselves outside of the controlling ideological framework. This possibility is not translated to revolution or rebellion and doesn’t even express itself in many changes, but the position of the haredi woman as “knowing” or as “knowing more” distances her from the generation of her mothers and grandmothers” (El-Or 1998b: 178).

El-Or’s conclusions suggest no imminent transformation of social structure or attitudes, but rather that the haredi system of education largely carries out Rabbi Wolf’s goals. While women question and overstep boundaries, they do so while accepting the basic ideology of inequality. Yehudit Rotem, whose fiction I will address in Chapter Two, wrote a nonfictional account of haredi women’s lives, ‘Ahot Rehoka (1992) [Distant Sisters (1997)]. Her narrative demonstrates a complicated negotiation by haredi women of feminist perspectives and haredi ideals. Rotem was raised and 6

For example, while material success is certainly a criterion of status in the community, the Gur community also emphasizes an ascetic lifestyle so that men may pursue full-time Torah study, rather than full-time employment. At study sessions, the Gur women are subject to constant exhortations to be modest in terms of material needs and demands. Unable to free themselves of certain contradictions central to their lives, imbuing ascetism with religious meaning helps the women live within the facts of their existence (El-Or 1994: 188-199). 9

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married within the haredi community, but in her late thirties she divorced her husband and left the haredi framework. She writes with little nostalgia for what she views as a rigidly patriarchal society inimical to women. She portrays aspects of haredi life (the shiddukh system [arranged marriage], marital and mother-daughter relations, pregnancy, mikve [ritual purity], and faith) through interviews with women whose lives conform to the ideal haredi pattern. Rotem’s equivocation between impartiality and objection is evident in her depiction of one woman’s expression of faith in the rewards that await her in the world to come: “When I asked her about faith, she instantly replies, I have faith, strong faith; then a flash of fear shone in her eyes. I barely heard her quiet voice whisper as though to itself, ‘But if I ever find out that it’s all one big hoax—then I am doomed’” (30-31). Rotem ascribes a false consciousness to women who cope by adhering to haredi norms and “memoriz[ing] their happiness” (46) and finds a disjunction between thought and action which she explains by the difficulty, sometimes even impossibility of leaving the community (Rotem 57-59). She attempts to present the positive and negative aspects of the women’s lives by eliciting both expressions of faith and contentment even as she seeks out all signs of resistance, however subtle.7 Rotem notes that even as haredi women tend to defend their lifestyle with a vengeance, they are not immune to feminism (Rotem 1997: 56). First, there are those rare haredi women, often raised in a somewhat different religious environment, who manage a low-key feminism within the context of the haredi framework, reflecting a post-modern or post-feminist consciousness that pervades accounts of haredi women’s lives. Second, consistent with the views of Friedman and Hyman on the transformative role women have played in Orthodox society, Rotem sees women’s participation in the workplace as a catalyst of change: “It is as though the window of the haredi community has been left open intentionally, to allow the winds of 7

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In the introduction to the English translation of Rotem’s book Distant Sisters, Nessa Rapoport (whose own novel I discuss in Chapter Five below) unequivocally condemns the conditions of haredi women’s lives: “Although there is genuine spiritual glory within their lives, the book is a testimony to the distortions that result when Jewish roles have been allocated solely on the basis of gender” (Rapoport 1997: x). Rotem herself is more reserved in her criticism. She acknowledges in the title to her book her closeness to and distance from her subjects’ perspectives, and the resulting danger that she will interpret her subjects’ comments through the lens of her own discontents. Rotem attempts to withhold condemnation and allow one to conclude that some haredi are content with the haredi system.

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equality to breeze in unimpeded  . . as more women become either primary or secondary wage earners, many of them are making a mad rush for the open door” (84). Further, feminism has worked a more subtle change in interpersonal relationships: They ignore the ever present fact that feminism, if not as a movement then as a spiritual force and as an idea, has revolutionized the power struggles between men and women. The effects of this revolution are as far-reaching as those of a stone cast into the water. Even women in more insular and extreme societies, such as Neturei Karta, are more independent, more selfaware, than their mothers and grandmothers were. When I discuss this point with haredi women, even those from the more closed communities they understand and generally agree (84).

Yet despite this gender consciousness and assimilation, if only partial, of feminist ideas, Rotem’s portrait of haredi women is consistent with El-Or’s more academically informed finding of conformity with and adaptation to a declared ideology of inequality. Finally Alyse Roller, in her book The Literary Imagination of the UltraOrthodox Jewish Woman (1999) evaluates the impact of feminism on haredi women by exploring non-academic writing by haredi women addressed to a haredi audience. Roller, who has been a doctoral student in English at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Wisemon 2001), discusses literature written in English, but fails to address the implications of the national origin of writers and readers, treating the haredi world as a monolithic unit. She finds that haredi women “display a deeply assimilated feminist awareness, despite unconvincing disclaimers otherwise” and are preoccupied in their narratives with redressing feminist arguments by affirming the role that women have played in traditional culture (Roller 1999: 5). Echoing American sociologists who have explored the motivations of ba‘alot teshuva [newly Orthodox women],8 Roller emphasizes the hostility of haredi women writers to classical feminism and the tendency, particularly among ba‘alot teshuva, to use rhetoric that resonates with feminism of difference. She cites narratives that celebrate women’s life-cycle experiences, women’s relational capacities, 8

Kaufman, in her study of American ba‘alot teshuva, arrives at similar conclusions (Kaufman 1991: 2-9). Roller complains that Kaufman and Lynn Davidman, another American feminist who studied Orthodox women, misrepresent the voices of Orthodox women (Roller 1999: 4) yet her findings correspond with both Kaufman’s and Davidman’s. 11

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and the mothering role. Roller finds such writing to be part of a “reactionary infrastructure” that reveals the pervasive influence of feminism. Roller argues that resistance to feminism is sometimes unsuccessful or contradictory, revealing that “classic feminism may be the ultra-Orthodox women’s ‘madwoman in the attic,’ a suppressed, undesirable feminine ‘delinquency’ that surfaces occasionally to reveal what its very denial cannot deny; the extent of its influence. The significance of the madwoman’s suppression is that it demonstrates the ambivalent or negative image of feminism in ultraOrthodox women’s minds” (138). Roller does not address those narratives by haredi women in English (Ragen) and Hebrew (Bat Shahar, Reisman) which would not be deemed acceptable to the haredi community. She therefore exaggerates the degree to which haredi women writers’ attitudes toward classic feminism are either negative or suppressed. C. Feminism and the National Religious

or Modern Orthodox Sector Feminism has also proven problematic for Israel’s religious Zionists, known as dati le’umi, or national religious, despite the commitment among members of this group to bridging the gap between Jewish tradition and modern ideologies. While many women from this sector are likely to have educational and employment aspirations similar to those of secular Israelis, men enjoy superiority in a religious realm from which women are in many ways excluded. Moreover, women may feel a high degree of conflict between personal goals and the family responsibilities considered central to Jewish life. However, some women in this sector embrace, rather than suppress or deny, ambivalence concerning changing gender roles, so that Orthodox feminism has developed to become a significant and dynamic force in national religious society. Anglo-American influence in Orthodox feminism, as in the development of Israeli feminism in general, is significant. While many early and visible American feminists were Jewish, they paid little attention publicly to religion other than to dismiss it as yet another of patriarchy’s many manifestations. However, as feminism became more widespread, religiously committed women began to explore Judaism from a feminist perspective. Increased focus on ethnic consciousness encouraged the turn inward, as did criticism of leading feminists for overlooking ethnic and cultural differences between women. There is a wide-ranging literature dealing with the exclusion of women from Jewish public life and documenting a feminist revolution within 12

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American Judaism (see e.g. Heschel 1983; Plaskow 1990; Barack Fishman 1995). Following the lead of women activists in the more liberal branches of Judaism, Modern Orthodox feminists are seeking to play a greater role in public religious life. Building on the ideas of the prominent American Orthodox Jewish feminist Blu Greenberg, Orthodox feminists have had some success in shaping institutions and practices in the United States and in Israel. They argue that change has always been a component of the halakhic structure: just as rabbis have been innovative in other areas of life, they can be creative with regard to rules regarding women, so as to meet the challenge of integrating them as equals into halakhic society. JOFA (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance) in the United States, and Women at the Wall and Kolekh, in Israel, work on many levels to advance the Orthodox feminist cause. Their activities include expanding the role of women in public prayer, advocating for more liberal halakhic interpretations in areas significant to women, and providing opportunities for religious scholarship and leadership by women. The volume Lihiyot ’isha yehudiya [To Be A Jewish Woman] (2003) includes papers delivered at Kolekh’s July 2003 conference that chart the growth of Orthodox feminist activism in a broad range of areas. Commentators are divided on whether Orthodox feminism has had only marginal impact on Israel’s national religious, or whether it has set in motion what will become a sweeping change in this vital sector of Israeli society. Orthodox feminists exude great energy and excitement. Their dynamism evokes the early days of American feminism and is palpable in Shilo’s introduction to To Be A Jewish Woman. Some believe that Orthodox feminism is restoring to Judaism a vital critical voice absent in Orthodoxy since it assumed a defensive posture. They envision a movement that will grow in force and move beyond attention to the role of women in religious life to advocate political perspectives that emphasize individual rights and pluralism (Greenfeld 2001: 242-9). On the other hand, in her review of To Be A Jewish Woman, Baumel contends that the group Kolekh, and one can infer Orthodox feminism in general, has not affected either secular or haredi society and is considered suspect by many women in the national religious camp. She draws on anecdotal evidence to note that many women either are not interested in changing attitudes toward gender, or think that it cannot be done as long as haredi rabbis continue to wield wide influence: “one group believes that men and women have separate roles to play and there should be no mixing or crossovers; the other, despairing of any possibility for change, circumvents the institutions and norms it finds offensive” (Baumel 2003). 13

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Tamar El-Or’s lucidly presented research on Jewish literacy among national religious women mediates, in some ways, contradictory views of the influence of Orthodox feminism. In her study of women’s religious education, El-Or describes nothing less than a feminist theological revolution, albeit a quiet one, taking place while the guardians at the gate doze. She documents how women’s demand for opportunities for intensive study have led to small changes in education, which have accumulated to allow women greater religious participation even while such change is not publicly validated. In one of the most poignant passages of El-Or’s book, she relates an exchange between a rabbi, who is the male head of a midrasha [institute for women’s religious study], and one of his students. The rabbi is quite genuinely surprised to learn of his student’s desire to bring about halakhic change relating to gender roles. El-Or shows how Orthodox young women bring questions about gender to the classroom based on a reality that contradicts, in many ways, traditional ideology (El-Or 1998b: 202). She also notes that the essence of this critical and subversive activity is to remain a part of and play a more vital role in national religious society. In the effort to liberalize Orthodoxy, the energy and excitement of activism sits alongside the pain of those who find themselves psychologically split because they believe deeply in both rabbinical authority and women’s equality. Blu Greenberg, an influential American Orthodox feminist, expresses sharply the sense of difficulty and ambivalence of the committed Orthodox feminist: In negotiating this encounter, a thousand tasks present themselves: assessing every act, every statement, every ritual and tradition through a new lens . . . questioning the revealed word and obeying the Commanding Voice . . . allowing intellect and personal integrity to speak forcefully to our tradition; discerning when to come closer to Gd through that tradition and when to distance from inherited assumptions—and assessing the costs of all these choices . . . Often, these are wrenching steps (Greenberg 2000: ix).

These perspectives on the impact of feminism on Orthodoxy go far to illuminate the reason for the high profile of women and emphasis on feminist concerns in the body of literature representing Orthodoxy: under the influence of the women’s movement, gender unambiguously arises as a site of conflict with traditional religion. For writers, representing Orthodoxy construction of the New Jewish woman is far from just one more 14

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now-outdated quest. Moreover, paradoxically, women’s very marginality in religious life may stimulate creativity in other realms: unencumbered by certain obligations that men seek to fulfill, Orthodox women may at certain points in their lives have relatively more opportunity than their male counterparts for contact with secular ideas and for the literary activity we now take up. Out of the negotiation by women of conflict between sacred and secular, Orthodox Judaism and modernity, a complex discourse emerges; one in which, in Showalter’s tradition of gynocritics, several themes recur. I will primarily follow four themes that weave themselves throughout women’s narratives representing Orthodoxy in order to highlight similarities and differences in the narratives and in the ways in which they engage feminist and Jewish feminist theory. First, I will briefly contextualize these four themes: the problem of female embodiment, mother-daughter relationships, Israeli politics, and the appropriation or subversion of traditional Jewish sources.

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REPRESENTING ORTHODOXY

A. Female Embodiment Rabbinic Judaism’s claim that there are essential biological and psychological differences between the sexes that determine social roles highlights female embodiment as a central issue for Orthodox women. Discussions of female embodiment, a hotly contested issue in feminist theory, are informed by two opposing strands of thought about female biology and reproductive potential. The first strand, the basis of egalitarian feminism, was developed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) and regards women’s biology, in particular her reproductive powers, as a problematic limitation upon women’s self-realization and access to power. For de Beauvoir, motherhood is a powerful source of a sense that women are partly monstrous. Ambivalence toward women pervades myths about female otherness, and creates an intersubjective dynamic in which the male is the subject, and the female is the marginalized other. Theorists have taken up from a variety of perspectives de Beauvoir’s analysis of female alterity. For example, in the Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976), Dorothy Dinnerstein indicts motherhood by enlisting post-Freudian psychology to evoke an all-powerful mother who is the source of destructive feelings of ambivalence. In The Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Luce Irigaray gives an account of a misogynistic philosophical tradition informed by a sense of women’s otherness. Anglo-American feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, often called classic, second-wave, equal rights, liberal, or humanist feminism, downplayed sexual difference and women’s distinctive biological capacities and encouraged transformation of gender roles, which were perceived to be socially and not biologically constructed. But liberal feminism underwent a shift in the 1980s under the influence of French feminist theory, which celebrated sexual difference and the capacities of the lived female body. Feldman postulates that the cooption of the feminine by male poststructuralist philosophers (Derrida, 16

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Lacan, Foucault), who used the category of woman abstractly for new epistemological and linguistic possibilities, contributed to the valorization of difference by French feminists. These theorists reembodied abstract ideas of feminine otherness: “hence the exaltation of female anatomy and female homoeroticism, the hystericization of feminine writing, and the exuberant celebration of female desire and the maternal function” (Feldman 1999: 55). In America, with Carol Gilligan’s publication of In a Different Voice (1982), liberal feminism came under attack for positing masculinity as a universal norm, and American feminists also began to embrace difference. In her interesting essay on the origins and history of the word feminism, Karen Offen shows how European and American activists developed different strands of feminism; one “relational,” the other “individualist” (Offen 1988). She traces a European tradition of relational feminism in which feminist activists (in contrast to de Beauvoir) emphasized the importance to society of bearing and nurturing children and demanded that government recognize the contribution to society of women in nurturing roles. Meanwhile, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, feminists in England and America developed most expansively an individualist feminism that focused on women’s quest for autonomy and self-realization and de-emphasized sexlinked roles. Offen notes that, historically, European feminist discourse has often been “bi-valent”; feminists insisted both that based on sexual dimorphism women had a special role in society and could make demands based upon that role, and also that women’s situation in society was unjust and must be changed by political action. Further, she notes that AngloAmerican feminists increasingly deploy “relational” and “individualist” modes of argument side by side. Relational or difference feminism resonates with socially conservative values in general, and with Jewish Orthodoxy in particular, by stressing the maternal function and women’s capacities for nurturance. To the extent that haredi thinkers have explicitly addressed feminism, they endorse difference feminism as compatible with Jewish life (Roller 1999: 76-80).9 Some haredi women have developed a theology in which religious regulations,

9

Roller refers to Michael Kaufman’s book Feminism and Judaism: Women, Tradition and the Women’s Movement (Jerusalem: Heritage Press, 1996) as a rare example of a direct, detailed and lengthy account of the conflict between Judaism and feminism by a haredi writer. Kaufman finds a sympathy between difference feminism and Orthodox ideals, while rejecting classic feminism, in his terms “masculo-feminism,” as confusing divinely ordained and essential differences between the sexes (Roller 1999: 76-80). 17

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particularly the laws of nidda [family purity] are seen as recognizing and enhancing women’s access to spirituality. This theology links women with the natural world and their bodily cycles to cosmic forces. Because of their affinity with nature and their distinctive duties, women approach, more easily than men, a state of divine creativity (Myers and Litman: 1995).10 In her study of American ba‘alot teshuva, Debra Renee Kaufman points to the ways in which haredi women incorporate into their discourse a feminism of difference (Kaufman 1991: 155-67). She also observes that while both radical feminists and the newly Orthodox women whom she studied stress the importance of sexuality, reproduction and mothering, the politics of the two groups diverges: “the latter develop a female consciousness limited by the parameters of patriarchy. The former develop a feminist consciousness shaped by their resistence to patriarchy” (Kaufman 1991: 153). In contrast to haredi discourse on feminism, Modern Orthodox feminist discourse tends to be bi-valent, insisting on integration of women into public religious life as well as commitment to family life. The Orthodox feminist should “face the challenge of confronting honestly some of the conflicts between ‘pure feminism’ and Jewish family life” (Barack Fishman 1995: 62). El-Or finds that Israeli women in the national religious sector reject the idea of separate spheres for men and women served up as official religious doctrine. Based on social realities, Modern Orthodox women do not envision an identity based exclusively on serving the needs of a family: “their distinction as religious women is in that they wrap their maternal identity in the cloak of destiny and holiness . . . but this identity is not exclusive” (El-Or 1998b: 209). Literary critics have noted the “bi-valence” that characterizes Modern Orthodox discourse, as a distinctive feature of contemporary women’s fiction. Hanson discusses the tendency in contemporary Anglo-American women’s fiction to “interrogate the identification of the intellect solely with the masculine, but also explore the positive aspects of a (female) subject 10

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Myers and Litman draw in their study upon texts by haredi women. These include The Voice of Sarah: Feminine Spirituality and Traditional Judaism by Tamar Frankiel (San Francisco: Harper, 1990); The Secret of Jewish Femininity: Insights into the Practice of Taharat HaMishpachah by Tehilla Abramov (Southfield, MI: Targum Press, 1988) and various publications by Habad hasidim. They distinguish between the different cultural contexts of these narratives by noting that Abramov, who is Israeli, has the least contact with secular life and refers less to external culture as a justification for Jewish practice than do Frankiel (an American who accepted Orthodoxy as an adult) and Habad writers (Myers and Litman 1995: 57).

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position closely tied to embodiment” (Hanson 2000: 16). Feldman identifies as a central theme in Israeli women’s literature the tension between “the wish to overstep boundaries of any kind, including sexual boundaries” and “the fear of losing one’s personal identity as a result of this overstepping,” or, in other words, the desire to define women’s subjectivity on the basis of sexual difference and the fear of the limitations an essentialist definition might imply (Feldman 1999: 184). The attempt to negotiate between the terms “relational” and “individualist” has been a central project in Israeli women’s fiction as it has been in contemporary Anglo-American women’s fiction (Feldman 1999: 39; Hanson 2000: 160). Interestingly, the Israeli writers from haredi backgrounds (Rotem, Bat Shahar, Brandes) most emphatically reject any exaltation of female embodiment as a source of spiritual power. Rotem explicitly rejects any dichotomy that associates women with body and men with the intellect and condemns the maintenance of separate male and female spheres. Such separation seems particularly damaging to the protagonists of Bat Shahar’s claustrophobic narratives. In contrast, Mira Kedar accepts Orthodox norms that assign to women primary responsibility for nurturing the family even as she participates in the male Jewish intellectual tradition. She accepts traditional gender roles but also insists on the unique powers of women to illuminate sacred texts. Mira Magen, on the other hand, often places her characters on the margins of Orthodox life, yet connects Orthodoxy with positive aspects of a female subject position related to embodiment. In her fiction, Orthodox women are fecund, their lives intimately connected with cycles of birth and life. Acceptance of corporeality and submission to divine will often positively inform her Orthodox characters’ scale of priorities. El-ami, who takes her character beyond the Orthodox milieu, goes a step further to celebrate female difference, portraying lesbian eroticism and childbirth as avenues to Jewish spirituality. B. Mother-Daughter Relations As feminists struggled with conceptualization of female embodiment, they have also paid attention to the mother-daughter relationship and the ways that it is shaped by patriarchy. Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) significantly revised the Freudian account of oedipal configuration by focusing on the girl’s lengthy pre-oedipal period. In Chodorow’s theory, mothers treat male and female children differently so that an exceptionally close relationship arises between mothers and 19

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daughters. The mother’s treatment of the daughter produces a long, intense pre-oedipal period which sets the stage for the daughter’s later objectrelationships and sense of self. The mother tends to emphasize her difference from the boy and, in contrast, to identify narcissistically with the daughter. [M]others of daughters tend not to experience these infant daughters as separate from them in the same way as do mothers of infant sons . . . Primary identification and symbiosis with daughters tend to be stronger and cathexis of daughters is more likely to retain and emphasize narcissistic elements, that is, to be based on experiencing a daughter as an extension or double of a mother herself . . . (Chodorow 1978: 109).

Chodorow looks to extreme cases of symbiosis and mother-daughter boundary confusion to illuminate what she sees, in less extreme form, as a general tendency for issues of oneness and separateness to dominate the mother-daughter relationship. Like many female critics, Chodorow rejects as unconvincing Freud’s concept of penis envy, in which the daughter turns to the father when she discovers that her mother does not have and cannot bestow upon her a penis. She suggests, alternatively, that a girl develops a heterosexual orientation when she seeks freedom from her intense and ambivalent relationship with her mother by strengthening her relationship with her father. The boy, with a less intense attachment to the mother, and with a growing sense of his difference from her, is not looking for an excuse to drop the mother (Chodorow 1978: 120). Chodorow does not stray very far from Freud’s “penis envy” explanation of the girl’s turn to her father in that she explains this turn, in part, by the fact that the girl has been provided with no easy out (masculinity, a penis, difference) from the intense and ambivalent relationship with her mother. Yet, the daughter does not resolve the oedipal triangle quickly, for the father is a somewhat distant figure, and is not “a sufficiently important object” (128) to break attachment to the mother. While in the oedipal period the girl turns to her father, the daughter’s oedipal attachment to her father is less intense and is mitigated by continued attachment to her mother. Thus, mothers and daughters enjoy an unusual and enduring closeness unparalleled by the relationship between either mothers and sons or fathers and their children. The close relationship between mothers and daughters has been theorized both as primary cause of women’s oppression and as a source of liberation and creativity. The title of Chodorow’s influential work summarizes well its central thesis that women are compelled by tradition and social 20

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structure to tend children. In her construction of the psychological dynamics of the family, the intensity of the mother-daughter relationship develops a girl’s capacity to nurture, a capacity that becomes embedded in her psyche. Chodorow argues that men will develop relational capacities similar to those of women, and women the capacity for independence, only when they share childcare arrangements. Irigaray goes beyond Chodorow’s rather mild suggestion to restructure childcare arrangements to claim that a whole new vocabulary of relationship is needed to supplant the patriarchal family in which it is impossible for mother and daughter to “achieve a satisfactory relation” (Irigaray 1985b (1977): 143). Rich and Gilligan have elaborated upon how a dispiriting compliance is passed down from mothers to daughters. Adrienne Rich calls for change in childcare arrangements so that women will no longer be raised by powerless mothers who teach daughters to conform in order to survive (Rich 1976: 235). In Brown and Gilligan’s account, girls learn to become compliant with the unconscious complicity of women who fail to encourage a deep trust in the self and in the authenticity of one’s own voice because, to varying degrees, they themselves have forgotten or have only partly recovered the capacity for honest communication (Brown and Gilligan 1992: 220-21). Similarly, Ruddick elaborates on how women unconsciously pass on cultural values inimical to themselves and their children. In her conception of “maternal thinking,” a mother’s interests include raising a child acceptable to the cultural group to which the mother belongs. “Maternal thought” is inauthentic, in the sense that it advances values of the dominant culture that are inconsistent with the mother’s inner voice and values. This inauthenticity amounts to a betrayal of children that could not be wholly conscious or it would be intolerable (Ruddick 1983: 220-21). At the same time, feminist theorists of difference have celebrated the superior relational capacities of women born of the exceptional strength of the mother-daughter bond. While Chodorow condemned motherhood as leading to a psychically encoded inequality of the sexes and called for change in child-care arrangements, her elaboration of the pre-oedipal period paved the way for revaluation of the mother-daughter bond (Feldman 1999: 51). In her influential In a Different Voice, Gilligan argues that male development is perceived as the norm and deviation from it as failure properly to adopt mature behavioral patterns. For example, separation may not be part of “normal” female development at all. Thus, “women’s descriptions of adulthood convey a different sense [than men’s] of its social reality. In their portrayal of relationships, women replace the bias of men toward 21

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separation with a representation of the interdependence of self and other, both in love and in work” (Gilligan 1982: 170). Male dominance must be challenged, supplanted, or judged by new criteria as women assert the value of the relational capacities that they, with their particular psychology, have developed or are capable of developing. Thus, the closeness of the motherdaughter paradigm is a model for a more advanced state of existence that we should learn to value. French difference theorists, from whom the American feminists and scholars have drawn inspiration, emphasize the mother-daughter bond in theories that link sexual difference to language and writing. In Cixous and Clement, the ongoing relationship between mother and daughter is the source of sexual desire and linguistic creativity (Cixous and Clement: 1986). Kristeva develops the female principle of “the semiotic,” an instinctual wellspring of creativity that rises from the mother-child bond. The semiotic is not confined to women. Rather, it is associated with the poetic, the avantgarde, and the creative in that it challenges the existing male order (Stanton 1985: 74-75). Both Irigaray and Rich connect the pre-oedipal bond, or mother-daughter relationships, to homoeroticism, creativity, and new forms of expression. The revision by feminist psychoanalysts and theorists of assumptions about the family and their emphasis on pre-oedipal relations has opened a rich topic for literary critics who have, beginning in the 1980s, plumbed the depths of literary representation of mother-daughter relationships. Davidson and Broner (1980), Hirsch (1989), and Burstein (1996) trace, in different literary contexts, a progression from alienation to understanding between mothers and daughters. In the more recent fiction they discuss, daughters tend to achieve a new understanding of the mother so that the mother becomes a source of nurturance and inspiration. Feldman credits Israeli writer Ruth Almog with opening up the issue of mother-daughter relations by portraying in her subversive novel, Shorshei ’Avir [Roots of Air] (1987), the mother-daughter continuum as central to the protagonist’s artistic development. Feldman notes that beginning in the 1990s new attention to mother-daughter relations in both Israeli fiction and critical evaluation (Feldman 1999: 197, 284-85 n.8, n.10; cf. Shirav 1998: 143-46). Halbertal’s discussion of the mother-daughter dynamic in Modern Orthodox families puts feminist theory in interesting perspective (Halbertal 2000b). Halbertal rejects a Chodorow-like idealization of the mother-daughter relationship as unrealistic, failing to take into account disparity of interests between mothers and daughters. On the other hand, 22

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Halbertal argues that Rich’s and Gilligan’s contention that mothers either consciously or unconsciously train girls to be submissive blames patriarchy for maternal failings, but also denies mothers agency. Halbertal finds that many Modern Orthodox Jewish women have multiple values. They are aware of attempting to pass on not merely obedience but their own ambivalence: they speak with voices that are both committed to religion and ambivalent toward it. In view of recent cultural trends and the emphasis that Orthodoxy places on the maternal role, it is not surprising that the mother-daughter relation is a central thematic in the literature I address. Halbertal’s view contrasts with Ratner’s perception that, in fiction by women who remain in the Orthodox context, daughters are generally blocked from positive relation to the mother because of her unyielding, patriarchal role (Ratner 2002: 162). Bat Shahar, Rotem, Reisman, Brandes, and El-ami problematize the mother-daughter connection, as do American writers under discussion here (Roiphe, Goodman, Goldstein). They all broaden literary exploration of this thematic by introducing, with interesting variations, the particular pressures of Orthodoxy. C. Appropriation of the “Language of

the Fathers” [leshon ha’avot] Language and writing have long been associated with male authority. Canonic, male-authored texts are important transmitters of central national, cultural and linguistic values. Men have made and interpreted scripture, in particular, and developed the rules of dominant cultural systems generally. Freud and Lacan identify the whole symbolic-cultural system into which we are thrust with the male. Feminist literary scholarship, particularly in its early phases, paid attention to the way that women were represented in that symbolic order, taking issue with a literature largely reliant on male perceptions of women. Female writers and critics sought to liberate themselves from conventional representations of women and to position women as speaking subjects and not marginalized others. But if women were to express an authentic female voice unrestricted by a language and a literary tradition that has perceived woman as other, they would need tools beyond access to education. In the quest for self-representation women writers have developed new expressive means, emphasizing either a unique female language or remaking and subverting the language of the fathers to their own ends (Cohen 1996: 72; Feldman 2004b). 23

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In the Hebrew literary tradition, women’s alienation from the language of the fathers was acute. Hebrew was used in the study of canonical texts traditionally reserved exclusively for men and was not spoken in the daily course of life. In Eastern Europe, division between Hebrew and Yiddish constituted not only a boundary between sacred and secular but also between genders. While Yiddish was the language of conversation, men authored, studied and invoked religious Hebrew texts. A secular Hebrew literature developed during the haskala [Jewish Enlightenment]. Intertextuality became a prominent feature of that literature as writers called upon the sources to express relationship, however fraught with tension, to tradition. The field of Hebrew literature was dominated by men who had been raised to master those sources. Appropriation of the sources by women has been an important and largely overlooked Hebrew literary tradition. Women have enlisted the language of the fathers to assert the artistic, spiritual and intellectual identity historically denied them (Cohen 1996) and to reach beyond issues of female subjectivity to intervene in current ideological and political debates (Feldman 2004b). Cohen traces this tradition of intertextuality beginning with the nineteenth century Italian poet Rahel Moporgo, through the early twentieth century poet Rahel Blaustein and the later narratives of Yehudit Hendel and Ruth Almog. She demonstrates that appropriation of the sources is a central technique of women writers who express autonomy by personalizing and privatizing nothing less than the canonic record of national and collective history. Feldman detects a further, more subversive stage in the process of appropriation. She shows how Amalya Kahana-Carmon used, to unsettling effect, the most sacrosanct biblical sources to describe a private female perspective, and then as her political consciousness developed, appropriated canonic texts to take on more general issues of otherness. Traditional Jewish sources are an integral tool in the literary repertoire of the writers I discuss. Yehudit Rotem uses ironic quotation of the Talmud to register feminist protest against received images of femininity. In Kedar’s writing, intertextuality demonstrates her perception of herself as a link in an unbroken chain of theological continuity, while Brandes and El-ami thematize the process of language appropriation itself. These writers use the sources to subvert Orthodoxy, to affirm Jewish cultural commitments, and to remake them anew. Many of the narratives demonstrate the aesthetic advantages of a cultural literacy that includes knowledge of the Jewish library [aron hasefarim hayehudi] (the term that, in Israeli polemics, signifies Judaism’s foundational texts). As such they contribute to Israel’s 24

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continuing debate about the status of Jewish culture in Israel. In contrast to these other authors, Bat-Shahar avoids using sacred text in most of her fiction, highlighting the separation between male and female spheres that seems to underlie the oppressive and claustrophobic social situations her narratives unrelentingly describe. This avoidance may also signal the limits of Bat Shahar’s ambivalent critique of Orthodoxy. D. The Secular-Religious Gap

and Politics in Israel In Israel Orthodoxy has emerged as a vital countercultural force but one at odds with the secular Judaism at the foundation of Israeli identity. The basic religious conception of Jewish identity was ahistorical; Judaism was meaningful only in relation to Torah and halakha [religious law]. In contrast, Zionism posited a secular Jewish identity and encouraged goal-oriented political activity as the successor to Jewish religious belief. This conception of a secular Jewish identity locked haredim and Zionists in conflict over the nature of Jewish peoplehood.11 It was secular Zionists who advocated the establishment of a Jewish state and sought to supplant what they saw as a desiccated Jewish tradition with an active and creative secular Hebrew culture. Zionists viewed the old world yeshiva student as passive, effeminate and powerless, and envisioned the new Hebrew, who would conform to an ideal of active masculinity and strength. Feldman has noted [that] the “long-standing dichotomy in Hebrew culture, that of ‘Jew’ vs. ‘Hebrew,’ [is] referred to today as ‘Jew’ vs. ‘Israeli.’ For many years, this opposition persisted, branding the long Jewish tradition in the Diaspora as alien to the new Israeli experience and identity. The ‘Jew’ was the ‘other.’ ‘Israeli’ was the ‘self’” (Feldman 1989b: 47-53). Israel’s dominant secular, labor-Zionist ideology challenged the religious to respond. As discussed above, the establishment and growth of the secular 11

In a much repeated folktale, the influential haredi leader the Hazon Ish and David BenGurion met in the early 1950s to discuss the relationship between the Jewish state and traditional Jewish law. The Hazon Ish likened the tension between the secular and religious to: “two carts that meet in the middle of a narrow bridge. The question is which of the carts has to withdraw and move backwards so as to free the bridge for the other. One cart is full and loaded with goods while the other cart is empty. Is it not clear that the empty cart must withdraw before the full cart and vacate the road?!” (Greenfield 2001: 188). For the Hazon Ish, secular Zionism was devoid of eternal value, and therefore had to make way for the Torah wisdom that had fashioned Jewish consciousness throughout the millennia. 25

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state enabled the development of a relatively closed haredi counter-culture, within which haredi institutions flourished as part of an insular “learners society” [hevrat halomdim]. Religious Zionists (affiliated with the Mizrahi movement) were perhaps in a more difficult position than the haredim because they sought to maintain a religious lifestyle while joining forces with Zionists for whom rejection of traditional ways was a core revolutionary value. The national religious effectively gathered forces to forge a distinct identity. Many religious Zionist youths strove to embody the ideal model their community shaped, an ideal that incorporated the values of the religious and Zionist worlds. These youth sought to be Torah scholars with the strength and vitality of sabras. The Merkaz Harav yeshiva, founded by Rabbi Kook and his son, propagated an extreme version of the religious Zionist vision and became an institution central to religious Zionism. The Kooks stood out in the yeshiva world as exponents of the idea that secular Zionism was part of God’s program to bring about a final redemption. Those connected with Merkaz Harav saw Israel’s victory in 1967 as a clear validation of this idea and called for settlement outside of Israel’s 1948 boundaries. By 1974, when Gush Emunim began its settlement activities, it had the support of a broad spectrum of the religious Zionist public. For a time, secular society was attracted to the settlers’ nationalist zeal, but in the end the movement alienated secular Jews, who came to regard all national religious society as fundamentalist and to recoil from Modern Orthodoxy (El-Or 1994: 210). Some Israeli commentators go so far as to characterize the settlers’ movement as a counter-cultural revolution in which religion became the foundation of a nationalistic ideology (Sprinzak 1991: 117; Sheleg 2000: 38). The decline of labor-Zionist ideology and what some viewed as a crisis of values in Israeli society emboldened the religious sector and increased its confidence and sense of legitimacy. Beginning in the 1970s, it appeared to many religious Israelis that society was breaking with basic values of Zionism. The more extreme faction of the national religious party, exemplified by Rav Kook and Merkaz Harav, gained support during the 1970s and 1980s for its conception of a reconstructed Israeli society in which religion would be central. The haredi sector has effectively promoted its interests through political participation even as it has found increased reason to retreat from an Israeli society it views as rife with “secularity for its own sake” (Friedman 1991: 123). Moreover, secular politicians on the right have seen in religion a powerful tool to advance their nationalist goals (Liebman 1993: 352). The rise of a politically powerful religious sector has generated a pattern of 26

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growing antagonism between secular and religious Israelis, exacerbated by the predominance of right-wing political views among the religious and the failure of haredim to serve in the army (Don-Yehiya 1999: 94-95). Accounts of Israeli Orthodoxy, both journalistic and academic, immediately reveal the sense of struggle and alienation between social groups. Amnon Levy, in his descriptive account of haredi life, writes: “more than a few secular Jews have a collection of prejudices about haredim: [they are] smelly, sexual deviants, crooks, dishonest in monetary matters, hypocrites, and above all primitives” (Levy 1988: 256). While trying to dispel some of these prejudices, Levi himself approaches his subjects as beings from another planet.12 At the outset of her study of Gur hasidic women, Tamar El-Or likens herself to an anthropologist studying far flung tribes (El-Or 1992: 6). On the other end of the spectrum, Roller complains that secular writers such as El-Or who set out to understand Orthodox women are unable to set aside their own orthodoxies to understand the cultural and historical background of traditional Judaism (Roller 1999: 36-39). Assessments of the relationship between the religious and secular in Israel range from predictions of mutual transformation to forecasts of civil war. Yair Sheleg’s Hadatiyim hahadashim [The New Religious] (2000), and Tzvia Greenfield’s Hem mefahdim [They are Scared] (2001) express these polarities of opinion, as the titles of their books suggest. Sheleg, an Israeli journalist and social commentator, writes about what he terms the “Israelization of the religious,” or, the integration of the religious into Israeli society (Sheleg 2000: 13). He views the haredi and national religious sectors as dynamic and responsive to modern influences: even as the religious sector sought to attack secular society or to steer it toward new values, it increasingly absorbed influences from the secular world (13-15). The desire to influence secular society through legislation, political criticism, and education brings about increased opportunity, and even desire to mix with secular society and absorb its influences. Further, growth in the numbers of the religious has brought about increased diversity within its population, creating fissures in ideological unity, and new opportunities for openness and innovation. At the same time, there is increased interest by the secular in traditional Jewish lifestyles. Sheleg notes that interest in Judaism “has been in the air in a dominant way in recent years” (262), expressing itself 12

For example, he notes in apparent surprise: “Once one overcomes obstacles such as kashrut and prejudice, it is possible to maintain a good friendship between haredi and hiloni (Levy 1988: 258). 27

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in varied ways. He contends that renewed interest in Judaism is an expression of the intelligentsia’s need to enjoy and transmit a more vital cultural tradition than that produced by mass media (249-76). Sheleg also notes the rising tensions among the religious and secular during the past two decades and a feeling by each group that it is being overwhelmed by the other (298). Nevertheless he maintains a generally optimistic view that suggests the gradual emergence of a middle ground that will render the extremes less relevant. Consistent with Sheleg’s views, Don-Yehiya, a political scientist, describes not a society in crisis, but one in which political accommodation continues successfully to be used by politicians to resolve conflict relating to religious affairs (Don-Yehiya 1999). Greenfield paints a very different picture, portraying a religious sector hostile to the basic values of modern society and intent on its destruction. In her account, the opposition of nearly all of the religious to territorial compromise and to peace is symptomatic of continued opposition to secular Zionism, and of a desire to prevent achievement of its final goal: peace and regional integration. In her view the religious nationalists are contra-Zionists who failed in an effort to become a new elite that would bring about a spiritualcultural revolution and win the support of the country for Gush Emunim. The younger generation, having been fed a diet of narrow particularism, is unable to create for itself or to accept a new agenda. Furthermore, the haredi worldview remains pessimistic at its core and negates a human-centered reality that supports individual rights and freedoms (Greenfield 2001: 144). It is a worldview opposed at its core to the Zionist vision of securing the future of the Jews through rational means, universal ethics, and general participation with humankind (Greenfield 2001: 39). Echoing some of Greenfield’s arguments, Liebman discusses an ideological blurring between the haredi and national religious camps. Dominant leaders of both of these groups insist on retaining control of the territories and espouse core values inimical to democracy (Liebman 1993: 357). Greenfield concludes: “it is not at all clear that all parts of the Jewish people speak in the same spiritual and moral language and it is possible that the Jewish people has lost a shared identity itself ” (Greenfield 2001: 257). Writers representing Orthodoxy speak to this divide, which shapes their narratives thematically and stylistically, just as it shapes reception by a public that reads within a highly charged political context. Israeli critics consider writing by the religious a significant literary phenomenon, both symptom of and ammunition in Israel’s culture wars. Israeli commentators emphasize the origin of writers from the religious sector, and tend to group 28

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them together despite their diverse backgrounds, social identifications and poetics. This emphasis attests, I believe, to the significance Israeli society attaches to the designations religious and secular. Thus in a review essay, Yael Israel lumps together Bat Shahar, Brandes, and Magen, and describes them as “coming from the haredi world” (Magen does not) (Israel 1998). Ratner notes the diversity of Orthodox women’s writing, but nevertheless treats Orthodox writers as a group and tends to blur some distinctions between the social settings the authors describe (Ratner 2002). While this analysis pays attention to connections between the biography of authors and their texts, I treat Orthodoxy as a literary theme and have not limited the narratives discussed to those by writers who were raised in or remain within a religious framework. Thus, I discuss the novel of El-ami, a secular Israeli who writes powerfully about Orthodoxy and spirituality, providing, I hope, a broad perspective on the cultural status of Orthodoxy in Israel. Literature about Orthodoxy familiarizes the secular public with a lifestyle that is in many ways unknown to them. Yael Israel wonders how, in the short time since Jews emerged from studying Talmud “in the darkness of the shtetl,” we have “distanced ourselves from our cultural tradition . . . to the point that we need all kinds of double agents, that will steal into the haredi world and will bring its sensibilities back to us” (Israel 1998). Out of this profound distance arises the “curiosity, repulsion, and nostalgic longing” that makes novels by religious writers the best-sellers they have proved to be (El-Or 1997). At the same time, focusing on the more sensational examples of literature that engages Orthodoxy, some argue that this fiction tends to heighten rather than relieve social tension. First, some of the literature is more ethnography than serious fiction that validates, in simplistic fashion, stereotypical assumptions about haredim (Israel 1998). Second, the fiction exposes the darker side of social control in religious communities as well as all the flawed humanity of its members so that the secular may revel in the removal of any aura of moral superiority surrounding the religious (Friedlander 1997). Speculation about the appeal of literature by Orthodox writers tends to overlook readers within the Orthodox sector itself. While some doubt that such books are read within the haredi community, El-Or has suggested that Ragen’s novels, for example, perform an educational function within the haredi world: “for the first time masses of ultra-Orthodox readers are reading about themselves and are able to reflect” (El-Or 1998a). As noted below, Bat Shahar, Rotem, and Ragen all state that haredi women do read their novels. I therefore consider in Chapter Four, in light of their statements, the 29

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possibility that writing about Orthodoxy performs a consciousness-raising function within the Orthodox milieu. The tension between a writer’s identity as artist and as spokesperson from the religious world informs authorial perspectives on and critical evaluation of the work. Yael Israel divides the literature into good and bad categories depending on the extent of its didactic or informational content. Thus, narratives produced by Rotem, Ragen, and (early) Brandes lack authenticity, since their books include detailed accounts of haredi customs that seem “written to order for the sake of the secular,” and seem more “an authentic guide for the tourist in B’nei B’rak” than true expression of artistic consciousness (Israel 1998). Ratner makes a similar distinction when she argues for the correlation between the didactic stance and the simplicity of books by Brandes and Ragen (Ratner 2002: 164 n.5). She, along with Israel, prefers the narratives of Magen and Bat Shahar, who relate less overtly to Orthodoxy (Bat Shahar), or paint a more diverse picture of it (Magen). Significantly, Bat Shahar has protested, echoing secular Israeli women writers, against being categorized, finding that designation as a religious woman writer diminishes her role as artist. At the same time, her work, as discussed below, shows a clear progression toward feminist consciousness which she understands as political intervention. This dissertation will demonstrate that writers about Orthodoxy present a diverse body of work that interacts in a complex manner with the political stances of authors and readers (cf. Ratner 2002: 140). The differing portrayals by Brandes and Kedar of the national religious sector that I discuss in Chapter Three overtly engage Israeli politics and the controversial issue of West Bank settlement. Brandes’ didactic and heavy-handed books disseminate explicitly political messages, yet also reveal ambiguities in attitude toward the moderation she champions. On the other hand, Chapter Four will show how Magen’s narratives, which are not didactic in style or intention, advance through both aesthetics and thematics an ethic of connection that bears on conflict between secular and religious. Moreover, Ragen’s didactic novels with their transparent treatment of ideological issues, discussed in Chapter Two, are deemed either moderately conservative or highly inflammatory depending on the social context in which they are read. The narratives, diverse in theme and style, reflect a desire for dialogue between religious and secular. By charting more fluid boundaries between social sectors, they constitute significant commentary on a polarized Israeli political and social landscape.

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THE ORTHODOX ROMANCE: VEILED COMPLAINT AND AMBIVALENCE EXTREME IN HANNA BAT SHAHAR

A. A Double Life More than the other women whose writing I address, Hanna Bat Shahar’s life is split: she remains securely ensconced within the haredi world and at the same time pursues activities that, if widely known, would be condemned by her community. Bat Shahar is a pseudonym. To avoid censure by the haredi community, Bat Shahar revealed her literary activities only to her immediate family and closest friends for many years, although she admits to publicly “being outed” on occasion (Bat Shahar (interview) 1999a). Her fiction ranges well beyond the ideological narrative expressive of religious ideals that is acceptable to haredi authorities. Such acceptable fiction, consistent with the dictates of modesty, would not depict the expressions of sexual yearning (Roller 199: 10,143), distorted family relationships, and fantasies about impermissible attractions that are the staple of Bat Shahar’s fiction.13 While Bat Shahar’s family has learned slowly of her writing, and at this point her husband has read at least one of her books, she feels guilty that she publishes, since no authority has given her permission to do so, and since she publishes writing of which she fears her husband and father would not approve (Bat Shahar (interview) 1999a). Paradoxically, it may be that Bat Shahar dares to publish because of her husband’s elite position as a well-known rabbi within Jerusalem’s haredi community and his tacit acceptance of her writing. Bat Shahar insists both that she admires the central religious ideals of the haredi community and that she wants to write what she feels. She describes a split identity externalized by two masks: that of the haredi wife and mother; and that of the writer, the persona truer to her inner self. On the one hand she expresses the haredi fear of the influence of fiction 13

In general, fiction has a low profile in haredi women’s writing, which is dominated by autobiographical and personal narrative (Roller 1999: 82). 31

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on haredi religious and social norms and worries that her writing harms her community; on the other hand, she believes that, by writing, she has opened up the field of literary activity to haredi women (Bat Shahar (interview) 1998). Far more daring than the passive and victimized women that she portrays, Bat Shahar transgresses the boundaries of her social framework energetically to pursue this double life.14 The tension in Bat Shahar’s fiction between themes of romantic yearning and human alienation, and more particularistic feminist protest against religious patriarchy, expresses Bat Shahar’s fundamental ambivalence. In her narratives, social contexts emerge slowly, sometimes only in vague outlines, and seem far removed from the mainstream of Israeli political and social reality, so that Orthodoxy is a given and not often a subject of contemplation. Yet as her fiction develops, Bat Shahar suggests—through descriptions, analogies, and increased attention to the social details of her protagonists’ lives—connections between their depressed condition and the Orthodox Jewish milieu in which they live. Her narratives reflect all the contradictions of her lived life as she adopts a lyrical, expressionistic style, after the early Kahana-Carmon, enlisting the tradition of romantic individualist self-expression to soften the feminist protest against haredi patriarchy that emerges most strongly in her later writing (cf. Lauret 1994: 83). In her extra-literary statements Bat Shahar denies the subversive aspects of her fiction. She deflects attention from aspects of her writing that are critical of Orthodoxy by referring to the universal, formal and literary qualities of her fiction. While she admits that by “laundering the dirty laundry of the haredim” her fiction oversteps the boundaries of acceptability to the haredi community (Bat Shahar (interview) 1999a), she denies critical intent: In my stories I raise universal experiences, drawing out human motives. What, in religious society there aren’t feelings? There aren’t urges? It can’t be, even in theory, that a young girl will fall in love with her sister’s husband? The question is how these forbidden attractions are dealt with in religious society and this is what I describe . . . And it is incorrect that my writing is subversive from within . . . . 14

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Her oeuvre includes: Sipurei ha-kos [Stories of the Owl] (stories), 1985; Likro la’atalefim [Calling the Bats] (stories), 1990; Rikud ha-parpar [The Dancing Butterfly] (novellas), 1993; Sham sirot ha-dayig [Look, the Fishing Boats] (novellas), 1997; Yonkey ha-devash ha-metukim [Sweet Honey Birds] (novellas), 1999; Ha-na’ara me’agam mishigan [The Girl From Lake Michigan], 2002; Nimfa Levana, Seira Meshugaat [White Nymph, Wild Satyr], 2005; Tzlalim Ba-Rei [Shadows in the Mirror], 2008.

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Elsewhere, she states, It’s true that the heroines of the stories have many experiences of loneliness and repression; but it is incorrect that their society, exclusively, chokes their feelings and urges. Life and its necessities does that (Bat Shahar (interview) 1997c).

It is interesting to consider Bat Shahar’s denial of the subversive nature of her work in light of Roller’s conclusion that haredi women writers whose writing is within the limits of acceptability to the haredi community tend both to condemn feminist ideas and display in their writing deep feminist awareness, and El-Or’s observations on the limits of the education of the haredi woman (Chapter One). Further, like the veteran Israeli women writers Amalya Kahana-Carmon, Shulamith Hareven, and Ruth Almog that preceded her, Bat Shahar demands that her work be approached as serious literature, and not relegated to some narrow room of women’s literature, or dismissed as ethnography, folklore, or pandering to voyeurism: [I]t’s not enough to have the stigma of being a woman, now the stigma of being a religious woman writer was invented . . . I think that one must relate to a book as an artistic medium, as something that seeks to express a spiritual dimension of one unique person and not that of a group. This relationship to “religious women writers” is not literary but rather social and is intended to advance sales . . . (Bat Shahar 1997c).

Bat Shahar thus emphasizes the universality of her fiction. She contends that we discover the truth about human nature “in the kitchen,” amid the routines of daily life, so that if Israeli literature has ignored the story of personal relationships which are often seen as the particular province of women’s writing, or portrayed women only from the outside, the current boom in women’s literature is providing an important corrective. However, in one of her more candid moments (outside of her own country), and while still arguing for the universal relevance of her themes, Bat Shahar explicitly admits not just a feminist, but an activist, perspective, stating “feminism is politics too” (Bat Shahar (interview) 1998). Bat Shahar expresses her feminist orientation from the outset, opening “Baderekh el hayam” [On the Way to the Sea], the first novella of her first public collection, with a vision of a female quest for liberation from the father 33

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that she develops throughout her corpus. “On the Way to the Sea” begins with a young woman’s memory of a dream that she dreamt following the death of her father. In the dream, an old woman approaches a young woman, Libby, to ask for her father’s aron [bookcase], a furnishing, we can infer, that had once been filled with the father’s scholarly Jewish texts. The two carry the bookcase on their backs until Libby becomes exhausted. Libby then finds herself at an abandoned train station outside of which she glimpses the sea. She drags the bookcase through the sand to the sea and “pushes it between the waves. And thus, in her raft, she rows [hoteret] up and down, sailing to the wide open spaces of the sea” (Bat Shahar 1987: 7). Here, Libby upends the bookcase, a weighty symbol of the patriarchal code, and uses it to escape into the sea, a common image of an unrestricted, tumultuous space of freedom and imagination. “Hoteret” [rows] also means, in its more abstract sense, subvert, so that Bat Shahar’s use of this verb intensifies the sense of rebellion that motivates Libby’s quest for liberation and release to freedom. The stories in the first three collections, Stories of the Owl, Calling the Bats and The Dancing Butterfly, highlight a woman’s emotional frustration within a claustrophobic situation and fruitless fantasy of liberation. My analysis focuses on her later writing, in which she continues to deal with female repression in the context of more expansive networks of social relationships. In the later works, a more explicit critique of haredi Orthodoxy emerges culminating in the broad condemnation of haredi mores from a feminist perspective that the spaciousness of the novel The Girl From Lake Michigan permits. The reception of Bat Shahar’s fiction reflects her indirection and the development of her increasingly critical perspective. From the outset, Bat Shahar’s narratives were for the most part understood as feminist in orientation. In her analysis of the early Calling the Bats, Tamar Hess (Hess 1995) characterizes Bat Shahar’s stories as representing a systematically repressive patriarchy from a feminist point of view. In a review of Look, the Fishing Boats, Navot describes Bat Shahar’s writing as feminist in the tradition of Virginia Woolf, in that it describes “struggling with the wholeness of an inner world and with an independent way of thinking, related to the protagonists’ feminist points of view . . . ” (Navot 1997; cf. Oren 1993). Navot notes that in Look, the Fishing Boats Bat Shahar pays greater attention to characterization of the social world than to description of the inner world and the “series of reactions of complex synecdochal character” that are Bat Shahar’s strength (Navot 1997). Mincing no words, Gottkind points to the clear subversion in Look, the Fishing Boats of values central to haredi society 34

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and asks: “and how does Bat Shahar overlook the subversive, provocative plane of her stories?” (Gottkind 1997). Bat Shahar’s atmospheric style has elicited both critical condemnation and acclaim. Israeli writer Dan Seri, who brought Bat Shahar’s work to the attention of her publisher, praised her style early in her writing career as delicately powerful: “a crystal vase with worms running around in it” (Moskona-Lerman 1990). At the same time, reviewers evince an impatience with her indirection. In this vein, Yoram Meltzer takes her to task for failing to “take responsibility” for her views by exploring more directly the controversial issues that she raises (Meltzer 1999). Batya Gur finds frustrating Bat Shahar’s failure to sufficiently explain or develop certain tensions between characters at which she only hints (Gur 1997). B. No Body—The Ice Queen

and the Mummy The major subject of Bat Shahar’s considerable corpus is the psychologically wounded heroine’s quest for love. The Bat Shahar heroine experiences a moment of grace, an encounter with an elusive, would-be lover. The connection between the protagonist and her beloved is sometimes delusional and sometimes more fully realized, but leads inexorably to frustration. The moments of grace, often related as flashbacks, become the focus of contradictory impulses to reconcile with a fallen reality, or to cling to the unambiguously futile hope of the possibility of love. The object of love contrasts sharply with male authority figures who are associated in one way or another with rabbinic law. These authoritative figures are scholars, heads of yeshivas, lawyers, or simply oppressive fathers and husbands from whose domination wives and daughters escape by retreating inward into highly wrought emotional worlds. The influence of leading Israeli writer Amalya Kahana-Carmon, one of the “foremothers” of Israeli women’s writing, is strongly felt both in Bat Shahar’s subject and lyrical-impressionistic style. Kahana-Carmon typically structures her narratives around a moment of grace in plots “underlined by a typical heroine’s dysphoric script: the unrequited romance” (Feldman 1999: 63). Through her accomplished lyricism, Kahana-Carmon expresses her heroines’ ultimate resignation and inward retreat. In Bat Shahar’s lyrical writing, shaped in part by her participation in 1972 in a Jerusalem writers’ workshop (Bat Shahar (interview) 1999a), specific milieus and social settings often only vaguely emerge as heroines project their depressions, longings 35

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and fantasies onto their surroundings. The ability to evoke an atmosphere of gloominess and ugliness that reflects the state of her characters’ souls is one of the more impressive aspects of Bat Shahar’s thematically repetitive oeuvre. In long descriptive passages of first or third person narratives that stay close to a protagonist’s consciousness, Bat Shahar describes a natural environment as desolate as her heroines: In the courtyard of the autistics’ “Bet ha’or” the fig tree sheds its last leaves. The wind plucks at its twisted branches, hastening the process. The dry leaves crawl over the garden plots to the foot of the fig, spreading out farther from the trunk in every direction. They look like cut off palms. A murmur hums in the courtyard, the murmur of the dry palms, wrinkled, spread in a despairing plea, as if asking to return to the tree (Bat Shahar 1999: 78).

As in the romantic tradition, Bat Shahar uses nature, the raging sea (The Girl from Lake Michigan, “Look, the Fishing Boats”), the overgrown jungle-like garden (“Seven Days of Feasting”) to symbolize the impermissible instincts and urges raging in the hearts of her characters (Gur 1997).15 Threatening atmospheres mirror the hopelessness of the female condition in these stories: to be married is to be lonely and economically exploited (Bat Shahar 1997: 148; 1999: 13-14), or raped (Bat Shahar 1997: 141, 150; 1999: 113), and to be unmarried is to languish, untouched, in a state of emotional deprivation, repressed sexuality or madness. Bat Shahar’s heroines identify themselves with images of female passivity and victimization, with the ornately costumed Yemenite bride whose groom “will preserve her in a protected glass box” (Bat Shahar1985: 41), with the young girl of South American legend who is sacrificed to the god of the sea (Bat Shahar 1985: 28). In the novellas “Yonkei had’vash hametukim” [“Sweet Honey-Birds”] and “Tirtza vekamiliya” [“Tirtza and Camellia”] married or divorced protagonists are described by domineering men or experience themselves as defectively “cold” or unable to love (Bat Shahar 1999: 120; 15

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In her review of Look, The Fishing Boats, Gur points out that alienation of the traditional Jew from the world of nature has been a major motif in modern Hebrew literature, from S. Y. Abramovitch, through Bialik, Brenner, and Agnon. Bat Shahar uses images of nature to different effect, creating a male/female dichotomy: in the story “Look, the Fishing Boats” men are barely aware of the raging sea, while the heroine is acutely conscious of its movements and of its temptations. Her awareness symbolizes her romantic perspective (Gur 1997).

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1997: 132, 141). Icy imagery is woven throughout The Girl From Lake Michigan, whose protagonist envisions herself a legendary ice virgin. The Bat Shahar heroine is inevitably to be exploited within marriage, or consigned to a marginal existence without it. Sexual repression and emotional turmoil erupt in physical disease, as in the red sore-like blotches that cover the faces of characters in “Tirtza and Camellia” and “The Wings of the Stork” (cf. Almog’s Nashim 1986). Bat Shahar’s women express romantic yearning in a language of enchantment, that contrasts with overly heated, unattractive, or starkly gloomy landscapes as the lonely heroine is touched by a magical hero who briefly melts the ice. The object of desire is sometimes faintly exotic (American or Japanese), often interested in the arts (film, dance, literature) and is always a sensitive, attentive listener who is not associated with religious authority. This male object of desire is often named a variant of Joseph (Yasif, Sif, Joey) evoking the beauty and charm associated with the biblical Yosef.16 He contrasts distinctly with male figures of authority (husbands or fathers), who enforce patriarchal rules and are often condescending in interactions with women. During brief, ambiguous encounters with the faintly exotic, desired male, the Bat Shahar heroine experiences ennobling feelings of love: “Yoav, she said to herself, you started this miracle in me, you melted the ice in me” (Bat Shahar 1997b: 148); “In moments of sobriety she said to herself that their love was so short, like a blazing candle, but in any event she succeeded in loving. As if through the years she had frozen in an ice closet, and Yoav cut her out of it” (Bat Shahar 1997b: 161); “Over the years Natan succeeded in persuading me that I am a cold woman. Until I met Shinko and all that was dead and frozen within melted and woke up” (Bat Shahar 1999b: 120). Bat-Shahar describes attraction for the longed for lover in fairytale language that highlights the gap between romantic illusion and a dull, constricted reality. In The Girl From Lake Michigan, Haya-Sara compares Hillel to “a knight who came to save a princess from an ivory tower,” and imagines herself as Cinderella (Bat Shahar 2002: 45, 132, 188). In “Tirtza and Camellia,” Tirtza views her beloved as an enchanter who bewitches (a word overused by Bat Shahar) her, a genie with magic power (Bat Shahar 16

The beauty of the biblical Joseph’s hair and eyes is made much of in midrashic accounts of the attempt by Potiphar’s wife to seduce him (Ginzberg 1969: v.2, 47-48). Bat Shahar uses the biblical saga of Joseph and Potiphar as an intertext throughout the novella “Sweet Honey Birds.” 37

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1997b: 135, 152-53, 158, 162). In “The Wings of the Stork,” Lea yearns for Yasif, the “dream prince” (Bat Shahar 1999b: 49) who has married her cousin Mimi, and wonders if there is still “that magical understanding between them” (63). The married Trudy in “Sweet Honey-Birds,” describes the force of her own and her family’s attraction to her beloved student Shinko: “but more than anything it was his magic inexpressible in words, one that I can’t define, a magic in his very being that also attracted Ossie to him and even Natan” (Bat Shahar 1999b: 148). Trudy, along with many other Bat Shahar protagonists, believes that her love for the unattainable object is “the real feeling,” (Bat Shahar 1999b: 131), the real thing. The fairytale language, and the ephemeral nature of the connection between the female protagonist and the beloved, make clear the fantastic nature of the heroine’s romantic yearnings. In “Sweet Honey-Birds,” Trudy expresses a self-conscious awareness of the existential state of the Bat Shahar heroine when she asks: “Are many women waiting like me for Shinko? And perhaps Shinko isn’t a man but rather a concept or a legend?” (Bat Shahar 1999b: 148). In “Sweet Honey-Birds,” Trudy notices a man in a sailboat who resembles her beloved Shinko: Will he be seen again or will he continue and sail forward with the flow? Oh. What a colorful, delusive point you are, like Shinko. More than once I said to myself: he loves you, he will come back. But at other times, cured of my illusions, I knew: he doesn’t love me, and won’t ever come back (Bat Shahar 1999b: 112).

As their feelings of hopelessness, resignation, and powerlessness mount, these heroines try to convince themselves that having once experienced feelings of love is itself ennobling (Bat Shahar 1997b: 174; 1999b: 25, 157). DuPlesis and Miller have noted the ubiquity and deep-rootedness of the romantic plot in the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel, and commented on its ideological implications. DuPlesis notes: Romance plots of various kinds, the iconography of love, the postures of yearning, pleasing, choosing, slipping, falling, and failing are, evidently, some of the deep, shared structures of our culture. These scripts of heterosexual romance, romantic thralldom, and a telos in marriage are also social forms expressed at once in individual desires and in a collective code of action including law: in sequences of action psychically imprinted and in behaviors socially upheld (DuPlesis 1985: 2). 38

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Miller has noted that eighteenth century novel writers inevitably propelled their heroines toward marriage or death. In the “euphoric” plot romance triumphed and the heroine’s marriage marked her successful integration into society. In the “dysphoric” plot, the flawed heroine ultimately met with social failure and death (Miller 1980: xi). In the dysphoric plots of Bat Shahar and Amalya Kahana-Carmon, heroines lack access to sources of vitality and the resources to act upon authentic feelings, and as a result they experience a kind of living death. Like Kahana-Carmon’s heroines, Bat Shahar’s women wait for salvation from an oppressive situation by channeling their energies into romantic idealization of another. Many of Kahana-Carmon’s narratives focus on a protagonist’s experience of a destructive relationship with a husband or lover and the question of her ability to free herself from that relationship. Her characters seek moments of sublimity, peak moments related to a romantic perspective. Many of Kahana-Carmon’s narratives share a deep, fairy-tale-like structure in which a passive, dependent woman seeks salvation from the “dragon” (a powerful male figure) through a more sensitive male character for whom she yearns (Balaban 1979; Shirav 1998: 149-156). The romantic dream is never realized. Despite KahanaCarmon’s repetition of these themes, critics have noted complexity in and development of her writing in which she sometimes complicates her often dichotomous representation of the sexes. In her later work, notably in Up in Montifer (1984), she extricates her heroine from a state of passivity and dependence (here servitude) and allows her to exhibit a willingness to stand independently, whatever the uncertain consequences of her autonomy (Feldman 1997: 82-90; 1999: 70-84; Shirav 1998: 152). In contrast, Bat Shahar, even as she develops in her fiction an increasingly self-conscious and direct critique of haredi mores, never allows her characters to transcend their romantic dreams to free themselves of the ultimately destructive promise of “happily ever after.” The existence of oppressive male authority shapes the heroine’s passive nature. By representing romantic promise as utterly futile and as an alternative to an unrelentingly gray reality, Bat Shahar’s narratives register as protest. Thus, Ratner finds that Bat Shahar uses romance as a subversive strategy. Her characters are aware of their sexuality in a way that subverts accepted Orthodox norms. Their absorption in impermissible fantasy distracts Bat Shahar’s women from performance of expected social roles (Ratner 2002: 161). Moreover, in narratives in which she develops descriptions 39

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of the haredi social context, her complaint comes specifically to focus on Orthodox Jewish patriarchy (cf. Ratner 2002: 159).17 C. Jewish Art and Jewish Life:

Contesting the Images of the Fathers Bat Shahar lives in a haredi environment that discourages exposure to secular fiction, including modern Hebrew literature, the reading of which is considered dangerous and/or sinful. Nonetheless, Bat Shahar is well-acquainted with both modern Hebrew fiction and world literature: she was permitted by her parents to read freely, and has pursued a master’s degree in Hebrew literature from Hebrew University (Bat Shahar (interviews) 1997c; 1999a). Her familiarity with classics of modern Hebrew literature, strongly felt in her fiction, has been noted. For example, one reviewer finds an affinity between Bat Shahar’s demonized Jerusalem landscapes in Look, The Fishing Boats and Amos Oz’s descriptions of that city in Mikha’el Sheli [My Michael] (Gottkind 1997). More distinctively, Bat Shahar, like Amalya Kahana-Carmon, frequently refers in her writing to the visual arts. Certain aspects of Bat Shahar’s use of the visual arts supports both her claim to universality and lack of an agenda critical of haredi culture: Bat Shahar often employs universal symbols to evoke both the bourgeois settings of her fiction and the futility of the romantic quest. Muted or ruined art reflects the absence of joy and the futility of romantic notions of love. In The Girl From Lake Michigan, Haya Sara’s contact with Joey, the longed for romantic interest, takes place in an Italian apartment, the outer gate of which is decorated by two ruined stone figures which suggest the ephemeral nature of romantic love: “the folds in the man’s pants and the pleats in the women’s dress tell of some completeness that this couple stood for in the past” (Bat Shahar 2002: 177). “On her makeup table stood a statue of Venus . . . the arms of the goddess were cut off, and she seemed to Tirtza fragile and helpless” (Bat Shahar 1997b: 129). These images make clear that Bat Shahar deplores the futility of romantic promise in general.

17

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Ratner’s recently published study of the writings of Israeli Orthodox women also notes that as Bat Shahar’s fiction develops, her critique of Orthodoxy intensifies and becomes more direct. This study reached me, however, after I had already drawn the same conclusion about the evolution of critical voice in Bat Shahar’s fiction.

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At the same time, Bat Shahar uses Jewish art and Jewish ritual to create particularly grotesque images. While for secular Israeli writers religious Jewish art and ritual may be largely unfamiliar territory, for Bat Shahar, much like Agnon, they are part of the language of the Jewish patriarchy that frames her characters’ everyday lives. Unflattering descriptions render Jewish objects, ceremonies, and family gatherings strangely out of focus, suggesting an incommensurability between a marred social reality and religious practices intended to foster family and tribal continuity and harmony. In “The Wings of the Stork,” a kitschy painting of dancing hasidim becomes an ominous presence threatening curtailment of the potential for happiness: In the picture the hasidim looked like colorful blobs. With faces erased they stood next to each other, their hands raised upward in a kind of frozen dance. Their colors, in blue, gold, red and green were blurred and swallowed by the foggy background. At times, when Lea looked at them steadily, they seemed like colorful bubbles moving within the void of the picture until they were absorbed within it and disappeared entirely (Bat Shahar 1999b: 35).

An artistic and lovelorn female character, hovering on the edge of sanity, creates wild pictures for the succa: “and Ya‘acov Stein silently folds the crude pictures over the phrases ‘Blessed is your coming, and blessed is your going forth.’ ‘It’s forbidden,’ Suzy, he begs.” (Bat Shahar 2002: 88). The song “Hanukka, Hanukka, hag yafe kol kakh” [Hanukka, Hanukka, such a happy holiday] rings a jarring note at a tense holiday party (Bat Shahar 2002: 142). In “Seven Days of Feasting,” the seven feasts that traditionally follow a wedding become progressively more ominous. By the fourth party the atmosphere is spooky: “a group of ghosts gathered there, their shadows dancing on the walls” (Bat Shahar 1997b: 101). And in “The Wings of the Stork,” the writer eerily reverses celebration and mourning as a wedding takes on funereal qualities and “the seven days of mourning are celebrated by his [the father-decedent’s] daughter as if they were seven days of feasting” (Bat Shahar 1999b: 82). The gap between the joylessness of Bat Shahar’s characters and the ritualized expressions of joy and celebration at the Jewish festivals and gatherings that she depicts render her work unrelentingly critical. Further, Bat-Shahar at times renders traditional objects grotesque through unflattering analogies, as when the mehitza becomes a cataract: “I open the mahzor, trying to concentrate on the prayer. But little by little that same whitish curtain that divides the women from the men thickens 41

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like a cataract on my eye” (Bat Shahar 2002: 111). The image of the cataract, like Bat-Shahar’s themes and characterizations, recurs within her corpus: “[a]nd in the black panes of the windows one could see big paint stains, like cataracts in blind eyes” (Bat Shahar 1999b: 91). The cataract is a fitting metaphor for the emotional malaise that separates her heroines from more direct experience but when a mehitza becomes a cataract, one may take issue with Bat Shahar’s occasional claims to a non-critical stance toward the particular practices of the society she depicts. D. Varieties of Pathology:

The Mother-Daughter Connection in Bat Shahar and Reisman The extent of mother-daughter alienation in Bat Shahar’s narratives is particularly notable in light of developments in contemporary Israeli literature. Influenced by feminist theorists who have shifted attention from the oedipal to the pre-oedipal bond, motherdaughter bonds have become a popular thematic. Shirav and Feldman discuss the attention to mother-daughter relationships in contemporary Israeli literature: Feldman, analyzing Almog’s Shorshei avir [Roots of Air], and Shirav, using Kahana-Carmon’s Lema’lah bemontifer [Up in Montifer], show how recovering the repressed legacy of the mother becomes crucial to female identity formation (Feldman 1997, 1999; Shirav 1998: 144). I will explore in Chapter Seven this theme of “thinking back through the mother” (after the words of Virginia Woolf),18 in the context of a struggle for spiritual and artistic self-expression. In contrast, in Bat Shahar’s narratives and in the novel of another writer from the haredi world, Yocheved Reisman, mothers and daughters are distant or pathologically enmeshed in irreconcilable relationships. Their writing supports Ratner’s argument that by definition “mother/daughter relationships cannot be reconciled within the patriarchal order” (Irigaray 1985: 143; Ratner 2002: 155). Bat-Shahar’s extra-literary comments reveal contradictory and complex feelings about motherhood that bear upon the prominence of mother-daughter thematics and the absence of nurturing mothers in her fiction. On the one hand, in an interview she gave relatively early in her writing career, Bat Shahar describes an absence of maternal nurturance: 18

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For a discussion of the relation between this feminist slogan, coined by Viriginia Woolf, and Woolf’s own writing see Feldman 1999: 98-106.

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When I describe in my books cold mothers, who don’t know how to give love, this is drawn from my childhood. I never had a mother, and when I describe in my books women whose mother is dead or dysfunctional, I am speaking about myself. I feel motherless, despite the fact that my mother is living . . . A woman that didn’t have a real mother is unable to be a mother herself (Bat Shahar 1993a).

On the other hand, she describes herself as having had a mother who encouraged her reading of fiction and her writing. In an interview in English for a 1988 Canadian broadcast she states: “And my mother, that’s what’s so surprising to me now . . . always encouraged me to do it [write]. She appreciated my writing, she thought it’s great when I was writing even, you know, a regular piece for the school. She was very good to me about it” (Bat Shahar (interview) 1998). Bat Shahar’s contradictory representations of her own mother, one can surmise, arise from ambivalence about the haredi society into which she was socialized by that mother. Alternatively, her contradictory statements may evidence a “cover-up,” a self-censorship acquired to spare the feelings of others and to avoid portraying negatively haredi family life to a general, English-speaking audience. Bat Shahar also expresses ambivalence and oscillation in describing her relationship with her own daughter onto whom she projects the desire for freedom: “It seems I am still the girl who must comply with the moral rules that the men fixed and not me . . . maybe my daughter will liberate herself from this. She reads my books. We talk a lot about art. I hope that she will free herself. And maybe not. She received the same education as I did” (Bat Shahar 1999a). Even this limited candor between mother and daughter is lacking in Bat Shahar’s representations of mother-daughter relationships. There are no nurturing mothers and few genuine female friendships in Bat Shahar’s works, but rather claustrophobic, often homo-erotic relationships between women that fail to become alliances. Economic control and intellectual achievement are the province of men with book-lined studies, while women socialize with and entertain each other. Daughters are motherless and helpless (Frieda in “Seven Days of Feasting”; Tirtza in “Tirtza and Camellia”; Lea in “Wings of the Stork”; Haya Sara in The Girl From Lake Michigan). When mothers or their surrogates are present, they are strangely emotionally paralyzed (Sara in “Look, the Fishing Boats”), preoccupied by their own romantic fantasies (Trudy in “Sweet Honeybirds”) or exert pressure upon daughters to conform to dispiriting roles (Yokheved in “Tirtza and Camellia”). Ella, the protagonist of “Seven Days of Feasting,” asks herself: 43

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“Will I be able to pretend, to play the role of the big sister, the loving mother?” (Bat Shahar 1997b: 111). She is not able. Solidarity with one’s own sex fails. It never provides a refuge from oppressive relations between men and women. Enmity and jealousy lurk just below the surface of seemingly harmonious interpersonal relationships so that in Bat-Shahar’s fiction bonds of family, friendship and community are illusory. Her characters comment on a lack of authenticity in social relations: “People wear masks and their insides are not as their outsides. They pretend that they love, but in fact hatred and jealousy permeate their hearts. They don’t admit the truth only out of politeness and convention” (Bat Shahar 1997b: 59). In this hostile social reality, makeup becomes a mask that helps women to conform to social expectations: “Sara looked at her reflection in the mirror, and added another layer of makeup, as if adjusting a fixed mask” (20), “she made up her face until emotion was no longer recognizable in it” (48). In “Kanfei hahasida” [The Wings of the Stork], community solidarity is only a facade, so that after fulfilling basic rituals involved in visiting those in mourning, those who have come to comfort the bereaved scornfully beat a hasty retreat (Bat Shahar 1999b: 75-76). In “Look, The Fishing Boats,” a mother masks her feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness to protect her daughters. In that novella, the feverish activity to couple off the youth in order to insure individual and communal survival creates a sense of limitation, intensified by the existence of a separate male order beyond women’s reach. A young mother with many children, who receives little assistance from her mercurial spouse, is seen through the eyes of her own mother: “Sara felt a wave of anger rise within her: wasn’t Rahel once beautiful like that girl, Florence, that she saw on the beach. Now she is silent and extinguished, like the layer of dust on the window . . . Rahel seemed like someone lying on the windowsill of a broken window, and in a minute she would roll and fall downward . . . ” (Bat Shahar 1997b: 16). Here Bat Shahar presents an empathetic mother whose thoughts clearly subvert a central tenet of haredi society in which the young woman with many children is an object of admiration as she realizes one of the community’s highest ideals (Gottkind 1997). Sara’s maternal empathy is accompanied by feelings of maternal powerlessness, imaged in the narrative by her vision of a young girl wandering too close to the tempestuous sea, just beyond the reach of her warning voice. Ratner locates a subversive potential in Bat Shahar’s later narratives that focalize consciousness through the mother; a subversiveness that she cites as evidence of the tendency toward more overt rebellion against haredi norms in Bat-Shahar’s later writing (Ratner 2002: 159). In “Look, 44

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the Fishing Boats,” the mother, Sara, shares her unmarried daughter’s impermissible infatuation. Ratner reads Sara’s silence in the novella as submission (acceptance of her plight) and also as a refusal to collude in the patriarchal order since by her silence she fails to encourage what may be an ill-fated match for her daughter. Further, Ratner cites the juxtaposition of the perspectives of mother and daughter in “Sweet Honey Birds” and “Osnat” as a repositioning of mother and daughter relationships outside the patriarchal order that allows for sympathy between them.19 For Ratner, Bat Shahar’s maternal protagonists subvert the role of the good patriarchal mother by their inwardness and detachment from their surroundings. To support her argument, she cites Rotem’s description of the good haredi mother in her non-fictional Distant Sisters. In that study, Rotem notes the lack of a symbiotic, emotional dimension to the relationship between the haredi mother and daughter: ambivalent herself about the haredi lifestyle, the haredi mother cannot allow the self-revelation necessary for a close bond with her daughter so that physical assistance and not emotional connection is the basis of their relationship (Rotem 1992a: 161-163). According to Ratner, in “Look, the Fishing Boats,” Sara’s sympathy for and identification with her daughters implies an emotional dimension to their relationship that a good haredi mother, the enforcer of patriarchy, would not permit. I would point out, however, that much of Bat Shahar’s fiction gives expression to just this lack of emotional connection between haredi mothers and daughters that Rotem describes. The retreat of the mothers into a world of romantic fantasy does permit them silently to share in a daughter’s romantic fantasy, and vice versa. But the mother’s silence in “Look, the Fishing Boats,” is just that—she never conveys her sympathy to her daughter. Moreover, the different perspectives of and silence between mothers and daughters in “Sweet Honey Birds” and “Osnat” express maternal disempowerment and loss, more than subversion. The extent of this disempowerment becomes particularly clear with reference to Tova Hartman Halbertal’s insights into mothering in the Modern Orthodox community. Mothers in that community “assumed that there were limits to the cultural/religious world with which they identified, that there was a dimension to mothering beyond [Jewish] 19

In “Sweet Honeybirds,” a mother narrates the story of her illicit love, which resulted in rejection by the daughter. In the novella that follows, “Osnat,” Bat Shahar strikes a rare conciliatory tone. The narrator-daughter sympathizes with her mother’s emotional state and sees her need for protection and healing. 45

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culture and tradition, and that their mothering within a specific culture was optional” (Halbertal 2000a: 161). Whereas Halbertal’s mothers find a way to communicate and pass along their ambivalence, to speak in voices both loyal to and critical of tradition, the silence of Bat Shahar’s mothers confines them and their daughters within the narrow bounds of their social world. To demonstrate the extent to which representations of haredi motherhood do not bear out Halbertal’s description of mothering, and portray instead maternal repression, I will compare Bat Shahar’s most recent novel, The Girl From Lake Michigan (2002), to Yocheved Reisman’s earlier Tzipor yeshena [Sleeping Bird] (1998). Although the two novels greatly differ, mother-daughter relations are the axis of the psychological economy in each. The very different portrayals of maternal figures in these two novels are instructive in that they illustrate varieties of maternal repression, and the resulting lack of a powerful matriarchal legacy. Like Bat Shahar, Reisman herself remains in the haredi world. She is married to a Gur hasid with whom she has four children. Reisman works as an accountant to help support her family, paints and writes. She is open about her artistic activity and publishes under her own name (Ratner 2002: 143).20 Reisman carries further Bat Shahar’s more ambivalent critique of haredi social norms and makes a failed mother-daughter relationship the central subject of her darkly comic and satiric view of the haredi community. Reisman’s protagonist, Faige (in Yiddish, “bird”),21 having been deserted at the huppa in late adolescence, simulates illness by lapsing into a selfimposed coma-like state. In this reversal of the sleeping beauty myth, having been refused the prince’s kiss, Faige prefers not to wake and uses physical non-compliance to protest a social order that offers a repudiated bride few options. Faige becomes perpetually a child whose mother is enslaved to her care and feeding. At the heart of the novel is a tension between the haredi ideal of motherhood in which women throw themselves into the task of raising children and the difficulty of creating nurturing bonds between

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20

Ratner asserts that Reisman’s openness about her writing reflects a trend toward liberalization in the haredi community as a whole (Ratner 2002: 143). Bat Shahar expresses the belief that by writing and publishing she has paved a path for other creative haredi women. In an interview broadcast in Canada, Bat Shahar refers to Reisman, without naming her, as an example of assertion of artistic freedom by a haredi women (Bat Shahar 1998). Her statements suggest that perhaps Bat Shahar sees herself, as in some ways, the nurturing maternal figure that her narratives lack.

21

Reisman may be making ironic reference to the heroine of Shalom Aleikhem’s famous nostalgic romance, Shir hashirim.

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mothers with limited agency and their daughters. Reisman deploys her gift for satire and comic exaggeration to suggest the futility of attempts at liberation from oppressive social norms given the heavy psychic burden of post-Holocaust family relations. The focus on marriage and childrearing is set here against a background of loss that intensifies, and makes frantic, the quest for continuity: Faige’s mother, Miriam, struggles with adoptive children and with her desire for natural motherhood after the loss of her own family in the Holocaust; Faige’s hurried engagement occurs literally at her father’s deathbed, as an effort to comfort the dying man. These losses are more than factors that determine personal psychology; rather, loss shapes the character of the haredi society created by European Jews who emigrated to Israel in the 1950s, and whose children were born there. As Rotem’s novel, Mourning, discussed below, makes clear, the loss of European Jewry and the resulting need to defend Orthodoxy are important factors in the development of an insular haredi community that strictly supervises socialization and marriage. An unhealthy psycho-dynamic of investment in motherhood animates this novel. Faige is the natural child of Miriam, a Holocaust survivor who married a widower with four children. Miriam’s eldest adopted daughter, Menuha, becomes the mother who has lost her self. Her seventh child having reached school-age, she exorcises feelings of superfluousness through obsessive cleaning and compulsive eating. The second eldest adopted daughter, Esti, accuses the mother, Miriam, of having intentionally foiled Faige’s marriage to prevent her from leaving home. While the charge proves baseless in the end, we are shown that it contains a kernel of truth, evidenced by the tone of Miriam’s letters to Faige’s future in-laws. After Faige falls into a seemingly catatonic state, Miriam expresses both intense maternal attachment and resentment at Faige’s perpetual need for care: “I love you I hate, I love I hate love I love, believe me that like this . . . the main thing is that you are breathing the same air as me and you are another living body and I get up in the morning for you” (Reisman 1998: 191). The neighbor, Malla, is raising a mentally disabled daughter, whom she cares for fastidiously but does not love, and who eventually runs away. Miriam and Malla are literally trapped in their homes, Miriam to care for Faige and Malla to await the return of the lost daughter. Out of mutual understanding of the extremity of their situations, they “sunk in the pleasant warmth of solidarity” and were “like one person” (228), partaking of a primal and irrational essence of entrapped motherhood. In an anecdotal style, with shifting narratorial focus, Reisman accumulates evidence of all-consuming 47

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relationships between mothers and daughters, while fathers (even those who, as here, are not religious authorities) remain distant from the fray. Intensification of the maternal role is matched by the strong attachments of daughters to missing or inadequate mothers. There is the much referred-to suicide attempt by Faige at age five to get her ailing mother’s attention. There is, as well, a touching longing to resurrect the dead mother. Colette, a secular character in the novel, sits before an artist whom she has hired to paint the portrait of her mother, a Holocaust victim—lacking any photographs of the mother, she tells the artist what to change about her own image so that it will resemble that of the lost mother. Menuha is burdened by her relationship with Miriam, suffused as it is by tensions “which prevented the connection from being truly motherly” (28). The younger adopted daughter, Esti, doesn’t talk to Miriam for twenty years because, as the silent but astute observer, Faige, infers, she is angered by her adoptive mother’s failure to love her as her natural mother would have. Esti spends hours posturing before the mirror in borrowed hats and speaking to her reflection as if it were Rosa, her deceased mother. The loss of the mother leaves a sense of unbearable emptiness. Reisman takes up the theme of masking and dissembling so prominent in Bat Shahar’s narratives. Here, too, disguise is a strategy for coping with psycho-social pressure in a society that thwarts individual aspiration. The entire plot of the novel turns on Faige’s feigned illness, which impels her family to develop an elaborate set of lies to protect their status in the community. We eventually learn that another of Faige’s brothers, under the pressure of his own unsatisfactory marriage, secretly and for his own financial benefit, chased away Faige’s dissimulating groom. Pictures in family albums, cut up in anger, are patched together again, making the wholeness of family life seem counterfeit. Miriam passes off photos of strangers as Faige’s children, so that her neighbors will not know of Faige’s illness. Ratner notes the extent to which Reisman’s characters lie and conceal truth as well as the author’s representation of the theme of disguise on the cover of the novel so that haredi life is revealed as fragmented, and rife with deceptions and makeshift guises (Ratner 2002: 153).22 While for Bat Shahar, masking 22

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The cover of Reisman’s book captures the theme of dissembling. It displays a painting of a man’s suit in a frame, a suit being a “put on,” formal clothing that suggests both compliance with social norms and disguise. The title of the painting, which was painted by Reisman herself, is a phrase from the Yom Kippur ritual Seder Kaparot that means “this is my substitute, my vicarious offering.” Reisman thus plays on the Hebrew word “halifati” which could mean “my suit” or “my substitute.” Confusion between and substitution of suits plays a crucial role in the plot of the novel (Ratner 2002: 167n42).

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feelings leads to failure of communication and of nurturance, here it is taken to grotesquely comic and absurd lengths that suggest pervasive social dysfunction. Consistent with the wide-range of her critique, Reisman, in contrast to Bat Shahar (and Rotem), criticizes male authoritarianism less directly: repressive community norms clearly burden and afflict male and female alike. Circumscription of artistic expression literally and metaphorically represents the suppression of individuality. Reisman, who is herself a painter, shows Faige’s brother suppress his artistic urges because pursuing art, rather than a more conventional and lucrative career, would have transgressed haredi norms. Employing an artistic simile, Faige, the rejected bride, has distanced herself “from life like an artist whose paintings all the museums and galleries have rejected and he lingers by an unfinished painting” (Reisman 1998: 45). The novel, by alternating between Faige’s first person narration and third person accounts of the lives of her family members, allows Reisman ample material for her skillful satire (reminiscent of the early Aharon Megged’s send-ups of Israeli society) of bureaucracy, the shiddukh system, haredi belief in charms, fear of community opinion, prejudice and xenophobia. In this novel, characters articulate and hear others bitingly express exactly what is wrong with the system, so that Reisman disposes of complaint about haredi womanhood with a few quick strokes of her pen. As Faige waits without anticipation for her groom, she contemplates what awaits her in marriage: “we will share with each other a million experiences that make us yawn, and we will spread before each other the history of our lives, laundered and corrected and patched, without any black holes, and we will begin to weave with delicate thread a new sense of belonging” (Reisman 1998: 125). Any doubts about the fulfillment to be found in such arrangements are dispelled by a woman thrown out of the community: “I’m not sorry for a moment. I became a lawyer . . . instead of scrubbing floors, cooking big pots of food for ten kids and being queen of the house as they say among you in order to quench the rebellion of those with a bug in the head . . . ” (149-150). At the same time, Reisman does not portray exit from the system as impossible: Faige’s rigorous program of covert night-time activities, which include learning English, becoming a translator, supporting the arts, and maintaining a close friendship, call into question the extent to which Faige’s life is actually limited. In Reisman’s work, passivity has less to do with lack of self-awareness and will, than with a recognition of the intense burden of emotional en49

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tanglement. In the climactic final chapter of the novel, Faige acknowledges the failure of her subversive strategy in a scene that incorporates all the mother-daughter ambivalence developed throughout the narrative. Faige rises from the dead and puts on a grotesque disguise parodying the haredi bride she never became: decked out in her now twenty-year-old wedding dress, using a diaper as a veil and with a sieve over her head, she prepares to kill herself only to be interrupted by the unexpected return of the mother, to whom she explains that she has been pretending illness for years: “Each one took on the other as a complex project, you upholstered my bed with your self-pity and I protected you from the empty nest syndrome” (Reisman 1998: 238). She proffers to the mother explanations that she has already acknowledged to herself less explain her behavior than does simple rage (205). Killed, whether by the cup of poison that Faige had prepared for herself and whisks away from her mother’s lips, or by the poisonous words delivered by the daughter, Miriam drops dead to be hysterically mourned by her three daughters. Reisman’s satiric and often comic exaggeration suggests the futility of any attempts at liberation, given the heavy psychic burden of family relations in a social structure that generates dysfunction. While in Reisman’s novel, coming to consciousness seems rather beside the point, in Bat Shahar’s novel, The Girl from Lake Michigan, shaking off passivity seems just beyond reach. Bat Shahar’s 2002 novel is an extended exposition of her characteristic themes, including female victimization and passivity, failed mother-daughter relationships, and homo-eroticism. The plot of this novel follows the protagonist from childhood through adulthood so that Bat Shahar develops and plays out the consequences of all the oppressive forces she describes. The narrative compels the reader to make connections between haredi social norms and the heroine’s emotional malaise, resulting in direct challenge to the haredi order that Bat Shahar carries forward in two later novels, Nimfa Levana, Seira Meshugaat [White Nymph, Wild Satyr] (2005) and Tzlalim Ba-Rei [Shadows in the Mirror] (2008). Bat Shahar’s characters tend to undergo a process of partial consciousnessraising: she portrays characters with an awareness of patriarchy “not fully articulated,” and who exhibit a “pattern of hovering around the edges of disruption” (Ratner 2002: 156). While the later short stories and novellas more explicitly critique haredi society through their greater detail of social reality, her protagonists do not fully articulate protest (Ratner 2002: 161). But in the novel The Girl From Lake Michigan (which Ratner does not address), Bat Shahar’s heroine finally does just that. Here, Bat Shahar makes 50

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credible the protagonist’s development from a naive child to a woman who can explicitly articulate a feminist awareness in what comes closest in Bat Shahar’s oeuvre to a female bildungsroman. In The Girl From Lake Michigan, Haya Sara is exiled from the home of her father, a well-known rabbi and scholar because of her “peritzut” [loose behavior] as a young adolescent with her father’s disciple, Hillel. Bat Shahar focalizes this story of disappointed love through Haya Sara’s consciousness. Her innocence at the outset of the novel creates dissonance between her perception of Hillel’s warmth and the reader’s awareness of the inappropriate nature of the attentions he bestows. Haya Sara’s naive view of complex motives and relationships echoes the innocence of Agnon’s Tirtza, who narrates In the Prime of Her Life [Bidmi yameiha]. Substitution between generations (Haya Sara takes up her mother’s admiration for Hillel, then later in the novel loves Hillel’s son) resonates with Agnon’s thematics, as does the suggestive mixing of courtship and religious ritual: Hillel courts Haya Sara, she imagines, by intermixing his voice with hers in Sabbath song: “he would intentionally slow the rhythm and accommodate himself to my tune” (Bat Shahar 2002: 112). The dissonance between Haya Sara’s naive narration and the instances of obvious sexual abuse by Hillel that she describes intensifies the reader’s sense of the protagonist’s victimization. In the economy of this novel, Haya Sara’s arrested development is a result of her victimization by a sexual abuser, her father’s tacit tolerance of the abuse and his failure to hold his disciple accountable for it. Haya Sara both craves Hillel’s affirmation and internalizes guilt for contact she understands as sinful: “at night it appears to me that blue stains cover my body in every place that Hillel touched me, and I roll on the couch from so much pain” (Bat Shahar 2002: 27). In the view of the protagonist’s father, Hillel is inappropriate for Haya Sara neither because of his advanced age nor for his sexually exploitative behavior, but because of Haya Sara’s insufficient dowery. Bat Shahar here pointedly criticizes the traditional view of women as temptresses from which males need be protected. In that view Haya Sara is a temptress “a girl running toward a burning house” (72) who must be sent off to Israel to save her reputation while Hillel becomes an esteemed educator who is matched with a rich widow to advance his scholarly ambitions. In the step-mother’s words: “You can’t blame men. They are always attracted to the flesh” (126). Haya Sara is aware of all the irony and hypocrisy of a situation in which she is expelled from her father’s house and, it seems, pursued by ruinous innuendo, while Hillel remains an esteemed educator (108, 120). 51

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The novel is populated by longing, abandoned women (Hillel’s abandoned aunt, Haya Sara’s neighbor Mrs. Stein and her daughter Suzy, Haya Sara herself), whose plight (one is even driven to madness) highlights Bat Shahar’s typical themes of women’s exploitation and repression. The unmarried woman is linked to images of hunger and coldness. Haya Sara identifies with the ragged and hungry-eyed girl whose portrait seems out of place in her neighbor, Mrs. Stein’s, comfortable living room (Bat Shahar 2002: 56, 70, 140). Anthropological research provides Haya Sara with an image for her sense of desolation: the figure of an Inca virgin made a sacrifice to the gods by her tribe five hundred years ago: “the ice virgin frozen and preserved, with a wool scarf decorated with feathers on her head, and a man’s robe wrapped around her shoulders. Her father it seems gave her his coat on her way to the kingdom of the gods” (113). Haya Sara imagines Hillel laying her on icy ground; later she feels in his company “buried deep in the bowels of a snowy mountain” (117,145). She is the Inca virgin, dressed as a bride and accompanied by her father and brother on the way to be sacrificed. “‘Ah, a nice mummy,’ the researcher who digs and raises me from the belly of the earth will groan. She is frozen, and an unexplainable look of amazement stretches across her face” (160). Loneliness and virginity lead to a deep freeze, and to Haya Sara’s surprise, brothers and fathers engineer the destruction. In The Girl From Lake Michigan Bat Shahar draws out the theme of homoeroticism that percolates in some of her earlier narratives. Here she develops a homoerotic dynamic in the context of typically failed motherdaughter relationships. Haya Sara’s submissive but loving mother dies early in her childhood and is replaced by a stepmother (the mother’s sister) who cultivates the step-daughter as love object: “My stepmother loves to dance, and maybe she chose me as a partner because Daddy doesn’t ever dance with her. As a partner I try not to disappoint her” (Bat Shahar 2002: 24). When the stepmother rejects the stepdaughter, Haya Sara is drawn into a psychologically complex relationship with a maternal figure, Ittl, Hillel’s wealthy and alcoholic wife. The mother-daughter potential in the relationship is never realized, evolving instead into one of erotic substitution. “Dancing the waltz she hugs me, and I feel her breast, full, warm and fragrant at the height of my face . . . an unknown feeling, intoxicating, suddenly rises in me”; and “suddenly I wanted to burst outside with Ittl, to sail with this full and vibrant body into the pleasant darkness” (110, 133). In Bat Shahar’s heavily symbolic fiction, Haya-Sara’s pets, a pair of parrots of unknown sex, figure the interchangeability of male and female objects of affection and 52

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desire: “which of them is male and which female? And maybe both are the same sex? Will they become a couple?” (103, 121). Fictional representation of female homoeroticism, which I will discuss in Chapter Seven, has, until very recently, been rare on the Israeli literary scene. Veteran writer Shulamith Hareven’s treatment of homoeroticism in the short story “Bedidut” [“Loneliness”] (1980) “stands out as a sore thumb” in its treatment of this topic (Feldman 1999: 136). In “Loneliness,” the protagonist’s encounter with a young girl, contact with whom sends “a current of rare flame . . . through Dolly’s body” (Hareven 1992: 27) becomes an occasion for working out traumas of loss and dislocation occasioned by particularly Jewish trauma during the Holocaust (Feldman 1999: 139). Feldman argues that by explaining away this intense lesbian attraction as a working through of loss of the mother in the Holocaust, Hareven “domesticates” homoeroticism. At the same time, Hareven also anticipates Luce Irigaray’s and Adrienne Rich’s conceptions of women’s psychology, which connect mother-daughter relationships to a desirable and creatively powerful homoeroticism (271 n. 52). Like Hareven, Bat Shahar highlights a subversive potential in homoerotic relations that is never realized. Attractions between women arise in response to failing heterosexual relationships as women find in each other refuge from male domination: (“we smiled at each other like two girls who escaped the authority of a strict teacher . . . ” (Bat Shahar 2002: 137)), but their relationships work only fleetingly to subvert the male order. In The Girl From Lake Michigan, as in the novella “Sweet Honey-Birds,” the erotic relationship between women is ultimately curtailed by jealousy. Haya Sara becomes infatuated with Ittl’s son (Hillel’s stepson) Joey, a dancer who lives a bohemian life quite outside of the traditionally Jewish framework within which she lives. The reader finds Haya Sara still hoping for impossible love, first with Hillel and then with Joey year after uneventful year, until, at the end of the novel, the reader is made aware that twenty years have passed. Despite Haya Sara’s inertia, at the close of this novel, she is able to articulate a personal scale of preferences that contrasts with the values expressed by male haredi authorities. She privileges the capacity to love and attributes to that quality a spiritual richness. At the close of the narrative, we find Haya Sara taking care of the forsaken and sick Ittl who, having drunk herself to ruin, languishes in a nursing home. Bat Shahar, who worked for a time in an old-age home, the setting of one of her early stories (“Dance of the Butterflies”), describes the elderly and infirm as stuck in moments to which they eternally return—a state of mind that exemplifies the consciousness 53

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of the typically stuck Bat Shahar heroine. Haya Sara takes pleasure in her solidarity with the abandoned Ittl and in the knowledge that like Ittl she too has loved (Bat Shahar 2002: 225). Unlike Mr. Stein, who maintains his connection to Ittl because he hopes to receive from her donations to his causes, Haya Sara demonstrates real friendship and devotion. In the final scene of the novel, Haya Sara invokes the words of the prophet Elija to his disciple: “Today . . . I taught about the parting of Elija from his pupil and disciple Elisha,” I told Mr. Stein, moving even closer to Ittl so that she too might hear me. ‘“Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken from you,’ Elija asks Elisha, and Elisha answers him: ‘let a double portion of your spirit pass on to me’ [II Kings 2:9]. This is what I would request from Dad. That he will bequeath me twice his spirit, that this will be my inheritance” (Bat Shahar 2002: 228).

Haya Sara thus asserts her claim to a spiritual inheritance, while at the same time suggesting the insufficiency of the material and spiritual support her father has in fact provided. The “spirit” alluded to by Elisha ostensibly concerns prophetic powers of national import. In this unique moment in Bat Shahar’s corpus, Haya Sara identifies with sacred text, using Elisha’s words to articulate values contrary to the material concerns that motivate authoritative males who determine the rules of the society around her. Like Ruth Almog’s protagonist in the short story “Tikkun omanuti” [Artistic Mending], who also invokes the words of a prophet, canonic text provides Haya Sara with the language to express a private, oppositional stance toward the society that imposed the canon upon her (cf. Cohen 1996; Feldman 2004b). In the end, rather than being a “sweeping journey of education” as Menahem Peri contends on the back cover of A Girl from Lake Michigan, the novel remains, primarily, an anatomy of arrested development. While the novel’s conclusion expresses Haya Sara’s sense of empowerment and of female solidarity, the source of these feelings is a sense of shared victimhood and of sacrifice to a romantic ideal by which Haya Sara continues to define herself. Her words ring a grotesque note, surrounded, as she is, by the mute Ittl and dozing nursing home residents who, despite the frantic attempts of an accordian player to rouse them, scarcely move. This narrative ultimately tells yet another failed fantasy of romance beyond the confines of haredi patriarchy. As such, it is the latest rewriting in a rather long series of 54

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repetitions that depict no great change in the external circumstances or internal psychology of the female subject. Bat Shahar and Reisman represent the mother-daughter relationship in ways that resonate with Marianne Hirsch’s analysis of maternal repression in nineteenth century realist women’s fiction. In her psychoanalytically informed analysis, Hirsch detects a pattern of diminution of the figure of the mother: “mothers in these novels are either powerful and angry to the point of madness . . . or they are frustrated, trivial, inconsequential, sometimes comic. Falling into neither of these categories, dead or absent mothers are, ironically, the only positive maternal figures we hear about” (Hirsch 1989: 47). To the extent that the nineteenth century heroine achieves independence or agency, however fleetingly, it is by allying herself with fathers or brothers (57-58). Ultimately, the protagonists’ separation from the stories of their mothers “means freedom not only from constraint but also from the power that a knowing connection to the past might offer” (67). Bat Shahar and Reisman depict the silenced mother and the monstrous mother. Their heroines lack access to the world of fathers and brothers. They are further deprived of positive examples of maternal power and of the power that might come from having communication with and “knowing” the mother. In the narratives of Bat Shahar and Reisman, female protagonists adopt strategies of passive rebellion while remaining within the bounds of the religious world, which shapes their dysfunctional relationships. Romantic fantasies serve, in Bat Shahar’s fiction, to draw her heroines into inner worlds that reinforce passivity. In Reisman’s narrative the promise of romance becomes an object of satire given haredi social arrangements. These fictions are studies of arrested development which do not suggest uncertain futures, but rather dead ends; they are narratives of complaint in which the process of consciousness raising is either incomplete or irrelevant. In the following chapter I will discuss the work of Yehudit Rotem, who develops the theme of feminist complaint against the haredi system in two novels that, taken together, follow the plot of the Anglo-American consciousnessraising novel, in which American women writers of the late 1960s and 1970s charted a course toward autonomous selfhood.

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CH AP TER FOUR

YEHUDIT ROTEM’S CONSCIOUSNESSRAISING NOVELS

A. The Consciousness-Raising Paradigm In contrast to Bat Shahar’s dysphoric romances and Reisman’s satire, Yehudit Rotem’s narratives follow the generic conventions of the American consciousness-raising novel, in which the protagonist comes to recognize her unhappiness and then moves through a series of confrontations with the institutions that shape her life. These institutions include marriage, motherhood, college, the police, government and psychiatry (Hogeland 1998: 37-40). In the end, the protagonist, having developed a more independent sense of identity, typically leaves her marriage. The consciousness-raising novel, particularly in its “soft” form, may not refer explicitly to the women’s liberation movement, even though encounter with feminist aspirations forms a central element of its plot (39-40). Often the voices of Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir echo throughout these novels, and infuse the structural device of coming to consciousness with feminist and political overtones. Further, the novels themselves sometimes dramatize consciousness-raising as characters read books and measure their lives against them. Drawing on the circumstances of her own life, Judith Rotem’s, novel Mourning (1996) explores life within the disjunction between outer conformity with and inner rebellion against the dictates of Jewish law as interpreted by haredi authorities. The fictional Fifi’s struggle with religious authority takes place in the context of the emergence in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s of a restrictive haredi culture. This cultural context is familiar to Rotem, who writes in her non-fictional Distant Sisters: I grew up in the fifties in a Hungarian Orthodox family that observed the minor commandments as conscientiously as the major ones. I was cognizant of the difference between “regular” religiosity, like that practiced in my parents’ house, and haredi’ut—a phenomenon that developed, literally, before my very eyes as I was growing up (Rotem 1997: 34). 56

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Haredi’ut becomes a harsh reality in Fifi’s life as her parents move from an idyllic, pastoral locale where she enjoyed relative freedom, to B’nei B’rak, the center of the emergent haredi society. There teachers at the Bet Ya’akov school extend their supervision far beyond the classroom, and neighbors are quick to censure any deviation from the strictest religious norms. Fifi’s family and the atmosphere of B’nei B’rak are fraught with conflict, and her struggle for identity is bound up in larger issues surrounding the pains of immigration, confrontation between traditional Jewish refugees from Europe and their new secular environment, and the relationship between secular and religious Zionism. Caught up in the post-Holocaust struggle for the survival of the “traditional” in a triumphantly secular society, Fifi’s name itself becomes a site of conflict and ambivalence. In her early childhood, the name “Fifi” is naturalized to the Israeli Shlomit, but then changed to the Yiddish Fraydel: to act Jewishly one must have a Jewish name. Fifi accepts the name Shlomit but, identifying with her mother’s grander, cosmopolitan background, becomes in her dreams Frederika, a name of a princess, full of possibility.23 The culture wars surrounding Fifi/Shlomit reach a climax when she expresses the intention to attend a liberal Orthodox high school, modeled on the teachings of the European Modern Orthodox rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch. The narrator, close to Fifi/Shlomit’s consciousness, notes: In the war over the future and the soul of the girl Fraydel-Shlomit-FifiFrederika, it will be decided whether the education she received will be properly realized. Hanging in the balance stood her Jewish soul and all its latent future to the end of generations, a future whose quality would soon be clarified . . . In this battle every soul was an entire world which must be saved (Rotem 1996: 77).

Here, and throughout the narrative, Rotem ironizes the concept of an eternal, ahistorical, unquestionable and unitary Judaism to which the respected authorities of B’nei B’rak are committed. Her sense of the urgency with which religious leaders undertook the mission of reconstructing and fortifying an embattled Orthodoxy does not diminish the outrage she conveys through her irony at the pressures brought to bear to force conformity. 23

The changing names of Rotem’s protagonist resonate with Nessa Rapoport’s story “The Woman Who Lost Her Names,” after which a 1980 anthology of Jewish women’s literature is entitled. In that story, the renaming of the protagonist expresses her loss of agency. 57

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As Fifi/Shlomit moves into adulthood, patriarchy comes to bear on her experience in full force. She enters into a process of coming to feminist consciousness, growing increasingly doubtful of the justification for rules that limit her horizons. Rotem’s descriptions of the ritual aspects of passage into womanhood ring with the insights of Friedan and de Beauvoir. As in the consciousness-raising paradigm, books play an important role in Fifi/ Shlomit’s growing inner resistance. Within the context of haredi insularity, the act of reading itself becomes a source of conflict that calls attention to the relationship between narrative and change: Fifi/Shlomit’s father and teachers forbid her visits to certain libraries. Her husband, alerted by rabbinical authorities to the danger of books, protests: “books plant all sorts of distorted ideas in your head” (Rotem 1996: 234). The liberation that the reader comes to expect never occurs in Mourning, but rather in Rotem’s second novel, I Loved So Much, which also, though differently, engages the consciousness-raising paradigm. B. The Body as Carnal Other After setting up the tensions inherent in Israel’s Orthodox sector during the 1950s and 1960s, the second half of Mourning describes representative experiences in haredi women’s lives (mikve, early marriage, childbirth, work to support a family). Throughout the novel Rotem has Fifi/Shlomit experience female maturity and sexuality as a source of mystery and dread, a giving up of self: a female haredi shopkeeper fits her with a bra with “the same decisive experience with which Yankel Grossman cut the necks of chickens” (Rotem 1996: 63). Tired of inner and external conflict, Fifi/Shlomit foregoes dreams of personal intellectual development and agrees to a marriage that she increasingly comes to dread. In one of Rotem’s more melodramatic passages, she describes her protagonist’s reaction to the obligatory study of the laws of marriage and nidda: she was already trapped deep within the tangle of phrases and clauses. They instilled fear within her. In vain she tried to extract herself from them. At night she dreamt that she was in a forest of ferns whose tendrils entwined around her, blackened, twisted and turned, and wound around her like a tortuous serpent embracing, choking and swallowing her (179).

Here Rotem invokes the image of the serpent, that evil inhabitant of Eden who, in Genesis, tempts woman to eat the forbidden fruit, an act which 58

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results in her subjugation to man. The tortuously twisting serpent expresses Fifi/Shlomit’s sexual dread, her sense of the inescapable grip of the law, and her fear of loss of self. The serpent also evokes the moral feebleness and self-indulgence that the prototypical woman, Eve, displayed in patriarchal versions of the ancient myth by eating the forbidden fruit.24 A dynamic of male superiority/female inferiority is repeated in Fifi/Shlomit’s marriage, as her husband fails to relate to her emotionally and regards her primarily as a source of temptation. Fifi/Shlomit both rejects and in part internalizes her husband’s sense of the female body as a source of shame and impurity: “she hated herself and him: him because he saw in her impurity, and herself because she rebelled within but submitted to his rulings” (195). Fifi’s submission to her husband conforms with God’s punishment of Eve for eating the fruit and for tempting man into sin: “And he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). Rotem’s critique of traditional Jewish laws regarding ritual purity echoes classic feminist writings. Simone de Beauvoir viewed woman as a scapegoat for ambivalent feelings about carnality: woman is both the source of life and death. Exploring and extending de Beauvoir’s insights, Dinnerstein refers to the widespread, if not universal, nature of this ambivalence and its expression in law and ritual. She points out that de Beauvoir, anthropologist Margaret Mead and others have all noted that: Man has magic feelings of awe and fear, sometimes disgust . . . toward all things that are mysterious, powerful, and not himself, and that woman’s fertile body is the quintessential incarnation of this realm of things. Alien, dangerous nature, conveniently concentrated near at hand in woman’s flesh can be controlled through ritual segregation, confinement, and avoidance; it can be subdued through conventionalized humiliation and punishment . . . History and ethnography abundantly illustrate human use of this opportunity (Dinnerstein 1976: 125).

In I Loved So Much, her second novel, Rotem makes explicit the connection between women’s obligations under Jewish law and a universal need to control women as carnal others. In that novel, the “liberated” protagonist 24

Zafrira Cohen interprets the Israeli poet Yona Wallach’s “Two Gardens” as a response to negative evaluations of Eve’s character based on her actions in the biblical paradise. For an interesting reinterpretation of the myth of Eden, see Wallach’s poem and Cohen’s analysis (Cohen 2003: 134-140). 59

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directly advances views consistent with those that Rotem expressed more circumspectly in Distant Sisters: [C]overing the head is in my view a symbol of humiliation and enslavement, like the triangle imprinted on the skin of cows. Maybe I am being too sharp, and maybe not: men allowed themselves to impose on women all kinds of humiliating and difficult injunctions—the binding of the feet of Chinese women, circumcision of African women and more. I won’t say a word about the laws of ritual purity (Rotem 2001: 186).

Fifi/Shlomit reacts to her dread of and inner resistance to assuming a submissive role by splitting herself off from the experience of going to the mikve, and of her wedding. She reports on these events as if they are happening to someone else. “Things happened to her, around her, but there was a screen over her consciousness” (Rotem 1996: 156). Of her first visit to the mikve, she reflects: “And perhaps she wasn’t really there? Her body was, but not her mind” (184). And later, “she had studied the halakhot, but in one way or another had succeeded in cutting herself off from them, like one who can’t believe that the worst will happen to him” (193). She disengages herself emotionally from the role she plays. In this third person narration, Rotem describes the sense of dividedness by giving the reader access to the protagonist’s thoughts. American women writers have expressed a similar sense of dividedness, evoking through sometimes complex narrative techniques a disjunction between women’s reality and aspirations (Roller 1986: 67-68; Hogeland 1998: 31-32).25 Similarly, a sense of dividedness and alienation from self shapes the narrative structure of Israeli writer Ruth Almog’s Shorshei avir [Roots of Air] in which the protagonist loses and eventually regains a first person voice (Feldman 1999: 219-22). In Kahana-Carmon’s Veyare’ah be‘emek ‘ayalon [And Moon in the Valley of Ayalon], first person and third person narration alternate to convey Noa Talmor’s fractured personality and identity crisis (Shirav 1998: 186). Their characters’ sense of dividedness resonates, as well, with the themes of masking and dissimulation that both Bat Shahar and Reisman take up. 25

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Hogeland notes that feminist consciousness-raising elicited images of women’s consciousness as split. In a discussion of expressions of this duality, she cites as influential literary examples Lessing’s Four Gated City (1969) and Virigina Woolf’s description of the “splitting off of consciousness” in A Room of One’s Own (Hogeland 1998: 32).

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For all of Rotem’s obvious familiarity with feminist writing, she takes pains to convey the sense that in the face of haredi interpretation of Talmudic law, one does not need theory to develop an oppositional stance. Feelings of rebellion and resistance are the natural outgrowth of the system. Following the birth of her daughter, Fifi/Shlomit chooses from the books a secular neighbor has brought her. [S]he puts aside for now the book of the French writer with the strange and noble name, Simone de Beauvoir, and opens the collection of short stories by Devora Baron: small letters, the whispering, hesitant, learned Hebrew of the daughter of a scholar. The arduous parade of shtetl women march before her when she turns the pages: abandoned poor, tortured by the tortures of the time and place, deprived of the love of their husbands (Rotem 1996: 229).

That Rotem has Fifi/Shlomit set aside “for now” de Beauvoir, a presence in Israeli culture since the 1950s (Feldman 1999: 42), signals the gap between Rotem’s familiarity with feminist theory and the protagonist’s relative lack of knowledge of the broader, contemporary framework of her struggles. Rotem delays her protagonist’s engagement with the foundational and popular feminist texts that are clearly felt in her novel. It is Baron’s particularistic stories26 that nourish Fifi/Shlomit’s rage and become part of the evidence that Rotem accumulates throughout the novel (in the form of intensive citation of Talumudic passages demeaning to women) to support her attack on Talmudic law. C. Ironizing the Language of the Fathers As a child, Fifi/Shlomit vacillates between two possible female role models: she may be “righteous like Rahel or wise like Beruria” (Rotem 1996: 25). However, Fifi/Shlomit sees beyond the cliches used to describe these legendary women to note that Rahel’s virtue lay primarily in encouraging her husband to abandon her for twenty-four years in order to study Torah. According to Talmudic lore, Beruria, a great scholar known for ironic responses to rabbinical comments demeaning women, killed herself after Rabbi Me’ir, jealous of his wife Beruria’s learning, arranged for her to be tempted into adultery. The young Fifi/Shlomit thinks for hours 26

For discussion of Baron’s work, see Govrin 1988 and Seidman 1997. 61

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about her intellectual role model, Beruria, vaguely aware that the formidable but pitiable assemblage of women described by the sages bodes ill for Fifi/ Shlomit herself, a girl about whom her father had proudly proclaimed: “A pity that she is not a boy. A real talmid hokhem [scholar] she would have been” (19). Rahel and Beruria accompany Fifi/Shlomit throughout her negotiation with female identity. Fifi/Shlomit’s sense that she is playing a role resolves itself into a recognition of, and mounting rage at, her confinement to a separate female sphere, apart from the male world of intellectual inquiry. Teaching and housework to maintain a home supportive of her husband’s study consume her life: “she was subject to hard labor without reprieve and her husband was swept off to horizons in which she had no place at all” (Rotem 1996: 208). Fifi/Shlomit is required to withdraw to the bedroom to avoid distracting her husband and his guests as they discuss Talmudic complexities so that female exile from the intensive study which is the most valued activity in haredi communal life is enacted literally. Restriction to a female sphere, here the bedroom, tests the limits of Fifi/Shlomit’s ability to conform: What raised the doubts in her again? The prohibition against taking part in their Talmud, her understanding which was superior to theirs and made them seem dull and empty in comparison. Or perhaps it was that she must constrict herself within her own home? From whence came her criticism of the words of the sages and of the words of Rabbi Me’ir, Beruria’s husband, in whose garden she strangled herself? And some say: she took a distaff and stabbed herself to death (206).

As Rotem parodies the hair-splitting distinctions characteristic of Talmudic debate (did Beruria strangle herself or stab herself?) she evokes both women’s despair and the obtuseness of the sages (and of her husband) who argue with an emotional detachment that overlooks the essence of a situation. Fifi/Shlomit objects to her exile from Talmud and to the uncritical nature of the study in which her husband is engaged. Interpretation of religious law to confine Fifi/Shlomit to her bedroom is an extreme expression of the division between male and female spheres de Beauvoir describes in The Second Sex. Here, rabbinical authorities preach a variation of Friedan’s “feminine mystique,” a discourse that persuades woman that her “world was confined to her own body and beauty, the charming of babies, and the physical care and serving of husband, children, and home” (Friedan 1983: 36). 62

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If the world of Rotem’s Orthodox women is constricted, the world of men is the province of fanatics. Various male characters, including Fifi/ Shlomit’s childhood friend and her father, become fanatically religious. Fifi/Shlomit’s husband becomes so narrowly devoted to the study of religious law that he loses all capacity for emotion. For Rotem, this ideological blindness is rooted in the earliest Jewish texts and perpetuated by traditional modes of Jewish study. In Kor’ot mibereshit: nashim yotsrot kotvot al sefer bereshit [Israeli Women Write About the Women of Genesis] (Ravitsky 1999), Rotem creates a modern midrash to explain Sara’s childlessness: Sara is not barren, but is instead a virgin for much of her married life because Avraham transformed his erotic energy into ideological fervor directed at converting others to monotheism.27 Thus, for Rotem, ideological blindness is not only inherent in Talmudic disputation, and reinforced by the haredi educational and shiddukh [arranged marriage] system which fosters rigidity and fanaticism, but is also inscribed in the first book. Fifi-Shlomit, who has failed at playing the self-sacrificing Rahel is, at the conclusion of the novel, tragic like Beruria. Like Beruria she mourns the loss of her child; like Beruria she is guilty over the temptation to commit adultery. There is no salvation here, only a growing resistance, small acts of rebellion within the conformity, and a final cry for emotion over law. The novel ends with a scream of outrage, echoing the imagery of the Yom Kippur liturgy: “someone please touch me, and if not, I will scream like no woman ever screamed before in the hospital, this house of death, and from this scream all the curtains will be torn and the heavens will be opened” (Rotem 1996: 244).28 Rotem herself left the haredi world, but not until after twenty years of marriage and ten births (with seven surviving children). She describes this personal history to some extent in Distant Sisters. The reader familiar with the biographical facts of Rotem’s life is led to expect a sequel, in which her bereft character will undertake an active rebellion against the oppressive circumstances of her life. But even without knowledge of Rotem’s biography, Fifi/Shlomit’s final proclamation resonates with an anger that holds forth the promise of an attempt at liberation.

27

Agnon artfully evokes the same theme in his ’Agudat hasofer [The Tale of the Scribe].

28

There is a long hasidic tradition of illiterates piercing the heavens with cries instead of prayers. Here a woman replaces the male illiterate, but she screams for entirely different reasons. 63

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D. Mothers and Daughters

in the Confessional Mode [I Loved So Much] While the protagonist of Mourning does escape the haredi social framework, the central character in Rotem’s next novel, Gabriella Manheim (Gabi), documents her struggle for independence outside of Orthodoxy to become a kind of historical mother to those women involved in similar struggles. Rotem reconstructs the lost world of a bourgeois and rigorous Hungarian Orthodoxy, the pains of life as a refugee, immigration to Palestine, and survival in Israel. Against this dramatic historical background, the narrative focuses on Gabi’s gradual understanding of and battle against an unhealthy psychological dependence, passivity, and need for validation. Unloving and repressive parents, two failed marriages, breakdown, psychoanalysis, single motherhood, and a third husband’s infidelity provide Gabi with much material on which critically to reflect in tracing the nature and effects of a deeply ingrained lack of confidence. Gabi’s confession functions both as a record of one individual’s struggles in a dramatic historical period and an expression of feminist concern with representative aspects of female psychology and experience. The structure of I Loved So Much highlights the relationship between female writer and female reader, and enlists the conventions of the confessional narrative to revision mother-daughter relationships. The novel intersperses Gabi’s first person account of her life, which her niece Naomi is taping in order to write a book about the aunt,29 with Naomi’s own diary entries. Gabi functions for Naomi as a surrogate mother, so that her narration is a gift to her niece, an act of nurturance from which Naomi is to gather insight and strength. Finally, Naomi’s daughter, who has left the haredi world with her mother, listens to much of Gabi’s story, an act that further intensifies the impact of the narrative and highlights the relationship between female narrator and female audience, female writer and female reader. Listening to the aunt’s story together with her daughter is for Naomi an act of bonding with her daughter, Shira: “This is what I am trying to do now—to bring my story close to that of my aunt, like two tracks

29

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Rotem’s non-fiction suggests possible autobiographical elements in I Loved So Much. In Distant Sisters, Rotem refers to a divorced aunt who was a stain on the family’s reputation (Rotem 1997: 77).

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that will one day meet, and at the same time, to be here for Shira, to bring myself closer to her until she will hint to me: stop” (Rotem 2000: 206). In contrast to Rotem’s linear, third person narration in Mourning, the narrative structure of I Loved So Much continually highlights the distance between Gabi’s past and the present in which she narrates her story. As such, the novel conforms to the genre Feldman labels “fictional autobiography,” a form in which the past is distinguished from the narrative present, and the very process of narration promises insight, integration and change (Feldman 1988). I Loved So Much also shares the characteristics of the confession, a subgenre of autobiography “which signals its intention to foreground the most personal and intimate details of the author’s life . . . Like consciousness-raising, the confessional text makes public that which has been private . . . ” (Felski 1989: 87-88).30 The confessional novel is an instrumental type of literature that seeks to disclose intimate details of the author’s life and to understand their meaning. The feminist confession is typically a writing of personal history that strives to express essential truths about the self that have broader implications and may prove useful for other women (87-88). Felski includes a long list of representative works, which, while differing in many respects, “share an explicit rhetorical foregrounding of the relationship between a female author and a female reader” (88). The “[f]eminist confession exemplifies the intersection between the autobiographical imperative to communicate the truth of unique individuality, and the feminist concern with the representative and intersubjective elements of women’s experience” (93-94). I Loved So Much is what I would call a fictional feminist confession: Rotem makes clear from the outset the distance between Gabi’s past and the narrative present, and the intimate and instructional nature of her narrative. This is writing meant to reveal all of life’s traumas to get at the real truth of the self: On the way to the world of truth . . . I have to reveal my own truth . . . I return all the time to my painful moments, because the past, death, pain are engraved in me, they are part of me. I raise in my memory childhood, love, marriage, motherhood, uprooting, old age, and loss, and I connect again, for the last time, with my life . . . And still I don’t understand why . . . this strong impulse to tell you my story . . . to expose it as one exposes a body, stirs in me . . . (Rotem 2000: 16, 17). 30

For more on the relationship between fictional confession, autobiography and other related genres, see Naveh 1988. 65

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In this passage, Rotem foregrounds the exposure of intimate detail and the quest for truth about oneself, as well as the intimate relationship between the teller of the story, Gabi, and her audience, her niece Naomi. In I Loved So Much, the act of narration is intended finally to endow Gabi with understanding and to enable her to construct the stable sense of self that she has lacked, an absence expressed by an affinity for decoration and disguise (Rotem 2000: 245). That Gabi’s experiences have broader relevance is highlighted by her niece’s [Naomi’s] effort throughout the narration to make connections between the “aunt’s big story and my own small story” (18, 103). Finally, Rotem highlights the relationship between narrative and personal change by emphasizing the liberatory role that books have played in the lives of these women. Naomi writes in her diary: “The desire for forbidden books, I inherited, apparently, from her [Gabi]. Books are my oxygen, without them I choke. ‘Riding on a bookworm, I left the haredi world,’ I once wrote in my diary” (62). In contrast to Bat Shahar, who portrays mother-daughter alienation, and Reisman, who depicts pathological investment in motherhood, Rotem portrays the powerful mother who provides a model of emancipation. Thus Gabi serves as a historical mother, whose story empowers another mother, Naomi, to demand her own and her daughter’s freedom. Here, personal change, liberating oneself from the psychological legacy of a stifling upbringing, is portrayed as itself heroic. Casting off religion may not turn out to be as simple as throwing one’s shaytl [wig] to the winds (or flinging it out of a train window, as Gabi’s cousin does in I Loved So Much). For Gabi and Naomi, and, the narrative structure suggests, for other women out there, the road out requires a process of self-analysis and recovery that is as “lengthy as an entire life” (Rotem 2000: 62). Rotem’s novel draws on her own experience of fear that her daughters will lead the life she led as a haredi woman (Rotem 1997: 151), and on her ultimate decision to leave haredi society. In I Loved So Much, leaving Orthodoxy becomes an act of mothering and of affirmation of the strength of the mother-daughter bond. In this way, Rotem “highlights empowerment at the most vulnerable site of women’s autonomy—motherhood” (Ratner 2002: 146). In both the non-fictional Distant Sisters and in the novel Mourning, motherhood is presented as a potential source of meaning and joy for the haredi woman. Motherhood is the great adventure upon which haredi women, lacking other outlets for intellectual and emotional fulfillment, embark (Rotem 1997: 35-42). In addition to the empowered mother, Rotem portrays the disempowered mother (Fifi’s mother in Mourning), and the 66

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oppressive matriarch (Gabi’s mother in I Loved So Much). In Mourning, Fifi’s mother never embraces the rigid Orthodoxy that her husband adopts, but is a submissive and burdened figure who, despite all her own dissatisfaction, plays the matriarchal role of socializing the daughter to traditional society’s norms. While in I Loved So Much, Rotem does not describe in detail Naomi’s relationship with her mother, she laments the toxic effects of the rule of the father: “I . . . must uproot from within the submission and weakness that my education planted within me and that became part of me. My father was mistaken when he called me hutzpedika . . . he broke me and didn’t see my brokenness” (Rotem 2000: 61). The aunt, Gabi, relates how her own mother, a rigid representative of the Hungarian Orthodox matriarchate, scorned her non-conformity and instilled within her lasting feelings of inadequacy. Among the Zionist youth with whom she flees to Israel during World War II, Gabi experiences for the first time a sense of family: “we dreamed together, fought together. We devoted ourselves to each other. We loved so much” (221). In this twenty-first century novel, Rotem has Gabi succeed at liberation more than did many of the heroines of 1970s American consciousnessraising novels whose stories often end in uncertainty. She, more than her European-born husbands, manages to adapt to Palestine and to Israel and to thrive economically there. Eventually she succeeds at love as well. When she discovers that her last husband is a philanderer, she dictates the terms of the marriage and, as the novel reveals at its close, enjoys a long-term relationship with a lover. While the plot remains within the telos of romance, it transcends the time-honored romantic conclusion of safe marriage by allowing its heroine to achieve emotional and sexual liberation. Zionism, or support of any “ism,” remains, almost incredibly at times, outside of Gabi’s area of interest (the outbreak of Israel’s 1948 War is marked only by mention of dinner with a departing soldier). Despite the political upheavals that shape her life, Gabi, in contrast to her male peers in the novel, does not pay attention to communal, national, or ideological issues. In this respect, Rotem’s fictional autobiography differs from the “arrested” fictional autobiographies of male Israeli writers of the 1970s and 1980s, in which collective issues and ideology tended to overtake personal psychology (Feldman 1988). It is also not the “masked autobiography” of veteran Israeli women writers who indirectly expressed concern about female autonomy by projecting feminist dilemmas onto a distant past, and embedding them in a larger national and collective narrative (Feldman 1999: 27-28). Here, against a background of dramatic historical change and the birth of a nation, Rotem allows Gabi fully to play out a story of personal development. To 67

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the extent that this novel is concerned with the collective, it is interested in analysis of representative aspects of women’s, particularly Orthodox women’s, psychological development and experience. As such, Rotem’s fiction embraces exactly that liberation narrative, characteristic of American women’s writing of the 1970s, that an earlier generation of Israeli women novelists tended to bypass (Feldman 1999), and provides a link between American and Israeli women’s feminist narratives. E. Tired Plot or Grand Recit—

Is there an Israeli Haredi Audience? In Israeli narratives of haredi life, women writers critique Orthodox Jewish patriarchy by ironically quoting sacred texts, emptying out traditional images and rituals, and portraying distorted family relationships in communities hostile to aspirations for personal and romantic fulfillment. Bat Shahar’s protagonists rarely articulate the feminist consciousness that ferments just below the surface of the fantasy worlds into which they often withdraw. In Reisman’s novel, Faige’s feigned withdrawal from consciousness altogether evokes the impossibility of attaining personal agency within the circumscription of her family life. Rotem, herself a renegade, intensively exploits the consciousness-raising paradigm and allows her protagonist to exit the Orthodox community. These novels raise the question of whether representations of haredi life addressed to an Israeli audience perform the consciousness-raising function attributed to American women’s narratives of the late 1960s and 1970s. Since they appear on the scene after critics have declared the grand recit of female subjectivity no longer relevant, one can wonder about the cultural significance of these Israeli narratives of feminist complaint and liberation. Shakdiel’s comments on Rotem’s Mourning highlight this issue: Familiarity with the contemporary feminist agenda is recognizable in every line. The book reads as a didactic-popular text, as an illustration of a thesis known in advance . . . I did not like this manifesto. It is written for some imaginary audience that is outside of the social sector described, but also outside of the soul of the writer. In this sense, Rotem’s book is too similar to Naomi Ragen’s bestsellers, and less authentic in my view than . . . a book written for the haredi audience itself. Rotem’s book is an invitation to another type of feminist experience: the secure plane of the group of women, in which one need not write the feminine equivalent of James Joyce in order “to be accepted” (Shakdiel 1997). 68

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On the one hand, Shakdiel doubts the existence of a haredi reading audience for Rotem’s novel so that the book cannot facilitate social change by drawing women into its consciousness-raising structure. On the other hand, the book is irrelevant to an audience outside of the haredi community because the form of the consciousness-raising novel has been popularized and conventionalized so that it lacks literary value. Ratner addresses the same readership issue to different effect when she suggests that haredi and secular readers might engage in very different modes of reading: Reisman’s exaggeration and unlikely plot shifts may remind Orthodox readers of Yiddish popular stories, and Bat Shahar’s indirection might be similar to “Orthodox sexual and emotional discourse” (Ratner 2002: 161). In contrast to Shakdiel, then, she posits a haredi reading audience that simply reads differently than a secular one so that what is subversive in one context may not be so in another. However, the authors’ own comments about readership, derived from unquestionable familiarity with the haredi community, paint a different picture and suggest that these novels perform a consciousness-raising function within the haredi world. Rotem has discussed how her non-fictional Distant Sisters elicited responses from members of the haredi community who shared with her their dissatisfaction with haredi life (Rotem (interview) 1992b). Bat Shahar states that haredi women read her fiction (Bat Shahar (interview) 1997c), and cautiously expresses the belief that she has paved the way for writing by other haredi women (Bat Shahar (interview) 1998). Sociologist Tamar El-Or asserts that literature about haredi life performs an educative function within the haredi community (El-Or (interview) 1998a). Naomi Ragen, whose fiction I will analyze in Chapter Five, most explicitly relates her literary efforts to an attempt to reform haredi Orthodoxy in Israel and America. Her activism, which straddles the American/Israeli divide, includes maintaining a website and publishing columns in The Jerusalem Post. In a foreword to the recent republication in English of her first novel, Jephte’s Daughter, Ragen proclaims that her books are intended to give “[Orthodox] society members the ability to view themselves honestly, and with a clearer perspective towards improvement” and that her fiction has contributed to positive changes in the treatment of women in Orthodox communities (Ragen 2002:vii-viii). These comments suggest that Israeli novels about haredi women play the liberatory role that feminists have attributed to American women’s literature. In the next chapter, we shall turn to American Jewish literature to see how women writers have used Orthodoxy to revise the narrative of feminist liberation. 69

CH AP TER FI VE

REVALUING THE TRADITIONAL IN AMERICAN JEWISH WOMEN’S WRITING

Beginning the 1980s and 1990s, American literature has seen an explosion of fiction that explores deeply Jewish historical memory, Jewish tradition, and Orthodoxy. Post-immigration Jewish-American literature, particularly fiction written between the 1930s and the 1960s, featured the angst of the alienated Jew who still struggled for acceptance in the American environment.31 In contrast, the second wave, or new wave, of American Jewish literature reflects not only a search for new subjects, but the social upheavals and movements that began in the 1960s and led to a new interest in ethnic identity and alternative lifestyles. American Jewish women’s writing has participated in the more general tendency of American Jewish literature to turn inward, away from the theme of integration into and alienation from mainstream American culture, to address Jewish thought, tradition, and collective experience. Contemporary American Jewish women’s fiction that engages Orthodoxy constitutes an interesting counter-narrative to Israeli women’s representations of haredi womanhood. American Jewish women writers enlist Orthodoxy to critique American values, the goals of second wave feminism and to incorporate strands of difference feminism into narratives of female subjectivity. These writers revise classic feminist goals of the late 1960s and 1970s. Their heroines embrace or reclaim Orthodox lifestyles that foster deep and satisfying connections to family and community, while never foreclosing opportunities for personal growth and development. In drawing on difference feminism, American women’s narratives anticipate similar developments in the Israeli women’s fiction discussed in Chapters Six and Seven, including Mira Kedar’s engagement with feminist reform of Orthodoxy, and Lilach Galil El-ami’s daring and ultimately un-Orthodox 31

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In this vein, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Grace Paley wrote novels and short stories that portrayed characters burdened by and ambivalent about their identity as Jews.

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transformation of Jewish spirituality. However, in the American context, women’s narratives that engage Orthodoxy tend to emphasize finding satisfaction within a rich tradition that demands preservation, rather than on describing oppression, pointing toward avenues of escape, and forging new opportunities for religious expression. American Jewish women novelists respond to Orthodoxy in different ways: Naomi Ragen and Nessa Rapoport meet head-on the feminist challenge to Orthodoxy. Allegra Goodman delivers a nuanced and literary critique of gender roles within a hasidic sect but she also weaves throughout her novel Kaaterskill Falls a defense of motherhood and a recognition of what Sara Ruddick has called “maternal thinking” that resonates with the haredi valorization of woman’s caretaking role. Anne Roiphe’s Lovingkindness examines the feelings of a feminist academic whose adolescent daughter has joined a haredi community in Israel, and brings into sharp focus some of the issues that other American Jewish women writers explore. For Roiphe’s secular protagonist, an Orthodox lifestyle seems both beyond the pale of enlightenment, and a reasonable choice for her psychologically unstable daughter. Similarly Ragen, Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein and (non-fiction) writer Lucette Lagnado portray Orthodoxy, sometimes ambivalently, as a palliative for a range of modern societal ills including loneliness, atomization, and feelings of loss and disconnection. As these narratives critique secular, liberal American culture, they also neutralize Orthodoxy’s threat to female autonomy. A. Enlightened Orthodoxy Naomi Ragen has developed a formula, successful both in the United States and Israel, that, paradoxically, enlists both the conventions of the consciousness raising novel that defies the traditional telos of romance and the romance novel whose popularity has been viewed as a sign of a backlash against feminism (Radway 1984: 19). The themes of Naomi Ragen’s crusading, formulaic fiction can be easily summed up by her own statement: “I think . . . of Orthodox women today, who are told to live quietly with abusive husbands or are brainwashed into having twelve children because God wants them to. And then I think of all these single, unaffiliated Jewish women. Basically no-one is doing what they are supposed to do . . . ” (Ragen 1998a: 7). Reflecting this view, Ragen’s narratives of liberation from patriarchal society are accompanied by counter-narratives critical of secular culture as nihilistic, unproductive, and damaging to the family. 71

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Ragen is, in several ways, a liminal figure, who has introduced into mass market fiction themes of conflict between sacred and secular that others address in a higher literary style. Raised in Queens, New York, she became Orthodox by choice as she absorbed Jewish teachings in the Orthodox schools she began to attend at age seven. She now resides in Israel, where at times she has lived in a haredi neighborhood of the kind in which she sets her bitingly critical fiction. Bridging between the genres of romance and feminist enlightenment, Ragen’s fiction engages issues within Israeli society as she addresses an American audience. Like mass market romance novels targeted to a women’s audience, her narratives focus on personal life and domestic detail, and rely on cliche, standard syntax, simple words, and limited character development (Radway 1984: 189). While literaryminded American reviewers have (justifiably) panned Ragen’s novels, trade publications have received them more sympathetically. Recently, several of them have even been reissued by an English press.32 In Israel, Ragen’s novels have achieved no less than blockbuster success,33 and her play, “Minyan hanashim” [A minyan of Women], has been staged at Habima, Israel’s national theater. El-Or attributes Ragen’s broad appeal in Israel to the salacious plots of her novels, and to the desire of secular readers for unflattering information about the Orthodox. El-Or also points out that by presenting Orthodox characters with a diverse range of attitudes, Ragen’s novels serve an educative function (El-Or 1998a). Ragen recreates Orthodox communities similar to the B’nei B’rak that Rotem described in Mourning and magnifies, or some would argue, sensationalizes their dark underside. In Ragen’s fiction, not only rigid adherence to the strictest interpretations of halakha, but domestic violence (Jephte’s Daughter) and the criminal activities of Orthodox vigilantes (Sotah) create the oppressive atmosphere. As in Rotem’s Mourning (in which sexual abuse of a child is allowed to continue because religious law is enforced only selectively) members of the religious community are concerned to

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32

For instance, a New York Times reviewer describes Jephte’s Daughter as “a sentimental, sordid tale of abasement marked by puerile fantasies and sophomoric theologizing” (Blickle 1989). In contrast, a favorable review of Sotah appeared in Publishers Weekly (1992).

33

In 1998, The Jerusalem Report noted that Ragen’s novels had been on bestseller lists in Israel for a total of 90 weeks (Gross 1998). In a discussion of the phenomenon of religious writers, Yael Israel (1998) erroneously reported that Ragen’s novels were best-sellers in the United States, an error based, perhaps, on an exaggerated conception of the role of Jewish Orthodoxy in American public life and debate.

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such a degree with community status that they betray core religious values. Defensiveness as well as abstraction leads to these abuses: “I know you can’t pick and choose among G-d’s laws. I’m talking about rules that have nothing to do with G-d, all those narrow-minded mistaken decrees our world has invented to somehow seal us off, to keep us all the same” (Ragen 1992: 478). Ragen’s first three novels employ devices typical of the consciousnessraising novel. Her heroines are pious women, faithful to the central principles of Orthodox Judaism, who because of tragedy or unusual circumstances come into conflict with the rigidity of ultra-Orthodox community norms.34 After traumatic suffering and confusion, the Ragen heroine has moments of feminist insight, “click” experiences,35 which bring about a transformation of consciousness so that her perspective on her surroundings is forever changed. After one such moment of revelation the heroine of Sotah relates that “[s]he felt as if she were an unwilling possessor of a magic lens that stripped the fresh veneer off everything, revealing the old, rotting wood beneath” (Ragen 1992: 455). In The Sacrifice of Tamar, the heroine finally arrives at an independent sense of moral judgment, separate from that of her religiously authoritative husband: “His judgment of her was no longer her judgment of herself” (Ragen 1995: 376). Ragen shepherds her haredi heroines along to a point of synthesis and integration, transferring them to less repressive milieus in which they can exercise agency as well as uphold tradition. The task of the Ragen heroine is to synthesize Orthodox and secular values, or borrowing terminology from the domestic realm, to “sift,” to live “a good life of her own choosing filled with the rich bounty of all that she loved and respected in both worlds” (Ragen 1992: 478). Ratner characterizes Ragen’s message as reformist but 34

Ragen attempts to establish the relevance and political importance of her narratives by insisting that her fiction is based on actual events that she has read about in the newspaper or heard of from friends and acquaintances (Ragen (interview) 1998a).

35

The origins of the word “click” to describe such a moment of transformative feminist insight is described in the introduction of Letters to Ms. 1972-1987. The editor of that volume notes that letters describing such an experience were an important constituent of Ms. magazine’s letters pages throughout the 1980s (Hogeland 1998: 19n13). The process that Ragen describes closely corresponds to descriptions of coming to feminist consciousness: “when women become feminists the crucial thing that has occurred is not that they have learned any new facts about the world but that they come to view those facts from a different position, from their own position as subjects . . . ” (Hogeland 1998: 4, citing Alcoff 1988). 73

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conservative in that the heroine “relies on the ability to integrate in society by means of adjusting individual aspirations to the social order and not on inner growth and awareness” (Ratner 2002: 145). But this overlooks the transformation of consciousness that is an integral part of the Ragen heroine’s coming of age, a transformation that necessitates a change in surroundings: Sotah’s heroine, Dina, moves with her husband from a haredi Jerusalem neighborhood to an artists’ community in Safed. Ragen emphasizes the liberation narrative more in The Sacrifice of Tamar (which Ratner does not discuss), in which Tamar leaves B’nei B’rak and, separated from her husband, joins the national religious community of a West Bank settlement, where she raises a child rejected by the haredi community. In a more literary style, Nessa Rapoport, whose Preparing for Sabbath (1981) precedes Ragen’s popular romance style novels, takes the meliorist plot a step further: Judith, her spiritually questing protagonist, wants to reap the fruits of feminist emancipation in the secular world and also to break down barriers to women’s religious participation and observance. Rapoport grew up in a liberal Orthodox environment and remains committed to the halakhic framework. Her novel captures the urgency of the conflict between Orthodoxy and feminism to a young woman fully committed to Jewish law. While the protagonist, like Nessa Rapoport herself, is raised in Canada, her identity quest and search for a spiritual, inclusive Judaism, develops between Jerusalem and the Upper West Side of New York where in the 1970s a Jewish renewal movement was emerging. Rapoport’s fiction anticipates the activism beginning in the 1980s by religiously committed feminists in the United States and Israel to broaden women’s participation in public and private ritual. Unlike Rotem’s Gabi who casts off the traditional ways in I Loved So Much, Rapoport’s Judith can draw on the thought and practice of leaders of the Jewish renewal movement to participate more fully in the traditions and rituals from which she is disenfranchised. There is much of Rapoport’s own biography in this novel: Rapoport spent the latter part of the 1970s living among observant Jews on New York’s Upper West Side during a period when a sense of a need for a more vibrant Judaism and Jewish feminism were developing. Midway through her novel, Rapoport has Judith complain: I’m sick of hearing about how women have a different spirituality . . . the physical act of wrapping yourself in a tallis, of reciting the blessing for tefillin, knowing that for centuries Jews have expressed their bond with 74

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God in just this way—there is no substitute. A man who davens every day with tefillin knows his prayer is incomplete without it, but a woman’s prayer has nothing physical, actual, to say: I am here (147-148).

Rapoport eloquently evokes Judith’s sense that she is heir to a rich spiritual legacy from which she is excluded: So many barriers. Up and down the streets chasidim walked, wrapped in robes designed in other times. They walked in pairs, arms linked, intent, and when their eyes met mine they turned away. They saw a young girl, slight, of modern dress. To me my heart thundered through my skin, my soul lit up my face. They did not pause. It’s in my blood, I cried. They would have said I did not know my place (280).

In the spirit of a Jewish renewal movement that sought to revitalize Judaism by emphasizing spirituality, Judith encounters the teachings of Bratslav hasidism, kabbala and yoga. Confronted by a myriad of spiritual choices and guided by a variety of friends and teachers, she makes her way through a process of discovering and defining her spiritual choices. In Rapoport’s novel, Judith comes to understand the value of striving and growth, building and unfolding. Rapaport numbers her chapters alternately using Hebrew and English, so that Chapter One is followed by Chapter “Alef” in a progression toward the final Chapter Seven. In her thoughtful analysis of the novel, Baris shows how these doubled chapter headings at first serve to mark separate spheres, and then to challenge separations (Baris 1994: 317). The narrative concludes with Chapter Seven, just before the onset of the Sabbath, so that the Hebrew chapter “Zayin” that should follow is never reached. At the close of the novel, Judith watches the inhabitants of Jerusalem hastening to get home before the beginning of the Sabbath. She notes that “whatever was not finished was left undone” (Rapoport 1981: 288) and that even if unfinished, “God looking back on the work of the week is finding it good” (288). The structure of this novel, which ends before the much anticipated Sabbath arrives, emphasizes the value of spiritual search and the contingency of seemingly conclusive answers. Rapoport’s novel documents the influence of the Jewish renewal movement that began in the United States in the late 1960s, and of the Jewish feminism that developed within it. In Rapoport’s fiction, liberalization of Orthodoxy is not, as in Ragen’s, merely relieving the more extreme consequences of uncritical application of religious law. Rather, Judith, 75

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impassioned by sacred text and tradition, seeks to appropriate a position of religious authority so that she may participate fully in that tradition. She envisions “[b]earded men, older and older, tefillin knotted on their brow, and she among them” (149). Rapoport’s embrace of feminist reform of Orthodoxy, undertaken in the liberal environment of New York’s Upper West Side, anticipates Mira Kedar’s more ambivalent and understated literary feminism in the service of a quiet revolution, undertaken by religiously observant women within Israel’s national religious sector. In contrast, on the American literary scene, while Rapoport stressed religious activism, other writers began in the later 1980s to enlist Orthodoxy to recuperate traditional values. B. Reclaiming the Mother—Maternal

Intelligence, Maternal Regrets In the fiction of both Naomi Ragen and Allegra Goodman, feminist consciousness-raising is accompanied by defense of traditional gender roles. Their fiction resonates with the conservative message of mass market fiction for women as much as it does with the consciousness-raising novel. Employing reader response criticism, Radway finds that the successful romance features an intelligent heroine wooed by a hero who must overcome the heroine’s resistance to win her over. Contemporary popular romance is a discourse that actively insists on the benefits of traditional roles, and on the belief that “women are valuable not for their unique personal qualities but for their biological sameness and their ability to perform that essential role of maintaining and reconstituting others” (Radway 1984: 208). This literature echoes the values of eighteenth and nineteenth century women’s novels, in which the “successful” heroine is inevitably propelled toward marriage and family (Miller 1980; DuPlesis 1985). Radway ascribes the popularity of this fiction, in part, to a need to reaffirm the benefits of the roles into which women have traditionally been socialized. The contemporary romance affirms conventional marriage, Adrienne Rich argues, “because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment” (Rich 1980: 654). Ragen uses the conventions of popular romance most intensively in The Ghost of Hannah Mendes, in which she abandons the haredi context and the enlightenment narrative entirely in favor of the theme of conservation. In this novel two sisters, barely aware of their Jewish heritage, are 76

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compelled by a dying grandmother to conduct research on seventeenth century Jewish life. As Ragen propels her characters toward the formulaic romantic conclusion of the novel, she appeals to an audience seeking not only escape but validation of family traditions and of traditional nurturing roles: “But the good things, the valuable things, it was so important that they get passed on somehow! Love of freedom, compassion for the poor, the transcendent joy of true prayer, the respect for a kernel of holiness in all human life and human creation. It was so important that those things didn’t get lost or disappear” (Ragen 1998b: 236). At the conclusion of the novel, the heroines, now happily matched with fantastically handsome and rich scions of historically important Sephardic Jewish families, are poised to perform the traditional maternal role of care and transmission of Jewish cultural values. With none of Ragen’s extremity or pat theological conclusions, Allegra Goodman, who describes herself as “traditional” (Burch 1994: 89), also critiques Orthodox Judaism from a feminist perspective while at the same time affirming its family-centered values. In the novel Kaaterskill Falls (1998), synthesis is the starting point, as well as a point of resolution. Goodman describes an insular, traditionally Jewish community in Washington Heights (the Kirshners), modeled after the Breuer community which was founded and led by the sons-in-law of Rabbi Samson R. Hirsch. In Germany, Hirsch was the leader of an acculturative stream of Orthodoxy that saw no necessary contradiction between traditional Judaism and secular culture. Hirsch’s followers rallied around the motto “Torah ‘im derekh-eretz” [Torah with worldly ways] and belief in the validity of progress insofar as it did not impede religious values and practice (Heilman and Cohen 1989: 20). In Rotem’s Mourning, the protagonist’s desire to attend a school founded on Hirsch’s philosophy is the source of bitter conflict. From the beginning, this attempt at synthesis required a careful balancing that became more difficult as traditionalists increasingly identified acculturation with non-Orthodox streams of Judaism. In America, the Breuers turned rightward toward a more conservative position (Heilman and Cohen 1989: 21, 220 n.68). The community that Goodman describes is not Rotem’s B’nei B’rak, or the large, New York or Jerusalem neighborhoods, policed by guardians of religious authority, in which Ragen sets her novels. Here, the protagonist, Elizabeth Shulman, and her family summer in Kaaterskill, New York with Jewish neighbors of various stripes. In Washington Heights, members of the community live in a building, surrounded by a few Kirshner stores, at 77

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the edge of an ethnically diverse New York City neighborhood. Traditional Judaism seems fragile, quaint and more threatened than threatening or repressive. In their clannishness and gravity, the Kirshners, like the Amish or Shakers, represent values that, though no longer relevant, are somehow worthy of preservation. Goodman employs third person narration that alternately stays close to the consciousness of a variety of characters, allowing perception of the Kirshner’s from the vantage of a religious skeptic: He looks at Isaac and Elizabeth and feels protective of them, almost proprietary of their narrow experience and messianic politics. He feels concerned, somehow, for the integrity of their quaint closed world view. Smooth, small, delicate, useless as a robin’s egg (Goodman 1998: 65).

While to the skeptic the Shulmans may be quaint, Elizabeth’s neighbor Nina admires “the shelter Elizabeth enjoys, the consistency . . . ” (78). In Kaaterskill Falls, Goodman fashions her narrative not along the lines of popular romance, but after the Victorian novel with its attention to detail, finely tuned descriptions of character and landscape and literary language. She sets Elizabeth’s struggle with the conflict between motherhood and her entrepreneurial interests against a background of conflict between change and continuity. Goodman’s references to literary and artistic classics evoke rich but out-of-fashion aesthetic and cultural traditions; the semi-corrupt village official, Judge Taylor, struggles against developers to preserve the character of his village; the old recluse Una Darstadt-Cooper seeks isolation from a commodified culture, preferring intensive, direct confrontation with nature. The leader of the fictional Kirshner sect strives to build a community, insulated from surrounding society. These characters recoil from mass culture, a theme that Goodman weaves throughout her oeuvre, most notably in the character Henry Markowitz, the aesthete who appears in Goodman’s two collections of interrelated stories, Total Immersion and The Family Markowitz. Synthesis between traditional and modern is fraught with complexity and ambivalence: there is a beauty and integrity in a traditional community that the intrusion of the outside world always threatens to compromise. For Elizabeth, there is spiritual majesty in her community, joy in her observance: “her religious life is not something she can cast off; it’s part of her. Its rituals are not rituals to her; not objects, but instincts. She lives inside them and can’t hold them up to look at” (Goodman 1998: 57). At the same time, Elizabeth craves the opportunities that the world outside, 78

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unencumbered by halakhic regulation, offers (227). Elizabeth’s obedience to dictates that impede her personal aspirations is utterly incomprehensible to her intellectually brilliant, secular neighbor Beatrix (242). Synthesis is no easy project, complicated as it is by attachment to community, love of family, and the fear that by approaching boundaries, one has irrevocably transgressed them and crossed over to the other side. Goodman brings her central character, Elizabeth Shulman, into conflict with the conservative tendencies of the Kirshner community. The youngest of her five children having finally emerged from babyhood, Elizabeth wants to expand her horizons, to create something of her own, and opens a grocery store in Kaaterskill. She is exhilarated by her commercial success, but then forced by the Kirshner rabbi to close her store because of his perception that she has loosely interpreted his permission. Elizabeth views her essential dilemma as a conflict between traditional gender roles and personal aspiration. Her yearning for personal fulfillment beyond the home is that of second wave feminists active during the period in which Goodman conspicuously sets her novel (1976-1978).36 Goodman naturalizes classic feminism by portraying dissatisfaction and coming to feminist consciousness as the inevitable trajectory of the intelligent woman. As in Ragen’s more didactic novels, Goodman interweaves a narrative of enlightenment with a revision of classic feminist ideals. Even as Elizabeth imagines the satisfactions of commercial success, she extols motherhood: What things? She thinks. What are all the things? All the opportunities to create something of her own. What are all the opportunities for someone who has only been a mother? Not merely a mother, as if it were unimportant, but only a mother. All consumingly. Only a cherisher and a teacher, a feeder of souls, hungry and mysterious, and always becoming more like themselves. What she wants is the chance to shape something that cannot become anything else, only hers. To truly create something, material, definable, self-limited (Goodman 1998: 96, see also 282).

Goodman has Elizabeth describe childcare in rather exalted terms—Elizabeth is a “cherisher . . . teacher, a feeder of souls.” In many passages, the duties 36

This was a period in which women’s liberation was everywhere in the media, and had already made it (following a sit-in) into the pages of Ladies Home Journal (Lauret 1994: 56). Elizabeth’s innocence and failure to explicitly engage with the women’s movement seem credible in the context of her life within a close-knit community that seeks to protect itself from external influence. 79

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of motherhood become less household drudgery and more an example of the “maternal thinking” that Sara Ruddick describes. Fixing her daughter’s broken school project, Elizabeth notes that “it is hard to depict Moses leading the children of Israel across the sea, the waves parting, and the pillar of fire before them—this was what had fallen off—with only cardboard, markers, and construction paper” (295). Just as from ordinary household objects the daughter is to portray miraculous events, there is spiritual glory and satisfaction in the doemisticity that Elizabeth’s devotion to her family and its religious life entails. It is interesting to note the radical difference between Goodman’s wellbalanced protagonist and the deeply depressed women in that classic of the American women’s movement, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977). Both French and Goodman give detailed descriptions of what it is like to take care of children. French’s unhappy protagonist finds raising children at once a deep pleasure and binding enslavement that obliterates absolutely the individual (66-69). In French’s telling, the price of child rearing under the middle class norms prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s ultimately proved too much to bear; women in that novel end up, at best, lonely, and, at worst, suicidal, committed to mental hospitals, or on welfare as a result of a war between the sexes that they were destined to lose. But in Goodman’s 1998 novel of enlightenment, male family members are supportive so that ultimately some change is tolerated. In this context, the value of tradition and of woman’s caretaking role may be affirmed; motherhood does not necessarily entail self-abnegation. Goodman ends her book on a harmonious note by having Elizabeth welcome a sixth daughter and regain her sense of possibility for herself and for her daughters, while various minor characters resolve their conflicts. In her portrait of a protagonist committed to a version of haredi womanhood, Goodman exhibits the same impulse to revise classic feminist goals that Roiphe’s Annie, the secular, soul-searching mother/feminist theorist in Lovingkindness articulates: I don’t know anymore how families should be. In the early days of the movement we thought we could do without them. Then we created a model of equality that left the children waiting at the window for someone to come home. Then we floundered and demanded day care and deprived women who wanted to watch their two-year-olds pound pegs into holes of their earnest desire. We woke up to discover that our goal of equality created a generation of gray flannel suits who played tennis to win and 80

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could tell you all about IRAs and CDs and nothing about Winken, Blinken and Nod. Now I am exhausted, a secret I am not yet willing to tell my friends and colleagues (Roiphe 1987: 120).

At the close of the novel, Roiphe has her character, mindful of her own feelings of failure as a mother, grudgingly accept that haredi motherhood centered around the care and feeding of a spouse and children may offer her daughter a measure of satisfaction. By revaluing traditional gender roles, she represents an impulse dominant in recent American Jewish women’s fiction. In Tova Mirvis’ fine novel, The Ladies Auxiliary (1999), women’s work extends beyond the home to community insitutions, and is presented as, though perhaps exhausting, central to the perpetuation of fragile and invaluable traditions. In this novel and in her later narrative, The Outside World (2004), Mirvis explores the tension between the traditional world and the freedoms and opportunities of secular life, offering sharply observed descriptions of the changing landscape of American Orthodoxy, both in the New York City environs and the American south. Mirvis, who grew up in the Memphis Orthodox Jewish community and later moved to New York City, manages to render descriptions of American Orthodox neighborhoods with both the fluency of an insider, and the distance of an anthropologist. She approaches her subject with humor bordering on satire, but also communicates an affinity to and admiration for her struggling characters that infuses her novels with authenticity. The Ladies Auxiliary, set in Mirvis’ native Memphis, is narrated in part by “we,” a group of women who reinforce a strong sense of communal norms; they are arbiters of right and wrong and confer status in a tightly knit neighborhood of Orthodox women whose lives revolve around home, shul and the religious school their children attend. The novel begins with the arrival of a young, recently widowed convert, Batsheva Jacobs, who brings with her to Memphis commitment to Orthodoxy, a fresh approach to spirituality, and an openness to questioning. An artist raising a young daughter, Ayala, Batsheva is seeking the support of community, but not at the cost of sacrificing her individuality: in the “gauzy fabric of her purple skirt, the hem of it trimmed with fringes,” in her “silver anklet with shiny blue beads” (Mirvis 1999: 12, 13), there is a threat to the conservative dress and mores that the women of the Ladies Auxiliary zealously guard. Batsheva’s integration into the community challenges this formidable body of women, the community’s collective consciousness. 81

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While at first Batsheva finds in Memphis the comfort and security she seeks, the relationship between her and her neighbors eventually frays. Ayala, adored and pitied by her new neighbors, is “adopted” by community matriarch, Mrs. Levy, and Batsheva too begins to connect with this close group of girls and women. The women of the Ladies Auxiliary view Batseheva’s religious enthusiasm (she sits in the front row at shul, sings audibily, prays with fervor, and visits the mikveh when she doesn’t have to) with a wary but mostly amused tolerance. Despite their reservations, they are drawn into Batsheva’s enthusiam for religious study and artistic approach to familiar rituals. Batsheva extends an invitiation to a Rosh Chodesh (new moon) celebration that most of the women attend, despite it seeming “like some feminist innovation that we, thank God, did not have to think about living down here… as far as we were concerned all the holidays were women’s holidays: we certainly worked hard enough for them” (124). Yet celebrating the new moon, elevated by song and dance to new spiritual realms, the women experience an unfamiliar sense of wholeness: “[i]n the dim lighting, we could just make out the outlines of each other’s faces, all lines and angles softened into each other, and we felt, for that one second, that we had slipped out of who we usually were” (130). The question of whether Batsheva can integrate into the community becomes bound up with the larger issue of the community’s survival itself; will the younger generation resist assimilation and assume the burdens of personal and communal obligation to which their parents are committed? Batsheva begins to teach art in the girls’ high school, and at first her creativity and candor seem the perfect antidote to the restless energy of teenagers frustrated with the restrictiveness of their small world. But when a school trip that Batsheva is chaperoning seems to spin out of control, a fresh round of teenage rebellion ensues, and: …all we could think was that Batsheva had brought something new into our community and she was leading our children astray. These incidents added up, becoming a sharp reminder that Batsheva was, after all, not one of us. The seeds of suspicion which had been swirling through our minds took root, and we watched her with newly opened eyes (203).

When Batsheva’s closest friend in the community, the Rabbi’s son, begins seriously to doubt his faith and his commitment to Orthodoxy, the sense of instability heightens. The departure of the rabbi’s son is interpreted as a rejection of the community and its beliefs: “Yosef’s absence created 82

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a hollowness in the middle of our neighborhood, as if during the night, a line of bulldozers dug a pit that stared back at us” (306). To the ladies of Mirvis’ Women’s Auxiliary, all that they have worked to sustain seems precarious and at risk: will the next generation strike deep roots in what now seems to be shifting ground? Even as Mirvis’ novel critiques the narrow-mindedness of the community’s female opinion leaders, she leaves no doubt that women’s work, exhausting and joyous, is at the heart of the struggle for Jewish continuity; it is in the matching paper plates and cups that decorate the Sisterhood lunch, the sukkah decorations cut out with the kids year after year, and no less than twenty varieties of kugels baked, on which, in the end, the surivial of Jewish tradition depends. Mirvis, in an interview ostensibly by the women of Memphis among whom she was raised, explains why it was important to her to represent their collective voice: In some respects, this domestic sphere is seen as less important, while the men’s world is the one that matters. But it is in the women’s sphere that the children are being raised and the community is being shaped. The men are off at work while this is takng place. Even though you may not have as many official leadership positions in the community, you are the ones who control a lot of what happens here (Mirvis 2000b).

By representing the perspective of women collectively (as well as indvidual points of view), Mirvis conveys the existence of accepted social norms, and also celebrates the centrality of women to the community and the importance of their labor in creating opportunities for interaction and maintaining institutional structures. As in Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls, the novel ends with a measure of hope. The rabbi’s wife, Mimi, continues her friendship with Batsheva despite her son’s defection, and insists on including her in the community. On the holiday of Shavuot, which celebrates divine revelation through the giving of Torah, Mimi teaches a message of tolerance; she invokes the story of the biblical Ruth, the Moabite, who was at first regarded by the Israelites with suspicion, but becomes the mother of their future kings (p. 309). Returning from synagogue at night, the women experience their own revelation in a flash of light that illuminates their Memphis homes: In the sky above these places was a chain of hands, our ancestors on one side, holding on to each other, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, stretching back to Sarah, Rivka, Rochel and Leah. We were part of this 83

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line of women, connected to them by the daily routines of our lives, the Shabboses we had prepared, the holidays we had celebrated, the homes we had made. Even Batsheva was there, holding on to Mimi’s hand. But when we looked at who was on the other side of our long line, our daughters were off somewhere in the distance, some closer and some farther away, and only if we stretched out our arms as far as they would go could we maybe begin to reach them. (311)

Here, homemaking, and not law, becomes the stuff of revelation. Women’s work is both mundane and complex, because interwoven with daily routine is the complicated and transcendant project of drawing close future generations; their task is to imbue burdensome obligations with joy and meaning so that these may survive in an American context that emphasizes individuality, self-actualization, and choice. C. American Orthodox Diversity Mirvis’ 2004 novel, The Outside World, as its title suggests, also explores efforts to balance commitment to tradition with openness to the “outside” world. In this tale, late-adolescent angst plays out against the backdrop of Modern Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and ultraOrthodoxy on the other. Mirvis contrasts the spaciousness and relative religious liberalism of the fictional, prosperous New Jersey community of Laurelwood in which the Miller’s reside, with the Goldman family’s less modern Brooklyn neighborhood, more crowded and more restrictive in its religious norms. The action of the novel moves between Jewish communities in Laurelwood, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, and, of course, Memphis, cataloguing varieties of Orthodox religious experience. Here again, the emphasis is not on critique of Orthodoxy, but on preserving tradition. The opening chapters of the book describe crises in two families. Twenty-two year-old Tzippy Goldman has, along with her mother Shayna, been planning her wedding since toddler-hood, but finds herself, at the advanced age of twenty-two, incapable of settling on a husband. A tireless Shayna is determined to locate Tzippy’s “bashert,” and to guide the search, Tzippy has composed conventional lists of desirable qualities in a husband, “learner” of Torah foremost among them. Despite her mother’s best efforts, there is no match. At the opening of the novel, Tzippy is simply unable any longer to tolerate a seeming endless series of “shiddoch dates” (dates set up for the purpose of vetting candidates for marriage) organized by her 84

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mother. Tzippy is both anxious to find a suitable mate, and at the same time, increasingly disturbed by speculation about what it might be like to live outside of Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community. During one of the seemingly endless string of dates she has endured in a hotel lobby (site-of-choice for the eligible Orthodox), Tzippy’s date, Yosef Schachter, describes to her the freedom he felt in Israel, inspiring Tzippy’s fantasy of liberation: Faced with the intensity of her mother’s desires, Tzippy wasn’t sure what she wanted for herself. But whatever it was, she was going to find it on her own. Tiny flitting pieces of Tzippy emerged and refused to behave. She envisioned standing up and joining hands with the other girls here on dates. At first they would cluck in surprise at her breach of dating etiquette. Then they would see the wild look on her face and start to feel it too. Something would break loose inside, and they too would need to cast off where they were, who they were. The soft background music would become louder, and Tzippy would dance the girls around the room, through the closely spaced tables and on top of the bar. From underneath their skirts, long graceful legs would come kicking out. Then she would kiss Yosef Schachter on the lips. All the girls would smack their dates on the lips and flounce from the room. Then Tzippy would go home to her room and close the door. When her mother and her friends gathered outside and demanded that she explain herself, the one window in the room would open and she would jump out. She would become a bird and fly away (Mirvis 2004, 21-22).

This imagined dance resonates with the biblical Miriam’s celebration of the Exodus, which, later in the novel, inspires the spiritually-seeking Naomi Miller. Miriam’s dance marks escape from Egypt and displays a female initiative only rarely reported in the Bible. While Miriam celebrated deliverance, Tzippy envisions a dance that transgresses law and convention to express sexual desire and enact a final exit from a somewhat overbearing mother and a restrictive community. While her free-spirited dance remains in the realm of fantasy, Tzippy’s imagined liberation inspires her to announce that she will spend the next year in Israel—far from her family and dates arranged by her mother. Meanwhile, Bryan Miller of Laurelwood, New Jersey is engaged in a very different sort of rebellion against parental expectation that leads him to Israel. Bryan, typical of other boys in his community, undertook a precollege year at a yeshiva in Israel, an experience expected by his parents 85

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to strengthen Jewish identity and ward off the temptations to assimilate that college may present. The Miller family, along with their neighbors, have negotiated a comfortable integration of traditional and modern, sending their kids to Jewish day schools “that doubled as feeders for the Ivy League;” they are most at home in a world in which a man covers his head at home and in shul, but removes his kippa upon entry into the corporate law firm. Naomi and Joel Miller have tried to communicate to their children, Bryan and Ilana, loyalty to tradition as well as openness to the secular world in which they are expected to participate and thrive. Yeshiva study is to be an immersion program of limited duration, a hiatus from “normal” life in which to accumulate a store of Torah knowledge. Joel and Naomi Miller send their son off for an experience, and certainly not to augment the ranks of a “community of learners” that scorns secular studies, economic striving and all that is modern. For nineteen-year-old Bryan Miller, intense study has turned out to be a spiritual revelation. Bryan “had studied Talmud before, in high school for the fifty-minute period between algebra and American history. But when he spent the whole day immersed in Talmud, he saw the shadow of God peeking out from behind the words (28).” Bryan, who now insists on being called Baruch, cannot reconcile the strict observance he has adopted with what he sees as the laxity of his parental home. Living with Joel, Naomi, and his teen-aged sister, Ilana, is an assault on his hard-won spiritual development. Bryan-Baruch’s family, in turn, is put off by his attempt to impose upon them rules derived from the strictest possible interpretations of Jewish law and, more so, by his emotional alienation from them. At the start of the novel, Baruch’s parents grapple with the unwelcome news that, after already having once extended his yeshiva study, Bryan will return to Israel for a third year rather than matriculate at Columbia University. When Tzippy and Baruch meet in Israel, the reader is not sure where their mutual attraction will lead; spiritually speaking, they are searching in opposite directions. Yet, both are seeking to find their own way and escape from futures that seem to have been pre-determined by others. Tzippy and Baruch had first become acquainted as children: their families had once been friendly but had grown apart. Upon bumping into Bryan in Israel, Tzippy recalls having watched him play basketball in shorts and a tank top in front of his house on Shabbos (behavior and garb unacceptable in her Brooklyn neighborhood), and thinking that he is cute. Bryan’s familiarity with the “outside world,” his determination to choose his own future, and the fact that their meeting was not arranged, render him just exotic enough 86

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to pique the independent Tzippy’s romantic interest. And in Tzippy, Bryan sees a modest and sweet girl for whom the desire to learn Torah for extended periods of time is nothing out of the ordinary. Against what seem like significant odds, the relationship between Tzippy and Baruch thrives and matures, as they marry and settle in Memphis, of course. While in the Women Auxiliary, the Memphis Jewish community seemed small and narrow, here it provides Tzippy the space to explore new options far from the neighbors and norms of her old New York neighborhood. She discovers all manner of books and then college, and while Baruch recognizes that Tzippy’s broadening horizons threaten the lifestyle he has adopted, raised as he has been, he would never dream of telling her what to do. In Memphis, where on the advice of Tzippy’s father he opens a kosher restaurant, Baruch himself finds that his own interests might actually lie more in business than in full-time Torah study. In this novel, the world is wide, and one can invent and reinvent oneself. In The Outside World, spiritual exploration is not reserved for the young. Naomi, endowed with a strong, intuitive faith and a certain acceptance of contradiction, begins to embark on a search for meaningfulness in her religious practice, taking stock of the rituals that she has taken for granted. Amid the neighbors and friends she has come to know through sisterhood lunches and fundraising efforts, sitting in shul (of all places) the people and prayers are transformed, in a genuine religious experience: “She heard the inner longings that accompanied the prescribed words. The air in the sanctuary was teeming with these wishes. The words had become real, and they were streaming out of their bodies” (156). Like Bryan, Naomi wants more; but for her spirituality does not flow from more stringent interpretation of Jewish law: “[s]he realized that she wanted more from the laws she observed. She didn’t want religion to be a garment she wore on the outside. She wanted the words of the prayers to be closely vested to her body, next to her skin.” (157). Naomi immerses herself in reading and workshops on everything from Jewish meditation, to new rituals, finding that she can peel back the layers of ritual and “feel them more deeply” (231). In contrast, her husband Joel is the religious skeptic who “was still trying to find a way to live within his world as best he could. The mysteries of the universe didn’t nag at him. He could live in the tenuous space of the observant agnostic” (227). When his daughter asks him what she is supposed to believe, he can only advise her to keep asking. In Mirvis’ hands, Orthodoxy is yielding: there are varieties of belief and different levels of observance that all fall under its umbrella; restrictions 87

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upon women are negotiable even in the context of traditional communities. In the Modern Orthodox framework, rabbinical pronouncements on women’s modesty are portrayed as religious excesses largely to be ignored. Baruch informs his mother that it is inappropriate for her to speak at his engagement party because “the glory of the king’s daughter is inside. From this, we learn that women aren’t supposed to be in the public eye” (117), Naomi responds: “I don’t think the rabbis mean inside, as in inside the house. I think they mean internal, that who you are inside yourself is what matters.” She gives a heartfelt speech at the party. While Tzippy’s mother takes the norms of her right-wing Orthodox community very much to heart, her daughters’ happiness is at the center of her concern. If Tzippy’s actions are, in the Brooklyn community in which she was raised, distinctly un-Orthodox, her mother will put the right spin on her doings to render them acceptable to the neighbors. At the start of the novel, Tzippy imagines leading girls in a liberating dance. At its close, always capable, she has gained far more independence, yet remains close to her family and her roots. At the end of this humorous novel, two generations of Millers and Goldmans, united by marriage, sit quite unexpectedly but comfortably around the Passover table. For Mirvis’ characters, the bonds of love and family prove to be far stronger than the religious conflicts that divide them, and the path to maturity entails recognizing that people can be different and together. Reflecting some of the diversity of American Jewish religious practice, a family can encompass a spectrum of observance ranging from right-wing Orthodoxy, to liberal Orthodoxy and even more recently invented ritual. Significantly, in Mirvis’ novel there is room for both men and women to defy and revise expectations, and exercise agency to carve out personally satisfying roles while remaining within Orthodoxy. D. The Daughters’ Orthodox Romance In American Jewish women’s literature, Orthodoxy often becomes a refuge for troubled daughters. A return to Judaism restores cultural loss, relieves loneliness and leads protagonists to successful relationships. Orthodoxy provides a framework within which troubled daughters, deprived of parental nurturance or troubled by a sense of purposelessness, may find a community of meaning and appropriate mates. In Roiphe’s Lovingkindness, Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel, Ragen’s The Ghost of Hannah Mendes and Goodman’s most recent novel, Paradise Park, young women trade lives of chaos, loneliness, or dangerous self-abuse for Jewish 88

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observance (to varying degrees), commitment to a community and domestic happiness. The protagonists of their narratives, like the real-life newly Orthodox women whom Lynn Davidman has described, seek “to create a new sense of self within communities of memory that might also help them establish themselves in nuclear families” (Davidman 1991: 193). The most troubled daughters turn to insular and stringently observant Jewish sects that provide substitute families for newcomers as well as a sense of community (125). Experimentation with gender roles enhances individual freedom, but with the cost of a certain amount of confusion and social disruption. Thus, Davidman found that women were attracted to Orthodoxy because they believed it was ancient and durable, and that it articulated a clear role for women that would place them in the center of families (Davidman 1991: 96, 109). Similarly, Debra Renee Kaufman concluded that American women who had “returned” to haredi Orthodoxy had discovered in “religious profamilialism one answer to the instabilities associated with familial and occupational arrangements for women in the closing decades of the twentieth century” (Kaufman 1991: 164). El-Or, an Israeli sociologist who has studied Orthodox women, has commented on the curiosity of secular acquaintances about whether Orthodox women are happier than they. El-Or comments: A society that is structured according to sexist compartmentalization of men and women is nevertheless thought of as a possible source of happiness. Somehow, it seems better than the indeterminate here and now of a society that has, for the last hundred years, been conducting a probing inquiry into the relations between the sexes (El-Or 1994: 209).

Loss of community and an ethnic and religious context for their lives has set late twentieth and early twenty-first century female Jewish protagonists dangerously at sea, in ways that resonate with the commentary of Davidman, Kaufman and El-Or on attitudes toward traditionalism. Ragen’s haredi heroines often have an important relationship with a woman who has fallen from traditional ways (Hadassah Mandelbright in The Sacrifice of Tamar), or who is unfamiliar with her Jewish heritage (Joan in Sotah). As these female friends nurture the heroine’s emerging sense of subjectivity, their own lives are cautionary tales of the evils (divorce, overwork, sexual harassment, poor relationships, bad parenting) of a secular culture rife with corruption. In Paradise Park, Goodman’s peripatetic young protagonist, 89

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alienated from her troubled parents, is on a desperate search for structure. In Mazel, Goldstein’s Phoebe, the most stable of the protagonists who discover Orthodoxy, is also ill-equipped for contemporary life. A brilliant mathematician, Phoebe is “impossibly tender” (Goldstein 1995: 337); “there has always been some unplumable realm in Phoebe” (337). Phoebe’s mother is startled, of course, when Phoebe seemed suddenly to start taking being Jewish so very seriously, insisting on removing it from the level of mythology. Chloe had no idea whether this was, in itself, a good thing. But she did find herself believing, increasingly, that it was a good thing for Phoebe. In fact, she couldn’t help feeling that Phoebe—who had always been an extraordinarily gifted problem-solver, first as a little chess prodigy, and then as a mathematician—had hit upon a quite brilliant solution to the problem of being Phoebe (336).

The quest for meaning, family, and stability is intertwined with yearning for an authentic past. Goodman weaves passages throughout Paradise Park about Sharon’s disconnection from and longing for a history she associates with the memory of her grandfather: “You could hear Grandpa Irving in the rabbi’s voice. All rueful, Brooklyn-Yiddish, dark and smoky . . . Deep down underneath Siegel’s poetic diction, if you listened hard enough, he was there: Grandpa Irving! And I sat up in my chair and I closed my eyes and I thought as hard as I could, Grandpa Irving, are you there?” (Goodman 2001: 148). Goodman renders the yearning for an authentic past, shared by others in the novel, particularly poignant by locating her characters in her native Hawaii, far removed from centers of Jewish culture. At a gathering sponsored by newly arrived members of a hasidic group: Dr. Sugarman started telling all of us how the services and the food reminded him of his childhood, and Betsy started pursing her lips like she always did when he went on like that, since apparently the doctor had grown up reform in Ohio, not the Old Country. Betsy thought the doctor had some kind of nostalgia delusion going on. But I said to her, “No, Betsy, see I understand what he means. Cholent makes me nostalgic too.” And she said, “How can you be nostalgic for something that never was?” She didn’t understand that’s the strongest nostalgia there is, when you’re missing and reminiscing about what you never had. I would have pointed to Fred . . . He was the perfect example. He practically got tears in his eyes from Ruchel’s kugel, and he’d grown up Irish Catholic (212). 90

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Goldstein’s Mazel, by alternating between past and present, recreates most intensively the loss of a Jewish cultural legacy. Sorel/Sasha, once a star of the Yiddish theater in Poland, has lived for many years on New York’s Upper West Side. The novel is narrated in the third person and from a multi-generational perspective that develops the chasm between Sasha’s childhood in a Galician shtetl, Shluftchev,37 and an Upper West Side/northern New Jersey present. Early chapters of the book focus on Sorel’s (Sasha’s childhood name) childhood and adolescence in Galicia and her later life in Warsaw. Goldstein, who studied Yiddish to write the novel, powerfully evokes not only the traditional Jewish past, but also the rich legacy of Yiddish secular culture and vibrance of inter-war Polish-Jewish culture with its competing dogmas. The vitality of the slice of European life that Goldstein depicts brings into high relief the rootlessness of Sasha’s New York City-born granddaughter, Phoebe, the child of an absent, nonJewish father and a mother with only vague knowledge of her own parents’ European background and Yiddish secularism. But in this novel, the past cannot simply be longed for nostalgically. At the center of the narrative is one of the grotesque tales that Fraydel, Sorel’s older sister, told to her siblings. Fraydel describes a lavish wedding that combines her well-developed sense of the fantastic with the details of a traditional Jewish wedding. She invents a scene of wild celebration that culminates in the bride’s dance with Death, here an evil badchan [wedding entertainer]. Unable to escape the badchan’s thrall, the bride dances with him and loses her identity completely. Fraydel’s story reflects her understanding of marriage as a loss of self, and portends her rebellion against arranged marriage and her subsequent suicide. Following the suicide, Sorel’s family moves to Warsaw, where she is exposed to opportunities that had been unavailable to Fraydel. Sorel becomes a star of the Yiddish theater. Fraydel is Sorel’s muse: “‘She could have been anything, my sister Fraydel. She could pull knowledge from out of the air, even there in the shtetl. You don’t know what it was like there’—her voice suddenly became fierce—‘especially for a girl like Fraydel’” (291). Fraydel’s ghastly story takes center stage, as Sorel/Sasha introduces it to the Yiddish theatre, and the play based on it, The Bridegroom, catapults her company to success. Along with Ragen, Goldstein and Goodman lead their heroines along to happy marriage and maternity. At the close of Mazel is another wedding 37

In the tradition of S. Y. Abramovitz, Sholom Aleikhem, and Agnon, Goldstein gives a mocking name, “Sleep City,” to the shtetl in which her protagonist grew up. 91

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scene—that of Sasha’s granddaughter, Phoebe, who has chosen a Modern Orthodox lifestyle. We know little of Phoebe as the narration stays closest to the consciousness of Sasha and her daughter Chloe. Furman notes that, for Phoebe, “mainstream American culture offers its share of material rewards . . . but it offers only thin fare for the soul” (99). In contrast to the wedding celebration Fraydel so eerily described, this lavish wedding is life-affirming: the bride’s face, waiting for the ceremonies to begin, is “like a flower, open to the sun” (351). Goldstein expresses ambivalence about Orthodoxy by juxtaposing Sasha’s disdain for the wedding proceedings and Phoebe’s joy. Sasha brings to bear on the events surrounding the wedding all her condescension for the old ways, and all her irony, as she dubs the materialistically-oriented suburb in which the bridegroom’s family lives “Shluftchev . . . with a designer label” (333). Aware of the “enormity of the irony” that she alone can perceive, Sasha remains aloof at Phoebe’s wedding: “Sasha didn’t dance. She stayed near the periphery of the room, archly surveying, keeping up a silent running commentary on what she had taken to calling the ‘reshtetlization of America’” (354). Sasha’s daughter, Chloe, wonders at the strange rituals of the Orthodox, much less familiar than the pagan rites she studies as a classics professor, but unencumbered by her mother’s past, she is determined to see what her daughter finds in this life. As the wedding celebration proceeds Sasha is literally dragged to join the circle of dancing celebrants: “And Sasha and Chloe and Phoebe were all dancing together, their arms linked . . . and their feet barely touching the billowing floor, as they swirled in the circles drawn within circles within circles” (357). Between Sasha’s condescension and Phoebe’s joy, Goldstein expresses her ambivalence about her own Orthodox upbringing. She critiques patriarchal tradition while evoking the longing for continuity: “the circles drawn within circles within circles.” Goldstein neutralizes Jewish patriarchy in her novel by recontextualizing it within a modern, urban and suburban America in which a feminist revolution has already taken place. For Furman, the lesson of the novel is its emphasis on Jewish continuity, and the nurturance of a distinctly Jewish identity: “To ask that Orthodox Judaism abide by the contemporary secular ideals of scientific rationalism and gender equality is to miss the point (and the beauty) behind its ancient and inviolable rituals” (Furman 2000: 99). But more to the point here, Goldstein can have Sasha suggest that Phoebe use the name Fraydel in her Jewish marriage contract precisely because of great historical change that has transformed the circumstances surrounding 92

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marriage and gender roles. Phoebe is a brilliant mathematics professor whose achievements in the secular world will not be threatened by her conversion to a Modern Orthodoxy in which gender inequality is compartmentalized to the realm of religious ritual. One can be nostalgic for the old ways, even countenance a return to religious ritual, because, as the novel has shown, the context has been irrevocably altered. In Paradise Park, the second of Goodman’s novels to engage intensively with Jewish womanhood, as in Lovingkindness, and Mazel, the protagonist’s encounter with Orthodoxy allows her to restore a vital link to a longed for past and to arrive at a more stable sense of self. Turning toward Orthodoxy helps Goodman’s Sharon to start a nuclear family and arrive at “a new sense of self within communities of memory” (Davidman 1991: 193). Sharon tries on every form of spiritual enlightenment that 1970s counter-culture had to offer: I was going to find God again, I knew it. Plenty of other options were still out there. If one didn’t work, I’d switch. Visions, Bible study, hallucinatory trips. I had a fickle soul, but I couldn’t see it that way. The only thing I can compare it to is that time in your life when you’ll sleep with anyone, but you think you’re doing it because you so believe in love (Goodman 2001: 108).

Sharon’s voice, youthful, self-ironizing, and resilient, quickly engages the reader. Goodman endows her protagonist with the anti-authoritarian sensibility of a college student of her decade (the 70s), deep loneliness, spiritual longing and a comic distance from the people and spiritual communities she encounters so that the novel is a picaresque comedy of manners. Sharon’s road to redemption figures a conservative rabbi, an Israeli yeshiva in which women spend a lot of time serving food (where she concludes: “I am seeking God. And to me that is not about silverware, okay?” (185)), and finally intense happiness at the more spiritually oriented school run by Bialystoker hasidim for ba‘alot teshuva. Much of the humor and energy of Paradise Park derives from the cultural clash between Sharon’s secular background, sense of autonomy and cynicism and the belief structures she encounters in her search for the great epiphany. Even amid the intense satisfaction she finds among the hasidim, Sharon finds that the problem of her independent spirit remains: “There they were, springing me from all my predicaments, and all they wanted was my soul. What a small price to pay. What a simple thing to give, 93

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if only you knew how to do it. If only you could extricate yourself from the person that you were before” (257). Here, a return to Orthodoxy ultimately serves as a basis for developing an attachment to Judaism and new paths of spirituality within it. Goodman’s protagonist in Paradise Park displays the individualism that Cohen and Eisen find emblematic of the contemporary American Jew. This “postmodern” Jew emphasizes voluntarism and personal autonomy over obligation, and is committed to pluralism and to seeking spirituality and personal meaning (Cohen and Eisen 2000: 34-42). These contemporary Jews are “explorers in Judaism, people in perpetual quest of Jewish meaning” (38), who pick and choose among religious rituals and texts to find those that they can affirm. While Cohen and Eisen see this “postmodern” Jewish identity as potentially damaging to the vitality of Judaism in America, Goodman celebrates spiritual search as an opportunity for development, and a stimulus to creativity in a Jewish context. Toward the conclusion of the novel, Sharon marries a fellow traveler, another recruit to Bialystoker hasidism but in so doing, to the shock of her hasidic hosts, risks transgressing certain halakhic technicalities. Having fallen out of favor with the Bialystokers, Sharon and her spouse join a Boston havura and start a Jewish wedding band. In this contemporary Jewish romance, Sharon’s return to tradition enables her to reunite with her parents, heal wounds of the past and find love, work, and a spiritual home. In the secular, individualist American milieu, young people may feel bereft of the guidance of elders and the support of strong communal structures; in an interesting counterpoint to tales of troubled youth, reporter Lucette Lagnado highlights how the elderly who lack large, caring, or extended families may similarly be set adrift. In her memoir, The Arrogant Years (2011), Lagnado describes the difficulty of coping with the illnesses of her aging parents. Discussion of The Arrogant Years is useful here because its themes resonate, from a different perspective, with those that preoccupy American Jewish women novelists who engage with Orthodoxy. In telling her own story, Lagnado traces her mother’s attempts at “rebuilding the hearth” (107), a mission that becomes increasingly elusive as family members scatter and she is left to care for an ailing husband. Lagnado offers an immigrant’s perspective on America, to which she arrived from Cairo as a young child: here, there is freedom of religion, but people do not practice religion; there is an emphasis on family, but people are not family-oriented (Lagnado (interview) 2011b).

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Lagnado portrays the arc of her life from childhood in an immigrant, sephardi community in Brooklyn, to adulthood in Manhattan, juxtaposing her story with that of her mother, Edith. In 1963, Lagnado’s parents unwillingly fled Cairo, which had been home to a vibrant, culturally rich and historically important Jewish community; its exiled leaders were once members of Cairo’s political and cultural elite and the guardians of their poorer brethren. The “arrogant years” refers to the period in the lives of both mother and daughter when anything seemed possible. Edith’s “arrogant years” were prior to her marriage when she held a prestigious teaching position and was a protegee of Madame Alice Cattaui Pasha, a leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and confidante of King Fouad. While Edith’s arrogant years were cut off by marriage, Lucette’s were shattered by a diagnosis of cancer in her senior year of high school. Lagnado does not seek the early marriage customary in her community, a choice in part, she feels, dictated by her illness. As Lagnado navigates education at Vassar and Columbia and then a journalism career, she looks back, always, with nostaglia and longing, at that traditional Brooklyn community in which she had felt a sense of belonging. Lagnado opens her book with a story, about attending synagogue, emblematic of her ambivalence toward tradition. Each week the young Lucette dutifully accompanies her mother to shul, and feels both annoyed and protected by the flimsy wooden divider between men and women: In my mind, there were two worlds—the gossipy, trivial, inconsequential world of the women’s section and the solemn, purposeful world beyond it, the world where men sat in vast and airy quarters communing with God. The world that I longed to join and where I felt I belonged. The world beyond the divider (4).

The women’s section, “an enclosed space, much like a pen . . . felt more cozy than claustrophobic” (2). There, sitting among a warm and familiar group of women and girls Lucette: was usually blissfully content in my chair. The universe as defined by the wooden partition was one of the few places where I could be myself, where I felt at ease, and where that sense of not belonging, of being different and foreign that had haunted me since leaving Egypt vanished (7).

The congregants of The Shield of Young David, primarily Middle Eastern refugees, had constructed a substitute for religious communities lost to them, recreating a sense of familiarity and belonging; sitting with the 95

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women and girls of the Shield of Young David, Lucette finds warmth and protectors—she is among women who feed her, embrace her and treat her as a daughter. When the Shield of Young David suddenly closes, Lucette returns to the deserted building to find the wooden partition torn down, stray pieces scattered. She feels “strangely desolate seeing the divider reduced to dozens of pieces of wood, ready for the trash. I wished that I could gather them and hold on to them” (222). In the final chapters of the book, Lagnado describes her struggle to insure her mother a measure of dignity in her final years, and her ambivalence about traditional ways, which are both limiting and comforting, intensifies. For Lagnado, the breakdown of barriers to women’s participation goes hand in hand with loss of community. She places herself among an entire generation of women, Jewish and non-Jewish, that “had, together, reached the men’s section and exultantly sat down with them to find… To find what exactly?” (357). Ever the investigative journalist, she checks back in with the friends of her youth, some of whom stayed within close Jewish communities, and some who ventured far beyond them. She summarizes the description of the Syrian Jewish community offered by her old friend Marlene, who delivers a powerful critique of American individualism: Families stuck together here, and children lived near their loved ones even when they were grown: that was the rule . . . Above all, the Community took care of its own…if someone was sick and infirm, there were armies of volunteers rushing to visit them and comfort them and bring them soup… It was exactly as the Jews had functioned back in old Cairo and in long-ago Aleppo…when philanthropy was personal as well as communal and didn’t depend on welfare or bureaucracies of the United Jewish Appeal. And that outside world I had found so seductive: It was a wasteland, a lost and hopeless place…it was such a lonely country… (Lagnado 2011, 365).

While Lagnado’s significant journalistic achievements certainly seem worthy of celebration, she raises the question of whether she might have been happier had she found a way to follow a more traditional path. For her, community is not the merely the existence of a like-minded group of people; rather, it is the presence of children and grandchildren, of large families that live together, harmoniously or not, and take care of each other. She asks whether classic feminist ideals are ultimately consistent with maintaining a truly rich and intimate family life and an ethic of care. 96

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E. Translating the Language of

the Fathers As American Jewish women writers increasingly affirm their Jewish identity, sacred texts become vehicles for re-connection with Judaism and tools for creative self-expression. For example, there is a sharp difference in use of Jewish texts between Roiphe’s early and later fiction: while her early characters use biblical references to denounce Judaism, every bit as sharply as does Rotem with her ironic deployment of misogynistic rabinnical phrases, her later characters do not. Roiphe’s early heroines are disenfranchised from Judaism and its texts, just one more manifestation of female powerlessness in a male-oriented society: Rachel, Rachel, the wait is too long. Weep, Leah, weep for being first and ugly; both weep for being cattle traded two for one on the open market. Powerless to choose, to run away into the long desert . . . Weep far away from the Torah, weep away from the holy center of the men’s world, because the Lord God . . . the nameless name of all names, does not like menstruating women (Roiphe 1972: 58)

However, when Roiphe’s later protagonist, Annie, in Lovingkindness (1987), copes with her daughter’s conversion to haredi Judaism, Annie’s encounter with Orthodoxy is mediated by dreams of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. In these dreams, Rabbi Nahman shares stories that can be interpreted as lessons in love that draw Annie closer to her spiritual side (Halio 1997: 108). These stories, communicated in dreams, are difficult to interpret so that access to the Jewish past remains an elusive possibility, but a possibility nonetheless. In Goodman’s Paradise Park, the heroine’s access to Hebrew words provides a harmonious close to her spiritual journey. When a musical adaptation of The Song of Songs is played at a night of Jewish folk dancing, Sharon reflects: “Only then I realized that very quietly, without even intending to, I’d been singing along. And it was Hebrew poetry on my lips, but I understood exactly what I was singing. I knew all the words” (Goodman 2001: 360). Nessa Rapoport, in Preparing for Sabbath (1981), most intensively engages Jewish sources, translating to contemporary American literature the Hebrew literary tradition of intertextuality. Her novel is an assertion of the possibility of enlisting the “Jewish library” to create an American Jewish cultural renaissance. Rapoport, in the tradition of Agnon, blurs 97

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the lines between sacred and secular, so that the contemporary novel is one more way to expand the Jewish tradition of commentary and interpretation. Sacred Jewish texts exemplify “a sanctioned intoxication with language, stunning formal inventiveness, imagery made resonant by millennia of use, a dazzling range of style . . . ” (Rapoport 1992: xxviii). In her introduction to a collection of stories by American Jewish writers, she argues that “our fiction can equally be a dialogue with earlier Jewish books; it can retrieve the materials and structures of an august and infinitely rich imaginative tradition for art” (xxix). Although Rapoport seems to secularize the tradition so that writers retrieve the sacred text for “art,” at the same time these writers enter religious tradition by participating in the age-old dialogue with sacred texts. Thus, in her introduction to the anthology of American Jewish Writing, Writing Our Way Home, she celebrates in a wide range of fiction the renaissance of the Jewish literary tradition. Rapoport’s comments reflect her sense of mission and the centrality of the ancient word to her writing. Throughout Preparing for Sabbath, Rapoport emphasizes her protagonist’s sense of cultural privilege, derived in part from her father’s stories of his ancestors, a long line of rabbis going back to the fifteenth century (Rapoport 1981: 22, 147). In Rapoport’s non-fiction writing, she has talked about her rabbinical lineage and similar sense of aristocracy (Rapoport 1999). This sense of cultural entitlement carries with it the obligation, made all the more urgent by the Holocaust, to contribute to a lineage of Jewish scholarship and commentary. In Preparing for Sabbath, Rapoport enters the dialogue with sacred text by an act of feminist appropriation, as she, in the tradition of secular Hebrew women writers, privatizes the sources (Cohen 1996; Feldman 2004).38 Thus, in chapter “Gimel,” Rapoport has her heroine, Judith, walk through the streets of Jerusalem searching for her boyfriend, Ori, in passages that recall the sequence of events and the language of The Song of Songs. When she finally encounters Ori, the words that express the Jews’ fathomless gratitude to God in the Sabbath morning prayers give voice to Judith’s romantic feelings. In the prayer known as “Nishmat kol hai” Jews express the depth of their gratitude to God, a gratitude so great that it cannot be rendered in words.

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I thank Nessa Rapoport for pointing out to me in a personal interview (Jan. 2003) her use of biblical and liturgical passages in Preparing for Sabbath.

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Could song fill our mouth as water fills the sea and could joy flood our tongue like countless waves, Could our lips utter praise as limitless as the sky and could our eyes match the splendor of the sun, Could we soar with arms like eagle’s wings and run with gentle grace, as the swiftest deer, Never could we fully state our gratitude For one-ten thousandth of the lasting love . . . .39

Rapoport appropriates the language and images of “Nishmat kol hai” to describe the sublimity of the moment when Judith meets her lover: If her mouth were full of song like the sea and her tongue rejoicing like the rushing waves and on her lips praise like the breath of heaven, her eyes the sun, the moon, her arms outspread like the sky eagles, her feet delicate as gazelles, still it would not be nought to hold what happened then. The multitude of Light! From Ori’s face the light streamed, struck her so that her hands flung themselves to her face and she thought, I cannot stand before him and live (112).

Rapoport renders their sexual encounter in the erotic language of The Song of Songs, the language of the daily prayers, and in the words of the blessing recited on special occasions: “Now all her body was praise and her being exulting, holy, holy, holy, who enabled her to reach this day” (116). Here Rapoport appropriates the sources not only to express an artistic and an intellectual self (Cohen 1996) but also a sexual self. Rapoport challenges and begins to overturn the same theological dichotomy between body and spirit that El-ami, as we shall see in Chapter Seven, engages in her exploration of lesbian sexuality and Jewish spirituality. *** In the American Jewish women’s narratives that I have discussed, Orthodox Judaism provides for deracinated protagonists an important corrective to instability and to the bankruptcy of the surrounding culture. In contrast, the Israeli narratives I have addressed so far (with the exception of I Loved So Much) take place within an isolated haredi world

39

Translation from Siddur Sim Shalom 1985: 335. 99

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whose members have little contact with their secular surroundings. The Israeli writers Mira Kedar and Yochi Brandes, whose narratives I discuss in Chapter Six, confront the meaning of Orthodoxy in a secular Jewish state. Their narratives implicate questions of nationalism so that female agency is addressed within an exploration of ideological issues at the heart of Israeli politics. Brandes adopts a critical position toward the sources, deploying biblical language and paradigms to launch a wide-ranging critique of extremism in Israeli society. In contrast, Kedar’s narratives evoke a strongly nationalist and religious vision, in which God is immanent in an unbroken chain of Jewish history.

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POLITICS, NATIONALISM AND THE SECULARRELIGIOUS RIFT

A. Yocheved Brandes

1. Confrontation of Others—The Pioneer and the Yeshiva Student The style and thematics of Brandes’ fiction are informed by her unusual biography. Brandes was born in 1959 in Petakh Tikve to a haredi (hasidic) family. She describes herself as drawn to the freedom of secular life from earliest childhood. By the age of fourteen, following the 1973 War, she became active in Gush Emunim, attending demonstrations and the dedication of a new settlement (Brandes (interview) 1997b). She has described later becoming disenchanted with Gush Emunim because of expressions of violence against Arabs by members of that movement (Brandes (interview) 2001a). Brandes is now politically active on the left and an opponent of legal institutionalization of religious norms: “[t]he religious establishment is the biggest evil in the country; it is what causes the secular not to love Judaism” (Brandes 1997b). She now defines herself as secular according to sociological criterion, but remains attached to certain traditional Jewish practices and to study of traditional sources which she regards as an important constituent of Jewish culture (Brandes 2001a). Brandes studies and teaches sacred Jewish texts and has served as editor of the publishing house Yediot Aharonot’s series on Judaism. Her narratives reflect her cultural agenda so that her use of biblical paradigms and language contrasts with the deracinated, urbane, “Tel Aviv” school of writing attributed to many in the latest generation of Israeli authors. Her plots also reflect the trajectory of her life so that in her narratives Brandes attempts to stake out a middle ground between what she presents as competing extremist ideologies. By extensive use of traditional Jewish sources, she linguistically advances the meeting between traditionalism and secularism, nationalism and humanism to which her plots aspire. 101

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Brandes’ first novel, Gemar Tov [Getting Out For Good] (1997), scrutinizes hasidic marriage customs in exposé-like style,40 but her next novel goes on to address political themes and to portray characters who undergo radical conversions fraught with implications for contemporary debates about the nature of Israeli identity. In Hagar (1998), Brandes has Hagar, her haredi protagonist, enter into a process of internalization of the secular “other” (unfortunately quite literally here) to create a mobile, complex, though ultimately unconvincing identity. In Lekhabot et ha’ahava [Quench Love] (2001), Brandes draws on the gender dichotomies she explained in Hagar to inform her critique of the emergence of Gush Emunim. In her 2003 novel, Gar‘inim levanim [White Seeds], she revisits the secular-religious gap she addressed in Hagar, describing participation by religious Jews in the first aliya [immigration to Israel]. She decries negative effects both in the past and in contemporary society of an elitist brand of secularism that denigrates the religious.41 While there is enough in Brandes’ combination of biblical quotation, midrash, soap-opera, stereotype and historico-ideological manifesto to evoke critical condemnation,42 her commercially successful novels examine critically Orthodoxy and its relationship to political ideologies. 40

Getting Out for Good covers much of the same ground as Rotem’s Mourning in describing religious strictures, and this is why I do not address it here. In contrast to Mourning, in Getting Out for Good, the third-person narrative stays close to the consciousness of a naive protagonist. The young protagonist does not exit the haredi hasidic world, but reconciles herself to her mother’s patriarchal values. This resolution is hardly presented as satisfactory, however, since the haredi characters engage in sexual practices made to seem bizarre, and express narrow-minded, extreme views so that the narrative is as condemnatory of haredi Orthodoxy as that of Rotem’s more self-consciously critical narrator.

41

White Seeds, Brandes most recent novel, is not addressed in detail here as it covers from a different historical perspective the division between secular and religious that Hagar addresses. In White Seeds, a contemporary character reviews the history of the second aliya to draw parallels between disdain for the Orthodox among Israel’s political and academic elite and oppression of the Roumanian members of the first aliya by secular authorities.

42

Gottkind deplores Brandes’ heavy-handed symbolism and exaggerated motifs in Hagar and registers her annoyance at Brandes’ “crude” and “childish” use of the Bible (Gottkind 1999). Similarly, Erlich criticizes the didactic, propagandistic quality of Quench Love and suggests that the novel is in print because Brandes edits a series produced by Yediot Aharonot which also publishes her novels (Erlich 2001). Baumel gives more sympathetic treatment to Quench Love, but suggests, generously and, I think, erroneously, that it was intended as parody (Baumel 2001).

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To understand the opposition between male/female and old Jew/new Hebrew that Brandes employs as a conceptual framework in her novels, it is necessary to refer to the background surrounding the emergence of these constructs. Ideas about Jewish inferiority or “degeneracy” were part of the intellectual environment of nineteenth century Europe that gave birth to Zionism and other nationalisms. Sander Gilman has examined in detail stereotypes of the Jew in Europe, presenting images of the deformed Jewish body and Jewish mind from popular and scientific literature, and documenting myths about the Jewish voice, foot, nose, gender, and color. Gilman shows how academic and scientific literature associated Jews with femininity. He traces how the wandering Jew was viewed as prone to hysteria, a disease associated with women, so that “the Jew is the feminized Other” (Gilman 1991: 76). In complex ways, Jews both internalized and reformulated negative Jewish stereotypes.43 The feminized Jew, who is weak, passive, incapable of physical labor, and sexually impotent is a central subject of nineteenth century Hebrew literature written in Europe. For example, in the classic mock epic, The Travels of Benjamin the Third, S.Y. Abramovitch portrayed emasculated central and eastern European Jewish men who are easily frightened, victimized by overburdened wives, physically weak, not quite men. Influenced by Russian positivism, especially in his earliest works, Abramovitch sought to exaggerate the sorry state of the impotent Jew as a call for action, enlightenment, and participation in the secular arenas of science and culture. In his poem Metei midbar, Bialik, the post-enlightenment Hebrew poet, imagined Jews at the turn of the twentieth century as sleeping giants who do not disintegrate, but, like the dead, remain passive and immobile (Bialik [1902] 1966: 340). Jewish response to racial anti-semitism included both self-hating pseudo-scientific tracts and politically oriented programs for reform. Otto Weininger (1904), for example, employed scientific language to equate Judaism and femininity as similar and essentially inferior psychological states (Hoffman 1997: 38). In contrast, Fishberg, in his 1911 sociological

43

Hoffman gives a detailed discussion of the European intellectual atmosphere that informed the Zionist politics of gender. Brandes’ critique of the Zionist mythos of toughness contrasts with what Hoffman shows to be much more subtle interrogations of Zionist ideology by Shabtai and Yehoshua. These authors develop psychologically complex characters to deconstruct received truths about gender and national boundaries (Hoffman 1997: 35-40) . 103

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study The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment, decried the notion of a racial explanation for difference, but projected a litany of stereotypical images of the Jew on the Eastern European Jew in particular, a Jew recognizable by his “ghetto face.” For Fishberg, any and all observed difference is due to social conditions, and will disappear as soon as Jews everywhere join the mainstream of society. Most significantly here, for Zionists such as Nordau, Jews’ degeneracy would be cured by allowing them to develop in their own land, where they would become tanned and strong, in direct opposition to the weak, feminized Jew bearing the marks of the ghetto. Cultivation of a new type of Jew, the “muscle Jew,” capable of striking roots in an untamed land, became an important Zionist aspiration (Hoffman 1997: 38-40). For many of the young immigrants who arrived in Palestine during the second aliya, hard physical labor was the key to redemption of the land and redemption of the self. In his popular portrait of Israeli society, Amos Elon described the Zionist founders of the second aliya as idealistic followers of Aaron David Gordon, “the prophet of the religion of labor” (Elon 1971: 115). These pioneers shunned luxury, embraced physical labor, and lionized those who embodied a romanticized ideal of toughness. The heroes of the second aliya were those who “sooner than others . . . conformed to the new ideal of the ‘un-Jewish’ Jew, as strong and hardy and courageous as the Gentiles were held to be and, according to the Zionist myth, as the ‘diasporic’ Jew was not” (122). Hebrew literature includes numerous well-known fictional portrayals of the hero of the second aliya and explores from various perspectives the burden of coping with the legacy its members bequeathed.44 The secular ethos of Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, along with the dominant role model of the “muscle Jew,” challenged the religious sector. The traditionally observant responded to the enormous challenge that secular Zionism presented by developing vibrant identities that reacted to and absorbed Zionist influence. The religious Zionists sought to develop a new generation of religious youth, who would embody the characteristics of the “sabra,” including military prowess, and take pride in their religious identity (Sheleg 2000: 29-31). For their part, more traditional Jews have developed a haredi identity and counter-culture, with actual physical boundaries within which they express their distinctiveness from a society perceived to be antagonistic to Jewish values (124). Hagar explicitly addresses and aims to repair the secular-religious gap by developing an alternative perspective on Israeli history. In that novel, 44

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See, for example, Aharon Megged’s Ha-hai al ha-met [Living on the Dead ] (1965).

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the protagonist, Hagar Friedman, impulsively leaves her haredi (hasidic) husband to visit the secular kibbutz where her grandfather trained as a hagana [defense force] member before the establishment of the state. Brandes bases a central character of the novel, Avraham Friedman, on an actual historical figure, Avraham Hausman, a yeshiva student who died in Israel’s War of Independence.45 Brandes’ central characters, Hagar Friedman and her grandfather Avraham Friedman, represent particular responses to secular Zionism. Hagar Friedman has rarely emerged from her haredi Jerusalem neighborhood, yet she has been educated to have a firm sense of her superiority to those beyond it. Her grandfather, Avraham Friedman, attached religious significance to statehood and defied the expectation of his traditional community in Me’a She‘arim to join the fight for Israel’s independence. Each is armed with an ideology counter to secular Zionism, developed within the dialectic between self and other that the opposition between Me’a She‘arim and the secular kibbutz represents. Throughout the portrayal of Hagar’s stay at the kibbutz, Brandes highlights and exaggerates “othering” discourses, the mythologies through which secular and religious have come to draw boundaries between each other. As Sander Gilman has noted, “stereotypes arise when self-integration is threatened. They are therefore part of our way of dealing with the instabilities of our perception of the world” (Gilman 1985: 18). Gilman draws out the process by which the subject imagines a line demarcating the boundary between self and Other in order to maintain a needed sense of difference between the “self” and the “object,” which becomes the “Other.” Because there is no real line between self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; and so that the illusion of an absolute difference between self and other is never troubled, this line is dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self (Gilman 1985: 18).

45

Avraham Hausman, one of ten children in a traditionally Jewish family of Me’a She‘arim, served in the Hagana [army] and was killed in battle in 1948. In an interview, his brother Hayim Hausman expresses nostalgia for a past of greater collaboration between traditional and secular Jews. “‘People don’t know,’ Hayim Hausman says sorrowfully, ‘but 73 students from the Eytz Hayim yeshiva fell in Israel’s battles. One can’t imagine, for example, that my brother, one Yom Kippur, was asked to enlist his friends in synagogue and tens of young men left prayers and went where they were needed . . . there were many different kinds of people in Me’a She‘arim . . . not like today. There also wasn’t today’s fanaticism, narrow horizons, fear of becoming involved. On the contrary, people took part in the struggle of the yishuv as a whole’” (Hausman 1998). 105

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Post-colonial critics have explored the dialectic between self and Other in the context of unequal power relationships. For example, in the colonial context, the native becomes aware of the colonizer’s objectifying gaze. He is then ashamed that he is allowing the colonizer to treat him as an object (JanMohamed 1983: 273). A dialectic different from that of colonizer and colonized operates in the encounter Brandes depicts between the secular Israeli and marginalized haredi. Brandes relates how the experience of marginality as an Orthodox Jewish child strengthened her: The religious community is a minority in society. Because of this religious youth undergo a fixed and ongoing exercise intended to strengthen character so they won’t be ashamed of their singularity and separateness. I will never forget the scornful shouts and name-calling that I absorbed from the secular surroundings as a girl and young woman because of my long skirt and thick socks. There is nothing more fortifying than this. After such an accumulation of experiences you go out into the world able to draw a long and decisive line over what other people think of you (Brandes 2002).

Traces of Brandes’ humiliating experiences emerge in White Seeds. In that novel, the contemporary protagonist does not muster the bravado that Brandes describes above, and endures a childhood of pain and yearning for closeness to a secular society that views her as other. In Hagar, Brandes portrays a process of “othering” in which each character is armed with a firm and carefully cultivated sense of identity, even of superiority. Just as Avraham Friedman was at first scorned at the kibbutz (‘“Everyone on the kibbutz is bursting with laughter, one of your soldiers seems to be a mistake, you won’t believe it”’ (Brandes 1998: 193)), Hagar senses the mocking looks of strangers as she boards a bus for Kibbutz Ein Shemer to visit the kibbutz where her grandfather had trained as a soldier. She fears going to the kibbutz, where “the worst people live, eaters of rabbits and bunnies [non-kosher animals], leftists, infuriating sinners” (161). Approaching the kibbutz, Hagar relates: “I felt that I was running alone within a dark tunnel of giant trees that covered almost the entire horizon. How fitting this is for them, to cut off the sky so and build a thick and gloomy cave with no connection to spiritual worlds” (166). In the kibbutz cemetery she hopes to encounter, and finally to expiate, the spirit of Hagar Ne’eman, her grandfather’s army compatriot for whom she was named. 106

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In the cemetery, she meets a woman, but hesitates to speak: “I didn’t know how one speaks to them” (170). But Brandes attempts to move beyond the limits of stereotypical discourse. Hagar not only overcomes her initial hostility to the kibbutz, but enters a process of familiarization: “After all, there is something close and familiar at this kibbutz, they are not so different from our people. Here too they know everything about each other’s habits, here too they interfere without being asked” (Brandes 1998: 173). And later, “I was unable to prevent myself from again perceiving the strange similarity between the secular kibbutz and our neighborhoods on Sabbath and holiday evenings, the same pleasant peace, the same measured steps, the same quiet” (197). The process of familiarization intensifies (in a particularly implausible plot twist) when Hagar enters into a love affair with Avraham Ne’eman, the quite elderly brother of the now long dead Hagar Ne’eman who had loved her grandfather. In the company of this new lover, she takes off her wig, feasts on unkosher food and generally undergoes a radical change in identity, all prior to returning to her haredi husband to bear the illegitimate offspring resulting from her sojourn in the countryside. Brandes explains competing ideologies in manifesto-like form, in an attempt to disrupt the opposition between Judaism/Zionism, feminized Jew and new Hebrew. The unusual love affair between the contemporary characters serves as a framing device for the earlier confrontation between “others” on the eve of the establishment of the state. The female army commander, Hagar Ne’eman,46 and the traditionally Jewish soldier, Avraham Friedman, are drawn to each other by the marginality they share among the secular and male soldiers. In the climactic dialogue between them, Avraham explains the conflicts between Zionism and Judaism, and how he has resolved them: he quotes from Rabbi Avraham Kook’s philosophical46

The figure of the new Hebrew woman, the gun-toting young soldier with braids, embodied a certain ethos of equal rights, even as equality between the sexes in the Israeli military was more myth than reality (Feldman 1999: 7-10). This Hagar brings to mind a real-life heroine of the palmakh generation, Netiva Ben-Yehuda, whose autobiographical trilogy, published between 1981 and 1991, debunks the myth of the palmakh with its promise of equality between the sexes (Feldman 1999: 177-91). Feldman discusses how Ben Yehuda’s internalization of the binary opposition between strong/Zionist male and passive/feminine diaspora Jew led to loss and trauma. Brandes characterizes Hagar as a hybrid. As an army commander she is the new Hebrew woman; however, her love of the stories of Genesis, as opposed to those of conquest in the book of Joshua, indicates her reservations about toughness and machoism (Brandes 1998: 184). 107

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religious tract ’Orot hateshuva [Lights of Repentance], and hails as patriots the “Kooknikim,” religious nationalists who, in contrast to more traditional Jews, saw establishment of a Jewish state as the first sign of messianic redemption. Hagar declaims the poetry of nationalist Hebrew poets Shaul Tchernichovsky, Bialik and Rahel to expound the values of secular humanism. But the two find that the exchange of quotations between them does more to foreground antipathy between religious Jews and Zionists than to exemplify the tolerance of modern Jewish thinkers and poets.47 Fittingly, it is in Bialik, master of literary synthesis between sacred and secular, that they discover common ground. Avraham recognizes himself in the following lines: “truly a son of the yeshiva am I/my forehead—snow, my face—whitewash/but, like this winter, I speak/strength will harden under armor”:48 “That is the poem I asked for,” laughed Avraham, “I too am a white and fragile yeshiva bahur [boy] who decided one day to put on armor of heroism and strength.” Hagar smiled. “But I hope that you won’t lose your fragility,” she whispered. “Why?” asked Avraham in wonder. “I love the gentleness in a warm, fiery temper, I love the delicate fingers, I love the high, white forehead, I hate rough masculinity” (Brandes 1998: 228-29).

In this hackneyed style, Brandes creates in Avraham, the religious nationalist, a third term to disturb the opposition between old Jew and new Hebrew. Similarly, Hagar, the new Hebrew woman, disrupts ideological truisms by expressing reservations about the machoism to which a Zionist soldier should aspire. Brandes uses the idealized figures of Avraham and Hagar to disrupt the notion of totalizing identities defined in opposition to the other. But her characterizations seem a crude merger of conventional stereotypes of masculinity and femininity so that she fails to carry out a nuanced and psychologically compelling critique of the mythos of toughness. 47

Hagar takes offense at Rabbi Kook’s well-known analogy in which Zionists are to the Jewish people what sediment is to wine, that is, an undesirable element that is nonetheless an agent of positive change (Sheleg 2000: 43). For his part, Avraham notes his awareness of negative images of the yeshiva student in the work of Hebrew poets (Brandes 1998: 222-28).

48

Brandes has Hagar attribute these lines to Bialik; I believe, however, that they were composed by Brandes herself.

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In calling attention to army service by Orthodox Jews, Brandes both points out their role in the establishment of the state and engages current Israeli political debate about exemption of haredim from military service. She subjects to criticism both militant secularists who marginalize the religious, and Orthodox Jews indifferent to Zionism. Significantly, Hagar was published in 1998, the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s independence. By attempting to disrupt conventional stereotypes of secular and Orthodox Jews to work through the conflict between traditional Judaism and secular Zionism, Brandes seeks to transcend the binary oppositions that Zionist discourse cultivated. Fifty years after the establishment of the state of Israel and the ostensible triumph of Zionism, she enacts a confrontation and reconciliation of “others.”

2. The Settler as Other In Quench Love (2001), Brandes develops a critique of religious nationalism, which, in Hagar, she had suggested as a site of compromise. She portrays what she views as the failure of Gush Emunim truly to synthesize Zionist and religious values. From the outset Brandes sets up generational tension in which moderation and openness to contemporary ideas conflict with youthful passion and religious extremism. She documents the early days of settlement—prior to institutionalization of Gush Emunim—when settlement referred to the ad hoc efforts of fervent, religiously motivated and rebellious youths without formal policies and procedures. As Mikhal’s twin sister Miryam prepares to leave her comfortable surroundings in an elite, Modern Orthodox home to settle at Keshet,49 she explains her motives: “Zionism is not everything,” Miriam said with excitement, “the question is how to realize Zionism. Now that we have a state, what do we do from here? How do we realize the Zionist vision in our own time? The generations before us lived a life of sacrifice and realization and established the state, and us, what about us? Should we spend our lives having conversations about housing?” Mikhal was silent. Her claims ended here. Her father and his generation really don’t offer a vision to the younger generation, they have no exciting ideology, they are satisfied with boring lives of religious compromise. (Brandes 2001b: 73) 49

In the early 1970s, a group of young squatters illicitly established the settlement Keshet in the Golan Heights (Sprinzak 1991: 125). 109

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The settlement movement offered a new challenge that placed religious Zionists in the vanguard and a way out of an Israeli crisis of vision. Brandes develops her critique through the figure of the pathologically violent Gilead, who in the 1970s takes up the call for territorial expansion. The territorial aspirations and inflated rhetoric of Gush Emunim mobilize Gilead’s aggression and male chauvinism and incite his tendency toward sexual violence. Gilead is a prototype of the charismatic leader, “a person who wins the loyalty of his followers not through their minds but rather through their hearts and emotions” (Sprinzak 1991: 140). His character suggests both a biblical warrior and the Gush Emunim leader Rabbi Moshe Levinger. Brandes renders Gilead’s love for land in the language both of The Songs of Songs (Brandes 2001b: 64) and of romance novels: “for long hours he lay down feverishly on his land, hugging her in his arms, rolling in its dust, kissing its grains with desire . . . ” (71). The land he wants to settle is ripe fruit [p’ri bashel] (93). Further, sexual and political conquest are inseparable: “Covenant with the land and covenant with woman are connected and mixed and it’s not possible to separate them” (115). Gilead uses the verb to “master” or “rule over” (liv‘ol) in describing his romantic and territorial quests (65, 94, 123, 124), a turn of phrase consistent with the generally inflated rhetoric his character employs. Gilead’s female counterparts are attracted to his dramatic strength: “He stood alone on the hill, erect, reddish and wild, filling the line of the horizon with his great height, a long necked rifle hung on his sturdy shoulders, his Tzitzit peering out on his thighs from underneath the long checked shirt thrown with a charming carelessness over his pants” (75). Gilead finally rapes Mikhal, who is so attracted to his exaggerated masculinity that she is willing to overlook his flaws. That exaggerated masculinity, intended as political commentary, lends to the narrative a sensationalism typical of popular romance novels. Quench Love is a multi-generational novel, in which Brandes portrays a next generation of settlers who are motivated by spiritual quest, but who also turn out to be in the thrall of anti-democratic and charismatic leaders. The novel is a first-person narration by Mihkhal’s daughter Na’ama which frames the third-person narration of her mother’s (Mikhal’s) encounter, as a young woman, with Gilead. Na’ama explicitly adopts as a paradigm Agnon’s novella Bidmi yameiha [In the Prime of Her Life] (1923), in which the young Tirtza tries to correct mistakes made in the past by seeking out for herself the lover her mother, now dead, had been prevented from marrying in her youth. Na’ama consciously tries to live out the great love affair to 110

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a charismatic leader that her mother [Mikhal] began, but that ended with Gilead’s forced flight from the country. In contrast to Tirzta who married the man her mother loved, Na’ama wants to marry a man with qualities opposed to those of the man her mother loved. She seeks out Ya’ir, who embodies spirituality rather than aggression. Like Tirtza, Na’ama longs for the love of a self-absorbed mother (Brandes 2001b: 49, 71). “Now I understand, Agnon’s Tirtza, that’s what you are trying to be.” “Not exactly,” I cried, “While I am correcting your life, I haven’t fallen in love with Gilead and I am not going to marry him, in that I am different from Tirtza” (175).

Na’ama makes of Ya’ir what Mikhal calls her “golem” (178), a reverse image of the lover of her mother’s youth. The mother-daughter dynamic drives the plot to an ending that is both unexpected and implausible: Mikhal abandons her husband for Gilead, whom she has somehow rediscovered, and moves with him to the West Bank. She thus eliminates the need for Na’ama’s marriage to the bizarre Ya’ir to correct her mistakes. Thus, the tikkun [correction] that occurs is not a substitution of one form of millenialism for another, as Na’ama had envisioned. Rather, by leaving, Mikhal compensates for a failure of maternal nurturance, and allows for a return to sanity. Brandes constructs her novel around the contrast between Gilead, the object of Mikhal’s desire as a young woman, and Na’ama’s love interest, Yair, whose ultra-spirituality is opposed to Gilead’s overwhelming physicality. Ya’ir begins his spiritual quest after hearing a recording of the tunes of Shlomo Carlebach, the neo-Hasid who created in America a Jewish analogue to 1960s counter-culture. Ya’ir turns to Indian spiritual movements and then finds in kabbala a Jewish substitute for his external search for meaning, adopting as an ancestor the kabbalist Avraham Abulafia. In Ya’ir’s character, Brandes represents and exaggerates the zeitgeist of a contemporary generation that rejects halakha as the focus of religious expression, and seeks new avenues of fulfillment through mysticism and spirituality. To construct the opposition between Gilead and Ya’ir, Brandes emphasizes Gilead’s physicality and memory and Ya’ir’s suppression of these aspects of humanity. Gilead thinks in national terms and appeals to historical and collective memory in his efforts to overcome what he sees as the weakness of the Jewish people: “It is forbidden to forget, we will remember what Amalek did to us, we will pour our anger on the goyim, we will revenge our spilled blood, we will comfort the inheritance of our fathers” (Brandes 2001b: 111

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146). In contrast Ya’ir represses all traumatic personal (199, 203, 218) as well as collective memories and is unable to master the basic facts of Jewish history: ‘“I can’t bear to hear about all the expulsions and tortures, hatred and pogroms, Holocaust and murders”’ (204). Gilead sees the realization of Jewish identity in “’eretz yisrael hashelema,” or restoration of a Jewish homeland based on historical claims, while for Ya’ir the path to redemption is in achieving the highest levels of spirituality, leading him to envision himself as the Messiah, a Jesus figure. Ya’ir’s excessive spirituality produces an aberrant physicality that carries Brandes into the realm of a magical realism in which a golem plays a role. Brandes represents settlers, through her characterizations of Gilead and Ya’ir as dangerously “other.” The character of Gilead seems, in part, a reaction to the assassination of Rabin by a law student firmly ensconced within the elite of the national religious community. Rabin’s assassination expressed the height of religious nationalist alienation from a collective which increasingly had come to regard that sector as extremist. This alienation informs Brandes’ protrayal of pathologically violent or psychologically aberrant ultranationalist characters in Quench Love.

3. Appropriation and Misappropriation of the Language of the Fathers Brandes carries out her grand designs (at the expense of character development) by using biblical poetics to connect her plots with Jewish history and destiny. In her fiction, interpersonal relationships often relate to biblical paradigms that constitute the kind of collective unconsciousness that A.B. Yehoshua evokes in his novels. Yehoshua’s Mar Mani [Mr. Mani ] (1990) is clearly felt in Hagar with its repetitions, exchanges of identity between generations and the use of the well-known familial dramas of Genesis (Avraham and Hagar, Avraham and Yitzhak, Judah and Tamar). Feldman has pointed out how in Mr. Mani, an exploration of epic proportions of, among other things, the problem of defining identity (ma ’ani? [what am I]), Yehoshua employs a biblical poetic of spiral repetition: stories are repeated as variations on a theme, progressing to points different than their origins would suggest. In Mr. Mani, Yehoshua exaggerates inter-generational strife so that the akeda [binding of Isaac] is carried out, while at the same time his family saga suggests a historical progression away from aggression to a dominant and more harmonious biblical family dynamic of repression or sublimation of inter-generational conflict (Feldman 2002). 112

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Brandes employs a more transparent version of Yehoshua’s biblical poetics, relentlessly calling the reader’s attention to biblical family dynamics that course through the generations. She wants her characters to progress beyond the dynamic of alienation signaled by the biblical Avraham’s cruel banishment of Hagar and her child. This banishment is only one symptom of Avraham’s wide-ranging pathology: “the curtain opens on Avraham who exiles himself from every element of his previous life. After that he tries to build a new life for himself, but banishment comes to be an inseparable part of his destiny and personality” (Brandes 1998: 254). Under this broad definition of the term gerush [expulsion], Avraham not only banished Hagar and two children (Yitzhak and Yishma’el) but also Sara (253). In Hagar the characters perceive themselves to be reenacting or resisting biblical stories so that Hagar’s effort at substitution for her grandfather and correction of his sins becomes an effort to rework the seminal text. Dialogue between Brandes’ characters becomes a kind of incessant midrash as they perceive parallels between their own lives and biblical plots which they interpret variously. The author leaves no biblical stone unturned, so that explicit references and parallels to the story of Genesis burden Brandes’ prose and confuse its conceptual clarity. Brandes opposes belief in biblical destiny to rationalistic notions of selfdetermination. Her contemporary Hagar attempts to evade the bad luck that her community attaches to that name because of its association with the biblical Hagar, the exiled mother of Ishma‘el and progenitor of Islam. Brandes gives voice to strident criticism of haredi Orthodoxy through Avraham Friedman (Hagar’s grandfather), who attacks rabbinical conservatism and an anti-rationalist approach to life (360). Avraham Friedman, and Hagar’s husband, Shlomo, are rationalistic men open to secular knowledge, who recoil from superstition: “‘the time has come,’ they said in one voice, ‘that the phrase “bad luck” and “fate” are erased once and for all from the family vocabulary. You have suffered long enough from the insanity of the ancient curse’” (79). Yet even as Brandes develops this critique of haredi antirationalism, the repetition of language from the biblical account of Hagar’s exile takes on incantatory power (84, 51) so that the attempt to evade fate and communal memory seems futile. By the end of the novel, even the characters who extol rationalism struggle with biblical destiny: “Faith in destiny and predestination crosses the accepted boundaries between religious and secular” (250). Despite the attractions of rationality, the biblical Avraham’s failings have become deeply embedded psychological paradigms that underly alienation between groups in Israeli society. 113

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In Brandes’ 2008 novel Malachim Gimel [Kings III], she further explores the idea of the power of myth, retelling the stories of the central biblical characters, David, Saul, Michal, Jeroboam, and their part in the division between the Kindgom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. This book, in part inspired by the academic biblical scholarship of Yair Zakovitch, with whom Brandes studied, mines the bible and midrash for minority, counternormative voices that undermine the conventional interpretation of ancient history (Brandes 2008: 446). Throughout the book, Brandes’ characters emphasize the power of words to shape future perception of their actions and to influence personal fate and history. Commenting on the novel’s perspective toward Jewish texts, Brandes advises digging deeply into and examining critically the powerful, paradigmatic myths of the bible to uncover repressed traditions that evoke plurality and various models of leadership (Brandes (interview) 2008b). In Quench Love, Brandes draws parallels between ancient biblical paradigms and specific contemporary issues. Through the character of the violently nationalistic Gilead, an exaggerated version of stereotypical masculinity whose character contains not a trace of “fragility,” she likens modern ultra-nationalism to biblical conquest in order to criticize Jewish territoriality at its origin. Brandes, after her fashion, has her religiously welleducated characters point out parallels between the plot of the novel and biblical stories in order to enlighten the reader who is not well-informed (Brandes 2001b: 147-49). The biblical King David married Mikhal rather than her older sister Merav. Mikhal eventually married Palti ben Laish (Samuel I:18, 19, 25). In Brandes’ novel, Gilead marries Mikhal instead of her older sister Miryam. Mikhal eventually weds Elisha Palti when Gilead flees, after Barak, his deputy and friend, betrays him. In Samuel II, David is betrayed by Ahithophel and Avshalom by Hushai the Archite (Samuel II:15-17). Brandes’ use of biblical analogies makes it clear that Gilead’s aggression is like that of ancient warriors, his religious and nationalist fervor unmediated by more than two thousand years of rabbinical interpretation of the sources. While Brandes’ use of biblical intertexts is sometimes clumsy, and far too explicit to afford the reader the pleasure of exercising interpretative imagination, what is interesting here is her use of traditional sources as a vehicle of entry into contemporary political controversy. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to Israeli women writers’ privatization of biblical sources dealing with collective or national events to express a feminine perspective (Cohen 1996). Further, beginning in the 1980s, women writers venture beyond use of the sources merely to establish female subjectivity by revising 114

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them to jar received and comfortable notions of power relations (Feldman 2004b). In contrast, Brandes, significantly, does not change the gender roles of her biblical paradigms. In applying these paradigms to contemporary controversies, she alters their original value, thereby entering into the arena of “male” public and political debate. Consistent with Brandes’ critical approach to the Bible, her novel, Quench Love cautions against accepting the co-option of sacred sources to advance millenial visions. She characterizes Rabbi Kook’s “operative messianism,”50 as an incitement to violence when preached to receptive minds. Brandes has a rabbi at Merkaz Harav communicate to his students his excitement at a redemption near at hand: We returned to the land of our fathers, we conquered the desolation, we established a state and we also liberated holy land from the hands of strangers. The Kotel is ours, Rachel’s tomb is ours, the Cave of Makhpelah is ours. We did what is required of us: we brought the beloved to her lover, the door is wide open, the lover no longer peers and yearns from behind the lattice, he stands beside his beloved, with nothing between them, and comes to take her in his arms. The consummating hug of redemption is about to take place any day now, any hour, and this last step we must allow Him to do for Himself (Brandes 2001b: 61).

The rabbi mobilizes, for his rhetorical purposes, a woman’s description of the approach of her beloved in The Song of Songs (“My beloved is like a gazelle / Or like a young stag / There he stands behind our wall / Gazing through the window / Peering through the lattice” (Song of Songs 2:9)), endowing the erotic verse with theological and political significance.51 In his 50

At the Merkaz Harav yeshiva, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook refined the theological views of his father, Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, to formulate his vision of Israel as a halakhic kingdom. The elder Rabbi Kook, who died in 1935, saw in Zionism the first signs of the dawn of redemption, an innovative idea in that it departed from the traditional Jewish belief that the Messiah alone could effect the ingathering of the Jews to their homeland to usher in the messianic era. While the older Kook did not relate his view to any political program other than support of the secular Zionists, his writings took on for many an immediacy and prophetic significance following the 1967 War, so that redemption seemed surely to be at hand. Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook interpreted his father’s writings to formulate an “operative messianism,” in which redemption could only proceed in a Greater Israel, including Judea and Samaria, “because God had promised them to Abraham four thousand years earlier, and because the identity of the nation was shaped by that promise” (Sprinzak 1999: 153).

51

For more on theological interpretation of The Song of Songs, see Jacobs 1995: 475. 115

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interpretation, God is the beloved, brought closer by Israel’s land acquisitions during the 1967 war. The spiritual consequence of this military success is that God is now poised fully to embrace the Jewish people by restoring their ancient kingdom. While the rabbi advises restraint, his language is infused with an inflammatory eroticism and imperialism, moving Gilead to lead his fellow students actively to bring about redemption (140). Brandes criticizes not only the aggressive personality but also the elite religious institutions and leaders that shaped Gush Emunim. Therefore Gilead is not drawn from the margins of society, but his biography bears the recognizable markers of an elite education of the period. While still at Merkaz Harav, Gilead takes up his rebellious cry “the time has come to remove the abomination,” a reference to plans to “liberate” the Dome of the Rock from Muslim hands associated with members of Gush Emunim.52 In the face of territorial compromises, most Gush members heeded Rabbi Kook’s advice to remain loyal to the Israeli government and trust God. However, “[m]any observers of [G]ush [E]munim have not failed to identify its behavioral messianic craze, that extra normal quality of intense excitement and hypernomic behavior that produced within many members of the movement constant expectations of progress toward redemption” (Sprinzak 1999: 158). Sprinzak notes an “affinity between messianism and terror,” a pull toward violence once the advent of redemption is seen as near. He locates violence not only on the fringes of but at the heart of Gush Emunim as a by-product of a belief in the necessity for settlement in Judea and Samaria to bring about redemption (171-72). In its redemptive fervor, Gush Emunim becomes not the realization of Zionism, but a countercultural force that, in the end, denies the very essence of Zionism: “the movement should not be seen as a religious offshoot of the secular Zionist movement, but as a very successful religious raid into the heart of secular Israel” (Sprinzak 1991: 117). While Brandes criticizes Gilead’s extremism and messianic fundamentalism, Ya’ir is a more benign sort of false messiah. Brandes draws on, and has 52

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In 1984, Israeli authorities discovered a plot by members of a Jewish underground to remove “the abomination”—to blow up the Dome of the Rock. Those involved in the terrorist plot were atypical members of Gush Emunim responding to the territorial compromise of the 1978 Camp David accords. For them this setback could not merely be a sign of political weakness, but must surely signify a sin of immense proportions. That sin, they determined, was the presence of a Muslim shrine on what they viewed as the most sacred Jewish site. In accounts of the actual plot, a Gilad Peli of Moshav Keshet is a central figure in the conspiracy (Sprinzak 1999: 156-59).

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Ya’ir distort, elements of Abulafia’s mystical teachings. Abulafia was known for an unconventional use of images of physical love, drawn primarily from The Song of Songs, as a simile for the stages necessary to achieve mystical experience. He likened the pleasures of mystical experience to those of sexual intercourse (Idel 1988: 184-90). Ya’ir literalizes these concepts and characterizes sexual intercourse as the mystical “avodat hadevekut,” an opportunity to bring salvation to humanity. Ya’ir uses the female figure of the Shulamite (Song of Songs 7) to interpret a temporary separation from Na’ama in millenial terms: “before the final union the Shulamite hides herself in her locked room and doesn’t answer her beloved who knocks on her door, and this is the exemplary sign that the hour of union approaches, and the great light is poised to rise and to flood the entire face of the earth” (Brandes 2001b: 268). After she leaves Ya’ir, Na’ama finds that his exaggerated spirituality turns out to be bankrupt: he quickly marries another in her place, and his apotheosis of women turns in on itself so that he believes “females are the cursed sex” (296). By the end of the novel, it is clear that Ya’ir’s inflated rhetoric is merely a vehicle for self-serving fantasies of power. The novel ultimately rejects ecstatic religious fervor and exaltation, as well as fantasies of power that Brandes associates either with male aggression or with a kind of delusional mysticism, in favor of the moderation, compromise, and sanity that she connects with maturity. The use of The Song of Songs to express millenial visions cautions against uncritical reception of rhetorical power. In her rejection of demagoguery, Brandes echoes both A.B. Yehoshua and Shulamith Hareven, who, in their non-fictional writing, have insisted on the importance of political “sanity,” rejecting extremism, fanaticism and messianism. In Hareven’s Freudian-informed analysis of Israeli political attitudes, she equates democracy with maturity; in contrast, dependence on a strong leader is a troubling symptom of regression into an infantile state (Feldman 1999: 162).53 Quench Love resonates with Hareven’s analysis as the daughters Brandes portrays, first Mikhal and then Na’ama, turn away from fathers perceived as weak and compromising to attach themselves to charismatic, rhetorically powerful and ultimately dangerous or duplicitous male figures.

53

Feldman cites Hareven’s The Dulcinea Syndrome (1977) and Messiah or Knesset (1987), as well as Yehoshua’s The Wall and the Mountain (1989) and Between Right and Right (1980) (Feldman 1999: 276n46, 278n63). 117

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4. Mind, Body and the Mother-Daughter Connection In portraying the various sectors of Israeli society (secular socialist and haredi in Hagar, radical religious nationalist and moderate Modern Orthodox in Quench Love), Brandes’ characters strut out and try on stereotypical versions of female identity emerging from the ideologies she describes. These alternative identities are more stereotypical constructs than well-developed characterizations. There is the haredi mother, the religious feminist, the feminist of difference. Unfortunately, here, too, Brandes’ attempt at synthesis fails under the weight of her good intentions, producing in the end only a tepid affirmation of a liberal religious and feminist vision. Throughout Hagar, the protagonist undergoes a severe identity crisis that engenders rapid conversions from iconoclastic skepticism to acceptance of the most stringent interpretations of halakha, followed by a total disregard of the most basic halakhic precepts, and then an implied return to the haredi community. At first, Hagar, allied with the unconventional grandfather, deviates from community practices. Because of a personal crisis she then becomes a hozeret biteshuva [one who repents and returns] and adopts the strictest interpretations of halakha, which offers Brandes the opportunity to parody, in the spirit of Yehudit Rotem, the more misogynistic aspects of rabbinic law. To her relatives, it seems a dybbuk has possessed her body (131, 134). Just as suddenly as Hagar embraces religious fanaticism, she abandons it at the kibbutz. These rather arbitrary and sudden changes of identity undercut the credibility of the emergence at the end of the novel of a centered, well-integrated Hagar, who is triumphantly returning to her haredi home. Synthesis is supposed to be realized in the contemporary affair between Hagar Friedman and Avraham Ne’eman: the process of reconciliation culminates in the birth of their child. The novel ends with Hagar envisioning the naming ceremony for her child: “and the congregation will hear the great voice resound from one end of the hall to the other: ‘And they will call his name in Israel Avraham son of Hagar”’ (Brandes 1998: 289). However, what can synthesis mean for Hagar? What does the haredi Hagar make of Hagar the halutza [pioneer], the new Hebrew woman, who, at least according to socialist theory, is as equally capable as her brothers? While the halutz Hagar declaims the poetry of “faith in man, friendship and freedom” (226), her haredi counterpart has in her phase of religious devotion become a great housekeeper, and has “learned my proper role in life, no more books, tests 118

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or idle chatter, a woman of valor, who can find?” (160). Does Hagar’s early socialist feminism influence the haredi woman who embraces so intensely her story, and, if so, what are the personal and communal ramifications of that influence? Unfortunately, Brandes leaves us few clues as to how the program of synthesis might be carried out; the narrative suggests merely a symbolic synthesis, embodied in the incarnation of a (male) child with parents from two different camps. As such one can envision Hagar’s future in the haredi community only in terms of continued personal deviance, rather than as pregnant with creative possibilities for her character and community. In Quench Love, the characters self-consciously reflect upon the difficulties of reconciling feminism and Orthodoxy as part of the synthesis between tradition and modernity central to their religious identity. Mikhal (the mother), as a young woman finds that the equality between men and women espoused by her parents is not practiced, and that it is in the settlements where a “real feminist revolution” is occurring (Brandes 2001b: 135). While the ideology of settlers led by a chauvinistic, religious leadership may be one of difference, even inequality between the sexes, Mikhal persuades herself that the reality among the settlers she joins as a young adult is one of female power. She plays a key role in developing the cultural life of the settlement, and finds substance in the claims of its women, through whom Brandes evokes the appeal of “pioneering” new communities: Not only religious and national renewal are taking place under the nose and in the backyard of leftist Zionism, but also a real feminist revolution. Judaism does not need strange western ideas, because within it alone women merit a truly exalted position, without silly slogans of equality between women and men, but with a lot of flesh and content (135).

Mikhal’s political opposition to the settlers’ movement of which Gilead is a leader is tempered by her taste of the “feminine power” (135) flourishing in the settlements where community development is left to women. However, Mikhal’s activities prove merely a distraction from the violence that Brandes portrays at the core of Gush Emunim. Mikhal’s daughter by a second husband, Na’ama, chafes at what she sees as a liberalism that compromises religious ideals. She and her peers represent a second generation that finds heretical the lectures of enlightened professors of Jewish studies. Na’ama expresses a type of “postfeminist” consciousness that even as it takes for granted the classic feminist 119

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aspiration of self-determination, resists identification with feminism. However Na’ama is open to her boyfriend Ya’ir’s mystical belief in women’s unique spiritual powers: In the dark world, violence, aggression, invasion, and the rest of the dark masculine forces rule, and they succeed in crushing and suppressing love, fluidity, giving, and all the other feminine characteristics of the kingdom of light. But now, finally, after thousands of years of masculine rule, male darkness is poised to dissipate and to give up its place to the feminine glow (Brandes 2001b: 244).

He must condemn feminists, since they try “to turn women into men, to extinguish the little light that remains after thousands of years of male control” (245). Ya’ir’s views on gender have little to do with actual kabbalistic texts, so that his exposition serves more as an opportunity for Brandes to parody essentialist claims of feminine difference than to illuminate kabbalistic perspectives. His gender essentialism echoes the difference feminism acceptable to the most traditional rabbis, while his characterization of classic second-wave feminism resonates with rabbinic condemnation of “masculo-feminism” (Roller 1999: 76-80). In this way, Brandes parodies and rejects the difference feminism that may resonate with views on gender within the haredi community in which she was raised. Despite the centrality of charismatic male figures in Quench Love, identity is worked out within the psycho-dynamics of mother-daughter relations. The novel highlights mother-daughter relations through its structure which alternates between Na’ama’s narration of her own story which frames an account of her mother’s youthful romance with Gilead. Ratner relates the disappearance of Mikhal at the end of Quench Love to a more general mother-daughter dynamic within narratives by women who remain in Orthodox communities. Ratner argues for a strong connection between the biography of women writers and the outcomes of coming-ofage processes. In the fiction of Reisman and Bat-Shahar who remain within Orthodox communities: women protagonists are not free to establish the separation needed for an independent constitution of their autonomy. Their coming-of-age has to stay within the terms of the law and is therefore manifested either as a process of consciousness raising that is not fully acted upon (Bat-Shahar) or a contrived and dissembled independence of detrimental consequences (Reisman) (Ratner 2002: 160). 120

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Ratner then draws a parallel between the resolution of Reisman’s novel Sleeping Bird and that of Brandes’ Quench Love: both authors make removal of the mother a condition necessary for safe resolution of the daughter’s rebellion. Thus, Ratner concludes that the ending of Quench Love indicates that Brandes has not necessarily moved significantly away from Orthodoxy, presumably because she cannot envision mother-daughter reconciliation (Ratner 2003: 155, 160). Ratner’s interesting insight blurs somewhat the dichotomies that Brandes carefully creates between a liberal version of Modern Orthodoxy and more extreme religious views. In contrast to mothers in the novels of haredi life to which Ratner compares Brandes’ narrative, Mikhal (Na’ama’s mother) is not expected to enforce a strict patriarchal code (see Ratner 2002: 151). Rather, Mikhal espouses a liberal feminism that contrasts with the male dominance and aggression that characterizes the settlers’ movement that she came to reject. The daughter’s rejection of extremism and return home should, therefore, allow solidarity between mother and daughter in their mutual affirmation of female subject autonomy. Instead, the split between mother and daughter, and their failure to reconcile, indicates a disturbing ambivalence. At the close of the novel, Na‘ama embraces her parents’ stability, moderation and liberal values; she abandons her studies of the Dead Sea Sect for the drier fields of law and administration in which her father toils. She rejects all of the passion of The Song of Songs, whose verse the characters had previously mined to express their devotions (Brandes 2001a: 64, 170): “For love is fierce as death/Passion is mighty as Sheol / Its darts are darts of fire / A blazing flame / Vast floods cannot quench love / Nor rivers drown it (Song of Songs 8:6-7). Now Na‘ama seeks to “quench love” (296), and finds that in her newly acquired sobriety she can extinguish it. Na‘ama rejects passionate commitments: ‘“I am not extinguished . . . only the love is extinguished, love of the land, of Torah, of nation, of redemption, of spirituality, of devakut, and also of men, because all love is the same thing, a sickness . . . ’” (299). She embraces liberal feminism, affirming the tired old egalitarian principles of women of her mother’s generation: In another year or two I will get married . . . When I stand on the stage of the national building, among the jurists of the future, and I look with pride toward a secure career, it suits me to have not just a father and brother, but also a husband . . . It suits me to be called to the stage with two family names—married, and also ambitious and feminist (299). 121

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Here, Na‘ama espouses the goals of classic feminism that her mother had endorsed, but, at the same time, she is drained of enthusiasm. In contrast, her mother has seemingly recaptured a spirit of youthful adventure. Has all passion been apportioned to the mother, who has renounced her autonomy and beliefs by moving to a West Bank settlement with a violent male chauvinist? Is Brandes’ novel ultimately “post-feminist,” in that aspiration for gender equality is no longer a goal, but merely acceptance of an accessible reality that excludes passionate commitments? The close of Brandes’ novel raises these questions. The conclusion of the novel expresses therefore only a tepid affirmation of the liberal Orthodoxy that Brandes attempts to rescue from association with extreme, nationalist positions.

B. Mira Kedar

1. Sacralizing Space While for Brandes settlement becomes an outlet for latent aggression, in the narratives of Mira Kedar, settlement is the fulfillment of the deepest and most ancient spiritual need. Nothing could be farther from Brandes’ depiction of national religious society and of Gush Emunim than Kedar’s representation of the quest for spiritual perfection through the synthesis of Orthodoxy and humanism in Ratzo vashov [To and Fro] (1999). Kedar, who, in addition to several novels, has also published three volumes of poetry, is a member of the right wing of the national religious sector who lives in the West Bank settlement Ofra, in which many of her stories take place. To and Fro is a collection of stories, several of which, because of their expository style, resemble essays more than narrative fiction. Because of the expository nature of much of the collection, one reviewer concludes that Kedar lacks storytelling talent (Balaban 2000). While his point may be valid, Kedar enlists various narrative forms to reflect her stance as one of the “last modernists” in Israel, a member of the Orthodox community that remains steadfast in its belief “in the human spirit that strives to advance in culture and enlightenment, in exploitation of science for spiritual purposes, in an adaptable and universal value system that is not relative and in the ideal of realization of a public vision under the auspices of the state” (El-Or 1998b: 256). It may be Kedar’s pressing need to advance these goals that overwhelms her imagination and inventiveness to render much of her narrative more like theosophical reflection or literary criticism than fiction. 122

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A “greater Israel” is a central element of Kedar’s conception of wholeness. In Kedar’s formulation, Israel will resacralize its space not through acts of aggression, but through sheer determination and acts of kindness. Her story “Mikol makom” [In Any Event], the most substantial piece in the volume, describes building a home on the West Bank. Without Brandes’ lengthy explanation of Rabbi Kook’s philosophy and its use as the spiritual foundation of Gush Emunim, Kedar makes clear that settling the territories is in part a religious enterprise. She connects the West Bank settlement of Ofra to the biblical Ofra within the territory apportioned to the tribe of Benjamin (Kedar 1999: 60). In several stories, the narrator’s secular cousin, Eliyahu, is a central character who, she emphasizes, finds in Torah what he needs to strengthen the flagging Zionism of a younger generation (121). Kedar has her narrator endow Ofra with special characteristics that suggest holiness, and, perhaps because of its status as disputed territory, Ofra replaces even Jerusalem in significance: Although I am a Jerusalemite, daughter of a Jerusalemite, who spent most of my years there or nearby in Mevaseret Yerushalayim, it is nevertheless difficult for me to leave Ofra. I don’t know if that is because the air in Ofra is clearer and more restorative than that of Jerusalem, or because Jerusalem has changed so much from the Jerusalem of my childhood and it is difficult for me to see the city in her strangeness, or because I am hoarding hours in Ofra since I arrived there after a delay of many years and am making up for what I have missed (Kedar 1999: 82).

Further, Kedar’s use of intertextuality explicitly evokes the religious basis of the narrator’s construction project so that progress on the house is related to divine providence for “unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain on it” (Psalm127: 1). On the one hand, in this verse the psalmist expresses the humility appropriate to man: the success of the building plan is totally dependent on God’s will. On the other, by appropriating a verse traditionally interpreted to relate to the building of the temple (Davis 2001: 368-69), Kedar likens the building of the home to the construction of sacred space; the settlement of Ofra to the redemption of the Jewish people. As previously noted, settlement here is tied to fulfillment of the deepest and most ancient spiritual need. Biblical scholar Baruch Levine notes that, while it may be difficult truly to identify with the depth of sadness expressed by liturgical laments over the destruction of the temple, to 123

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dismiss the centrality of the temple to Judaism, even in the modern period, is to misunderstand the essence of Jewish religious experience. Sacrificial worship in the temple was for ancient Jews an intense, meaningful activity: the sacrifice was “[a]n actual gift, offered to God in a sacred environment in which He is thought to reside and in which consecrated priests minister to Him in purity” (Levine 1989: 216). Levine traces the ways in which Jews sought to compensate for the destruction of the temple, the loss of sacred space, by restructuring religious practice. However, Levine astutely predicted that the notion of sacred space would remain powerful. [H]uman needs do not change appreciably, even over long periods of time as regards religious experience: The need for perceptible demonstrations of God’s nearness and Presence has not diminished among the devout, even to this day. In theory, despite the destruction of the Temple, Jewish religion never renounced sacrificial worship permanently . . . Through the centuries since late antiquity, Jewish liturgy has expressed the hope for the reinstitution of sacrificial worship as part of the larger hope for the restoration of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. At the present time, when the land of Israel has been rebuilt, renewed proximity to the locus of ancient worship has, indeed, awakened a deep sense of the sanctity of space and released feelings that were previously unexpressed. It is too soon to project the course of future developments in Judaism relevant to sacred space, but we should expect that the factor of space will play a greater role than it had during the long centuries of dispersion (Levine 1989: 215).

Kedar’s narration resonates with this “sense of the sanctity of space” (215). The rapid home construction progresses in a way analogous to the history of the Jews and their progress toward redemption. Just as Agnon constructed of his own life a myth of the writer (which included inventing his chosen name and the birthdate of Tish‘a be’av) to stand in for the Jew in the modern world, Kedar connects crucial stages in her building project to a conception of Jewish history that looks toward redemption. Particularly difficult days in the planning stage occur during the period of Tish‘a be’av, a period in which Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple (Kedar 1999: 68-69). Initial steps to build Kedar’s new home are taken on the fifteenth of Av (a month in the Jewish calendar), a particularly fortuitous date as demonstrated by a Talmudic prooftext: “there were no better days for Israel than the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur” (71, 161). In Kedar’s account of home contruction, even the names of building materials relate to Talmudic sources. The narrator and her family triumphantly celebrate the move into 124

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their new home on the date of the establishment of Ofra itself, a date which Ofra’s inhabitants imbue with religious significance by refraining, as they do on Israeli Independence Day, from the mourning customary during that period of time (the period of the counting of the omer) (96). Here, Talmudic lore and the facts of modern city building and planning combine seamlessly, so that settlement of the West Bank is part of the continuous progression of a divinely informed Jewish history. Kedar draws out the parallel between home/settlement/temple to make clear her argument that sacred space is acquired only through acts of goodness and lovingkindness. Kedar constructs “In Any Event” around opposing poles of sin and grace. Because the narrator and her family want badly to construct a home as part of an effort to possess and build the land for the Jews, they hasten to build, proceeding with what they perceive to be kindness and rationality in spite of significant obstacles. Their less compromising neighbor, dubbed Yosef K. (after a Kafka character who is mired in bureaucracy), finds his building project stalled by his own rigidity, by bureaucratic vagaries and by the ill-will of others. Kedar’s appendix to her stories extends the metaphor of home and temple, making reference to a Talmudic statement declaring that the Second Temple was destroyed because of needless hatred. If a Greater Israel is to be realized, it will be on account of Jewish acts of goodness; if the temple was destroyed because of sin, it will only be rebuilt by repentance and grace. Kedar imparts this lesson through the theme and structure of her story. Her narrative alternates between the blessings bestowed on the narrator’s project and the obstacles confronted by the less compromising Yosef K. In the final lines of the story, she brings home its moral: “and if Ofra seeks to hold onto land that everybody wants, it is preferable for her to cleave with all her strength to the quality of mercy” (Kedar 1999: 99, 81). Conveniently, the name of the settlement is feminine (unlike Ariel, for example), and “naturally” lends itself to association with “mercy.” Kedar allows for no question that this project, undertaken with the express intention of settling a Jewish homeland as speedily as possible, is truly blessed: that “the Lord builds the house” (Kedar 1999: 62). The narrator and her husband, in a demonstration of their goodwill and their anxiousness to proceed, make numerous compromises with a neighboring landowner, and with village and other bureaucracies. When construction begins, the house begins “to run” (94). Arab workers brave roadblocks and closures assiduously to perform their work. The narrator’s frequent prayers concerning the construction are answered by what seem to be miracles: 125

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“I don’t know what he did and how he did it, if it was a miracle or if it was sheer exertion” (72). The narrator mediates between public and private good and, drawing on the inspiration of Amos 4:7, asks God for good weather on her plot alone during the season in which the devout utter prayers for rain. Her carefully formulated entreaties are miraculously answered by unusual weather patterns (95, 96). These miracles contribute to the sense that this divinely inspired construction project is carried forward with divine cooperation. In identifying with religious-nationalist goals, Kedar’s text departs from the tendency of secular Israeli women writers to critique nationalism from separatist feminist or postcolonial points of view. Feldman traces how, by 1984, veteran Israeli writer Amalya Kahana-Carmon treated in her fiction issues similar to those that Israeli “new historians” were addressing by contesting received accounts of the Zionist enterprise. In “The Bridge of the Green Duck,” Feldman argues, Kahana-Carmon troubles the line between self and other and enters the postcolonial conversation by depicting a female/minority alliance that connects feminist protest to the more general exploration of “otherness” that postcolonial theory has undertaken (Feldman 2004b). Similarly, Shulamith Hareven’s counter-histories, the first of which was published in 1983, employ a parallel technique of defamiliarization by presenting nothing less sacrosanct than biblical narrative from the perspective of the outsider, encouraging identification with “the other.” Feldman shows the evolution in Shulamith Hareven’s fiction of a separatist/ feminist pacifism. While Hareven initially expressed confidence in the possibility of androgyny in City of Many Days, in ’Aharaei hayaldut [After Childhood] (1994), the third volume in her trilogy, Hareven’s heroine rejects on essentialist grounds a masculine drive for territorial expansion (Feldman 1999: 169). And while Brandes does not endorse gender essentialism, in Quench Love, she draws a connection between violence against Arabs and sexual aggression towards women by violent male leaders. In contrast to these explorations of otherness that relate directly, or indirectly, to pacifist positions, in “In Any Event” the female narrator presents the Arab other wholly from the perspective of a member of the ruling group who wholeheartedly supports the goals of Jewish hegemony in Israel and of national expansion. She portrays the Arab men working for her as exemplary human beings, expert in their work, unflagging in their enthusiasm and honesty: “As much as Ahmed is modest and quiet and wellmannered, Hassan is even more modest and quiet and well mannered. As much as Ahmed is decent and agreeable and truthful, Hassan is even more 126

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decent and agreeable and truthful and doesn’t tell lies” (Kedar 1999: 61). During one conversation with Ahmed, the narrator notes, “he lowered his head in humility” (84). Respectful and compliant, these workers are beyond reproach as long as they work on the settlers’ project, but as such are exceptional among Arabs: “Azam had harsh criticism of his brothers the Arabs” (84). They are exemplary human beings, the reverse reflection of the culturally unacceptable, but nevertheless embedded, stereotype of the hostile, conniving and disrespectful Arab other. Continued progress on the house as hostilities outside escalate becomes a metaphor for the possibility of a more peaceful relation between Arab and Jew, here a relationship the terms of which are clearly dictated by those in power. The narrator’s self-congratulatory reports of having treated the workers humanely contrast with the cruelty of Jewish children who throw rocks at them. When armed conflict, closures, and roadblocks threaten progress at a particularly crucial stage in the construction, the Arab workers are permitted to work in Ofra, under the condition that they are kept under watch by their Jewish employers. Kedar’s intertext here is clearly Agnon’s parable “Me’oyev le’ohev” [“From Foe to Friend”] (Agnon [1941] 1978). In that story a man attempts to settle in Talpiot,54 but is frustrated in his building efforts by the destructive actions of a personified wind. The settler persists. After much struggle to build a strong home and plant trees that deflect the wind’s violence, the wind senses the futility of his opposition and befriends the settler. Kedar’s narrator is as determined as Agnon’s. A person with less confidence than this narrator in the divinity of her construction plan might have been rattled by telephone calls from drivers en route who report that they are being shot at (Kedar 1999: 76), but in this narrative all are privileged to be participants in a plan of blessed design. Despite the humiliating circumstance of being kept under watch, despite the fact that they work in Ofra because, due to closures, they are barred from better work within Israel, the narrator perceives her Arab employees to be not only grateful for work, but at one with her goals: “The comradeship between us that day, a type of unity for a single end, was like an island of peace during a time of war . . . and even though we weren’t able to celebrate it, it was a day of rejoicing of the heart and not only because of the roof that was poured” (76). 54

In 1927, Agnon moved with his family from Jerusalem to Talpiot, which at that time was an isolated suburb of the city. In 1929, Agnon’s apartment there was ransacked by Arab rioters as part of wave of violence against Jewish settlers. Agnon returned with his family in 1931 to a new home in Talpiot, which has become the site of a museum (Band 1968: 26). 127

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Here, the narrator allows no fissure in the armor of her absolute ideological and religious certainty for complication of relationship between self and other. Her description of absolute solidarity between Jew and Arab contrasts sharply with Savyon Liebrecht’s nuanced portrayal of relations between an Israeli woman and Arab workers in a short story called “A Room on the Roof.” In that story, the complicity and proximity of conqueror and conquered engenders a complex relationship, during which the protagonist’s preconceived notions of her Arab workers are disturbed and she sees, in one of them, a unique individual with his own aspirations and humanity (Rattok 1998: 22). Kedar’s narrative, in its tendency to treat the Arab other merely as an extension of the self, is distinct from attempts in contemporary Israeli literature to probe alterity by moving the other toward a subject position (e.g., Liebrecht, Grossman, Kahana-Carmon). It differs as well from Israeli women’s writing that, parallel to women’s well-documented activities in peace movements, recoils from and associates expansionist enterprises with a harmful male aggression (Hareven, Magen). Kedar’s fiction does not not offer an opening onto the experience of the other or an alliance between feminist/minority protest; instead we are offered a narrator with the courage of her convictions.

2. Mending Otherness Another essay-like piece in To and Fro demonstrates the tension between insistence on both a particularistic nationalism and participation in a state founded on democratic and secular principles. “In the Presence of Three,” presented as a soul-searching dialogue following Rabin’s murder, discusses the balance between nationalism, religion and humanism in light of writings by Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook in ’Orot hateshuva [The Lights of Repentance]. The story reflects the challenge presented to the national religious by the murder of Rabin. That political assassination, committed by a young man associated with elite national religious institutions, expressed the political gap between secular Israelis and the national religious sector. Throughout the discussion, the narrator acknowledges that evil may arise “from the pairing of religion and nation unhampered by universalism” (Kedar 1999: 27). The form of this piece, a dialogue between the narrator and her secular cousin, mirrors the staging of a larger Israeli conversation following Rabin’s murder. Paradoxically, Rabin’s murder expressed the height of alienation between the two groups, and also opened a conversation that began to reattach the national religious to the nation (El-Or 1998b: 79-80, 241). In the 128

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conversation that Kedar stages after Rabin’s death, the narrator reconnects religious nationalism to a Jewish-democratic mainstream, insisting that humanism and individualism temper the messianic strand of Modern Orthodox discourse. Rabin’s death becomes one more manifestation of the failure to achieve the wholeness that will bring about ultimate redemption and a more just world. Even as the narrator asserts the possibility of achieving a perfect balance between nationalism, religion and humanism, the dialogue illuminates the nature of the difficult balancing act in which the national religious community engages. In Shutafei Sod [Parties to a Confidence] (2002), Kedar intensifies her literary effort to bring the national religious community back into the fold, devoting her first novel to the theme of wholeness—a perfect balance between religion and humanism. Shutafei Sod is in large part an explication of Kook’s The Lights of Repentance, framed by and interwoven with a romance that allegorically represents the union of different perspectives. Kedar’s protagonist, Klil, is a fantastically talented young woman, an artist, poet and musician, who works with children in Mevaseret Tziyon, in the outskirts of Jerusalem, as part of her national service. Her name denotes completion and also suggests the phrase klall yisrael, the community of Israel. Klil embodies an ideal combination of spiritual, intellectual and artistic inclinations and abilities. In Mevaseret an architect, Amikam (my nation rises), offers his home to Klil as a studio and exhibit space, and comes to supplant Yedidya, Klil’s friend and study partner, as her romantic interest. Both Klil and Yedidya, raised in the settlement Ofra, are firmly within the right-wing of the national religious camp. Amikam, older then Klil, and a secular Jew, seems a much less appropriate partner for Klil than does Yedidya, a yeshiva student and soldier. Nevertheless, at the end of the novel, obstacles to romance are overcome and Amikam and Klil unite to drive home Kedar’s belief that union of humanism and religious devotion will engender national renaissance. Much of the novel is devoted to the question of whether nationalism, particularly Israeli occupation and expansion, can coexist with universal humanism. As in To and Fro, Kedar bends and blends genres, so that much of the novel reads more like commentary on a philosophical text than fiction; this formula is not successful here, as philosophical discourse overwhelms plot, character development and narrative tension. As the novel’s characters react to Klil’s sometimes politically-oriented painting and writing, debate simmers between Klil, Amikam’s left-wing friend Adam and Klil’s co-worker Nili, so that the novel acknowledges perspectives 129

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other than Klil’s committed right-wing stance in favor of Israel’s expansion. Under Yedidya’s tutelage, this group of young people embarks on study of Kook’s work which posits a connection between religious and national renaissance; explication of its passages respond to the political issues the characters raise. The harmonious ending, the implied union of Klil and Amikam, is meant to illustrate the balance of ideals that Kook describes. Emily Amrousi’s, Tris [The Settler] is a much earthier novelistic attempt to bridge the divide between secular Israeli and settler: she humanizes the settlers by portraying familiar details of daily life and also their efforts to reach out to Arab neighbors. While Kedar finds Ofra’s air clear and restorative, Amrousi’s heroine, Na’ama, is sure that environmental conditions in the settlement of Alrom are sickening her; she embarks on a public health crusade which also becomes a peace-building mission. After being diagnosed with hypothyroidism, Na’ama becomes convinced that the ailment, which afflicts other women in Alrom as well, is caused in part by living at high altitudes and can be prevented by adding iodine to the water. She believes that government authorities should address this health issue, but is convinced that they will do so only if it is raised not only by the settlers but also by the residents of Rania, a neighboring Arab village. She defies the opposition of male community leaders to organize a meeting between the women of Alrom and the women of Rania. The Settler describes an extreme ideological and cultural gap between settlers and the Israeli mainstream. Amrousi’s narrator, Na’ama, is a professional photographer, mother, and committed settler. In the waiting room of a Tel Aviv office, she describes her sense of otherness: Looks follow me. Surely they think that I am one of those settlers with ten children. What’s with her and photography? She should go pray or uproot some Palestinian’s olive tree or something like that. This woman, right here, I hear an imaginary conversation behind my back, because of her, occupation. Because of her, we live by the sword. Because of her the stock market is in a slump. Because of her they hate us all over the world. How does she dare sit with us here as an equal among equals . . . (Amrousi 2009: 32).

Amrousi emphasizes the geographical closeness of the settlements to Israel and their spiritual distance. “Listen, almost everyone in this damn country lives fifteen minutes from the settlements” (65) she chides a man during a brief encounter in the supermarket, resentful of the curiosity, suspicion, condescension and sometimes outright hostility 130

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that she perceives in her interactions with those outside the national religious camp. While Alrom offers space, bucolic surroundings, and a closeknit, like-minded community that Na’ama values, it is also an island in hostile seas. Amrousi, much more than Kedar, depicts a complex relationship between Jewish settlers and Arab West Bank residents: Na’ama fears Arabs, is curious about them, and also identifies with them as others. “What the hell do we know about them? They are here, sharing with us one mountain, drinking from the same bar, breathing the same air,” Na’ama observes (92). At the same time, Na’ama shares with these strangers a deep alienation from the Israeli mainstream. Na’ama recalls that when she returned, after the second intifada, to her studies at a photography school: The hat burned on my head and every word that came out of my mouth was recorded as the expression of settlers as a group, just as Nadar, the Arab from Natzeret, was forced to represent all Arabs. It seemed to me that in that crowd Nadar’s role was much easier: he felt less compelled than I did to squirm in his seat, to cough, to apologize (155).

Amrousi intersperses moments of curiosity about and identification with the Arab other with accounts of confrontation and violence: a neighbor is shot on the road to Alrom; Na’ama covers, as a photographer, attempts to establish new settlement outposts and violent protest over attempts to dismantle them. Here the Arab is mysterious neighbor and potential enemy, but also much closer to Na’ama than the secular Israeli public. By portraying Na’ama’s powers of empathy and her critique of male aggression from a feminist perspective, Amrousi seeks to redeem the image of settlers as violent and unrestrained nationalists, and return them to the democratic mainstream. Na’ama befriends Noora, a religiously observant Muslim woman from Rania, and finds as they discuss clothing, rules of modesty, food and the compromises they make between community mores and personal expression, that they have much in common. Na’ama’s collaboration with Noora on public health issues expands to a feministpacifist vision of women, united, awakening a sleeping nation to possibilities for peace: Perhaps a national movement, an “awakening,” so to speak—awakening the sleeping of Alrom and Rania, those affected by the iodine-poor air, and also this whole sleeping country, wounded for a hundred years. I still haven’t entered her house, or she mine and we fantasize and daydream, 131

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rising above all the Palenstinian men whose reactions she hides from me, and all the male settleers whose reactions I hide from her (298).

Ignoring male opposition to her contact with her Palestinian neighbor, Na’ama forges ahead with plans for a meeting between the women of Alrom and of Rania. She is emboldened by her belief that women, with their lifegiving capacities, can bridge seemingly irreconcilable differences: “…only women. These must be only women, women who create life like Effi and Odelia, women who yearn to create life like Noora and Aviva . . . women and peace, like in an ancient Greek drama” (279). Yet even as Amrousi makes her case that the settlers, contrary to stereotype, can advance peace efforts, she reinforces the image of the settlers as an anti-democratic bloc, antipathetic to the social and political ideas of Israel’s founders and its political left and center. While she depicts a range of religious and social attitudes among Alrom’s residents, a community leader espouses forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. Other of her comrades cannot comprehend objection to settlement of previously unpopulated territory, and seem either naïve or deliberately obtuse in their failure even to acknowledge that there is any complexity to the issue. Most significantly, in the end, Na’ama’s efforts to get to know her neighbors are only salutary. At the novel’s close, the carefully planned meeting of women from Alrom and Rania does not take place: a terrorist attack has made the roads impassable, so that Arab aggression seems to Na’ama an intractable obstacle; Amrousi’s heroine is easily discouraged, and ultimately her peacebuilding efforts seem only a hesitant nod to commitment to coexistence.

3. Writing the Language of the Fathers Both Kedar and Amrousi draw in their narratives on biblical sources; in Kedar’s writing, the connection to traditional texts is particularly intensive so that it is impossible to approach her narrative technique without an understanding of the rabbinic use of intertextuality that shapes traditional approaches to textual study. In her work on the relationship between rabbinic interpretation and modern literary theory, Susan Handelman points out the primacy of the written word for the rabbis, for whom “[e]very crownlet of every letter is filled with significance, and even the forms of letters are hints to profound meanings. To understand creation, one looks not to nature but to Torah . . . ” (Handelman 1982: 38). To unearth the hidden meanings of Torah one must apply imaginative, intertextual modes of interpretation. “The basic unit of the bible, for the 132

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midrashist, is the verse: this is what he seeks to expound, and it might be said that there simply is no boundary encountered beyond that of the verse until one comes to the borders of the canon itself . . . ” (Kugel 1983: 145). Hence a passage from Genesis may be interpreted with reference to a verse from Psalms; the more remote the source, the more pleasing the interpretation. The Rabbis come to Torah searching for hidden meaning that is discovered through memory, imagination, and relationship: Their minds are filled with biblical language, narratives, themes, figures of speech, exhortations, formulae, lists, and these have shaped the speech and contexts of their thinking. They do not come empty-headed to their texts. They . . . approach a verse and recall parallels and semiparallels and quasi-parallels, and, once again, who knows with what earlier interpretations they received, and read both into and out, line by line and between the lines . . . (Goldin 1988: 280).

Boyarin relates intertextual practice of midrashists to the multivocal, dialogic quality of the bible itself. The biblical text itself refers to other texts in the canon, incorporating prior texts and traditions and engendering commentary which imitates its strategies and takes its diversity into account (Boyarin 1990: 15). Discovery of the meaning of Torah requires one to delve into its difficulties and discontinuities and to appreciate its manifold meanings as part of a divine revelatory process. While we may view as paradoxical the multivocality of midrash and its claim to contain sacred truths, the ancients found in scripture plenitude and wholeness. Like Agnon, Kedar engages “a deeply rooted mystique of the wholeness inherent in sacred language” (Hoffman 1991: 1). Agnon famously created secular texts that invoke the multivocality of midrash using methods that were various and subtle: sometimes he directly imitated sacred texts. More often, he simply alluded to, appropriated, or embedded within his fiction phrases from classic Jewish texts that evoke manifold meanings. In this way, Agnon used classic sources both to affirm tradition and to suggest non-traditional meanings (Shaked 1989: 25-27; Hoffman 1991: 180), evoking stylistically and thematically the wholeness of a past progressively and irrevocably removed from the modern present. Kedar closely imitates Agnon’s literary style, although without the same tendency toward subversion: for Kedar it is quite possible to negotiate the distance between a past of closeness between God and His chosen people and the present. She neither negates nor criticizes the ideas her intertexts convey, but 133

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rather invokes traditionional sources to create layers of meaning that assert the continuity and relevance of Jewish tradition. Her sense of the wholeness of sacred language interacts then with belief in the possibility of achieving spiritual wholeness. Kedar deploys in her texts the erudition and interpretive techniques of the rabbis, fashioning for herself a place among the sages. Kedar does not refrain from laying claim to the highest levels of authority. In Parties to a Confidence, paragraphs devoted to discussion of Rav Kook’s philosophy are presented in a column while quotations from Kedar’s own writing and from the Talmud appear in smaller print in a paralell column, mirroring the construction of a page of Talmud in which mishna and gemara take center stage and rabbinic commentary appears in the margins. Again, she invokes the multivocality and wholeness of sacred language, and also, daringly assumes an authoritative position by positioning herself as an authoritative interpreter of the law. By constructing her work as a page of Talmud, she also demonstrates a certain playfulness, and freedom from traditional perspectives. Kedar’s consistent blurring of division between sacred and secular language serves her larger project of grasping holiness and bringing it down to earth. She repeats the title of the collection, “to and fro,” throughout the stories contained in it. Its meaning as an overarching theme is best expressed in the story “Kokhavim bifnim” [Stars Within], a theological interpretation of the early modernist, secular Hebrew poet Natan Alterman’s “Pegisha le’ein ketz” [Meeting Without End] in his volume Kokhavim bahutz [Stars Outside]. Alterman, writes Kedar, “well expressed the difficulty of the connection between heaven and earth, its transience, to and fro . . . ” (Kedar 1999: 111). As Kedar’s play with the title of Alterman’s book suggests, her interpretation aims to capture those elusive moments of recognition of the divine on Earth. The narrator’s exposition of the poem emerges from a debate with her secular cousin, Eliyahu, about its meaning. She refuses his interpretation of the poem which opposes technology to both nature and poetic inspiration, arguing instead that Alterman describes moments of grace in which the earthly (nature and technology) makes contact with the divine, of which it is a reflection. The narrator’s husband, the authoritative scholar, enlists the Zohar, and a rabbinical treatise with all its biblical citation, to reinforce the affirmation of divine presence that the narrator reads in Alterman’s lines. This affirmation is understood, the narrator argues, only by those who approach the text from the spiritual/emotional stance of believers whose 134

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faith endows them with great interpretive power. Here Kedar advances the Modern Orthodox project of synthesis by interpreting modern poetry in accordance with a transcendent, rabbinical vision that marries all that is human with all that is divine.

4. Mind, Body and Women in the Vanguard Throughout the story “In Any Event,” and in others of her collection, Kedar represents women who accept and revel in the traditional caretaking role prescribed by Orthodoxy, however greatly they expand that role. In “In Any Event,” the task of homemaking literally becomes homebuilding, so that work of home and community building entails taking on a range of roles, including that of construction manager. Kedar presents a series of accomplished women whose community building activities include fostering artistic and intellectual life so that they are crucial constituents, if not leaders of, the settlers’ movement (91). These female characters exert an agency which resonates with the “feminine power” (Brandes 2001b: 135) of the chorus of religious women in Brandes’ Quench Love who take on leadership roles. Kedar’s characters identify wholly with the religious nationalist goal of a greater Israel and— consistent with El-Or’s study of religious nationalist women—operate as full participants in that political struggle, with strong voices and decisive opinions (El-Or 1998b: 242). In the story “Dalet amot” [Four Measures], Kedar has her narrator champion, as does Nessa Rapaport (less cautiously and more radically), the expansion of women’s roles in religious life. She couches her activism within a tract demonstrating the adaptability and continued relevance of the sources: a revered modern day halakhic expert, Rabbi Shlomo Ne‘aman, ascends to heaven where he checks the validity of his rulings by conferring with a chain of learned rabbis extending back to Moses himself. The phrase by which the story is entitled, “Four Measures,” denotes in rabbinic literature a minimal distance (Even-Shoshan 1993: vol.1, 53),55 meaning that while we moderns may be thousands of years removed from divine revelation, in the afterlife, that is but a small distance. Kedar has Rabbi Ne‘aman report to this heavenly rabbinic assemblage on the advances in women’s Jewish literacy so that he delivers a colloquy deftly reinterpreting rabbinical pronouncements on women and Jewish study. In Kedar’s hands, the 55

The phrase “four measures” also alludes to the length of a grave, suggesting the small measure of the human body. 135

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Talmudic contention that teaching your daughter Torah is teaching her folly (B. Sota 21b) becomes the assertion that if you are teaching your daughter folly (e.g. secular topics), surely you should be teaching her Torah.56 In a play on words difficult to convey in translation, Kedar substitutes the modern day meaning of kala [quick], for the Talmudic use of that word in a derogatory sense to negatively characterize women’s minds as kala [lightweight], and therefore unsuitable for serious study. Here, rather than being unsuited to intellectual endeavor, women have the facility to study quickly: “[t]hey saw that women study quickly because ‘women’s minds are quick’” (Kedar 1999: 153, 163). Rabbi Ne‘aman’s speech demonstrates Kedar’s confidence in the continuous relevance of halakha, its adaptability, and paradoxically, as discussed above, a certain playful freedom from its perspectives. Reflecting the commitment to Jewish literacy evident in Kedar’s sourceladen narratives, she has her narrator interject her own observations on women’s study: At that moment I said to myself, if only I could ask permission to speak. Ah! What I would have said before them. And even though I am not one of those women who seek to study gemara and halakha . . . it is enough for me that my husband asks me for advice when he interprets the law— sometimes even that is beyond my powers—in any event I would have laid before them the profit that Torah has realized since women have joined the learners’ circle. And not because they engage Torah in the same way that men have engaged it, but rather, on the contrary, because they reveal in it new faces . . . that only women are able to discover, that is, through the understanding of the heart and by way of feminine intuition (Kedar 1999: 154).

Here, gender difference, invoked by some rabbis to justify the exclusion of women from religious study, advances the argument for women’s learning. If Torah indeed has a myriad of faces, these can only be discovered by application of a myriad of approaches, the feminine included. Kedar’s commentary relates to the gender-based feeling/intellect dichotomy that has prevailed in the Torah world’s approach to study: rabbis have considered legal texts to be appropriate for study by men, while they have deemed folklore, morality and Jewish thought suitable for women’s study. This gendered 56

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Kedar’s play with rabbinic statements to promote women’s study echoes the reasons given by rabbis to justify women’s religious education at the beginning of the twentieth century (Introduction: 18).

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approach to teaching and learning has been reinforced by sex-segregated study (El-Or 1998: 31). Kedar’s passage, while accepting the feeling/intellect binary, argues that extension of women’s study allows for new interpretive perspectives, and perhaps ultimately for a dialogue that will allow learners to integrate approaches and transcend the binary opposition between feeling and intellect (cf. El-Or 1998b: 32). The discourse of Kedar’s narrator is ambivalent: on the one hand, she accepts traditionally authorized views of gender, and on the other, she advocates removing limitations to women’s study based on her belief in the value of Jewish knowledge and of women’s perspectives. Rabbi Ne‘aman’s comments make clear that women are caretakers first, and learners after that (Kedar 1999: 153). Kedar’s narrator takes pains to state that she herself has no intention of entering the field of halakhic disputation, and acknowledges her status as a learner secondary to her husband. Moreover, the great Rabbi Ne‘aman describes women’s study in a positive light but refrains from pronouncing it legitimate (154). These reservations reflect the conservative attitude of a religious Zionist leadership that does not encourage changes in women’s literacy (El-Or 1998: 41). On the other hand, the choice of haredi and Modern Orthodox communities to place study at the center of Jewish experience has made it hard to keep out those who want to learn, and a movement that began on that society’s margins has gathered momentum and is brewing a revolution within (El-Or 1998: 26). Further, as El-Or points out, knowledge is power: in demanding literacy, women are expanding their opportunity for religious participation so that they are quietly and circumspectly, even ambivalently, carrying out a revolution that will soon bring about halakhic change and that will make national religious society “more feminist and more religious” (El-Or 1998b: 17). However, “Four Measures” ends by affirming limits to change: Rabbi Ne‘aman describes himself as helpless before the terrible effect of a halakhic ruling that he can find no way to avoid making. So, in the midst of change, the delicate balancing act continues to play itself out in the tension between women’s spiritual fervor and traditional interpretations of Jewish law. In Echad Mi-Elef [One in a Thousand] (2008), Kedar again chooses the novelistic form to polemicize on a topic she addressed more briefly in To and Fro, the legitimacy of women’s Talmud study. A review in Nekuda (a now defunct journal of the settler’s movement), reveals a complex web of paralells and associations between her contemporary characters BeruriaLeah Aharoni and Rachel Dotan and Talmudic figures. Beruria-Leah, the daughter of a rabbi, and an only daughter in a family of many sons, is 137

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a brilliant scholar; her father recognizes her talent and engages with her in rigorous Talmud study. Beruria founds a women’s yeshiva. Will she resemble Beruria of the Talmud, whose learning leads her to sin and then suicide? Or can this contemporary Beruria cultivate her intellect, develop her character and, like the biblical Leah, become a mother? Beruria-Leah becomes friend and colleague to Rachel Dotan, a feminine ideal; Rachel is beautiful, delicate, and devout, and, like Rabbi Akiva’s wife, she is wholly devoted to advancement of her husband’s Torah study. A complicated twinning creates plot tension: Beruria seems suited to Rachel’s husband Eki (her intellectual twin), while Rachel shares a deep interest in theater with Eki’s twin brother Yeki. After a series of difficult encounters with men who fail to appreciate her intellect, Beruria, at the close of the novel, finds love with a learned and musical man who respects her vocation; Rachel in turn becomes more independent of her husband, who encourages her to become a scholar in her own right and pursue her theatrical interests. Interestingly, one commentator, Yemima Hovev, notes that the novel, set in the 1970s and 1980s, problematizes women’s study in the national religious context to an extent that is now a bit outdated. While the American Modern Orthodox and the Israeli national religious have been slow to allow changes in rules on women’s religious participation, there is fairly widespread acceptance of women’s study. Hovev observes: If I, or someone else from my generation who grew up in the midst of the [women’s study] revolution were writing the story of Beruria Aharoni, no doubt the story would have been simpler and the reality described natural to us. We would have married off Beruria somewhere in the middle of the book to a good guy, and the two of them would have studied Torah, worked and together raised kids, and washed floors and dishes” (Hovev 2008: 51).

She notes that Kedar, born in 1956, was educated in an era with different values than those prevalent a generation later; she reads Kedar’s novel as a testament to “the depth and breadth of the revolution that occurred” (51). The writing of Brandes, Amrousi and Kedar reflect aspects of the national religious attempt to synthesize tradition and modernity, democracy and messianism, Jewish particularism and universal humanism. While Brandes’ fiction is overtly and sharply critical of right-wing religious nationalism as expressed in the settler’s movement, Amrousi and Kedar, from a position firmly within the nationalist religious camp, gesture, often from feminist 138

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perspectives, toward a need both for moderation of nationalism and development of religious perspectives that include sensitivity to universal values. In the next chapter, I will discuss the very different development of the theme of synthesis in the novels of Mira Magen and Lilach Galil El-ami. These writers do not, like Kedar, portray protagonists who remain within the framework of Orthodox society, and struggle with all its particular paradoxes, or, as does Brandes, face head-on Jewish history, destiny, and Israeli politics. Rather, they develop what have been considered particularly female subjects—interpersonal relationships and the quest for love. Within this framework, however, they develop female protagonists with complex and fluid identities who refuse rigid boundaries between secular and religious communities in Israel.

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INCLUSIVITY AND TRANSFORMATION

A. Mira Magen

1. Fertile Land, Fertile Bodies Mira Magen often portrays rural environments, much like the setting in which she herself was raised. Magen’s father immigrated to Israel from Czechoslovakia in 1933 and, along with his mother and six brothers, purchased land in Kfar Saba, which they farmed cooperatively. Magen, whose parents are Orthodox, married a man from a religious kibbutz. They lived on a religious moshav [cooperative village] for ten years, where Magen worked in education prior to moving to Jerusalem (Magen 1994b). Magen describes her lifestyle as one of contradiction, built somewhere between the poles of secular and haredi life. She wonders: “Where am I? I am running around all my life between the poles and I don’t find a place. There are days of doubt, and I maintain a religious lifestyle, and there are days that I live in acceptance and absolute submission” (Magen 2000c: 34). Fittingly, Magen’s fictional characters build bridges between religious and secular life, resist rigid constructions of identity and affirm the legitimacy of different lifestyles. Magen sets much of her early fiction in rural environments that she often contrasts with the city. The religious moshav is the setting for some of the short stories in Magen’s collection Kaftorim rekhusim heytev [Well Buttoned Up] (1994), and of her first novel Al take bakir [Don’t Knock Against the Wall] (1997), and is the point of origin of the protagonist in Magen’s second novel Beshokhvi uvekumi ’isha [Love, After All] (2000). The comments on the back cover of Don’t Knock Against the Wall describe the exceptionality of its setting both in the Israeli landscape and as a fictional milieu: “Mira Magen’s novel—in a relatively unknown region of Israeli reality . . . [is] absorbing in its capacity to tell the story of a normal enough young woman, whose world is so different than that of the heroine found in Israeli women’s narrative.” The rural environments that she depicts seem removed from polarities that nourish Israel’s culture wars. 140

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Magen does not in her fiction emphasize the restrictive aspects of Orthodox Judaism, but rather its harmony with the rythyms of nature. The moshav, narrow as its horizon may be, is an idealized place, and Magen’s prose abounds with descriptions of its abundant beauty, for which the rundown Jerusalem neighborhood to which the protagonist Yiska (“Ossie”) moves is a poor substitute. The temporal period of the narrative (a year’s time) is marked by description of seasonal cycles and the religious observances that distinguish them. In Don’t Knock Against the Wall, the idealized character Elisha, Ossie’s romantic interest, embodies a connection between earthiness, sensuality and spirituality. Elisha is a thirty-eight year old widowed farmer whose daughter Ossie’s mother has raised. He derives an appealing strength from his connection with the soil. Farmers have strong hands: “thick thumb muscles, stripes of dust in the nails, hands that leave the ground no choice” (20). Farming endows Elisha with a combination of earthiness and spirituality that appeals to Ossie: “Apparently there is nothing in his world except persimmon, and clementine plants, but when his boots are planted firmly in the wet soil his head roams the heights and becomes acquainted there with what makes him so desirable” (117). And, she relates: “I smelled from his mouth the straw he chewed in the field. His face burned above me, and the branches of the lilac seemed as if they were sprouting from his head and connecting him with the heavens” (208). Persimmon and orange juices figure prominently in Ossie’s attempts and ultimate success at Elisha’s seduction (Magen 1997: 27, 125). Magen naturalizes female sexuality by associating it with agriculture, the earth’s moisture, fruit, and fruit juices. Ossie, the first-person narrator of Don’t Knock Against the Wall, relates the vitality of the land to her own sexuality: The branches of the casuarinas moved, dropping, and flung about the pines with them, a sharp odor of earth whose crust had been removed blew from the western plots, in kislev you will be sowed and she is already loose and moist and ready, all week the cattle egrets dive and land their greenish legs in the open furrows . . . dryness belongs to old age . . . but I am only twenty five and moisture, naturally secreted, still anoints my body . . . the night teased me and invaded my throat and nose, my stomach and between my legs (Magen 1997: 25).

In Jerusalem, the smells of the moshav vehicle arouse nostalgia and desire: “the walls of the transit, that the sun beat down upon all day, threw off their 141

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sweat. A sharp smell of earth, oranges and wet sacks were bottled up between them. I breathed in the mix of pleasant odors with desire, and thought that I will miss this cocktail of smells” (121). In this agricultural milieu there is no sharp contradiction between nature, sexuality and religious observance. As an adolescent, Ossie laments Elisha’s unresponsiveness to her advances, noting ironically that for him her body is “another point of merit for the creator, one of the visions about which one says, how bountiful are God’s miracles” (123). Ossie does not experience female maturation as ugly and dangerous as does Rotem’s protagonist in Mourning. Instead her sexuality resonates promisingly with natural bounty and spontaneity, reflecting a different, more tolerant religious milieu. In Don’t Knock Against the Wall Ossie’s aggressive assertion of sexuality, independence and autonomy challenge stereotypes of female passivity and the conservatism of the religious moshav. In response to her mother’s angst at her move away from the moshav, Ossie remarks: “I couldn’t calm her and promise that I wouldn’t sin” (131). Ossie sets her own priorities, negotiating between the requirements of religious regulations, her own desire, and social realities. Ossie perceives herself as bold and independent. Cast in the mold of Shulamith Hareven’s “androgynous” hero Sara Amarillo of ’Ir Yamim Rabim [City of Many Days], Ossie declares that she is “one of the strong ones, and I am like that because I decided that I will take life on” (Magen 1997: 32). She has no patience for superstition, or belief in “goral” [fate] that caused Alma, Elisha’s first wife, to take all sorts of precautions against the danger she felt awaited her. By moving on her own to the city, Ossie not only exercises her sense of independence but also ultimately achieves a heightened sense of interdependence and obligation toward those around her, a central theme in Magen’s writing In the city, Ossie ultimately finds herself at a loss before the complexities and vulnerabilities of attraction and relationship. In understanding and regretting that she has used Heda, Elisha’s daughter, as a means to an end, she moves toward emotional maturity and development of an ethic of care: Strange Alma, your daughter, the girl with the lopped off finger-nails, she, of all people, succeeded in scratching that hippopotamus’s ear called conscience and awakening the seedlings of regret, and now they are moving painfully in my stomach. I only dare tell you Alma, because no one can keep a secret like the dead, outside of you no one will know what an overdraft I’m in if you weigh what I received from her against what I gave her (202). 142

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At the end of the novel Ossie expresses both her desire to take on a nurturing role and her sense of autonomy by considering the idea, novel to her, of parenthood without marriage: And I thought that if Elisha suggested to me what her Iraqi had suggested to her, I would have accepted the suggestion wholeheartedly. A child from Elisha, maybe in San Francisco or London, but in a straight and narrow moshav like ours you won’t find one womb that would agree to open before being presented with a ketuba and the signature of a rabbi, but in any case, the idea continued to beat about in my head like the bee caught just then in the transit (220).

In her next novel, Love, After All, Magen portrays and legitimizes a woman’s choice to become a single parent outside of marriage. She constructs the protagonist, Zohara, as an autonomous, independent heroine for whom relationship to and care for others are central concerns. In characterizing Zohara, Magen engages the strand of gender psychology, articulated by, among others, Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, that regards men and women as fundamentally different and women as being first and foremost concerned with connection and relationship. Zohara and her romantic interest, Michel, are constructed along familiar essentialist lines. Michel travels around the world as chief of a high tech firm while Zohara focuses on taking care of others as a mother and nurse. Their conversation highlights gender-related subject positions: “What am I missing, tell me? I work in a successful company, I have power and authority, people depend on my opinions, I have more money than I need, the same with women, and with all this I am no happier than my father who breaks up shit in the pipes of a hospital. A harmless existence, that doesn’t shake anything up. I don’t know, maybe only Mozarts and Shakespeares and other demi-gods move the world somehow, and everyone else? They can only ask to come home safely to a house with someone in it, that’s all. Only if that small truth sits well with you can you talk about happiness.” He drank his vodka and opened a button in his shirt and was quiet. I had no idea if the chance for happiness is reserved only for great artists and what moves the world and what doesn’t, and I didn’t have evidence of something of the rare and meager happiness that I experienced here and there, so I said: “This morning I took care of someone who would give up both of his eyes and some limbs only to go home safely.” 143

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“So really,” he said and hit the table with the salt shaker, “today’s poor soul whose troubles can put my troubles in perspective? That’s a cliche, Zoorie, and not at all comforting.” I didn’t tell him that Ostrov was not a poor soul, but someone who knew exactly where he comes from and where he’s going, but that unlike Michel, he doesn’t think that between the drop he was born from and the hole he’s going to, he deserves something. I got warm and also opened a button in my shirt and said: “Cliche? A cliche sometimes begins from some truth” (Magen 2000b: 234).

Here Magen associates the male sense of self with a quest for singularity and a drive for transcendence while she defines female subjectivity not by what “moves the world” but by appreciation of relationships and mundane experience. But, significantly, Magen does not attribute an appreciation of the value of connection and relationship only to her female characters. Zohara describes here the importance of home to her pious and dying patient, Ostrov. By interpolating Ostrov into the conversation, Magen relates both Orthodox life and the experience of illness to a conception of self-identity derived from relationship to others. In Love, After All, Magen draws upon notions of gender essentialism but at the same time tries to transcend them, bringing sharply into focus the similar project at the heart of much of contemporary women’s literature: Like Irigary . . . women writers . . . are engaged in a double manoeuvre. On the one hand, they must resist the symbolic distribution of functions where by the mind and spirit are ascribed to man while woman is identified with the body (and matter, and death). They must claim their right to intellectual and spiritual identity. However, they must also “defend” that which has been identified with the feminine, if they are not simply to replicate a masculine subject position. Characteristically, then, they interrogate the identification of the intellect solely with the masculine, but also explore the positive aspects of a (female) subject position closely tied to embodiment (Hanson 2000: 16).

Feldman has shown how, in the Israeli context, women’s literature has negotiated in a variety of ways, and through diverse poetics, the conflict between “androgyny” and what might be lost in achieving success as men have defined it (Feldman 1999). Magen’s Zohara, by pursuing single parenthood and insisting on her economic independence, appropriates for herself, undeterred by social or religious convention, autonomy and agency, while at the same time expressing that autonomy by choosing 144

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what has been associated with femininity—motherhood, care-taking, appreciation of relationship and connection. The recuperation of the value of motherhood and mothering that characterizes the recent American Jewish women’s writing as discussed in Chapter Five resonates with Magen’s thematics and aesthetics. Magen celebrates motherhood and associates Orthodoxy with an attractive and sensual fecundity. In Love, After All, Zohara’s Orthodox sister Odelia, a West Bank settler, is described as appealingly sensual in her pregnancy: “It appeared that the being she carried in her belly doubled her powers. Mario stood in the doorway, looking at the sweat ringing her breasts that appeared about to burst from fullness, shedding their abundance on the gray maternity dress. His hand smoothed over what swelled in his pants and he entered his house” (Magen 2000b: 16). The protagonist of the short story “Gerbera Daisies at Half Price,” who for a time becomes a “hozeret biteshuva,” contrasts the aridity of café society with the fecundity of the Orthodox neighborhood to which she moves: [W]e used to walk around practically naked, wearing shorts and thin shirts that reached only about an inch above our navels and were cut down to the middle of our backs, but the truth is that we were always covering up, concealing, trying to be what was expedient, not what we really were . . . Here, though everyone is wrapped up in layers of fabric, life is really naked, always touching their flesh, filled with the smell of sperm and blood and milk, and they don’t use creams and bleaches to battle their flesh, they live within its cycles, they give birth, nurse, count the days of their nidda . . . (Magen 2000c: 169).57

Similarly, in Magen’s third novel, Mal’akheiha nirdemo kulam [Her Angels Have All Fallen Asleep],58 the protagonist, Moria, neither pities nor idealizes her haredi sister, who calmly accepts her chosen “life of purity and eternal fatigue decreed by continuous cycles of high estrogen” (2003: 238).

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Translated by Sondra Silverston in Dreaming the Actual: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry by Israeli Women Writers, ed. Miriyam Glazer (New York: SUNY Press, 2000).

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The title of the novel has several layers of meaning. It puns on a popular Israeli folksong “Dugit” [Fishing Boat] in which the fishing boat sails “umalaheiha nirdemu kulam” [and the sailors have all fallen asleep]. In spoken Hebrew the words for “sailor” and “angel” are almost homophones. The confusion of Magen’s protagonist is captured by the image of an unguided boat at sea. 145

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The lives of Orthodox women, bound up in the cycles of pregnancy and birth, are appealing in their embrace and acceptance of human corporeality and immanence.

2. Bodily Bonds Magen’s narrative highlights not only motherhood, but also intimate relationships formed by care-taking and physical proximity. Magen focuses not only on the pregnant body but also on the sick body to emphasize human relationships and the dependence made necessary by biology. Love, After All is dedicated to nurses who offer comfort through “a word, a touch of the hand or a glass of water” (Magen 2000b). The protagonist, Zohara, works as a nurse, as has Magen herself (Magen 1994b), a job that involves contact with bodies, daily encounters with the fact of human dependence and frequent confrontation with death. Zohara’s familiarity with the details of sickness and death informs her sense of priorities. Throughout the novel, Magen emphasizes processes of bodily decay (190, 97), as well as the power of small physical acts to comfort (187). Taking care of other people’s bodies and being taken care of forges psychic and emotional bonds between strangers. After a patient figures in Zohara’s sexual fantasy, she muses: Ostrov, a righteous man, if he only knew in what consciousness his sick body starred tonight, and I, who knows in whose dream I appeared. Perhaps Mina Steiner saw in her sleep the geese of her birthplace quacking in the fourth floor coal pan, and I was in my white uniform shepherding them in the space between departments (119).

In this novel, corporeality, the inevitability of dependence, and the ways in which our corporeality renders us physically and psychically interdependent are unavoidable facts of existence. Her Angels Have All Fallen Asleep is about the mid-life desolation that besets the sensitive protagonist, Moria, who longs for a wonderment she connects to intensely close and physical relationships, so that the narrative is a requiem from the perspective of middle age to childhood and to young motherhood. Moria is an acutely sensitive protagonist who is as sharply aware of the pain of others as she is of her own desolation. Magen’s character describes her mid-life crisis as a moment when the angels are asleep at their post and so fail in their duties of stewardship and guidance. In the tradition of other Hebrew women writers, such as Kahana-Carmon, Magen privatizes the akeda (a biblical story in which an angel saves Yitzhak from death) by appropriating 146

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the image of sleeping angels. The protagonist, who inconveniently finds herself pregnant in mid-life, is compelled to abort a child because the angels that might have spared the child are asleep (Magen 2003: 249). As discussed below, Magen’s characters use the sources to express a heightened sensitivity and unusual powers of expression and understanding. The protagonist, from a large Orthodox family of six children in Jerusalem, juxtaposes the scattered, less frequent contacts of siblings as adults, to their closeness in the crowded, chaotic household from which they sprung: “once we came to each other with the flicker of an eyelash, with a whistle, always called. Today? How can we come without a pretext” (Magen 2003: 93). In a similarly nostalgic passage, Moria muses on the infancy of her grown son and her niece: Their shared infancy, that same period of life compelled by biology and not by the road that should be taken, brought together the two babies on mother’s knees. Hadassa stuck the pacifier attached to his undershirt into her mouth, he screamed because the shirt was dragged after the pacifier and rubbed his skin, and mother separated them and did justice between the two. When they grew up and education swept biology away, the two took separate paths (111).

Moria idealizes childhood, infancy and the mother-infant bond, so that in her aesthetic of connection even the vision of children’s clean laundry becomes powerfully attractive and elicits rhapsodic memories of a majestic past: “tiny undershirts, pure whiteness, new, soft cotton, exuding a baby’s pleasant smell, talc, chamomille oil . . . a dozen like that I once bought for Giora . . . on all the porches they held clothespins between their teeth and hummed songs. We didn’t think then that this was happiness, we supposed that this was life” (52). The juxtaposition of an idealized past of close relations and a present in which adults are distanced from each other becomes the dominant structural feature of the narrative, and Magen’s concern with the body overwhelms plot. The juxtaposition between childhood intimacy and adult alienation reaches a peak in Chapter Six of the novel, previously published as part of the novella Ah ve’ahot [Brother and Sister] (2000a). Through images of bodily proximity and effusion of bodily fluids, Magen evokes in this chapter the childhood intimacy of Moria and her brother, Muli, in contrast to their distance as adults: “and the poor mouth that must lay on the words from such a distance, once there was the range of a secret between mouth and ear, words touched the silken plume on the earlobe and felt its coolness” 147

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(Magen 2003: 20).59 Moria calls upon her brother Dr. Shmuel Stein, an ob/ gyn, to perform an abortion for her. And as the brother examines her: this man is Doctor Shmuel Stein, I said to myself, and I during the time of this examination will erase from my mind the eight year old boy who stood within a step of the honeysuckle bush and guarded me while I peed. He doesn’t look back, waits till I put on my underpants, and switches with me increasing the size of the puddle, and I hear the urine flowing and only once I turned around and there was a yellow arc shining in the sun, directed to shatter on the honeysuckle flower, and a white rear-end gleamed in the strong light and strands of tzitzit danced above it. After we drew down the branches of the honeysuckle so they would cover the wet sand . . . (38).

Here the impersonality of the hospital, and formality of the relationship between patient and gynecologist (a medical specialist that figures prominently in Magen’s fiction, beginning with Ossie’s affair with the cynical gynecologist Sheinfeld in Don’t Knock Against the Wall), contrast with the childhood bond between brother and sister, forged as much by physical proximity as compatibility. By foregrounding corporeality, pregnancy, bodily effusion and relationships formed by care-taking and physical proximity, Magen troubles the lines between male subjectivity, conceived of as self-contained and transcendent, and female embodiment that has positioned “the female relationship to her body as ‘abnormal’ and as an inappropriate starting point for thinking self and personhood” (Battersby 1998: 36; Hanson 2000: 15-16).60 Rather, in Battersby’s thinking the association of the female with corporeality and immanence is not something to be overcome but a starting point for a subjectivity based on relationships: [R]ecognizing natality—the conceptual link between the paradigm “woman” and the body that births—does not imply that all women either 59

Shulamith Hareven’s influence can be felt here as well. In her City of Many Days, Hareven emphasizes the close relationship, beginning in the womb, of adult twins. “They had grown up together, curled around one another in the same amniotic fluid, their fingernails tiny, coeval” (Hareven 1977: 41).

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Battersby specifically criticizes de Beauvoir’s description of female biology in horrible terms: “What interests me about the female subject-position is thinking this necessary relationship to embodiment and the ambiguous boundaries between self and other more positively . . . Like Luce Irigaray, I am also interested in a more positive thinking of that sticky boundary between self and other. Indeed, I regard Beauvoir’s obsessive desire for a freedom that is only exercised through the negation of flesh as itself a form of bad faith that comes from taking the male subject as norm” (Battersby 1998: 36).

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can or “should” give birth. Instead, an emphasis on natality as an abstract category of embodied (female) selves means that we need to rethink identity. The “self” is not a fixed, permanent or pre-given “thing” or “substance” that undergoes metamorphosis, but that nevertheless remains always unaltered through change. Instead, we need to think of identity as emerging out of a play of relationships and force-fields that together constitute the horizons of a (shared) space-time. We need a metaphysics of fluidity and mobile relationships; not a metaphysics of fixity, or even of flexibility (Battersby 1998: 7).

Here, femininity becomes then a “non-essential essence,”61 a desirable norm, an untainted substratum that goes to our basic humanity and the existential facts underlying all culturally constructed conventions. Consistent with Magen’s recognition of human connection, in her novels, family solidarity is inviolable, and withstands the pressure of departures from conventional norms, rebellion, and falls from faith. While Magen indicates the potential for conflict, family remains the primary social framework and inclusion within it non-negotiable. For example, in Love, After All, Zohara’s mother, although at first shocked by her daughter’s decision to become a single parent, sympathizes: “motherhood is a type of instinct, created like milk is created” (Magen 2000b: 59). She overcomes her opposition quickly and says “I’m with you, let everyone here say what they say” (62). Such notions of gender essentialism even function as a bridge between the Orthodox and secular communities. The members of this religious kibbutz for whom family is everything do not say much. Zohara notes that “no one excused himself from giving an opinion about my pregnancy, but even the most conservative of the conservatives were tolerant toward me: unmarried, and also without children, who could judge her?” (146). One older, unmarried veteran of the religious kibbutz looks enviously at the pregnant Zohara and remarks “it’s a shame that I didn’t have sense in time” (146). Family solidarity is part of Magen’s overall thematic of inclusiveness. This author often charts a pattern of movement “from dichotomy to diffusion” (Ratner 2002: 149). Magen’s characterizations are informed by familiar perceptions of Orthodox and secular Israelis: the secular person is up-todate, autonomous, spontaneous, skeptical, and seeking self-fulfillment, while the halakhic Jew is conservative, accepts structure and authority, is strong in faith and above all courageous. In Don’t Knock Against the Wall, the earthy, 61

Battersby seeks to develop a notion of essence that helps us think about the specifics of female experience without positing it as a monolithic unity. She conceives of essence as shifting and always subject to historical change (Battersby 1998: 23, 34-35). 149

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religious moshav and Elisha’s spirituality at first contrast with the seedy, opportunistic urban environment. In Love, After All, Zohara’s sister Odelia and her husband, members of Gush Emunim, represent an extreme pole of religious idealism, and the minor character Einat, the opposite extreme of empty materialism. Odelia glows: “Odelia smiles and everything she’s made of smiles with her. She became heavier since the birth, an abundant woman, but her steps are easy, her walk is light, and her hug is a hug . . . and even in the fading light there was brightness in her eye” (Magen 2000b: 123). At the opposite end of the spectrum, Einat, whom Magen portrays somewhat satirically, represents a certain kind of trendy Tel-Aviv resident whose pursuit of happiness through consumer spending is doomed to failure. However, as Ratner notes, these dichotomies break down throughout Magen’s novel as characters cross societal divides to disrupt stereotypes and embrace ambiguity in the process of self-development. Not surprising given Magen’s emphasis on body and connection, motherhood plays a central role in her protagonists’ lives, providing a solution to their dilemmas. In Don’t Knock Against the Wall, Ossie envisions motherhood in her future, while in Love, After All, by choosing motherhood, the protagonist expresses her autonomy. In Her Angels Have All Fallen Asleep, Moria at last resolves her angst by deciding to adopt a disadvantaged young boy who fortuitously crosses her path. Soon I will sit down with them on the sand at the foot of the spout. I will lay a hand on the shoulder of the small one, I will hug the big one. The blue sky above us will become thin and empty like God’s first heavens, and the story of the world will begin anew, from now, from here, from the foot of the spout, with the boy, the man and the woman and without the snake. We will gather him [the boy] to us and we will be gathered, a man to his wife and a woman to her husband (Magen 2003: 348).

Reconstructing a family centered on raising a child returns equilibrium to her life and to her relationship with her husband. Magen does not directly involve her characters in Israeli political conflicts in these novels about creating bridges, mending bodies, and smoothing over conflict, but she does suggest that mothering has political implications.62 In Love, After All, during a car ride to Odelia’s West Bank home, Zohara’s son Evyatar watches Palestinian children playing and wonders if they will harm him. To reassure the child, his uncle talks about military presence, 62

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For a discussion of polemics that connect gender and pacifism, see Feldman’s work on the historiography of pacifism (Feldman 2004a).

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and Zohara invokes rituals ubiquitous among parents and children: “‘In a little while they’ll be called to dinner and they’ll say “Just a minute,” so that Evyatar didn’t know whether to trust in the army or in the routines of mothers’” (Magen 2000b: 122). In Her Angels Have All Fallen Asleep, reports of the suffering of children because of political violence (Magen 2003: 257, 282, 287) have a strong impact on the protagonist, perhaps contributing to her desire to adopt a child in need. Magen’s emphasis on the care-taking role of parents (particularly mothers) suggests a connection between motherhood and pacifism. She evokes a universal humanity that expresses itself in care-taking and suggests that political violence entails negating one’s recognition of the “other’s” humanity. In this way, Magen echoes Shulamith Hareven’s separatist rejection of patriarchy, a rejection that Hareven expressed late in the course of her literary career, in the novella After Childhood (Feldman 1999: 15976). In Hareven’s parable, violent male patriarchy is rooted in the sacred Jewish tale (the akeda) that she rewrites from the point of view of a mother. Magen’s novels bear no such message about the origins of violence. Rather, Magen associates motherhood with awareness of relationship that provides the basis for a universal ethic; Orthodoxy with its emphasis on family, reproduction, and relationship to God serves as a paradigm for acceptance of corporeality and of our basic and essential interconnectedness.

3. Exploiting the Language of the Fathers In Don’t Knock Against the Wall, characters quote Tanakh and rabbinical commentary as part of a witty repartee (e.g. Magen 1997: 70) in a type of nuanced communication inaccessible to Ossie’s colleagues in the Jerusalem café where she works: “ . . . I didn’t tell her that if she tortures with whips I will torture with thorns, [I Kings 12:11] because sentences like that were beyond her” (173). When Elisha finally wants to tell Ossie that he is romantically interested in her, he uses the stories of Genesis to get at the complicated relation between them as would-be lovers and practically members of the same family (185, 195). In Love, After All, the religious background of the protagonist, Zohara, gives her a linguistic edge, and a privileged position among her co-workers, as she exercises an ability to exploit both religious and secular frameworks. In Her Angels Have All Fallen Asleep, reference to biblical lore, such as the story of Noah and his ark, that appeals to children (Magen 2003: 250), and to prayers customarily said by children (43), deepens the sense of a lost Eden by juxtaposing childhood faith and adult skepticism. 151

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Magen’s characters freely quote the sources as a vehicle for communication of feelings exalted and mundane. Magen thematizes the communication gap between secular and religious: by showing that biblical references are often beyond the understanding of secular characters, she points out the polemical and aesthetic advantages of a cultural literacy that includes knowledge of the Jewish library, and signals to the uninitiated reader the provenance of her language. Connection to or birth within the religious framework privileges Magen’s characters with possibilities inaccessible to others. Consistent with her emphasis on human commonality, she does not seek to subvert the sources, by now a familiar strategy in Israeli women’s writing, but instead evokes the expressive possibilities of ancient language and its relevance to contemporary situations. Magen’s privileging of the sources contrasts sharply with both Rotem’s ironic deployment of Talmudic passages and Bat Shahar’s subtle demonization of ritually-oriented events. In contrast to Kedar, Magen makes no effort in her fiction to connect the use of intertext to a particular theological vision rooted in language. Like Brandes’ novels, Magen’s narratives argue for cultural literacy; unlike Brandes, Magen does not insist on transcending biblical paradigms or tying her plots to Jewish destiny. Rather, Magen employs the sources to characterize protagonists with powerful gifts of association. Her talent for creating natural dialogue and convincing characters renders her argument for the aesthetic and cultural value of the Jewish library compelling. In the following section, I will discuss Lilach Galil El-ami’s attempt to bridge the societal and cultural chasms that Magen’s characters negotiate. Her protagonist’s journey leads her into deeply divisive issues within Orthodox Judaism, including alternative approaches to sexuality and spirituality. B. Lilach Galil El-ami

1. Imagining Through the Mother: A Lesbian Continuum? The protagonist in Lilach Galil El-ami’s first novel, Ro’a et hakolot [Seeing the Voices] (1999),63 follows a protagonist who must liberate herself from the mores of the religious kibbutz. Unlike the other

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I would like to thank Zafrira Cohen of Stern College, Yeshiva University for bringing to my attention El-ami’s novel. See her review, “Shirata shel Yona Wallach hayeta ner leragleiha” [The Poetry of Yona Wallach Lit Her Way] (2000).

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Israeli authors I discuss, El-ami is from a secular background but has come into contact with and explored Orthodox lifestyles: she lived with her parents in Canada for several years where she attended a religious day school, studied Judaism seriously with a rebbetzin, adopted for a time a religious lifestyle, and was married to a man from a religious kibbutz (El-ami 1997b). Several stories in El-ami’s first book, Akhshav tikhtevi (1997) [Now Write!] reflect her interest in Judaism and set the stage for the thematics of her first novel. The story “Le’olam lo eshma od” [Never Will I Hear Again], a verbatim use of a Yona Wallach poem (see more about use of Wallach below), describes the tension between a young woman’s sense of belonging and of constriction on a religious kibbutz. “Higale na uferos” [Please Appear and Spread]64 evokes the comfort and spirituality of Sabbath services in a rural synagogue. These two stories, along with “Drama beyom ’aviv” [Drama on a Spring Day], a story of lesbian desire, set the stage for El-ami’s more intensive treatment of a protagonist’s exploration of spiritual and sexual identity in Seeing the Voices. In this novel, coming out as a lesbian structures a story of artistic development. El-ami borrows the title of her novel from the biblical account of the giving of the Law, during which “vekhal ha‘am ro’im ’et hakolot” [all the people witnessed the thunder] (Exodus 20:15).65 Thus El-ami signals that her novel is a story of revelation. The book is divided into three sections: “The Voice of Longings” (summer, 1986); “The Pain of Longings” (winter 1988); and “The Voices of the Ripe Fruit” (winter 1991), relating to discrete stages in Yona Weissman’s journey of self-discovery, a journey toward her “real life” (El-ami 1999: 238). El-ami’s characters are spiritual seekers, who reach beyond traditional Judaism to redefine spirituality. In Seeing The Voices, El-ami disrupts disjunctions between body and spirit, so that lesbian sexuality is a spiritual experience and the experience of childbirth an avenue to divine revelation. The final section of the novel celebrates Yona’s arrival, her embrace of sexuality, spirituality and literary creativity and her ability to successfully integrate these elements of her personality. Yona’s admiration of Israeli poet Yona Wallach expresses her sense of limitation within the bounds of the traditionally religious kibbutz on which 64

The phrase implies the continuation “your wings (or mercy) over us,” echoing the liturgy of the Sabbath evening service.

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This translation of the verse obscures its resonance with the title of El-ami’s novel. The Hebrew “kolot” means “noise” and “voices,” as well as “thunder,” and evokes El-ami’s image of seeing what is thought of as only audible. 153

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she was raised. Wallach’s poetry, which El-ami appropriates for chapter and section headings and weaves throughout the narrative, serves for Yona as a repository of poetic inspiration and a model of daring transgression of convention. In the first section of the novel, Yona, having dropped out of college, is commuting between the kibbutz (where she has been caring for her dying mother) and her apartment in Tel-Aviv (where she works as a waitress). She turns to Wallach as she mourns her mother’s death: On the third day of the shiva Dad finds me in one of the rooms reading her book. I hurry to close it, but Dad had already entered the room, approached me and sat down next to me. “How many of her books do you have,” he surprises me with a question. Several, I answer. I was reminded of his disapproval of the poems, especially his criticism of the poem “Tefillin,” that caused a storm in the establishment, and also angered some kibbutz members, among them my father.66 But even before that it had been Mom who showed him several of the poems. Once I heard her read in front of him . . . I remember how Dad listened, offhandedly, and after asked why the poet writes in the male person. Mom lifted her head to him, sent me the amused look of someone who shares a secret, smiled and said: “It seems that sometimes that’s how she feels, this poet.” I didn’t smile, I only thought about her name, Yona, about my name, and about my short hair that was growing then, slowly and stubbornly. (El-ami 1999: 23)

Through this memory, El-ami evokes central themes of the novel: Yona’s confusion about gender identity, the sympathy and distance between mother and daughter, and the limitations of rigid gender roles (that Wallach poetically transgresses through play with Hebrew grammar).67 Yona’s 66

In the poem “Tefillin,” Wallach stages the use of tefillin in sado-masochistic sexual acts and then murder. The poem was considered blasphemous by many. The religious poet Zelda refused to be published in the same journals as Wallach after the publication of “Tefillin” (Zisquit 1997: xxvi, xxvii). Israel was not ready in the 1960s and 1970s for Wallach’s “brazen destabilization of the sociosexual value system,” but in the 1990s Wallach became something of a cult figure (Feldman 1999: 9). Zafrira Cohen’s recently published Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman (2003) critically analyzes and culturally situates Yona Wallach’s corpus.

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Referring specifically to Wallach’s well-known and playful poem “Hebrew is a SexManiac,” Zisquit notes: “Wallach manages to take the ‘natural’ dichotomies in male

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confusion about gender identity is crystallized in her name: named after a grandfather, she insists by age twelve on being called “Yoni,” the diminutive of the boy’s name Yonatan and a name “that raises controversy as to its identity” (36). Later, as she mourns her mother’s death, she wonders what womanly attributes her mother bequeathed her, a loving mother but one who seemed to take no special pleasure in having an only daughter among three children (41), and who insisted on short hair for convenience’s sake. When, at age sixteen, Yoni encounters Yona Wallach, known as a feminist poet, she is able to take pride in her given name, and glimpses a way beyond the rigid gender boundaries taken as a given by her father (37, 38). Later in the novel, El-ami links Yona’s complicated gender identity to a desire to transgress gender/sex roles during sexual intercourse and to lesbian desire: “I want to shout, I want . . . to do what he is doing, but I am a woman” (79). Both Wallach and Yona’s mother serve as muses for Yona’s emerging art. Yona remembers her mother as giving, a person with great spiritual resources, but also as always a bit distant, so that the mother-daughter relationship is never fully satisfying. “Mom was the present figure, listening, quiet, caressing. A figure very much there, with us. But the older I grew the more I learned how distant she was” (37; see also 24, 25). El-ami hints at a kind of poetic unrest in the mother: “something always told me that really, perhaps, she wanted to escape from this time and this place” (17). The mother has a love of prayer, a great faith and also a great openness that Yona sees as existing in tension with her religiosity: “She had in her an amazing mixture of great faith in her religious path, next to this imagination, this very wide and inclusive vision” (283). Yona Wallach’s poems are a shared language between Yona Weissman and her mother (23, 283), and her mother’s love of Wallach’s poetry hints at an emotional investment in something unarticulated, and beyond her immediate surroundings. The relationship between mother and daughter pulsates throughout the novel and creates the sense of a connection between the mother’s veiled otherness and Yona’s search for self. In this way, Seeing the Voices participates in a tradition of kunstlerromane by women writers, shaped by and female sex and gender, and fuse or exchange them. She overcomes the most basic divisions, rejecting the cultural and linguistic constructs that dictate them. She calls the language a sex-maniac, poking fun at the highly gender-controlled Hebrew . . . ” (Zisquit 1997: xxvi). Zafrira Cohen comments that Wallach’s repetition of the sex-maniac refrain “suggests that Wallach sees the Hebrew language as obsessed with the gender/sex distinction—and that the poet is preoccupied with the biased world-view the gendered nature of the language might impose on its speakers” (Cohen 2003: 189). 155

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a specific drama in which “the daughter becomes an artist to extend, reveal, and elaborate her mother’s often thwarted talents”(DuPlesis 1985: 93). Yona, still struggling to find her own poetic voice, ambivalently notes: “my body is a reception vessel for all that my beloved [Wallach] said, and for what my mother didn’t say” (El-ami 1999: 86). DuPlesis writes of this type of kunstlerromane: This intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical defense of the mother, becomes involved with the evocation of the preoedipal dyad, matrisexuality, or a bisexual oscillation deep in the gendering process. In these works, the female artist is given a way of looping back and reenacting childhood ties, to achieve not the culturally approved ending in heterosexual romance, but the reparenting necessary to her second birth as an artist (DuPlesis 1985: 94).

El-ami expresses the affinity between mother and daughter through references to their mutual identification with Wallach’s unconventional poetic language. After the mother’s death, Yona conducts an unspoken dialogue with her mother’s spirit. She has a sense of being confronted by a presence that is not only comforting but also challenging: “looking at me as she never looked at me before. Exactly how I look at myself now” (172); “she looks at me, directing her quiet glance toward me. She isn’t angry or threatening, only looks at me well. A big question is in her eyes, who are you, my daughter? She asks and I am quiet” (190). The mother created an unusual atmosphere, her art, as it were, that hinted at exceptional imagination. Here continued communication with the deceased mother enables “reparenting,” so that Yona is able, concretely, to realize the potential of the imagination that her mother did not fully express: Yona articulates artistically and poetically the singularity of the unconventional self. El-ami creates a sense that the richness of the mother-daughter relationship, though never fully realized, enables Yona’s self-discovery and her poetry. By portraying the mother-daughter relationship as a repository of creative energy, in this feminist kunstlerromane El-ami deconstructs conventional literary images for creativity. Duplesis emphasized the centrality of the pre-oedipal bond to women’s creativity, following radical feminists who previously had undermined the centrality of the male to acts of creation. Farwell has traced the ways in which sexuality has been used as a metaphor for creativity, so that literary production is likened to reproduction. She shows that in the Western literary canon—whether the 156

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image is of lover, androgyne68 or, strangely, mother—the male has figured as a central force that absorbs female qualities to produce high levels of artistic achievement: male and female qualities are opposed so that female body, emotion, and matter feed male soul, intellect and idea. And so woman becomes the means to man’s artistic end, his transcendence of the earthly world, “a transcendence that is rooted in the male orgasm and metaphorically replicated in his poetic inspiration” (Farwell 1988: 104). The image of motherhood as a description of creativity has been useful to women seeking to reclaim the creative process. Adrienne Rich, with other radical feminists of the late 1970s, suggested a connection between female reproductive and imaginative powers. But mother as an image of creativity became secondary to that of the lesbian (Farwell 1988: 113). The lesbian returns to the pre-oedipal bond with the mother, offering her love to a woman and not a man. She thus returns to her original love, a possibility that Freud had reserved for boys and not girls. She is the unfettered woman who, free of male control, can soar to imaginative heights (Farwell 1988: 110). In her famous definition of a “lesbian continuum,” Rich expanded the term lesbian to “include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience . . . to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life” (Rich 1980: 649). She wrote: as we deepen and broaden the range of what we define as lesbian existence, as we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself, as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent in “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic,” and in the sharing of work; as the empowering joy which “makes us less willing to accept powerlessness” (Rich 1980: 650).

It is a short leap, then, from Rich’s broad definition of lesbian existence, to understanding the term lesbian as a metaphor for creativity. It was Rich who had earlier announced: “It is the lesbian in us who drives us to feel imaginatively . . . It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack” (Rich 1979: 201).

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In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf suggested a more equal dynamic between the male and female elements of the creative, androgynous mind (see Feldman 1999: 96). 157

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As a symbol for disruption of a tradition that conceives of women’s imagination as marginal, the idea of the metaphoric “lesbian” is distinct from lesbian sex, but preserves the link between sexuality and creativity (Farwell 1988: 110-11). The metaphoric, creative lesbian draws on eroticism in the broad sense articulated by Audre Lorde for whom the erotic is “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered” (Farwell 1988: 111, citing Lorde 1984). In Rich’s writing, this broadly defined eroticism becomes an abstraction from the nature of lesbian sex that is diffuse and unfocussed on a single part of the body; it is this attention to each other that explains the metaphoric connection between lesbian sexuality and women’s creativity. This vision of women’s creativity emphasizes both autonomy and community: “In this act of attention, women become both the lover and the beloved, subject and object, and the resulting fecundity does not focus on a product owned by the author but on a network of relationships among author, reader, text, and even literary foremothers” (Farwell 1988: 112). Seeing the Voices does not engage the separatism implicit in the valorization of a women’s community, yet lesbian as an image for creator operates in the novel metaphorically and literally. Yona’s engagement with Wallach as a literary foremother and her complex relationship to her mother are important wellsprings of her art. Moreover, it is in part erotic energy, the drive to acknowledge and recognize her own lesbian sexuality, that drives her poetry. By foregrounding the mother-daughter relationship, Elami engages a topic relatively new to Israeli literature (Feldman 1999: 13539). She develops it so that the complexity of female relationship is linked to the emergence of the artist as a young woman. Further, her portrayal of lesbian sexuality ushered in a new dimension to Israeli women’s literary discourse.

2. Unfettering the Body, Unfettering the Self The painful unfolding of Yona’s lesbian sexuality can be understood in the context of the prevalence of negative attitudes toward homosexuality in Israeli society and the internalization by gay men and women of society’s norms. In Aron betokh aron [Altering the Closet],69 Irit Koren describes the prevalence of homophobia in Israel and relates 69

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In Hebrew, aron refers to both “closet” and to the “ark” in which the Torah is kept in a synagogue. Koren’s playful pun irreverently equates the inner sanctum of human individuality and sexuality with the inner sanctum of the organized prayer service.

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it to the cultural prominence of militarism and religion (Koren 2003: 68, 69). The editor of Lesbiot (1995), an English language collection of oral histories of Israeli lesbians notes in the preface to the volume: “In spite of a rich lesbian history in Israel, as of 1988 no one had publicly recorded her own—not in newsletters, not in underground journals, certainly not in books” (Klepfisz 1995: xiii). She attributed this silence to the internalization of institutional and culture prejudices. Similarly, fictional representation of female homoeroticism has, until very recently, been rare on the Israeli literary scene. Veteran writer Shulamith Hareven’s treatment of homoeroticism in the short story “Bedidut” [Loneliness] (1980) “stands out as a sore thumb” in its treatment of this topic (Feldman 1999: 136).70 El-ami’s novel was followed shortly after by others that address lesbian sexuality (‘Ani lo yekhola shekoa‘sim ‘alay [I Can’t When They Get Angry at Me] (2000) and ’Az ma ’at be’emet rotsa [So What Is It That You Really Want] by Idit Shemer (2003) as well as Hine ’ani mathila [Here I Begin] by Yehudith Katzir (2003)), so that her writing appears to have ushered in a new trend in Israeli women’s writing. Koren makes clear the particular difficulties of being both gay and religious. From her transcription of personal interviews with men and women who identify themselves as religious and gay, interesting perspectives emerge on the complications of this dual and potentially conflicted identity. Koren surveys Jewish religious perspectives on homosexuality, which range from biblical and Talmudic prohibition of specific sexual acts to a broader demonization of homosexuality by later commentators, and then recent attempts at a more tolerant approach (Koren 2003: 149-68). She notes as a dominant theme in her interviews the tension between what the body knows and what the mind chooses not to know, supporting the idea that denial was almost always the first stage in the process of self-recognition of homoerotic desire. Further, her subjects expressed both the wish to reconcile conflicting aspects of identity through new approaches to halakha as well as the willingness simply to live with conflict between religious stricture and individual need. Koren’s description of a new, postmodern Orthodoxy in which individuals, unwilling to give up parts of the self, live with division and contradiction (93) is an interesting counterpoint to the kind of modernist aspiration to

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Ruth Almog treated lesbian sexuality in her 1980 novel ’Et hazar veha’oyev [The Stranger and the Foe] (Feldman 1999: 136, 285n16). 159

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synthesis and reconciliation that El-Or describes (El-Or 1998b) and that Mira Kedar evokes in her short stories.71 El-ami’s style successfully evokes Yona’s struggle with her own welldeveloped power of repression. Long descriptive passages show how, for Yona, Wallach’s poems are a repository of memories and associations that hint circuitously at the nature of her sense of alienation. The first section of El-ami’s novel, “The Voice of Longing” (a phrase from Wallach’s “Never Will I Hear the Sweet Voice of God”), builds on slowly accumulating hints at the nature of the spiritual journey Yona ultimately undertakes: I am surprised to find that despite the alienation and distance from the holiday prayers, something in me after all softens during these days, stops, as if asked to measure the distance from this, to ascertain if in fact it is real. I open the book, flip through it, come to a poem and read: Never will I hear the sweet voice of God /never again will his sweet voice pass under my window.72 I breathe deeply. Though I had read this poem more than a few times, this time I understood it differently. A great sadness descended upon me, on what was and was lost and will never again be mine. I can’t today, like Oren, get up and come back. Something within me was killed as it were. When I stand in a shul, nothing is moved. I look at Oren, all absorbed in the words before him, as if encountering them for the first time, and I don’t understand. I am even jealous of this ability of his to immediately get back what I thought he had lost, the sensibility, the spirit, the inspiration . . . . And now, when I sit at this warm time of the day, at the beginning of this Shabbat with the book in my hand, I am stunned by this poem, I read

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Koren’s interview subjects expressed positions that highlight modernist and postmodernist approaches to identity conflict. One subject likened the position of the religious homosexual to the larger condition of being Modern Orthodox, a position that for him involves living with contradiction between submission and self realization. While able to live with contradiction, he also sought halakhic change and viewed his position as similar to that of women in Modern Orthodox society, that is, subject to change and reform (Koren 2003: 89-93). In contrast, a haredi subject accepted as legitimate rabbinical views condemning homosexuality. He placed limitations on his behavior in part by following the advice of a rabbi who recommended leaving town to commit sin (109). This rabbinical recommendation seems to recognize and legitimate a postmodern acceptance of a divided consciousness.

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The translation of El-ami’s work is my own. The italicized passages are from Yona Wallach’s poem “Le‘olam lo eshma et kolo hamatok shel ha’elohim” [Never Will I Hear the Sweet Voice of God], as translated by Linda Zisquit in Wild Light (1977).

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it, and not for the first time, and tears collect in my eyes: if only his sweet glance would stand by my bed and I weep. What power of words she has, what power my beloved has, who knew how to write my feelings. And for some reason that last image of my mother suddenly rose before me, lying in her bed, her gaze fixed on the huge invisible void before her, her hand in my hand. If only his sweet glance would stand by my bed and I weep. I wipe my forehead, my eyes, I am all wet. I have no strength to get up and sit in the shade. I read again and again, my thoughts feverish. Never will the voice of longing pass the threshold, and a gloomy ache rises in my throat, my eyes fill again with all that is lost, with all that disappeared and that will never be again. When man will revive like the dead in memory, I continue and the picture of my mother returns and rises. I lower my gaze and see—her hand in my hand, and suddenly, a tremble passes over my back: this is her wrist, held in my hand, so narrow and delicate, narrow and delicate, and so familiar (El-ami 1999: 95).

In this passage, at first Yona longs for the transcendence she had experienced by participating in traditional Jewish prayer and ritual. She mourns her alienation from God, who, in Wallach’s poem, is an embodied God with voice, body, eye, movement. This embodied God reminds Yona of her mother, of maternal love, and of her mother’s voice which, like God’s, she won’t hear again. But then the longing for embodied love becomes longing for the body of a woman who is not her mother. She envisions herself holding a narrow and delicate wrist, a metonym for her friend Shirley whose narrow and delicate wrists Yona has noticed (64, 72), and with whom Yona has an intuitive understanding. This drawn-out, associative passage in which longing for God becomes longing for Shirley evokes the process of delving into different levels of consciousness as part of progression toward the connection between spirituality and sexuality that lies at the heart of the novel. In the second section of the novel, Yona locates herself two years later in Jerusalem, but her narration is dominated by memories which progress toward her sexual encounter with Shirley, so that El-ami makes the reader complicit in the process of the return of the repressed. Yona has returned to Orthodox Judaism and is pursuing religious studies. This turn of events is explained by her vividly drawn memories of travel in India, a popular destination for young Israelis that A. B. Yehoshua previously put to literary use in his 1994 novel Hashiva mehodu [Open Heart]. In India Yona reacts powerfully to Indian spirituality and awakens to spiritual possibilities within traditional Judaism, possibilities that lead her to “return.” Her 161

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religious studies highlight the inward, experiential aspects of religion—hers is a search for personal meaning and not for social belonging.73 As a “hozeret biteshuva” in Jerusalem, Yoni attempts to convince herself that she has indeed arrived: “Surely, I returned to my true self, I tell myself voicelessly, reminded of the words of Rabbi Ezra, that I must never go against my nature . . . ” (El-ami 1999: 138). However, throughout the second section of the novel Yona comes to realize that she is not at the end of her path toward selfhood: “the road has not ended. It has not ended at all . . . I must take an additional step on the road to myself, on the way inward to my place, to the saddened place within me” (162, 169). She leaves her program of religious study but embraces the self-searching, the striving that her rabbi recommended: ‘“to be close to God is to be close to ourselves,’ I hear someone’s voice, maybe Rabbi Ezra or maybe Sagi, I don’t remember. I smile at the possibility that the same sentence was said by either one of them” (172). Here self-knowledge is the bread and butter of religion, as it were, be it her brother’s Buddhism or the traditional Judaism to which she sought to return. Through reading her own poems, remembering, and writing again, Yona approaches her memories so that repression struggles with the emotional force of her sexual encounter with Shirley during their chance meeting in India. Artistic expression and development carries forward the slow process of coming to consciousness, as Yoni becomes more willing to lay aside Wallach’s poetry and speak in her own poetic voice (El-ami 1999: 172). As she writes about love and desire, El-ami’s protagonist visually images her repression as a circle: “Friends? I think of the empty void that I drew inside me over time, a complete and precise circle, closed and inscribed, drawn around that event and around the new feelings that arose” (188; also 190, 231). But when she is finally willing to face the nature of her feelings, she understands them only in terms of pain, of the pain that she might cause herself and others by pursuing her feelings, or “coming out.” “The voice of 73

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El-ami contrasts Yona’s search for meaning with her brother Oren’s return to a religious lifestyle on the kibbutz. Yona suggests that her brother’s return is counterfeit, that it is motivated by nostalgia more than faith, and that “things must flow from within” (Elami 1999: 136), but her friend Neta points out that Oren’s reasons for return might be different from Yona’s but are equally valid. Sociologist Wade Clark Roof has described a shift in religious life in recent decades, in which religious energy focuses on the quest for personal meaning, rather than social belonging. This shift that has been described as a heightened emphasis on “inwardness, subjectivity, the experiential, the expressive, the spiritual” (Roof 1999: 7).

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longing” becomes “the pain of longing”: “And so the closed circle is cracked, and what is in there other than great pain? . . . [M]eanwhile, still, a huge ache rises and spreads through my body, the pain of longing for what was and is no longer, and perhaps for what has not yet been” (191). In the final section of the book, Yona is living, studying, and working in Tel Aviv, her first volume of poetry about to be published. When she again encounters Shirley, the already cracked circle of repression slowly but finally gives way to a new vision of fecundity pregnant with the possibility of selfawareness. On her way to the kibbutz for Passover, fittingly the festival of liberation, Yona dreams: [A]nd in the dream I sit in a large garden, or maybe it was a wide orchard, and around me are grapefruit trees. I sit on the ground and the ripe grapefruits fall next to me from the tree, soundlessly. They are loaded with juice, full of juice, heavy from so much ripeness, and for all this they can’t be heard falling. And I suddenly see how rays of light radiate to me, directly to me, from each grapefruit as I continue to sit on the ground. And then, from these golden rays of light, I start to hear voices. Actually, I remembered in amazement, I don’t hear them, but rather see. I see the voices. At first I don’t understand, but then I identify: the voice is my mother’s voice. I see it in the form of a great light. I see it and suddenly understand that it is not calling me, it doesn’t call my name. I try to listen, to hear the words better. It seems to me that she is praying. Her voice, that whispers to me, light and clear and stable in appearance. And I see; my mother prays . . . [A]nd then I stop, and the end of the dream stands before me: It was one of the rays of light that glowed to me, that lit my hand, and suddenly all the lights were extinguished and also my mother’s voice was more. Because the silence around allowed only one ray of light to speak to me. I remember myself sitting on the ground, among the ripe fruit, my gaze inclined and shocked to discover that ray of light lighting up my wrist wearing a narrow bracelet. Shirley’s bracelet (El-ami 1999: 235).

The rays of light, the glowing, the mother’s prayer imbue with transcendence the moment of recognition. El-ami advances the garden imagery (suggestive of The Song of Songs) weaving into the description of the by now long-awaited sexual reunion between Yona and Shirley the lines of Wallach’s poem “Two Gardens,” which describes a harmonious mutuality. In this scene Yon a encounters transcendent experience: “strong desire, and with it a great purity, a tremendous radiance, a heavenly harmony” (246). El-ami playfully emphasizes her deconstruction of the 163

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body/spirit dichotomy through her use of the verb “hozer” [return]. The spiritual coming home here is not the return to tradition (“return to repentance” [hazara biteshuva]) but a return to Shirley: “[s]he knew that I would return. And I returned” (263).

3. Through the Body—God El-ami’s narrative is innovative not only because it explores lesbian sexuality, which does not have a high profile in Israeli public discourse, but also because it challenges a theological dichotomy between body and spirit that positions women as spiritually inferior, a dichotomy that the American Jewish writer, Nessa Rapoport, engages in Preparing for Sabbath (see Chapter Five). As discussed above, theorists from de Beauvoir to Irigaray have described the ways in which women’s alterity is embedded in culture (de Beauvoir 1989; Irigaray 1985a). Judith Plaskow, a Jewish feminist theologian, sees exploration and revaluation of female embodiment as a central task for Jewish feminists. Plaskow notes that in biblical and rabbinic texts God is primarily a gendered “he” free of the sexuality that characterizes humans (Plaskow 1990: 186). To control and moderate sexual behavior is to become closer to divinity. At the same time, rabbinic texts view women as ever-present temptresses, the sources of impermissible desires, hazards to be clothed and covered (185), a rabbinic attitude documented by Rotem who describes in Mourning an Orthodox community obsessively focused on clothing and controlling the female body. Divinity is associated with the control and channeling of sexual urges within traditional bounds, and strict regulation of women’s clothing and sexuality is deemed essential to such control. This set of attitudes, Plaskow argues, has underpinned arguments against innovations ranging from use of female God imagery to ordination of female rabbis: “The association of women with sexuality, and female sexuality with God, connects God to an ethic of sexual intemperance, potentially wreaking havoc with an ethic of control” (Plaskow 1990: 187). Plaskow does recognize in Judaism a plurality of positions in relation to sexuality and its symbolism, and notes particularly kabbalistic texts in which the mystics enlisted sexual symbolism to illuminate the inner workings of the divine and hoped for a redemption in which the shekhina, the feminine aspect of God, would join with the masculine to bring about redemption (190). At the same time, mysticism also associated women with demons who improperly provoke men to sexual transgression. Plaskow does not advocate merely neutralizing images of the female as sexual temptress to even the playing field, as it were, 164

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but instead argues for sexualizing the sacred. She asks: “Can we stop evicting our sexuality from the synagogue . . . and instead bring it in, offering it to God in the experience of full spiritual/physical connection?” (205). Just as Adrienne Rich drew on the poet Audre Lorde’s broad definition of the erotic to describe women’s power and creativity, Plaskow invokes Lorde’s sense of the female erotic to create a space for sexuality in Jewish theology. Sexuality is an aspect of a continuum of erotic energy, “a current that flows through all activities that are important to us, in which we invest our selves” (201). Plaskow draws two conclusions from this broad view of sexuality. First, if we fail to acknowledge sexuality, we diminish our overall capacity for deep knowledge and feeling. Second, if sexuality is related to the ability to reach out to and communicate with others, then it is inseparable from spirituality and the drive for communion with the divine (197). Hence it is the task of the Jewish feminist to revalue women’s experience of the body and of sexuality as a source of positive energy that connects us to the divine and to develop a theology in which “[f]eminist images name female sexuality as powerful and legitimate and name sexuality as part of the image of God” (210).74 Similarly, activists in the Jewish renewal movement draw on kabbalistic images of female divinity in their effort to make Judaism speak to the contemporary Jew. In The Jew and the Lotus (1994), Roger Kamenetz documents dialogue in India between Jewish religious leaders and the Dalai Lama.75 Based on his experiences in India, Kamenetz’s prescription for revitalizing Jewish life includes opening the door to the esoteric teachings of Jewish mysticism as the Dalai Lama advised. He sees this as particularly important in overcoming patriarchal aspects of Judaism. Kamenetz argues that feminist reform of Judaism, while a welcome development, has focused on external practice and failed to acknowledge women’s uniqueness. Feminist reforms “are in effect ‘disembodied’; what’s missing is a deeper acknowledgment of the body, and also of the body of literature in Judaism 74

Levitt astutely points out that by advocating long-term relationships similar to marriage, Plaskow imposes normative and theological claims on the erotic that undermine and contradict Lorde’s notion of the erotic’s liberatory power. She sees Plaskow’s text as contradictory, offering on the one hand a liberal feminist vision of inclusion, and, on the other, a more liberating vision in which there is no normative ideal (Levitt 1997: 96-104).

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El-ami’s novel resonates with Kamenetz’s book in interesting ways. For example, Kamenetz describes how, far removed from the pressures of Jewish politics, this creative delegation could realize in India new possibilities for Jewish prayer (Kamenetz 1994: 5758; cf. El-ami 1999: 110, 111). 165

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that might deepen the change” (220). Kamenetz finds such acknowledgment of female embodiment and sexuality submerged just below the surface of traditional practices. He notes that before the Torah reading Jews pray to the Merciful Father [Av harahamim], who, since the root of “rahamim” is “rehem” [womb], might just as well be “our Wombly Father” (220).76 In Seeing the Voices, we do not encounter the “Wombly Father,” but rather a scene of divine revelation that works a similar reversal of traditional Jewish images of divinity. Following the birth of her child, Yona relates: I close my eyes. Something calls to me. I hear someone calling, but I don’t understand. I open my eyes and see before me something pale and white approaching me slowly, approaching and calling me in its sweet voice. And maybe it’s her voice, my mother’s voice? No, it is not my mother’s voice. I listen, try to identify, and suddenly I see: it is her. It is absolutely her. And she is not my mother. I see her in the figure of a woman without body or outlines. I spread before her the two chambers of my heart, my gaping womb, my entire open body, my soul that continues to wander and move about the room. And she comes straight to me in her pale and faceless flight. Here I hear, here I see the sweet voice of silence, the voice of longing. And surely—the voice is her voice, the sweet voice of God. This is my God and how was I not able to hear her until now? And God comes to me . . . (Elami 1999: 300).

El-ami again invokes Wallach’s poem “Never Will I Hear the Sweet Voice of God” but this time to express divine presence and not its absence. The voice of longing for a physical, embodied love comes full circle to become a longing for divine presence answered in the experience of natality. Yona’s vision is of a loving female God, who is also the traditional Jewish God, “elohim.” This is a God without a body, whose presence is sensed through bodily experience.

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For earlier feminist arguments on the “gender” of God based on such biblical epithets, see Trible (1978).

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

A long road has been traveled from Bat Shahar’s muted criticism of Orthodoxy to El-ami’s bold spiritual journey toward the experience of a distinctively feminine and feminist spirituality. In the preceding discussion, I have explored women’s fiction written between 1980 and the present that is by or about Orthodox Jewish women and that engages conflict between feminism and Orthodoxy. These texts represent women’s diverse attempts to negotiate a fraught terrain. They range from critique of Orthodoxy to a revaluing of tradition initiated by American women writers out of a sense of loss and rupture and continued by Israeli women who seek in different ways fully to claim both female autonomy and Jewish culture and spirituality. I have analyzed these literary representations of Orthodoxy by examining challenging issues that recur throughout this corpus: female embodiment, mother-daughter relations, attitudes toward traditional sources, and Israeli politics. Out of the diversity of women’s writing on Orthodoxy, we can define several approaches to these issues which illuminate responses to feminism in modern literature and the ways in which women continue to be agents of change within Orthodoxy and Jewish culture. The first group of authors that I address reject, with varying degrees of ambivalence, Jewish Orthodoxy (Bat Shahar, Reisman, Rotem). These late twentieth and early twenty-first century Israeli women writers who left or remain within the haredi framework perceive women’s quest for self-realization to be irreconcilable with haredi norms. Features shared by the narratives of this group of writers include portrayal of repressed female sexuality, weak, absent or monstrous mothers and ironic reference to or avoidance of traditional sources. Further, the narratives often engage the themes, images or even narrative structure of the American women’s consciousness-raising novel. In this vein Bat Shahar, Reisman and Rotem portray the disjunction between a heroine’s inner life and expected social role. A Bat Shahar heroine will apply a thick mask of makeup to hide an authentic self, illequipped for a social reality against which she passively rebels by retreating 167

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into a fantasy world. Rotem’s protagonist in Mourning experiences a split consciousness, observing herself as if from a distant perspective, numbly undergoing the rites that mark passage to haredi womanhood. Reisman presents a dysfunctional haredi community in which a wide range of characters resort to dissembling and disguise to cope with the intense pressure on the individual to conform with haredi social norms. Representation of the split self, a typical feature of earlier American feminist fiction, reflects here the impossibility of female subject autonomy within haredi culture. These novels, again in the tradition of the consciousness-raising novel and Amalya Kahana-Carmon’s earlier Israeli novels of feminist complaint, tend to expose as bankrupt the promise of romance and marriage. In Bat Shahar’s fiction, husbands and fathers within the haredi community are domineering, authoritarian figures. Similarly in Rotem’s Mourning marriage is a condition of enslavement. These authors depict the position of women in haredi society as unrelentingly bleak, because protagonists who do not marry are marginalized figures. In Reisman’s novel, a canceled wedding seems to the heroine so calamitous that it causes her to feign a state of paralysis from which she lacks the will to emerge. In contrast to theological writings by haredi women who derive a sense of power from women’s role in haredi life and from Jewish rituals relating to women’s bodies, the narratives in this category tend to feature protagonists who experience their bodies as cold, diseased, dysfunctional, or beyond their control. Moreover, in these anatomies of oppression and repression, relationships within the family offer women little satisfaction. Consistent with Hirsch’s perception of a lack of a maternal legacy in nineteenth century women’s fiction, these writers of haredi life present mothers as weak and passive, or, alternatively, domineering. In either case, faced with the pressure to conform with strict rules for the socialization and early marriage of their children, mothers themselves fail to communicate with their daughters and thus their relationships lack emotional candor. Only in Rotem’s I Loved So Much, in which women abandon ultra-Orthodoxy, as did Rotem herself, do nurturing relationships between mother or mother figures and daughters become possible. In that novel, she portrays mothering beyond Orthodox culture, which Halbertal Hartman has described in her study of mothering in the Modern Orthodox community, as enabling communication between mothers and daughters. Negative portrayals of haredi women’s lives by women who live within the haredi framework (Bat Shahar, Reisman) demonstrate both the gender consciousness and the ambivalence of haredi women. In contrast to the closed, claustrophobic settings that this literature portrays, it is clear that, 168

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at least in regard to gender consciousness, these haredi writers have reached out and drawn from the secular world. But despite the oppressiveness of the haredi norms that Bat Shahar and Reisman depict, they live within the haredi framework. Bat Shahar’s ambivalence about her protest is expressed by her lyrical-impressionist style, which serves, particularly in her earlier writing, to mute the feminist message that emerges more clearly in her later work. However, such ambivalence is not always a feature of narratives about haredi life; it is virtually absent in the novels of both Reisman, who remains in the haredi world, and Rotem, who left it. The writers in this group, along with the American born Naomi Ragen, whose familiarity with the haredi community is unquestionable, believe that their fiction serves a consciousness-raising function within the haredi community. This aspect of their writing is largely ignored by Israeli reviewers, who focus on its impact on secular Israelis in an environment of conflict between religious and secular. The comments of Bat Shahar, Rotem and Ragen show that these writers believe that a haredi audience exists for their subversive fiction, despite the outward conformity of many women to norms that include hostility toward fiction critical of haredi ways. The existence of such an audience is bolstered by the findings of sociologist Tamar El Or, who found in her study of Gur hasidic women a widespread gender consciousness and a questioning of the role of women in haredi society that does not necessarily result in rebellion. In contrast to these Israeli representations of haredi life, American Jewish women writers have portrayed Jewish, including haredi Orthodoxy, as a refuge from a bankrupt secular culture. In these American narratives Orthodoxy is often portrayed as somewhat flexible so that women can both assert subject automony and remain loyal to the majestic traditions with which they were raised, or which they adopt. Thus, Goodman and Mirvis are concerned with the ways in which women’s work is central to transmission of tradition, highlighting in narratives that resonate with a feminism of difference, the close bonds and rich communal life forged by Sabbath and holiday celebrations. Others, such as Roiphe, Ragen and Lagnado, are critical of a pure equality feminism that erodes family and community. In the American narratives, Orthodoxy, rather than threatening self-realization, beckons the secular to retrieve and reengage with a life-sustaining Jewish spirituality and with a supportive community. It is difficult to draw general conclusions about the relationship between biography and the literature because of the heterogeneity of the backgrounds of the writers I discuss. Moreover, focusing on Orthodoxy as a literary theme, rather than limiting my inquiry to writers from Orthodox 169

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backgrounds, allows consideration of the values of Orthodoxy from a range of perspectives, including that of the secular Jew. However, it is notable that unlike the rejectionist group of writers described above, none of the Israeli or American writers who present Orthodoxy from a positive perpsective live within the haredi framework. Ragen who has identified herself as ultraOrthodox might be a possible exception to this generalization, but she has taken pains to distance herself from the Israeli haredi community she attempts to reform. This fact underlines the degree to which those writers who do live within the haredi context experience gender boundaries and other aspects of Orthodoxy as non-negotiable. On the other hand, writers who come from or write primarily about less restrictive Orthodox milieus (Kedar, Magen, El-Ami) are more sympathetic to Orthodoxy in general. The second group of Israeli writers, Yochi Brandes, Mira Kedar, and Emily Amrousi, explore possibilities for synthesis between tradition and modernity, often employing feminist perspectives to criticize aspects of national religious ideology. Despite their differing viewpoints on West Bank settlement, the narratives of these writers draw heavily on traditional Jewish sources, emphasize the expansion of women’s roles, and focus on the role of Zionist and religious Zionist ideology in either impeding (Brandes) or advancing (Kedar) synthesis between Judaism and secular humanism. Brandes’ fiction explicitly engages political issues, rejecting both extreme secularism, and the separatist position of the Israeli haredi community. She explores the secular religious rift during the period of the founding of the state of Israel, critiquing the Zionist mythos of toughness and opposition of male Hebrew and female Jew. Her novel, Hagar, rejects totalizing identities and argues for a synthesis between Zionism and Judaism. In her novel Quench Love, Brandes demonizes the settlers’ movement, which she attempts to distinguish from Modern Orthodoxy. She portrays Gush Emunim as an expression of the exaggerated masculinity that the Zionist movement cultivated during the pre-state era. As such it is a religiously motivated vehicle for the release of innate aggression by pathologically violent characters. Her fiction develops a feminist perspective that allies women with “others” in general to take issue with religious nationalist ideology and the Zionist mythos of toughness. In Brandes’ fiction, any synthesis between Judaism and modernity depends on rejecting just those visions of a “greater Israel” centered around religious ideals that Kedar’s and Amrousi’s narratives endorse. Kedar, herself an Orthodox resident of the West Bank community Ofra, represents women as leaders and community builders carrying forward the resacralization of Jewish land. Settlement of the West Bank by religiously motivated settlers 170

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provides women with leadership roles and the opportunity to participate fully in carrying out the religious nationalist ideal of synthesizing Zionist nationalism and religious idealism. At the same time, her rhetoric enlists theories of gender difference as she argues for the importance of incorporating distinctively female persectives in elucidating sacred texts. This expansion of women’s roles is consistent with the continuing effort to marry Jewish tradition and humanism. Kedar’s narratives evoke the delicate balance between submission to religious authority and tradition and advocacy of feminist perspectives within Orthodoxy. Both Brandes and Kedar work out issues of female autonomy within the framework of broad advocacy for synthesis between Judaism, nationalism and universal humanism in their varying visions of an ideal balance. The third and final set of Israeli writers that I discuss, Mira Magen and Lilach Galil El-ami, employs a poetics of the body to highlight positive features of Orthodox Jewish spirituality. Thus, Mira Magen, who herself wavers between identification with and distance from the Orthodoxy in which she was raised, draws upon essentialist notions of gender identity approved by Orthodoxy. At times she idealizes Orthodoxy, and often associates haredi womanhood with sensuality, fecundity and with acceptance of human corporeality. However, she portrays independent, autonomous protagonists who leave Orthodox frameworks, even as they often articulate an ethic in part related to their religious roots and based on recognition of human interrelatedness and connection. A writer from a secular background, Galil El-ami takes further a poetics of the body to explore Jewish spirituality. Her protagonist liberates herself from the conservative mores of the religious kibbutz where she was raised but longs for feelings of transcendence she had experienced during traditional Jewish prayer. In her spiritual search she challenges theological dichotomy between body and spirit so that revelation at the end of this novel of a distinctly Jewish God is attained by way of lesbian sexuality and the experience of childbirth. In these narratives, writers who place themselves and position their protagonists at a distance from Orthodoxy (to varying degrees) use female embodiment as a starting point to synthesize feminism and Judaism, consistent with the emphasis on childbearing in both Jewish and Israeli culture. Finally, the literature that I analyze shares many features that connect it to women’s fiction in general. I have already pointed out some similarities between the American women’s consciousness-raising novel and fiction about haredi Orthodoxy. Another interesting point of similarity is a focus on mother-daughter relationships consistent with trends in contemporary women’s literature and critical evaluation in general. Critics of Anglo171

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American women’s literature have shown a historical progression from depiction of alienation to understanding between mothers and daughters. In the representation of Orthodoxy, the nature of mother-daughter dynamics correlates closely to the type of religious environment portrayed. In the Israeli narratives mother-daughter relationships tend to be irreconcilable in the haredi context, but are less so in Modern Orthodox settings. In the American narratives I discuss, where Orthodoxy in general is presented as more flexible, mother-daughter relationships tend to be depicted positively and a return to Judaism sometimes becomes the catalyst for motherdaughter reconciliation. The responses to conflict between feminism and Orthodoxy that I have outlined here range from rejection of Orthodoxy to a range of attempts to synthesize tradition and modernity. In different ways, some more obvious and others less visible, these responses support the historian Menahem Friedman’s thesis that women are agents of change in Orthodox society and more generally in Jewish culture. As I have argued, American writers tend to stress preservation of tradition, while Israeli women writers address, in part, an audience of women who they believe are receptive to a more subversive message. While it is unclear what questioning of gender roles portends for women who remain within haredi society, production by haredi women of fiction opens up a new avenue of expression. Second, narratives such as those of Kedar, Rapoport and Brandes that represent Modern Orthodoxy engage with the quiet revolution that is expanding women’s public role in national religious and Modern Orthodox society as women take on leadership positions, and expand their Jewish literacy. Third, often Israeli women writers do not reject either Orthodox Judaism or feminism, but instead develop plots and construct complex characters that blur the lines between secular and religious identity. Even if only on the level of private consciousness, they adjust and remake their religious and cultural identity, staking out a middle ground between secular and religious that has heretofore not been well-developed either in Israeli literature or public practice.

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INDEX

A Abramov, Tehilla 18 The Secret of Jewish Femininity: Insights into the Practice of Taharat HaMishpachah 18 n.10

Abramovitch, S. Y. 36 n15, 91 n37, 103 The Travels of Benjamin the Third 103

Abulafia, Avraham 111 Agnon, S. Y. 36 n15, 41, 51, 63 n.27, 91 n.37, 97, 110, 111, 124, 127, 127 n.54, 133 ’Agudat hasofer [The Tale of the Scribe] 63 n.27 Bidmi yameiha [In the Prime of Her Life] 51, 110 Me’oyev le’ohev [From Enemy to Friend] 127

Alcoff, Linda, Martin 73 n53 Almog, Ruth 3, 22, 24, 33, 37, 42, 54, 60 159 n.70 Shorshei avir [Roots of Air] 22, 42, 60 Tikkun omanuti [Artistic Mending] 54 ’Et hazar veha’oyev [The Stranger and the Foe] 159 n.70

Alterman, Natan 134 Kokhavim bahutz [Stars Outside] 134 Pegisha le’ein ketz [Meeting Without End] 134

Amrousi Emily 130-132, 138, 170 Tris [The Settler] 130

B ba’alot teshuva 11, 11 n.8, 18, 93 Balaban, Avraham 39, 122 186

Band, Arnold 127 n54 Baris, Sharon Deykin 75 Baron, Devora 61, 61 n26 Bar-Yosef, Yehoshua 1 Bat Shahar, Hanna x, xi, 1, 5, 12, 19, 23, 25, 29-46, 48-56, 60, 66, 68-69, 120, 152, 167-169 Ha-na’ara me’agam mishigan [The Girl From Lake Michigan] 32 n.14, 34, 36-37, 40, 43, 46, 50-54 Likro la’atalefim [Calling the Bats] 32 n.14, 34 Nimfa Levana, Seira Meshugaat [White Nymph, Wild Satyr] 32 n.14, 50 Osnat 45, 45 n.19 Rikud ha-parpar [The Dancing Butterfly] 32 n.14, 34 Seven Days of Feasting 36, 41, 43 Sham sirot ha-dayig [Look, the Fishing Boats] 32 n.14, 34, 36, 36 n.15, 40, 43-45 Sipurei ha-kos [Stories of the Owl] 32 n.14, 34 Tirtza vekamiliya [Tirtza and Camellia] 36-37, 43 Tzlalim Ba-Rei [Shadows in the Mirror] 32 n.14, 50 The Wings of the Stork 37-38, 41, 43-44 Yonkey ha-devash ha-metukim [Sweet Honey Birds] 32 n.14, 36, 37 n.16, 38, 45, 53

Battersby, Christine 148-149, 148 n60, 149 n61 Baumel, Judith, 13, 102 n42 Ben Yehuda, Netiva 3, 107 n.46

INDE X

Bellow, Saul 70 n.31 Ben Gurion, David 7, 25 n.11 Ben-Yehuda, Netiva 3, 107 n.46 Bialik, Hayim Nahman, 36 n.15, 103, 108, 108 n.48 Metei midbar 103

Blaustein, Rahel 24 Blickle, Katrinka 72 n.32 Boyarin, Daniel 133 Brandes, Yocheved (Yochi) x-xi, 19, 2324, 29-30, 100-103, 105-123, 126, 135, 138-139, 152, 170-172 Gemar Tov [Getting Out For Good] 102, 102 n.40 Hagar 102, 102 n.41, 104, 106, 109, 112-113, 118, 170 Lekhabot et ha’ahava [Quench Love] x, 102, 102 n.42, 109-110, 112, 114115, 117-121, 126, 135, 170 Gar‘inim levanim [White Seeds] 102, 102 n.41, 106 Malachim Gimel [Kings III] 114

D Danzger, Herbert 4 Davidman, Lynn 11 n.8, 89, 93 Davidson Cathy N. 22 Davis, Menachem 123 De Beauvoir, Simone 3, 16-17, 56, 5859, 61-61, 148 n.60, 164 The Second Sex 16, 62

degeneracy 103-104 Derrida, Jacques 16 Dinnerstein, Dorothy 16, 59 Mermaid and the Minotaur 16

Don-Yehiya, Eliezer 27-28 DuPlesis, Rachel Blau xi n.2, 76, 156

E Eisen, Arnold M. 94 Elon, Amos 104 El-Or, Tamar, xii, 6 n.2, 8-9, 11, 14, 18, 26-17, 29, 33, 69, 72, 89, 122, 128, 135, 137, 160 Maskilot veburot [Educated and Ignorant] 8

Brenner, Yosef Haim 36 n.15 Broner, E. M. 22 Brown, Lyn Mikel 21 Burch C. Beth 77 Burstein Janet Handler x, 22

embodiment 15-16, 19, 144, 148, 148 n.60, 164, 166-167, 171 Even-Shoshan, Avraham 135 Erlich Tzur 102 n.42

C

F

Caplan, Kimmy 8 Carlebach, Shlomo 111 Chodorow, Nancy 19-22, 143

Farwell, Marilyn 156-158 Feldman, Yael vii, xi n.2, 1-3, 16-17, 19, 21-25, 35, 39, 42, 53-54, 60-61, 65, 67-68, 98, 107 n.46, 112, 115, 117 n.53, 126, 144, 150 n.62, 151, 154 n.66, 157 n.68, 158-159

The Reproduction of Mothering 19

Cixous, Helene 22 Clement, Catherine 22 Cohen Steven M. 77, 94 Cohen, Tova 23-24, 54, 98-99, 114 Cohen, Zafrira Lidofsky 59 n.24, 152 n.63, 154 n.66, 155 n.67 Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman 154 n66 Shirata shel Yona Wallach hayeta ner leragleiha [The Poetry of Yona Wallach Lit Her Way] 152 n.63

consciousness-raising xi, 30, 56, 58, 60 n.25, 65, 68-69, 76, 167-169, 171

No room of their own 2

Felski, Rita 65 feminism x-xii, 1-5, 10-14, 16-18, 33, 70-71, 74-76, 79, 119-122, 167, 169, 171-172 Fishberg Maurice 103-104 The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment 104

Fishman, Sylvia Barack 13, 18 Foucault, Michel 17

187

INDE X

Frankiel, Tamar 18 n.10 The Voice of Sarah: Feminine Spirituality and Traditional Judaism 18 n.10

French, Marilyn 80 The Women’s Room 80

Freud, Sigmund 20, 23, 157 Friedan, Betty 56, 58, 62 Friedlander, Judah 29 Friedman, Menahem 4-8, 26, 172 Furman, Anrew 92

G Galil El-ami, Lilach xi-xii, 19, 23-24, 29, 70, 99, 139, 152-156, 159-163, 165167, 170-171 Akhshav tikhtevi [Now Write!] 153 Drama beyom ’aviv [Drama on a Spring Day] 153 Higale na uferos [Please Appear and Spread] 153 Le’olam lo eshma od [Never Will I Hear Again] 153 Ro’a et hakolot [Seeing the Voices] 152

Genesis 58-59, 63, 107 n.46, 112113, 133, 151 Gilligan, Carol 17, 21-23, 143 In a Different Voice 17

Gilman, Sander 103, 105 Ginzberg Louis 37 n.16, Goldstein, Rebecca xi, 23, 71, 88, 9092 Mazel 88, 90-91, 93

Goldin Judah 133 Goodman, Allegra xi, 23, 71, 76-80, 83, 88-91, 93-94, 97, 169 Kaaterskill Falls 71, 77-78, 83 Paradise Park 88-90, 93-94, 97 Total Immersion 78 The Family Markowitz 78

Gordon, Aaron David 104 Gottkind, Naomi 34-35, 40, 44, 102 n.42 Govrin Nurit 61 n.26 Greene Gayle 2 n.1 Greenberg, Blu 13-14 Greenfeld 13 188

Greenfield, Tzvia 27 Hem mefahdim [They are Scared] 27

Gross, Netty 72 n.33 Grossman, David 128 Grossman, Susan 6 n.4 Gur, Batya 35-36

H Hafetz Hayim 5 Handelman, Susan 132 Hanson, Clare 18-19, 144, 148 Hartman, Halbertal Tova 45, 168 Halio, Jay 97 Hareven, Shulamith 3, 33, 53, 117, 117 n.53, 126, 128, 142, 148 n.59, 151, 159 ’Aharaei hayaldut [After Childhood] 126, 151 Bedidut [Loneliness] 53, 159 ’Ir Yamim Rabim [City of Many Days] 126, 142, 148 n.59 The Dulcinea Syndrome 117 n.53 Messiah or Knesset 117 n.53

Hazon Ish (Chason Ish) 25 n.11 Hausman, Avraham 105 Hausman, Hayim 105 n.45 Haut, Rivka 6 n.4 Heilman, Samuel C. 77 Hendel, Yehudit 24 Heschel, Susannah 13 Hess, Tamar 34 Hirsch, Marianne 22, 55, 168 Hirsch, Samson Raphael 57, 77 Hogeland, Lisa Maria 56, 60, 60 n.25, 73 n.35 homoeroticism xii, 17, 22, 52-53, 159 Hovev, Yemima 138 Hyman, Paula 5, 10

I Idel, Moshe 117 Irigaray, Luce 16, 21-22, 42, 53, 148 n.60, 164 In The Speculum of the Other Woman 16

Israel, Yael 29-30, 72 n.33

INDE X

J Jacobs, Louis 115 n.51 JanMohamed, Abdul 106 Jewish renewal 74-75, 165 Joyce, James 68

Kook, Tzvi Yehuda 115 n.50 Kugel, James 133

L Lacan, Jacques Marie Émile 17, 23 Lagnado, Lucette 71, 94-96, 169 The Arrogant Years 94

K Kafka, Franz 125 Kahana-Carmon, Amalya x, 3, 24, 32-33, 35, 39-40, 42, 60, 126, 128, 146, 168 Lema’lah bemontifer [Up in Montifer] 39, 42 Veyare’ah be‘emek ‘ayalon [And Moon in the Valley of Ayalon] 60 The Bridge of the Green Duck 126

Kamenetz, Roger 165-166, 165 n.75 The Jew and the Lotus 165

Katz, Elihu 4 Katzir, Judith 159 Hine ’ani mathila [Here I Begin] 159

Kaufman, Debra Renee 11 n.8, 18, 89 Kaufman, Michael 17 n.9 Feminism and Judaism: Women, Tradition and the Women’s Movement 17 n.9

Kedar, Mira xi, 19, 24, 30, 70, 76, 100, 122-139, 152, 160, 170-172 Dalet amot [Four Measures] 135, 137 Echad Mi-Elef [One in a Thousand] 137 Mikol makom [In Any Event] 123, 125126, 135 Kokhavim bifnim [Stars Within] 134 Ratzo vashov [To and Fro] 122, 128129, 137 In the Presence of Three 128 Shutafei Sod [Parties to a Confidence] 129

Klepfisz, Irene 159 Kristeva, Julia 22 Koren, Irit 158-159, 160 n.71 Aron betokh aron [Altering the Closet] 158

Kook, Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen 26, 107, 108 n.47, 115-115, 123, 128130, 134 ’Orot hateshuva [Lights of Repentance] 108, 128-129

Lapid, Shulamit 3 Lauret, Maria 2, 32, 79 n.36 lesbian; lesbian continuum xii, 19, 53, 99, 152-153, 155, 157-159, 164, 171 Lessing, Doris May 60 n.25 Four Gated City 60 n.25

Levine, Baruch 123-124 Levitt, Laura 165 n.74 Levy, Amnon 27 Liebman, Charles S. 4, 26, 28 Liebrecht, Savyon 128 A Room on the Roof 128

Litman, Jane Rachel 18, 18 n.10 Lorde, Audre 157-158, 165, 165 n.74

M Magen, Mira xi-xii, 19, 29-30, 128, 139-152, 170-171 Ah ve’ahot [Brother and Sister] 147 Al take bakir [Don’t Knock Against the Wall] 140-142, 148-151 Beshokhvi uvekumi ’isha [Love, After All] 140, 143-146, 149-151 Gerbera Daisies at Half Price 145 Kaftorim rekhusim heytev [Well Buttoned Up] 140 Mal’akheiha nirdemo kulam [Her Angels Have All Fallen Asleep] 145-146, 150-151

Maimonides 5 n.2 Malamud, Bernard 70 n.31 maternal thiking 21, 71, 80 Mead, Margaret 59 Megged, Aharon 49, 104 n.44 Ha-hai al ha-met [Living on the Dead] 104 n.44

Meltzer, Yoram 35 Miller, Nancy K. xi n.2, 38-39, 76 189

INDE X

Mintz, Alan 1 Mirvis, Tova 81, 83-84, 87-88, 169 The Ladies Auxiliary 81 The Outside World 81

Moporgo, Rahel 24 Moskona-Lerman, Billy 35 mother-daughter relationship 15, 1922, 42-43, 46, 50, 53, 55, 64, 155, 156, 158, 171-172 Myers, Jody 18, 18 n.10

N Naveh, Hannah 65 n.30 Navot, Amnon 34 Ner-David, Haviva 5 n.2, 6 n.4, 7

O Offen, Karen 17 Oren, Joseph 34 Oz, Amos 1, 40 Mikha’el Sheli [My Michael] 40

P Paley, Gracen 70 n.31 Peli, Gilad 166 n.52 Peri, Menahem 54 Plaskow, Judith 13, 164-165, 165 n.74 postcolonial xi, 126 pre-oedipal bond 22, 42, 156-157 Psalms 6, 133

R

Ratner, Tsila Abramovitz 23, 29-30, 39-40, 40 n.17, 42, 44-45, 46 n.20, 48, 48 n.22, 50, 66, 69, 73-74, 120121, 149-150 Rattok, Lily 2, 128 Ravitsky, Ruti 63 Kor’ot mibereshit: nashim yotsrot kotvot al sefer 63 bereshit [Israeli Women Write About the Women of Genesis] 63

Reisman, Yocheved x-xi, 5, 12, 23, 42, 46-50, 55-56, 60, 66, 68-69, 120-121, 167-169 Tzipor yeshena [Sleeping Bird] 46, 121

religious ix-xii, 1, 3-7, 9-10, 12-15, 1718, 24-33, 37, 41, 45, 48, 51, 55-57, 62-63, 71-78, 80-82, 84, 87-89, 9395, 98, 100-102, 104-106, 108-109, 111-114, 116-119, 121-132, 135-142, 144, 149-155, 159, 160 n.71, 161162, 165, 169-172 Rich, Adrienne 21-23, 53, 76, 157-158, 165 Roof, Wade Clark 162 n.73 Roiphe, Anne xi, 23, 71, 80-81, 88, 97 Lovingkindness 71, 80, 88, 93, 97

Roller, Alyse 11-12, 17, 27, 31, 33, 60, 120 The Literary Imagination of the UltraOrthodox Jewish Woman 11

Rotem, Yehudit x-xi, 5, 8-11, 29-30, 45, 47, 49, 55-69, 72, 74, 77, 97, 102 n.40, 118, 142, 152, 164, 167-169 ’Ahavti Kol Kakh. [I Loved So Much] 58-59, 64-67, 74, 99, 168 ‘Ahot Rehoka [Distant Sisters 9, 10 n.7, 45, 56, 60, 63, 64 n.29, 66, 69 Keri’a [Mourning] 8, 47, 56, 58, 64-68, 72, 77, 102 n.40, 142, 164, 168

Rabin, Yitzhak 112, 128-129 Radway, Janice 71-72, 76 Ragen, Naomi xi, 12, 29-30, 68-69, 7174, 76-77, 79, 88-89, 91, 169-170 The Ghost of Hannah Mendes 88 Jephte’s Daughter 69, 72, 72 n.32 A Minyan of Women 72 The Sacrifice of Tamar 73-74, 89, 164 Sotah 72-74, 89

Rapoport, Nessa 10 n.7, 57 n.23, 71, 74-76, 97-99, 164, 172 Preparing for Sabbath 74, 97-98 The Woman Who Lost Her Names 57 n.23 190

Roth, Philip 70 n.31 Ruddick, Sara 21, 71, 80

S second aliya 1, 102 n.41, 104 Schwartz, Yig’al 1 Shalom Aleikhem 46 n.21 Shir hashirim 46 n.21

INDE X

Shakdiel, Leah 68-69 Shaked, Gershon 133 Shemer, Idit 159

W Wallach, Yona 59 n.24, 152 n.63, 153156, 158, 160-163, 166

Ani lo yekhola shekoa‘sim ‘alay [I Can’t When They Get Angry at Me] 159 Az ma ’at be’emet rotsa [So What Is It That You Really Want] 159

Schenirer, Sarah 6, 6 n.3 Seidman, Naomi 61 n.26 Seri, Dan 35 Shalvi, Alice 2-3 Sheleg, Yair 26-28, 104, 108 n.47 The New Religious 27

Shilo, Margalit 13 Shirav, Pnina 22, 39, 42, 60 Song of Songs 97-99, 115, 115 n.71, 117, 121, 163 Showalter, Elaine x, 2 n.1, 15 Silverston, Sondra 145 n.57 Sprinzak, Ehud 26, 109 n.49, 110, 115 n.50, 116, 116 n.52 Stadler, Nurit 8 Stanton, Domna 22

T Tanakh ix n.1, 151 Tchernichovsky, Shaul 108 Torah 5, 5 n.2, 7 n.5, 9 n.6, 25, 25 n.11, 61, 77, 83-84, 86-87, 97, 121, 123, 132-133, 136, 138, 158, 166

Le‘olam lo eshma et kolo hamatok shel ha’elohim [Never Will I Hear the Sweet Voice of God] 160, 166 Tefillin 154 n.66 Two Gardens 59, 163

Weininger, Otto 103 Wisemon, Tamar 11 Wolf, Avraham Yosef 8 Woolf, Virginia 3, 34, 42, 42 n.18, 60 n.25, 150 n.68 A Room of One’s Own 60 n.25, 157 n.68

Y Yehoshua, A.B. 1, 103 n.43, 112-113, 117, 117 n.53, 161 Mar Mani [Mr. Mani] 112 The Wall and the Mountain 117 n.53 Between Right and Right 117 n.53

Z Zakovitch, Yair 114 Zelda 154 n.66 Zisquit, Linda 154 n.66, 154 n.67, 160 n.72

Zohar 134

191