Hebrew Classics: A Journey Through Israel's Timeless Fiction and Poetry 9781618110756

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Hebrew Classics A journey through Israel’s timeless fiction and Poetry

---------------------------------  Dvir Abramovich ----------------------------------

Israel: Society, Culture, and History

Yaacov Yadgar (Political Studies, Bar-Ilan University), Series Editor

Editorial board Alan Dowty, Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Notre Dame Tamar Katriel, Communication Ethnography, University of Haifa Avi Sagi, Hermeneutics, Cultural studies, and Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University Allan Silver, Sociology, Columbia University Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Ethnicity, London School of Economics Yael Zerubavel, Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University

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Hebrew classics A journey through Israel’s

Timeless Fiction and Poetry

--------------------------  Dvir Abramovich ---------------------------

Boston 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book as available from the Library of Congress.  Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-93623594-0 Book design by Olga Grabovsky On the cover: Published by Academic Studies Press in 2012 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Dedicated to my children Lori and Ethan, who are with me through every step of this journey, and who are my pillars of strength and greatest source of inspiration. No father has ever had two more wonderful and beautiful children.

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Contents

Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  ix Chapter I An Idyll of Rural Jewish Life Shaul Tchernichovsky’s “Boiled Dumplings”  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11 Chapter II Human Compassion as a Substitute for Divine Protection Yehuda Amichai’s “God Has Mercy on Kindergarten Children”  . . . . .  23 Chapter III Berating an Indifferent God Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s “On the Slaughter”  . . . . . . . . . . . .  35 Chapter IV Living in the Aftermath of the Holocaust Nightmare Shulamith Hareven’s "Twilight," "Loneliness," and "The Witness"   . . . .  49 Chapter V The Damaged Personhood of Holocaust Survivors Haim Gouri’s The Chocolate Deal  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  67 Chapter VI Confronting the Incomprehensible Reality of the Holocaust Universe Hanoch Bartov’s The Brigade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Chapter VII A Clash of Generations Aharon Megged’s "The Name"   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  93 — vi —

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Chapter VIII  The Kibbutz Girl, the Arab, and the Snake, or, just a modern version of the Garden of Eden Amos Oz's "Nomad and viper" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  113 Chapter IX And the Righteous Shall be Rewarded Dvorah Baron’s “Sunbeams”  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  133 Bibliography  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  149 INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  156

— vii —

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Introduction

This book is a celebration of great Hebrew novels, short stories, and poems. Each piece of literature examined here has been recognized as a major and substantial work within the Israeli and, occasionally, the international literary canon. Of course, greatness comes in many forms. Yet the golden thread that runs through the canvass of works presented here is that they seem remarkably fresh in their subject matter as when they were read decades ago. In a sentence, they have not dated and their prominence has not waned. Needless to say, tastes differ, and you may believe that another eleven works should have been selected. The inevitable agonizing headache I often suffered during the writing of this book involved the predictable and taxing concerns about inclusions and exclusions of texts. I was well aware of the inevitable questions I knew would be posed — “ Why did you leave that out?” or “Should you not have covered this author or that novel?” But the huge range of choices available, and the rich furrow of the field I could plough, meant that there are many literary gems that could not be represented here. One of the delights in writing this book has been the opportunity to include novels, short stories, and poems from various decades that have made a personal impact and that have meant so much to me. The simple truth is that my choice of materials stemmed first and foremost from my love for them and because of their literary, historical, and artistic value. But above all, it was because they made my heart pound when I first imbibed their words, images, forms, symbols, and messages. Since then, they have populated my intellectual imagination, and I have returned to them with some frequency. — viii —

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This project is also in many ways a response to the urgent request of teachers (with whom I have collaborated for more than a decade in presenting the splendor of Hebrew culture and fiction) to publish a volume that in a clear and informative manner would deepen students’ appreciation of the classics and serve as a valuable learning tool. It is my sincere hope that this book will connect readers with new experiences, challenge their perceptions, provide them with insights into Israeli and Jewish culture and generate greater empathy and understanding. There may be those for whom certain names are not as recognizable as others since some of the writers featured here are not well-known outside Israel. This may inspire readers to follow up and embark on a tour of the authors’ and poets’ other landscapes. More generally, readers may choose to undertake a personal odyssey into the domain of Hebrew fiction, a vista dotted by other literary pearls that are sure to inspire them. If in a small way my efforts here serve as a gateway to introduce and provoke readers to search for other Hebrew writers and cause them to come away with a more nuanced and profound appreciation of the Hebrew canon, then this ambitious undertaking was not in vain. I wrote these essays, in part, because I sensed that many readers seemed to possess little knowledge of the riches of Hebrew literature and, in part, because they were uninterested in the classics. What I did find was that when they did read and understood the themes of each of the narratives examined here, that it made an indelible impression on them. Their reluctance had vanished, replaced by enthusiasm and by a desire to continue to excavate the mines of this wondrous universe. Over the years, I have come to believe that everyone deserves to encounter masterpieces that capture the vision, voice, and personality of a singular artist, as well as a moment in time. Frankly, I could not bear the thought that those who are not familiar with Hebrew letters may never taste the fruits of such iridescent, iconic opuses. Finally, the chief pleasure of this project has been rereading these tales of merit and discovering anew the infinite complexities and wisdoms fleshed out in the caverns and domains the stories map. I hope that readers will share the enthusiasm that I poured into this book and — ix —

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equally appreciate that literary excellence is a region we should all take a stroll in whenever possible. Like the floor of the ocean, they offer breathtaking and unexpected depths of beauty and contain incalculable joys that stir the soul. I hope that those who enjoy a good story will read this book in their homes, cafes, trains, or under a tree and that in some way the writings will transport them to the literary culture, period, and historical milieu that each work resplendently charts and embodies.

— x —

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-----------------------------------  Chapter I  -----------------------------------

An Idyll of Rural Jewish Life

Shaul Tchernichovsky’s “Boiled Dumplings” One of the giants of contemporary Hebrew poetry, Shaul Tchernichovsky was Hebrew’s most productive and original sonneteer. Creating a new linguistic canvass that reflected and spotlighted new dimensions of Jewish spiritualism, he chronicled the pioneering era taking place in early twentieth century Palestine.1 Notably, he departed from his peers in both substance and form, avoiding the preachy style common to Hebrew poetry of the time and replacing the biblical rhetoric (though not necessarily biblical poetic lexicon) with thematic and structural innovations. At heart, Tchernichovsky’s writing, while textually underwritten by the scriptures, drew on those tales to configure a new creative reality that in a key ontological sense was primarily dissimilar to the Bible. Moreover, by eschewing the archaic scriptural vocabulary of his contemporaries and employing the style of the romantic and Greek poets, he liberated Hebrew from its rigid grammatical rules and earned the title of the first modern Hebrew poet. Indeed, his revolutionary works set new trends and anchored a radical change that has influenced generations of Israeli poets. Critics lauded his exquisite depiction of character and honest writing that focused, in part, on the quotidian nature of life, celebrating, with exuberant bliss and love, the simple existence of individuals. Ushering in a new era, Tchernichovsky enriched Hebrew literature, drawing on 1

There are numerous studies on this remarkable artist. One of the best is Shaul Tchernichovsky: Mivchar ma-amarey bikoret al yetzirato, edited by Yosef Ha’efrati. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1976. — 11 —

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the endless fount of Greek variety and resources. For his longer poems, and for almost all of his idylls, he utilized the dactylic hexameter, a mode typical of the Greek epic. Propelled by a modernist yearning to reassess received traditional mores, Tchernichovsky revivified literary myth (in accordance with pantheistic values) and infused Hebrew poetry with its currents — an overtone that was sharply extraneous to the literary realm he was working within. One critic rightly noted that Tchernichovsky, free of the weight of exile and orthodoxy, “stands at the beginning of an era and he is its inaugurator.”2 In a prolific and impressive career, he penned four hundred and seventy poems, more than thirty stories, medical essays, children’s poems, stories, feuilletons, journalistic entries, and humoristic pieces. An ardent admirer of Greek culture and classics, especially their premonotheistic, pantheistic traditions, he used Greek poetic techniques and added — through his sonnets, idylls (his preferred genre), and copious translations — new elements to Hebrew poetry. In fact, in his youth, he was given the nickname “the sharp-witted Greek” for his affection for Greek mythology, and critics tagged him “The Greek.” Radiating effervescent joy and energy, Tchernichovsky’s verse was modeled on Greek prosody, relying on the culture’s philosophy and poetry. He continually underlined the pantheistic idea that God is identical to the universe. Though Tchernichovsky penned spiritual poems that tackled the subject matter of paganism and Hellenism, fundamentally the poet never found a way to reconcile with the alien culture and religion. As an example, while in a group of liturgical sonnets written in 1919 and titled “Lashemesh” (“To the Sun”) a pagan appreciation of nature is expressed, in a poem such as “Lenochach pesel Apollo” (“Before the Statue of Apollo,” 1899), the sculptor of a statue of Zeus is unmoved by his masterpiece during its dedication, but is instead awestruck by the Hebrew concept of an abstract, unreachable God. Shaul Tchernichovsky was born on August 20, 1875, in the village of Mikhailovka, on the border of the Ukraine and the Crimea, and grew up in a modern religious home in which the ideas of the enlightenment 2

Silberschlag, Eisig. Saul Tschernichowsky: Poet of Revolt. London: East and West Library; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968: 91. — 12 —

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and Zionism were openly discussed. His father, Tuvia Guttman, a storekeeper and an early Zionist, and his mother, Bila Karp, imbued the young boy with a joyous love for Jewish law and ensured that he be taught the Hebrew language and its literature. From an early age, Tchernichovsky was exposed to Talmudic texts and Hebrew poems, which led him to compose, at age twelve, a poem about the biblical Uriah the Hittite. After attending Russian school, a period that enabled him to become acquainted with Russian and world culture, he was sent to Odessa in 1890 to conclude his studies at a private High school. It was in Odessa where he learned German, Latin, and English, and where he composed his earliest Hebrew poems. His first poem, “Bachalomi” (“In My Dream”), published in December 1892, marked the beginning of his national stage, evincing an attraction to the Land of Israel and to the ideas of political Zionism. In other poems, such as “Masat nafshi” (“My Ideal,” 1893) and “Ani ma-a-min” (“I Believe,” 1894), Tchernichovsky revealed his ideological manifesto, articulating, in a personal voice, the yearnings of generations of Jews to return to the land of their forefathers. Not surprisingly, Tchernichovsky served as the honorary secretary of the Zionist organization Nes–Tziyona (The Miracle of Zion). While in Odessa, he met his mentor, the scholar Yosef Klausner, who encouraged him to concentrate on his writing and who sent his early poems to various journals. In the years 1899–1906, Tchernichovsky studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, but graduated from Lausanne. During that period, he met his future wife, Melanie Karlovna Van Gozias, an ultraorthodox Christian from a noble Russian family. The poet’s Heidelberg-Lausanne period was one of enormous artistic development, with Tchernichovsky authoring many of his most distinguished works. He then returned to Russia but struggled to secure a permanent position because of the prevalent anti-Semitism of the time. After three years, he left Russia, sojourning briefly in Constantinople, Turkey, from where he hoped to secure a post in Palestine. Failing to do so, he settled in Berlin. He traveled to Melitopol, Ukraine, and later worked as a doctor in the villages of the Kharkov district. Accused of affiliation with revolutionaries, Tchernichovsky was jailed by the Tsarist authorities in 1907. When his medical qualifications were recognized in — 13 —

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1910, he made his abode in St. Petersburg (Leningrad). “Chezyonot u-manginot aleph” (“Visions and Melodies A”) was Tchernichovsky’s first collection of poems, published in Warsaw in 1898. It included not only forty-six original poems of love and nature but also translated works. Ultimately, the collection proved to be one of his most popular, stirring readers with its romantic descriptions. At the same time, the group of verse also expressed sorrow, anger, and desperation at the struggles of the Jew within a hostile world. If Tchernichovsky claimed, through his art, that his generation was stagnant because it adhered to old values and resisted change, several of the works in “Chezyonot u-manginot aleph” celebrated the empowerment of the pioneering Jew in Palestine. In 1901, Tchernichovsky published “Chezyonot u-manginot bet” (“Visions and Melodies B”). Another literary preoccupation for Tchernichovsky was the life of King Saul, an interest stemming from the poet’s attraction to marginal, downtrodden figures, rather than to pious men. The ballad “B’Ein Dor” (“In Ein Dor,” 1893) narrates events from Samuel I, most prominently the encounter between the king and the witch at Ein Dor, and moves toward Saul’s rueful end, in a manner reminiscent of Macbeth. At every juncture of his creative life, Tchernichovsky would write five meditative pieces about King Saul. His 1937 ballad, “Anshey chayil chevel” (“A Band of Valiant Men”) again based on Samuel I and recording Saul’s tragic end, has been lauded as one of the most splendid dirges in modern Hebrew literature. There is general agreement that the idyll that emerged as Tchernichovsky’s signature medium was a vessel into which he poured his ideological tendencies. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the father of the Hebrew idyll. Remarkably, even though his idylls dealt with harsh and explosive subjects, functioning as all-purpose charge sheets against the ruling authorities and their behavior toward their subjects, on the whole, the idylls radiated good-natured tranquility. “Hakaf hashvura” (“The Wooden Spoon,” 1907), about prison life, demonstrates Tchernichovsky’s ability to marry social indictment and melancholic equanimity. Another example is the epic, highly charged “Baruch mimagenza” (“Baruch of Mainz,” 1901) which recounts Jewish history and its attendant pogroms and persecution during the period of the Crusades. Baruch, driven mad by the senseless murder of his — 14 —

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wife and by being forced to convert, kills his two daughters so as to spare them similar abasement. Tchernichovsky frequently visited the theme of Christian treatment of the Jews, displaying astonishment at the irrational savagery committed against his brethren. Hand in hand with his artistic creations, Tchernichovsky contributed medical essays to the Russian Jewish Encyclopaedia and was commissioned to edit The Book of Medicinal and Natural Science Terminology. He served as physician in the Russian army during World War I and while working as a doctor amidst the turbulent days of the Russian revolution, continued to produce fine poetry, penning another piece about King Saul, and translating poems of Anacreon, Horace, Plato, and Homer. In 1923, Hechalil (The Flute), a book of children’s poems, was published, revolving around Jewish daily life and tradition and informed by an accurate sense of childishness. Alongside his poetry, Tchernichovsky, over a span of thirty years, also wrote prose works. A large portion of them were gathered in Shloshim ushlosha sipurim (Thirty-Three Stories, 1941). Constantly traveling, between 1924 and 1928 he stayed in Hungary (where he was labeled “The King of Hebrew Poets” by the Hungarian minister of Education), was in Poland for a year at the invitation of a friend, and visited the United States. He finally immigrated to Palestine in 1931, first settling in Jerusalem and then moving to Tel Aviv, where he worked as a doctor for municipal schools. In 1935, he was awarded an honorary title by the Finnish government, his work by then gaining worldwide recognition. In 1936, after obtaining a contract with Schocken Publishing House, he moved to Jerusalem, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Afflicted for a long time with cardiac chest pain, in the final years of his life he suffered from leukemia. The last poem he composed, “Kochvei shamayim rechokim” (“Distant Stars in the Sky”), printed after 1948, once again echoed the King Saul narrative in the way its lonely hero reflects on a life lived, reminiscing about his youth — just as King Saul did in “Ein Dor.” Tchernichovsky passed away in his home in Jerusalem on October 14, 1943, and was buried in the old cemetery in Tel Aviv. In honor of his monumental contribution to Jewish culture, Beit Hasofer, an archival literary center, was posthumously renamed after him. — 15 —

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There is no doubt that Tchernichovsky was instrumental in bringing Hebrew poetry closer to European literature, in introducing major genres and in bringing to the fore innovations that realigned the parameters of the canon. His ballads are still regarded as perhaps the finest and most inventive ever written by a Hebrew poet, and his poetry has been translated into several languages, including English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. It would not be too much to state, as Silberschlag does, that the idyll was not only Tchernichovsky’s most beloved form, but also that, “he was as much the father of the Hebrew idyll as Theocritus was the father of the Greek idyll.”3 Silberschlag goes on to elucidate the poet’s unique contribution: The poetic reflection on the life of Jews in rural, southern Russia was Tschernichowsky’s gift to Hebrew literature. Before him, Hebrew writers had confined themselves to the traditional urbanism of their people. When they wanted rural themes, they turned to history. Tschernichowsky was the first modern Hebrew poet to celebrate his native district. And he had the power to lift segments of life from regional obscurity to the status of literature. In his idylls Tschernichowsky achieved mature serenity. No overt fight against accepted norms, no iconoclastic stance mars the inner repose of his long hexametric lines. The Jew is at peace with nature.4

Tchernichovsky’s first idyll, “Levivot”5 (“Dumplings”),6 was written in Heidelberg in 1902. It has been celebrated for its coherence, vibrancy, and multiplex form as well as for its engagement with weighty subject matters significant at the time of its writing. "Boiled Dumplings" vividly illustrates Tchernichovsky’s bittersweet humor, sophisticated construction and acute feel for folklore. Critic Yosef Klausner observed that "Boiled Dumplings" had become a precious asset to the New 3 4 5

6

Silberschlag, Saul Tschernichowsky, 61. Silberschlag, Saul Tschernichowsky, 61-62. I am using the English translation found in Modern Hebrew Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited and translated by Ruth Finer Mintz. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982. In the first version Tchernichovsky called the idyll Levivot mevushalot and Levivot berotchim (Cooked Dumplings and Boiled Dumplings) respectively     —     but later dropped the adjectives “cooked” and “boiled.” — 16 —

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Hebrew poetry and occupies one of the most significant positions in the canon,7 while author Maxim D. Shrayer has called it “a gem of the new Hebrew poetry.”8 Set among the pastoral fields of the Ukraine, the poem opens with a lyrical description of a bright spring morning. As the sun breaks through, the lark wakes up Gittel, the old rabbi’s widow, who rises from her warm bed. It is as if the universe, enveloped by a dreamy calm, has risen and is stunned by the splendor of the world: “It seemed as if the universe greeted her now with a charming smile / As if everything was glad, rejoicing at life’s abundant beauty.” Gittel recites the morning prayer, observes the cat licking the milk, and is overcome by the alluring smell of the pancakes yet to be cooked. Infused with desire and hunger, she descends to the basement to fetch the cheese and jugs of buttermilk essential for the dumplings she intends to prepare. It is immediately evident that the poet aims at drawing the reader into the magical and idyllic beauty of nature, braided with the simple pleasures of quaint country life. However, before long, this tranquil atmosphere is broken by the appearance of the gentile Domaha, who initiates a conversation with her neighbor. The conversation hints at the crumbling of the Old World and the emergence of a new order, which the two women struggle to understand. Tchernichovsky masterfully conveys the conservative vernacular of the two villagers, studding the verse with a patina of down-to-earth authenticity. Gittel unmistakably emblematizes the older generation, a generation that symbolizes stability and consistency and which finds it difficult to come to grips with the incoming transformational winds. Domaha, in turn, gives witness to the disintegration of Christianity: Faith has disappeared in the people Who comes to the monastery service? Two old men, three old women, while they are still alive. 7

8

Klausner, Yosef. S. Tchernichovsky, Ha-adam ve hameshorer. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press Association, 1947: 96. An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Volume 1: 1801–1953: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2007: 185. — 17 —

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Domaha empathizes with Gittel’s grief concerning the dwindling of tradition among today's Jews. Domaha remarks that the Jews of today are heretics — eating pork, smoking on the Sabbath — in sharp contrast to how they were when she was a child, when the Sabbath was sanctified. The gentile woman tells Gittel that she is ashamed to buy from a Jewish shop on the Sabbath and reproaches Zalman, the Jewish trader, for daring to sell on that holy day. The Jewish trader responds by telling Domaha’s son that his mother should become their rabbi. Here, Tchernichovsky’s ability to mix humor with gravity is much to the fore. The buried message of this unpretentious exchange between the elderly characters concerns the waning of religion, especially among the younger generation, whose attachment to the past is gradually shrinking, and a concurrent sentiment prevalent among the older generation that their role is increasingly peripheral. In fact, a close examination of the opening verse discloses that even the serene portrait of the morning encases an allusion to the loss of tradition. Specifically, the line “And tranquility dreams in everything, desolate sanctuary’s silence” links the morning silence with the stillness that reverberates inside the synagogue. Both women share the sorrow they feel at the decline of their respective religions and the associated decay in personal morality. A profound sadness dapples the women’s early morning banter, and when Domaha leaves and Gittel sifts the flour through the sieve, we realize that the epic serenity of the first lines is merely an outer one, concealing an elegiac core, representative of man’s life. As the particles of flour fall through the holes of the sieve, Gittel is struck by flashbacks of her past, recalling the ups and downs, hard labor, suffering, but also the moments of bliss she has experienced. The second chapter narrates the tragic fate of Razeleh, Gittel’s granddaughter, and is intimately connected with the deteriorating values of the younger generation. Here, Tchernichovsky attributes the inevitable downfall detailed later to the motif of migration away from the physical abode and, by extension, away from tradition. Indeed, one of the poem’s operating motifs is the breach and divergence between the generation of the fathers and the generation of the sons. Thus, Gittel’s son leaves the small town for St. Petersburg (Leningrad) where his — 18 —

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Jewish character is weakened, or at least attenuated, by the demands of adjusting to the new conditions and mores of this urban milieu. Gittel’s son exemplifies the transitional generation, the one that favors the cosmopolitan city over his childhood village. He does not accept or cling to the modern world that confronts him but merely stands in awe of the enormous developments encircling him. Affected by the overpowering metropolis, the rabbi’s son enrolls his daughter, Razeleh, in a Russian high school. His wife too accepts the dilution of customs exhibited by her husband and delights in seeing her daughter excel in her studies. Soon, the poems of Pushkin are imbibed by Razaleh instead of the scriptural and Midrashic texts she once cradled. Formally, Tchernichovsky likens the kneading of the dough by Gittel to the remolding of Razaleh’s soul at school. At this point, the poet expresses a restrained protest against the Russian education system, which compels the young woman to shed her individuality and uniqueness, and unsurprisingly causes her to ultimately rebel against such pressures. The discipline and rules of the Russian school Razaleh attends crush the pupil’s singular personality and are equated with a pair of pliers pressing down. This reinforces the poet’s social opposition to the rigid imposition of opinions and manners that he found unconscionable and appalling. Tchernichovsky draws clear parallels between Gittel’s preparation of the dumplings and her ruminations about her granddaughter. The first juxtaposition concerns the whiteness and purity of the wheat flour when it is first put through the sieve and the purity of Razaleh’s soul before the unfamiliar element has invaded her being: Clean, pure and soft — the child will open his eyes: Wrapped up in itself, the foreign element has not thrust into its soul.

Gittel remembers Razaleh as a vibrant, active child, who infused the house with merriment and joy, and who taught her doll the morning prayer Modeh Ani.9 Next, the old woman cracks six eggs and places them into wheat and flour, changing the texture’s appearance. This is akin to the child standing 9

A prayer recited by Jews upon waking up while still lying in bed. It means “I stand before Thee.” — 19 —

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outside the protection of her parents, vulnerable to all those who pass her by, who inject her with harmful ideas that leave an abscess on her soul. The third analogy is foregrounded when Gittel rolls and smoothes the dough to make it into a single layer, with uniform shape and thickness, just as the teachers in Razaleh’s school endeavored to inculcate conformity and loyalty to the regime into the hearts of the students: Rejected, stepped on, wounded, the soul of the little one contracts under the mighty force whose long pressure alienates it— it dwindles like a candle struggling with a stormy wind.

The last parallel contains an oppositional resonance. As Gittel endows the dumplings with equal size and width, as if produced in a factory, the students in the Russian gymnasium evolve into revolutionaries, in contrast to their teachers’ rigorous instruction : But sometimes the child will free itself from the pressure of its bonds, And its soul is filled with hidden hate, eternal grudge Against its oppressor,who gave it things to sanctify Against its will: having no weapons in its hands, It will cleave to everything forbidden by its tormentors..

Gittel reflects on the several encounters she had with Razaleh after her parents relocated to the city. The alienation and distance between the two is palpable. After five years, the two meet, but Gittel does not recognize her granddaughter, who is now distant and aloof: This moment gone, she opened her lovely eyes To pierce the old woman’s heart with looks Canvassing and questioning: in spirit she was already a stranger to her.

The second encounter, two years later, further compounds the remoteness and detachment that has corrupted the erstwhile intimate bond. Despite Gittel’s far-reaching concession to her granddaughter (she agrees to place Pushkin next to her religious books), she fails to connect with the young woman who has now embraced unknown ideas and attitudes. The final meeting signifies total separation. Razaleh is quiet, forlorn, devotes all her time to reading, and does not communicate with — 20 —

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her grandmother. When Gittel hands her the poems of Pushkin, in a gesture of reconciliation, the melancholic young woman, enclosed in her own world, twists her lips, insulting and wounding her grandmother. Razaleh embodies the defiant generation, shorn of nationalistic ideals and removed from the traditional anchor of home and faith. Razaleh breaks away from the confining shackles of her school when she is swept up by the currents of the Russian Revolution. We learn of Razaleh’s doom toward the poem’s coda when the old woman reads a letter sent from prison (the Fortress of Peter and Paul) where Razaleh, awaiting trial, has been incarcerated for her dissent against the cruel regime of the Tsar. Shocked by this terrifying reality and unable to grasp this depressing outcome, Gittel becomes confused and faints. As she lies unconscious on the floor, the room is bathed in rays of light that caress her cheeks and stir her into waking. Opening her eyes, she hears the boiling of the water in the pot and spies the dumplings nestled among the bubbles. The sun, which bookends the opus, functions as the source of peacefulness. On one reading, the ending links man’s actions to nature, since Gittel’s deep sorrow apparently disappears before the resplendent brightness of the sun and the bubbles which ascend to the top of the water. The idyllic spirit that pervaded the poem’s introductory lines has returned. On another reading, one could argue that the intense peace radiated by the sun and boiled dumplings serves to underscore the antithetical nature of traditional Jewish life with Razaleh’s secular calamity. The boiling of the water in the pot, steaming, storming, rushing, rising up in foam, which concludes at once the tale and the idyll, signals not only the heartbreaking terminus of the story, but also the fomenting emotions of Russian youth, rising up against those who subordinate them.

— 21 —

-----------------  Yehuda Amichai’s “God Has Mercy on Kindergarten Children” -----------------

----------------------------------  Chapter II  -----------------------------------

Human Compassion as a Substitute for Divine Protection

Yehuda Amichai’s “God Has Mercy on Kindergarten Children” Although he repeatedly rejected the appellation, by general agreement Yehuda Amichai was recognized as Israel’s poet laureate and one of the half-dozen leading poets in the world, as Mark Rudman of the Nation opined.1 Accorded international acclaim unprecedented for a contemporary Israeli poet, he was called the most widely translated Hebrew poet since King David, and Israel’s No 1 Citizen. American commentator Jonathan Wilson wrote in 2000 that Amichai “should have won the Nobel Prize in any of the last twenty years.”2 In the many eulogies that followed his passing in 2001, he was feted by the speaker of the Israeli Parliament as the foundation stone of Israeliness and by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak as one of the greatest artists of Israel and the Jewish world. A master craftsman, whose elegant poetic style was always accessible and widely read, Amichai’s mosaic explored the possibility of coexistence in antipodal relationships, in the union of tradition and modernity, beauty and bloodshed that punctuated Israel’s history. Critic Edward Hirsch appositely noted that “Mr. Amichai is an essentially autobiographical poet with the rare ability to characterize 1

2

Rudman, Mark. “Car, Bomb, God.” The Nation 243:19 (1986): 646-648. A recent addition to the body of critical work about Yehuda Amichai is Nili Scharf Gold’s eyeopening study Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet. Hanover : Brandeis University Press ; University Press of New England, 2008 Wilson, Jonathan. “The God of Small Things.” The New York Times (December 10, 2000): 7. — 23 —

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the complex fate of the modern Israeli, the private individual invariably affected by the public realm of war, politics and religion.”3 And in 1985, following the release of the collection Me-adama ata ve-el adama tashuv (Of Man Thou Art, and Unto Man Shalt Thou Return), scholar Dov Vardi nicely summed up Amichai’s stature: “Few recent works of poetry have elicited such a broad response in the Israeli press. The older Amichai by now is a classic, and his language is the miracle of vernacular Hebrew poured into poems that speak to everyone.”4 An oft-repeated anecdote about Amichai’s popularity and accessibility among the young is that during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israeli students who were mobilized for the war effort packed a book of Amichai’s poems along with their military gear and rifle. Born in Wurtzburg, Bavaria, Germany, on May 3 1924, Yehuda Amichai grew up in a middle-class, strict religious family of ardent Zionists. In 1936 the family fled the Nazis for Palestine and settled first in the city of Petah Tikvah and then in Jerusalem — in the Yemin Moshe neighborhood (the first Jewish neighborhood to be built outside the Old City walls) where Amichai lived for most of his life. The twelveyear-old boy studied at the Ma’aleh high school and later graduated from The Hebrew University with a Bachelor of Arts in literature and biblical studies. He served for four years in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in World War II, and it was while serving in Egypt that he chanced upon an anthology of poetry that included works by W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas. According to Amichai, it was then that he began contemplating seriously the writing of poetry.5 He later joined the Palmach6 and helped smuggle arms and illegal immigrants into Palestine. Amichai fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and later served in three other wars. Although he was active in several of Israel's military conflicts, his wartime experiences resulted in a

3

4

5

6

Hirsch, Edward. “In a Language Torn from Sleep.” The New Times Book Review (3 August 1986): 14. Vardi, Dov. “Yehuda Amichai. Me’adam ata ve’el adam tashuv.” World Literature Today 61 (Winter 1987): 150–151. Gussow, Mel. “Yehuda Amichai, Poet Who Turned Israel’s Experience into Verse, Dies at 76.” New York Times (23 September 2000): 14. The fighting force of Jewish settlements during the British Mandate period in Palestine). — 24 —

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profound distaste for nationalistic fervor and a concern for the bereaved in the aftermath of the battle, as manifested in the volume Me-ahorei col ze mistater osher gadol (Behind All this Hides a Great Happiness, 1973) and in poems such as “Kinot al hametim bemilchama” (“Seven Laments for the War Dead” 1973). After graduating with a teacher’s degree, Amichai taught Hebrew literature at the Chaim Greenberg College in Jerusalem as well as in a variety of other colleges. Alongside the sixteen volumes of energetically imaginative poetry, Amichai also published tales for children, one-act plays, short stories, and the novel Lo meachshav, lo mikan (Not of This Time, Not of This Place, 1963). The novel, precipitated by a return in 1959 to his native hometown and later dramatized in the play Pa`amonim verakavot (Bells and Trains, 1967), was a fictionalized account of a visit to Wurzburg and the author’s exploration of the Holocaust and its effects on the present generation devastated by loss of friends, family and community. Indeed, the role of remembrance and man’s tendency to traverse the same roads of history was a perennial motif in his canon. An artist who expressed the emotions others would articulate if they were poets, Amichai’s first collection Achshav u-beyamim acherim (Now and in Other Days, 1955) transformed Israeli poetry with its shunning of the formalism of the pre-state poets and its employment of slang and modern vernacular. Small wonder that when he died, scholars reminded readers that with Now and in Other Days and subsequent collections, Amichai liberated Hebrew literature from its deep stupor, rigidity, and immersion in biblical phraseology, making it more concordant with modern realities. “Mr. Amichai’s work is remarkably accessible, imaginative, unburdened by artificiality and often almost conversational,” noted author Mel Gussow.7 Still, for all his iconoclasm, Amichai borrowed heavily from the scriptures, overlaying the archaic with a contemporary patina, as in a sequence describing a man under a fig tree calling another standing under a vine. The early poems also deal with his father’s death and their complex relationship. His second collection, Be-merhak shtei tikvot (Two Hopes Away, 1958), inaugurated the seminal themes that would 7

Gussow, “Yehuda Amichai”, 14. — 25 —

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characterize his corpus — war, memory, displacement, the figure of the father, the nature of Jewish identity, the disillusionment of the postwar generation, and love. The poems mirrored the central concerns and preoccupations of a whole generation of Israelis, yet, as he proved with his later work, Amichai’s exploration of humanity and its problems touched the core of any modern society. As stated earlier, despite all the modernism that shimmers through his poems, Amichai possessed a multivalent Jewish sensibility that braided the very personal with the mythic. Since he saw himself as a conduit between the old and new, the Jewish past is often alluded to, both in its theological meditations and in its reverberations through the life of Israeli society. For instance, one of his longest poems, the epic fifty seven stanzas “Masot Binyamin haacharon miTudelah” (“Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela,” 1968) about the great medieval Jewish traveler of the second half of the twelfth century was penned while Amichai was living on Benjamin of Tudela Street in Jerusalem and is brimful with self-referential elements and the autobiographical. Amichai’s canvas is characterized by colloquial language, selfdeprecating humor, and irony, showcasing a depth of emotion that was raw and introspective. With a few words and images, he could deliver special insights and evocative association on a breadth of weighty issues such as the Holocaust, God, loss, idealism, war and national destiny, unlocking a world leavened with allusions from the Hebrew Bible, and the quotidian. Typically, he probed, at times with a prophetic voice, the nexus between polar tropes — natural forgetting and the burden of memory, faith and doubt, personal and public history — tropes that acutely govern life in Israel. Though his poems were scented with metaphor (he once noted that the metaphor was equal to the invention of the wheel), they were never elusive and always astonishingly concrete and personal. His translator and friend Ted Hughes described the personal impact he felt reading Amichai: The effect his poetry has on me is to give me my own life– to open it somehow, to make it all available to me afresh, to uncover all kinds of riches in every moment of it, and to free me from my mental prisons.8 8

Ted Hughes as cited in Wilson, “The God of Small Things”, 7. — 26 —

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A substantial portion of Amichai’s writing zeroed in on Jerusalem’s political and religious undercurrents, reflecting his profound admiration for and exasperation with the city as an epicenter of history and conflict that transcends the imagination. The magisterial cycle of poems “Yerushalayim 1967” (“Jerusalem 1967”) embodies the special interconnectedness he felt existed between the capital and the Jewish people. In one poem, he wryly comments on the gravity of living in Jerusalem, warning embracing lovers to be careful since every display of love can turn into a new religion. As a result, a Newsweek critic called him the Walt Whitman of Jerusalem. Amichai wrote that the Jews, rather than being a historical people, were a geological nation, tied to their land by vows and oaths. Amichai won several literary awards, including The Shlonsky Award (1957), The Bialik Award (1975), and the country’s most distinguished award, The Israel Prize in 1981. In 1986 he was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and won The S. Y. Agnon Award. His poems have been translated into many languages, ranging from Catalan to Korean, and he is currently the most translated Israeli poet of all time. Although his art went beyond politics, Amichai frequently urged peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors and backed former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s initiative to make peace with the Palestinians. He was married twice: first to Tamar Horn, with whom he had one son, Roni, and then to Hanna Sokolov, with whom he had a son, David and a daughter, Emanuela. He died after a long battle with cancer on September 22, 2000, aged 76, and was laid to rest in the Sanhedria Cemetery in Jerusalem. When the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, he asked Yehuda Amichai, as the man most often described by the Israeli press as the spokesperson for his fellow citizens, to join the official Israeli delegation and read one of his poems, “Pirhei Bar” (“Wildpeace,” 1971), which includes these telling lines: “Let it come / Like wildflowers / Suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace.” Upon acceptance, Rabin quoted from “Elohim merachem al yaldey hagan” (“God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children”) — Amichai’s signature verse. Rabin then added his own words to the poem: — 27 —

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“Let’s hope that now there will be pity for us all.” Chana Bloch notes that “Amichai’s lines seem chillingly apt in the light of the Rabin assassination at a peace rally less than a year later.”9 “Elohim merachem al yaldey hagan”10 (“God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children”) has become one of Yehuda Amichai’s most quoted and anthologized poems. Appearing in his first volume of verse Achshav u-beyamim acherim (Now and in Other Days, 1955), it operates on multiple levels, but given its historical proximity to Israel’s War of Independence of 1948, one is hard-pressed not to view its surface theme as that of the savagery and price of war as well the sacrifice of its young soldiers. In various ways, it reiterates Amichai’s engagement with the vulnerability and the inherent weakness of the adult man and underscores his fascination with the emotional trauma felt by war-fatigued Israelis. However, the poem also typifies Amichai’s penchant, especially in his early poetry, to challenge and transform in an acutely ironic fashion the traditional perception of God as merciful. Having been a student in religious schools in Germany and Israel, Amichai had a very complex relationship with Orthodox Judaism. Through his texts he conducted a grand theological argument with the almighty, rejecting any submissive reverence and the certainties of an exclusive faith. For example, the companion piece to “Elohim merahem al yaldei hagan” is “El male rachamim” (“A God Full of Mercy,” 1960) which limns similar terrain, featuring a speaker who relates a life redolent with pain and misery, angry at a God who has kept all lenity to Himself with the result that the world is empty of mercy. It has been argued that Amichai differed from his contemporaries in that he integrated God into the texture of his poetry not only as a central factor but also as a dominant part of his individual development.11 The title “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children” positions the reader to expect a poem praising God’s benevolence, but the poem quickly 9

10

11

Bloch, Chana and Stephen Mitchell, (eds). The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996: XIV. I am using the English translation in The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited and translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Abramson, Glenda. “Amichai’s God.” Prooftexts 4 (1984): 114. — 28 —

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develops into a searing tract about a universe devoid of higher kindliness, ruled by a deficient, indifferent, and capricious God. The title is clearly ironic, for as the reader gradually discovers, the God that is described here dispenses mercy in an arbitrary and cruel manner. The first two lines foreground one of the poem’s key themes — that childhood and youth provide a type of protection and shelter denied to the adults: “God has pity on kindergarten children, / He has less pity on school children.” At first we are told that God does show mercy, but it is allocated in a discriminatory manner, only to those who are regarded as totally pure — kindergarten children and, to a lesser extent, schoolchildren. In a sense, God offers his concern and protection to the innocent and powerless, and as Amichai argues, age becomes the primary determinant for whether one is to be guarded from harm. Or, as Glenda Abramson asserts, it is not only age that is a factor: “It also implies a connection between God’s mercy and human purity for only kindergarten children are entitled to mercy, the rest of humanity, presumably, to justice alone.”12 In an interview with National Public Radio, Amichai said that the poem is also about war and about the order of life: We all have pity on a small child. And the bigger they grow, the less we need to have pity. But certainly a grown up man, a soldier at his full power, at his full strength, he needs more help than all the babies together.13

Amichai’s frighteningly distant God deprives the vulnerable grown-ups (embodied here as soldiers) of His sanctuary, even though soldiers are customarily more in peril than small children. As Joseph Cohen notes, “Adult soldiers in combat are ordinarily far more exposed to destruction than are small children, but for them God provides no watchfulness.”14 Amichai marshals the image of soldiers, crawling on all fours in the hot sand toward the first-aid station, bloodied and wounded, to underline the 12 13

14

Abramson, “‘Amichai’s’ God,” 114. Siegel, Robert. “Israeli Poet Discusses His Works, War and Prayers.” All Things Considered: National Public Radio (24 October, 1995). Cohen, Joseph. Voices of Israel: Essays on and Interviews with Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Amos Oz. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1990: 110. — 29 —

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idea that combatants, in this instance during the 1948 War of Liberation, were not the objects of God’s vigilance. More broadly, this “last station” could symbolize the final destination for all men. To be sure, this particular image struck a chord with Israelis, all too well acquainted with the high cost of successive wars. The soldiers, left entirely alone, have reverted to their infant state, dragging themselves as children, their wounds both physical and mental. In a way, the crawling could be deciphered as pleas for help by the soldiers, groveling before God, on their hands and knees, fuelled by the desire to survive. Yair Mazor adds the following comment: The narrator’s blatant accusation against God, who wrongly and stintingly distributes His mercy, takes on a singular meaning as the castigated adults are portrayed as wounded soldiers...The phrase “crawling on all fours” also likens the adults to helpless infants and consequently emphasizes their miserable condition.15

In the second stanza, the soldiers of the opening lines have been replaced with true lovers, and life has displaced mayhem and bloodshed. Amichai likens God to a tree, and His creations are allegorized as lovers and as a homeless person sleeping on a public bench. The poem stresses that among the band of grown-ups — those who were refused protection in the first stanza — “true lovers” may be deserving of God’s love (“But perhaps he will watch over true lovers and have mercy on them and shelter them like a tree over the old man sleeping on a public bench”). Still, the tree that supposedly will shelter the young lovers can only affect a limited form of safety. It will not insulate the lovers from the rain, from the cold, or from physical injury. Coupled with the second opening word of the second stanza (“Perhaps”), it is evident that God’s sanctuary is incomplete or in doubt. Moreover, the true lovers are depicted as lonely, helpless figures that are metaphorically “homeless”, their only refuge a “public bench.” Concurrently interleaved is the lovers’ plea for only a modicum of compassion, strongly alluded to by the image of the tree that can only accord partial protection.

15

Mazor, Yair. “Farewell to Arms and Sentimentality: Reflections of Israel’s Wars in Yehuda Amichai’s Poetry.” World Literature Today 60:1 (1986): 15. — 30 —

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One could argue that by hinting that God may be unable to furnish man with the necessary salvation he seeks, Amichai is diluting the divine’s supposedly unlimited power. Moreover, those who truly love can be likened to children in their naiveté and righteousness and thus more worthy, if only fractionally, of protection. The notion that only love can afford redemption, that only love will drive away pain and cruelty, was a recurring subject in Amichai’s oeuvre. The last section of the poem suggests that generosity and empathy will only be handed down by the all-purpose metaphor of the mother, in the form of the coins of compassion, and that it is human benevolence that will generate happiness for the adults shunned by a selective God. The coins, though physical objects, represent here a spiritual dimension, amplifying the idea of a mother who showers her children with affection that is pure and not related to any expectation of reciprocity. In turn, this act of charity, Amichai says, will lead to our protection. The poet urges us to engage in acts of kindness on a daily basis, in the same manner that we make use of coins. This further underlies the notion that it is not material wealth that infuses our life with joy but individual acts of goodness. Such dispensation of mercy and caring will ultimately benefit humanity, for as the poem's last line states, “Their own happiness will protect us / Now and in other days.” Glenda Abramson contends that a whole coin often emblemised completeness in Amichai’s poetry, observing that the soldiers, hurt and incomplete, can also parabolically signify people stuck in the mechanical drudgery of urban life, with its attendant isolation, estrangement, disjunction.16 Although the poem concludes with a note of optimism, it is seasoned with a dash of caution and doubt since the last stanza again opens with the word “Perhaps,” and the scarce coins of compassion bequeathed to this generation are only a handful and are the last of this inheritance. In effect, the world depicted in the third stanza is one that has been emptied of contemporary empathy and kindness — the adults have nothing to give and must rely on the last coins handed down by the previous generation. The point here is that the present generation, 16

Abramson, “Amichai’s God”, 54. — 31 —

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afflicted with a crisis of values and faith, is clearly a long way from the humanistic universe of its predecessors, so much so that the only remnants from the glorious, blissful past are “the last rare coins” that will save the human race from its current malaise. In a way, there is a sense of synchronicity between the first and third stanzas. The last coins of the mother evoke a sense of yearning by the grown-ups to return once again to the familiar and comforting time of childhood when they were shielded by the kindly mother, a world away from the burning sands of battle. The referencing of the mother evokes the association of “motherly love” with its accompanying warmth and affection remembered from childhood. This is not surprising. Time and again, reminiscences from childhood overhang Amichai’s canvas, operating as nostalgic glimpses into a world of peace and innocence. Ultimately, it is the unjust God who is cast as the designer of such afflictions. The poem maintains that human beings should not rely on God for refuge or mercy but must be responsible for their own safety. As Joseph Cohen maintains, “In Amichai’s poem, pity carries with it no omnipotent obligation, no guarantee of protection. Ultimately, living beings are responsible for themselves…”17 Abramson provides a similar reading, arguing that “it is left to people themselves to put it right — and in Amichai’s world, the redeemer is love — with God’s kingdom attributed to the lover.”18 Amichai is asserting, contra Jewish religious dogma, that human goodness, kindness, and love are far superior and can function as a worthy substitute for the lack of God’s concern, with allusion to the ambiguity of that concern. Compassion is to be reclaimed here on Earth, rather than in the heavens that are impoverished of kindness. Gershom Gorenberg sums up the poem’s underlying theme: “God has gone missing, and his orphans can only put their faith in love — however tenuous.”19 In other words, regeneration and renewal will emerge from a secular, not a religious philosophy. Yair Mazor, on the other hand, furnishes a contrary interpretation 17 18 19

Cohen, Voices of Israel, 11. Abramson, “Amichai’s God,” 54. Gorenberg, Gershom. “The Power Remains.” The Jerusalem Report (1 December 1994): 44. — 32 —

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for the concluding lines of the poem. In his view, the coins of grace inherited from the mother betray human beings’ dark side: The speaker’s magnanimity is nothing but a selfish investment: he aspires to support the castigated adults because it may be beneficial. Consequently, the ironic accusation leveled at God boomerangs and hits the speaker himself. Furthermore, to his allegations of divine indifference toward human misfortune, he adds the charges of selfishness and hypocrisy, thereby only widening the abyss between his pretentious selfportrait and his true nature.20

All in all, the message conveyed in the poem is that omnipotence does not encase within its midst a duty to provide protection against danger or death. In the end, it is only love that acts as a buffer for the suffering adults. Interestingly, the two final stanzas open with the anaphoric “Perhaps,” seducing readers to assume that the following passages will contain hope in stark contrast to the harsh tone of the poem’s first lines. But hope turns into disappointment as the figure of the pitiless God is fully revealed. "God Has Pity On Kindergarten Children" can be classified as a modern opus, an existential meditation by a secular humanist on the relationship between man and his creator. It confirms God’s presence in human affairs but demonstrates a loss of faith and profound disappointment that leads to a plea for human compassion, which may fill the void left by divine indifference and uncertainty.

20

Mazor, “Farewell to Arms,” 16. — 33 —

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---------------------------------  Chapter III  ----------------------------------

Berating an Indifferent God

Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s “On the Slaughter” Regarded as the greatest Hebrew poet of modern times, Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) was instrumental in the revival of the Hebrew language and in expressing the Jewish people’s pain and yearnings in a time of great change.1 Born on January 9, 1873, in the Ukrainian village of Radi, in Volynia, Russia, Bialik had a childhood filled with tragedy and pathos, although in later years he viewed his formative days with sentimental fondness, which he portrayed in his musings. Indeed, he was intoxicated by the mysteries of nature, a theme to which he would return frequently in poems such “Zohar” (“Radiance” 1901), recapturing and idealizing the hours he spent roaming the woods and resting in the hidden shades of the forest. His father, Yitzhak Yossef, was a timber merchant whose business failings forced the family to relocate to the town of Zhitomir, where Bialik’s grandfather, a sternly religious man, also lived. The period in Zhitomir left an indelible mark on the young boy, who, aged seven, was orphaned when his father, now a tavern owner on the outskirts of town, fell ill and died. This sudden loss would later come to occupy a central place in the poet’s personality and thematic choices, all the more as the familial trauma was set to continue. 1

A recent excellent addition to the study of the Bialik is the monograph by Avner Holtzman. Hayyim Nahman Bialik. Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar Letoldot Israel, 2009. See also Sara Feinstein. Sunshine, Blossoms, And Blood: H.N Bialik In His Time: A Literary Biography. Lanham: University Press of America, 2005; Dov Sadan. Hayyim Nahman Bialik: Darko, Bilshono, U’vilshonoteha. Tel Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuchad, 1989. — 35 —

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Before long, his mother, Dinah (nee Priva), incapacitated by her husband’s death, was unable to support her children. The poet paints a picture of the pain of life in the destitute mother’s house in poems such as “Almanut” (“Widowhood,” 1933) and “Shirati” (“My Song,” 1900–1), describing with pathos the scanty Sabbath meals, the chilly evenings, and his mother’s grief. Soon after his father's death, Bialik and his sister were sent to live with their paternal grandparents. Bialik had to contend with his puritanical and stern grandfather, Yaakov Moshe Bialik, a Hasid who shackled the boy to a rigorous program of learning and prayer. Nonetheless, this laborious study regime did not diminish Bialik’s enthusiasm for Talmudic inquiry, as he would often retreat on his own to the Bet Hamidrash (Jewish House of Study) to dissect the intricacies of Halacha (Jewish law). The image of the solitary individual who, secluded from the ever burgeoning reach of modernisation, firmly devotes his years to the lofty ideals of Torah study, and who foregoes and sacrifices his youth and the seductions of the world on the altar of his vocation, is vividly dramatised in Bialik’s oeuvre. At seventeen, Bialik convinced his grandfather to allow him to study at the Great Yeshiva in Volozhin, Lithuania, under the tutelage of Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin. There, he not only began his poetic activity, composing in Hebrew, but also gradually came to be influenced by the polemical writings of the father of spiritual Zionism, Ahad Ha’am. Later, he became a supporter of the developing Zionist movement Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion) and its backing of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Growing impatient with the deadening and myopic regimen of Yeshiva study2, Bialik left for Odessa, the hub of Hebrew literary activity. Although his hopes for a university degree were not actualized, the stay in Odessa did prove fruitful. In Odessa Bialik met his mentor, Ahad Ha’am, and influential editor and critic Y.H. Ravnitzky, who included one of his poems, “El hatzippor,” (“To the Bird,” 1892) in a collection of Hebrew literature, which cemented his place as one of the most promising young poets writing in Hebrew. Regrettably, the bard’s rise to prominence was cut short when he had to return to Zhitomir to tend to his gravely ill grandfather, who died shortly 2

Depicted in his magnificent poem “Hamatmid” (“The Diligent Student,” 1893). — 36 —

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after. In 1893, he married Manya Averbach, the daughter of a wealthy timber merchant, for whom Bialik reluctantly worked as a supervisor. During this period, he produced a series of national poems, which, in their despairingly bleak overtones, condemned the perceived passivity of the Jewish people in the face of the violent tragedies befalling them. In 1900, Bialik returned to Odessa with his wife, at first teaching Hebrew in Jewish schools and then becoming the literary editor of the journal Hashiloh. His first collection of poems Shirim (Poems), published in Warsaw, appeared to critical acclaim in 1901, and Bialik was lauded as the poet of national renaissance and the pre-eminent Hebrew poet of his time. The first volume was followed by Bialik’s magnum opus, the allegorical, historical prose poem, “Metei midbar” (“The Dead of the Desert,” 1902). Composed of three distinct episodes, it is based on the Talmudic legend that the desert generation of the Exodus, which was involved in a mutiny and therefore prevented from entering the Land of Israel, did not perish, but merely fell into an eternal sleep in the wilderness. From a short epigraph, “Come let me show you the dead of the desert,” the poet sculpted an epic that imagines the dead warriors as sleeping giants awakening in the midst of a storm to defy God’s imprisonment. The desert is described in apocalyptic terms and functions allegorically as the cursed Diaspora in which the nation has wandered, confused, for generations. As the tale unfolds, the beasts of the desert — snakes, eagles, and lions — attack the ancient mighty, but recoil in fear and awe at the sight of the soldiers. After the animals have withdrawn, the heroes are roused, for the hour of redemption has come. Although the giants return to their secret cavern in the end, the poem embodies a message of hope. In the elegiac poem “Levadi” (“By Myself,” 1902), Bialik took the demise of tradition to its fullest expression. At the outset, one boy is left alone with the divine presence (Shekinah), after all of the other young men have been enveloped by the tides of the Haskalah (The Enlightenment movement). In the stanzas that follow, the once powerful divine presence is now disgracefully damaged, a declining entity in a new universe that is moving away from an archaic tradition. In 1905, Bialik revisited the theme of exile and deliverance in “Megillat ha-esh” (“Scroll of Fire,” 1905), his much-discussed second prose poem. — 37 —

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Again, Bialik created a palimpsest of tales, borrowing heavily from biblical and mystical legends. The poem begins with the terrible destruction of the first temple. According to legend, a holy altar flame flickered from amongst the ruins and was transported to a desolate island, where it became protected by the morning star. Later, two hundred young men and two hundred maidens, the captured sons and daughters of Jerusalem’s aristocracy, were spirited away to the island. The poem focuses on two youths, representatives of the two camps and of life’s dual forces that draw the nation towards different paths. The bright-eyed lad gazes up into the stars; the other, in rage, looks to the earth, searching for what his soul has lost. While the first youth symbolizes hope by singing of redemption, the other sings of revenge and hate. They signify two possible courses for European Jewry: an imaginative one and a vengeful, distrustful one. At the end of the poem’s first part, the two hundred maidens walk blindly into a river, propelled by the song of destruction; they are followed by the young men, who dive into the waters to rescue them, only to drown in a powerful wave. The delicate lad tells a surviving winsome maiden of his anguished past, about the death of his parents, and about his suppressed longing for love. She is Bialik’s dream woman, the virginal figure imbued with heavenly light, offering the poet a chance to experience the delights of the flesh. As in Bialik’s previous poems, we get a glimpse of unrequited love: the maiden disappears; the infatuated teenager, lured by carnal temptation, follows her into the dark waters. In the poem’s coda, the youth roams around the land of exile, holding the hope of deliverance in his heart. One of Bialik’s most magisterial nature poems is “Ha-brekha” (“The Pond” 1905), a meditative piece on the true essence of creativity and art. The poem portrays a world that once was teeming with hope and dreams, but now has been shattered by a storm. It encapsulates Bialik’s favorite romantic theme: a time of innocence ruptured by a loss of faith as symbolized by his generation’s flight from tradition. In response, the artist retreats to nature in order to revive his soul and creative expression. Looking into the pool, he discovers a secret, wordless language, through which the treasures and beauty of the universe are revealed. — 38 —

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In 1921, Bialik and a cadre of Hebrew writers were allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Bialik settled in Berlin and later left for Bad Homburg. Besides putting out his first collected poems, he jointly established with Y. H. Ravnitzky in 1921 the Moriah Publishing Company, with the explicit aim of generating Hebrew pedagogical materials for schools. After moving to Germany, Bialik reestablished Moriah Publishing and increased its capacity, at the same time opening Dvir Publishing. After three years in Berlin and Bad Homburg, Bialik immigrated to Palestine in 1924, settling in Tel Aviv where he re-founded Dvir Publishing. From the time he arrived, the roaring town became his beloved hamlet, and his former home today houses the Bialik Museum, frequented by thousands of visitors every year. In Palestine, his creative output took a backseat to his public and cultural activities. Inevitably, he was called to serve on countless boards (The Hebrew University, The Hebrew Writers Association, the literary magazine Moznaim) and was sent abroad by the Zionist World Organization to enlist the financial aid of Diaspora Jews. Though he authored only a single opus while in Palestine, Bialik compiled into contemporary editions the medieval works of Ibn Gabirol and Ibn Ezra, as well editing several anthologies for children that brought together various legends. Near and dear to Bialik’s heart was the enterprise of kinnus (canonization or ingathering). For the first time in nine hundred years the loving care of a modern Hebrew poet brought together hundreds of medieval poems and legends and folklore of the Talmud and Midrash, which had been scattered in accessible and inaccessible books and manuscripts. It is symbolic that Bialik's swan song “Yatmut” (“Orphanhood,” 1928), a moving account of his forced separation from his mother and the death of his father, was completed before his untimely death from a heart attack in Vienna (where he had traveled for a prostate operation) on July 4, 1934. Translated into more than thirty languages, Bialik’s canon can be formally divided into verse articulating Jewish national revival, interior poetry keyed in the personal, and songs of nature. Radically experimenting with linguistic configurations and meters, he fused symbolist poetry with romanticism, making modernist Hebrew verse — 39 —

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accessible for future poets. In retrospect, it is small wonder that Bialik was endowed with the label of a “modern prophet,” especially as many of his poems acted as a springboard for the revival of the Hebrew language and its gradual enshrining as the Jews’ representative tongue in Palestine. Yet it is of particular salience that Bialik deployed the classical Hebrew of Judaism's founding books, with their theological weight, to hew out a poetry that in effect challenged and disrupted the historical authority of orthodox Judaism. That Bialik forged religious visions, encasing within their midst multiple ironic meanings, using the coherent qualities of biblical words and phrasings, was not lost on later Hebrew poets, who followed his route in displacing the original meaning of the biblical text. The poet’s dramatic focus was the process of change that affected the world of East European Jewry, transforming it from one of fierce tradition to one of secular values. Instead of using the biblical rhetoric of his predecessors, Bialik confected a new and expansive linguistic canvas that reflected the new and vibrant national and linguistic reality and which allowed Hebrew poetry to depict the youthful pioneering revolution sweeping through Palestine. Earning the title of “national poet,” Bialik set his imprimatur on an entire generation, combining the personal with the collective and intermingling national catastrophes and aspirations with his intimate sense of sorrow and orphanhood. The generation of poets who followed Bialik, including such luminaries as Yaakov Fichman, Yaakov Steinberg, and Zalman Shneur, to name but a few, were labeled “The Bialik Generation” in recognition of the enormous artistic and spiritual influence he wielded on their ars poetica. Hand in hand with the crystallizing of Zionism as a political movement, Bialik’s artistic output was reaching its apex, marked by his “Poems of Wrath” series, an unsettling and shockingly powerful bracket of pieces that led Maxim Gorky to label Bialik the modern Isaiah.3 The first was “Al ha-shehitah”4 (“On the Slaughter,” 1903), published in the 3

4

Aberbach, David. “Hebrew Literature and Jewish Nationalism in the Tsarist Empire, 1881–1917.” In Gittelman, Y. Zvi. The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, ix–xiv. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. I am using the translation to be found in The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, edited by T. Carmi. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982: 512–513. — 40 —

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magazine Hashiloach. The poem was penned on the eve of the artist’s visit to Kishinev, Bessarabia, in 1903 in the aftermath of the pogroms that raged in the Czarist Russian city and shocked the civilized world. In 1926, Bialik revealed that, “though he usually wrote his poetry slowly and without frenzy, the pogrom at Kishinev brought him to the threshold of insanity. He poured out his feelings on paper without delay, fearing that if he did not, his heart would explode.”5 And indeed, the poem’s electrifying lines still resound in the Jewish collective memory today.6 Dispatched by the Jewish Historical Commission of Odessa to interview survivors and compile first-hand reports of the massacre, the thirty-year-old took some sixty photographs of the atrocities and filled four notebooks with testimonies. David G. Roskies remarks on the poem’s uniqueness: Bialik’s Upon the Slaughter… brought the Poem of Wrath into the Literature of Destruction. However angrily a medieval poet complained about the silence of God, no synagogue poet had ever arrogated to himself the voice of the prophet. Bialik used the prophetic voice to rage against the Lord and His Chosen people.7

Ancient images of the Hebrew Bible and a stirring call to arms have equal prominence in “On the Slaughter,” an elegiac poem of agony and disbelief in the face of God’s apparent indifference. The poem’s title betrays a sense of subversive anger and irony, since the term “On the Slaughter” is borrowed from the penultimate passage of the blessing pronounced by the ritual slaughterer before slitting the animal’s throat. Bialik may be announcing that like the slaughtered animals, the Jews are the emasculated, passive victims, or that the pogrom was not only evidence of God’s lack of divine intervention but, worse, a display of ritual martyrdom commanded by God. The poem’s overall tone and title imply that the murdered are akin to acquiescent animals whose

5

6

7

Feinstein, Sara. Sunshine, Blossoms, and Blood: H. N. Bialik in His Time: A Literary Biography. Lanham: University Press of America, 2005: 92. Holtzman, Avner. Hayim Nahman Bialik. Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar le-toldot Yiśrael, 2009: 18. Roskies, G. David, ed. The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989: 146. — 41 —

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necks are presented to the slaughterer’s knife. Most obviously, the title points to the bestial nature of the atrocities perpetrated during the anti-Jewish riots. From the outset, the speaker is enrobed by complete Jobian desperation and is shattered by the lack of heavenly intercession. As the lacerating poem begins, the narrator, in a thunderous and rhetorical outburst, personifies the heavens — “Heaven, beg mercy for me” — and pleads clemency, although he is uncertain if God is still there and whether, sitting upon His throne, He will listen to his angry demands. In seeking lenity on behalf of the slain whose voices have been muted, he questions the existence of God: “If there is a God in you, and a pathway through you to this God — which I have not discovered — then pray for me!”. Roskies argues that for Bialik God is deaf and prayer is impossible,8 while Holtzman avers that the heavens are limned as “an hermetic and evil expanse, purged of divine presence, that abandon man to face his destiny without any hope or comfort.”9 Conscious that following the killing in Kishinev the very heavens he is addressing are barren of God’s mercy, Bialik may seem to nevertheless harbor a faint hope (evidenced by the word “if”) that the Almighty, who presides over earthly affairs, will help His children and extract vengeance for the deadly pogroms. In essence, when the poet states, “For my heart is dead, no longer is there prayer on my lips,” he bespeaks a partial loss of faith in God, yoked with a feeling of extreme disappointment. Conversely, the poet could be pointing to his own inadequacy since he cannot pray, cannot find the right registers that would open the gates of heavens and lead him to God. Therefore, he enlists the aid of the heavens to supplicate on his behalf. In different ways, the passage, “For my heart is dead, no longer is there prayer on my lips” underlines the Jew’s renunciation of his own personal capacity to connect with his creator. Moreover, the pity he appeals for is not sought for himself, but rather for the Jewish people as a whole, and underlines the deeply veined sense of dejection embodied in the words “all strength is gone and hope is no more.” With lines such as “Until when, how much longer, until when?” Bialik focuses attention on the absolute 8 9

Roskies, Literature of Destruction, 86. Holtzman, H.N Bialik, 18. — 42 —

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despondency felt by Russian and Diaspora Jews who knew that attacks such as those that took place in Kishinev were likely to reoccur. The three questions  —  “Until when, how much longer, until when?” — gain extra textual significance when we consider that they correlate to the three questions asked in Psalms 13:2 and Psalms 94:3 verses that evince discontent with God’s treatment of the wicked, who are jubilant, and His forgetting of His people, who are being trampled on by their enemies. In Psalms the unmediated appeal is to God, whereas in the poem it is to the sky. The stormy and prophetic tone of the poem is striking for its depiction (in the second stanza) of the gentiles’ abiding hatred and brutality. The speaker addresses the implacable murderers, the executioners, employing the present tense in hurling his contempt. Offering himself to the garrotter, the narrator reinforces the vulnerability of the Jews, reminiscent of the defenseless Isaac bound to the altar: You executioner! Here’s a neck — go to it, slaughter me! Behead me like a dog, yours is the mighty arm and the axe, and the whole earth is my scaffold —  and we, we are the few! My blood is fair game — strike the skull.

The picture of a dog being beheaded further registers the grotesque humiliation associated with the slaughter of the Jews. Yet, alongside his indictment of the beastly mobs, Bialik is perhaps expressing overwhelming disgust with the helplessness and impotence exhibited by the Jews. The executioner (in some versions, “hangman”) reappears in the fourth stanza as Satan, reinforcing the grisly, monstrous evil of the period that Bialik portrays. In that connection, Roskies ventures this observation, “Since God is deaf and prayer is stifled, the speaker turns to the only active force around, the hangman...The replacement of the heavens with the hangman resonates with an even more startling repudiation, that of God’s glory…”10 By directly addressing the hangman, representing the criminals who butchered the Jews, the speaker identifies with the victim. 10

Roskies, Literature of Destruction, 87. — 43 —

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The assortment of terms Bialik deploys in the second stanza is drawn principally from the terrain of the abattoir: “executioner,” “here is my neck,” “slaughter,” “behead,” “axe,” “blood spurting.” The phrase “the mighty arm,” referring to the vile butchers, can also be traced to Psalms 89:14, which praises God’s mighty arm, charged with immeasurable power, intimating that Bialik is laying the blame equally at the feet of a neglectful God. Concurrently, the speaker states that the whole land has become a scaffold, a killing field, and by extension intimates that it is killers who rule the earth rather than God. Additionally, the sentence “and the whole earth is my scaffold” points an accusatory finger at the world’s indifference to the Jewish tragedy, implicating the nations who idly stood by and watched as if this was happening on another planet. Never again will anyone be able to claim that they did not know of the barbarism and the loss of Jewish life. Instead of God’s mighty hand, it is the axe that presides over his domain. Power now resides with the wicked who have become the new Gods. At the same time, the speaker depicts the powerless victims whose blood is cheap, and reminds us that the rioters murdered young children and the elderly without distinction. As such, their blood will forever stain the clothes of the executioners just like the mark of Cain: “the blood of nurslings and old men will spurt onto your clothes and will never, never be wiped off.” Note also that the motif of blood appears in three of the four stanzas, morphing from a corporeal, concrete form to an entity that spurts, pursues justice and vengeance, and ultimately pierces the sustaining pillars of the world. Burning with escalating fury, in the third stanza the poet demands that the God in the heavens step down from His celestial seat and swoop down as an avenging angel to dispatch divine retribution. Bialik is declaiming that one would expect nothing less from a God whose righteousness and justice, we are told, in Psalms 85:12, look down from the heavens. The speaker insists that he witness the sanctions and punishment first hand: “And if there is justice, let it show itself at once.” He warns that if it appears only after the destruction of the Jews, only after he is killed, then the throne of God must be smashed, dooming the menacing perpetrators to live in a world of hellish violence. — 44 —

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On display, front and center, is Bialik’s remarkably heretical and rebellious insistence that God be removed from the helm, that the heavens He rules decay and atrophy because of His seeming lack of concern for the destiny of His people. This damnation is in sharp contrast to Psalms 89:15, which exalts God for having justice and judgment at the foundations of His throne and further acclaims that mercy, truth, love, and faithfulness are at the forefront of His rule. In another verse, the poet says to the murderers, “[L]ive by your bloodshed and be cleansed by it,” conjuring up the haunting and disturbing image of the victims as sacrificial offerings whose blood is shed on the altar to provide some kind of perverse atonement. It should be observed that the last word in the third stanza, hinaku, has been subject to varying interpretations that complicate matters considerably. While the translation I have relied on renders hinaku as “cleansed by it,” others construe it as “regurgitate this gore”11 or “suckle.” If we are to accept this construction, it would support Bialik’s desire that the evildoers be plagued by the memory of the dead for eternity; their punishment is to metaphorically imbibe the blood they have shed, to be forever consumed by the guilt of their deeds, and to eventually be destroyed by their evil conduct. The poem concludes with the speaker cursing those who seek vengeance for the crimes perpetrated, since even Satan has not conceived of a fitting revenge for the death of a very young child. Equally, the poet is aware that any retribution may lead to a sense, among some, that through a form of payback, symmetry has been achieved. Yet immediately afterward, he petitions for revenge, albeit a supernatural one. The speaker promises that the blood of the victims will flow through the darkest recesses of the earth and will corrode its depths until it rots. A corrupt world that immorally and irresponsibly stands by while acts of ethnic and religious hatred are committed must be eviscerated in a kind of biblical flood that will eradicate humanity and bring about its rebirth. After all, Bialik contends, a world devoid of mercy, justice, and divine providence, and ruled by violent, stone-cold thugs, will inevitably revert to the chaotic state before creation. More 11

Roskies, Literature of Destruction, 160. — 45 —

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broadly, the poet’s confection of this kind of unworldly retribution may be underpinned by a desire to demarcate a moral distinction between the Jews and the persecutors. While the gentiles physically exterminate the Jews, their victims will never descend to such repugnant behavior. The final stanza, dominated by shades of red (blood) and black (darkness, abyss, rot) reaps emotional dividends, lending the poem’s coda a genuinely mephitic and menacing edge. Bialik wants the world to be continually reminded of its atrocities against the Jews. Echoes of Genesis 4:10 reverberate through the line “Let the blood seep,” when God reminds Cain that the voice of his slain brother’s blood cries to Him from the ground. For Bialik, there exists no passage toward redemption or forgiveness for the gentiles. The buried message of the poem is that if mercy, compassion, justice, and a path to God do not emerge in the backwash of the pogroms, anarchy will reign as retribution for the innocent blood of the Jews that was remorselessly spilled. Formally, the poem moves downward, from the lofty and glorified space of the heavens, down to the land where killers run amok, then finally to a descent into the earth’s decaying foundations. The poem that opened with a plea for mercy closes with a curse and an apocalyptic prophecy. It is also noteworthy that the narrator assumes different personas throughout. At the beginning, he adopts the witnessing posture. He then embraces the first-person plural stance. Next, he reverts to the eyewitness position. And at the end he takes on the role of the prophet of wrath. Although the poem is clearly a charge sheet of the horrific acts committed against the Jews, it also embodies a new perception of a reality that is purged of a God that was expected to protect His people. Daniel Grossberg astutely points out that: The greatness of the poem is beyond Kishinev and Eastern Europe and any geographic boundary. It transcends any temporal delimitation, as well. “Al ha-Shehitah” is the wrenching cry from the depths of any agonized human being whose foundation is crumbling and who is teetering on the edge of the abyss. It is for this reason that it continues to resonate and its appeal lives on.12

12

Grossberg, Daniel. “Hayyim Nahman Bialik: the ‘National Hebrew Poet.’” Midstream 52:3 (2006): 45. — 46 —

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“On the Slaughter” was followed by the epic dirge “Be’ir haharegah” (“In the City of Slaughter,” 1904), the longer of the two lamentations.13 It again foregrounds the two day rampage that ravaged the Jewish quarter of Kishinev and left 49 Jews dead. Bialik was so outraged and horrified by the bloodbath that he wrote the poem without delay so as to stir Russian Jewry out of what he considered to be their submissive posture. Thematically, it is structured as a searing address to God by the prophet, who surprisingly scolds and indicts the survivors for their meek capitulation and derides their lack of resistance to the attacks. In castigating and denouncing the chosen people for their supposed cowardly behavior and inaction, Bialik elects to overlook the acts of resistance he heard about as he crisscrossed the city speaking to local Jews. In a similar vein, the poet laments the absence of justice, portraying God as an impotent entity, unmoved by His people’s suffering and unable to quell the violent storms of a sadistic, uncivilized world. The penetrating eye of the poet, overflowing with tears of shame, takes the reader on a visceral and graphic survey of the physical and spiritual wreckage in Kishinev. The explicit account reports on the cemetery where the ground is soaked with the blood of the martyrs, felled by the anti-Jewish rioters. From there, the prophet/speaker moves to the synagogue, disgusted with the mourners’ slavishness and loss of pride and dignity. In fact, one of the cardinal leitmotifs of the poem is the selfflagellation of a people that have plumbed the nadir of humiliation and are unable to rise with indignation against their enemies. Equally, Bialik is incensed and bitter at the absence of justice and struck by the apathy of the world to the atrocity visited upon the Jews.

13

One of the best examinations of the history of this poem is the book by Michael Gluzman, Hanan Hever, and Dan Miron (eds). Be’ir Haharegah: Bikur Me’uchar: bimlot me-ah shana la-poema shel Bialik. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2005. — 47 —

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---------------------------------  Chapter IV  ----------------------------------

Living in the Aftermath of the Holocaust Nightmare

Shulamith Hareven’s “Twilight”, “Loneliness”, and “the Witness” The first woman to become a full member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language and winner of the Prime Minister’s Creativity Prize in 1974 for her novel Ir Yamim Rabim (City of Many Days 1972), Shulamith Hareven was one of Israel’s pre-eminent authors. For forty years, her finely tuned plots and perceptive, intimate portraits of lonely, frayed individuals, as well as her commitment to civil rights, had earned her the respect of readers and critics alike. As a matter of fact, in a 1992 New York Times article, Hareven was acclaimed as achieving “a level of success and acceptance among the literary elite in Israel known by no other woman.”1 Likewise, she was hailed by the French publication L’Express as one of the hundred women “who moved the world,” and in 1988, on the occasion of Israel’s fortieth anniversary, she was selected by the Council of Women’s Organization as one of eleven women to be honored for their extraordinary achievements.2 Shulamith Hareven was born in Warsaw, Poland, on February 14, 1930. Her father, Abraham Ryftin, was a lawyer and her mother, Natalia Wiener, was a teacher. She published her first poems in a Polish children’s magazine when she was six. Her parents escaped Poland and traveled throughout Europe using fake documents until they arrived 1

2

Fein, Esther B. “Two Writers Who Keep Their Fiction Free of Political Realities: Tatyana Tolstaya and Shulamith Hareven’s Characters Struggle with Daily Life.” New York Times (17 March 1992): B1(N) & C13(L). Chertok, Haim. We Are All Close: Conversations with Israeli Writers. New York: Fordham University, 1989: 90. — 49 —

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in Palestine in 1940, settling in Jerusalem. She studied at the Rehavia Secondary School, graduating in 1947. A member of the Haganah,3 she served as a medic during the 1948 War of Independence and later was one of the founders of Galei Tzahal, the Israeli Defense Forces radio network. In the 1950s she worked in transit camps, helping new immigrants from Arab countries with their absorption, and was a military reporter during the 1969 War of Attrition and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. She married Alouph Hareven in 1954, and together they have a son, Itai Hareven (born 1957), a mathematician, and a daughter, Gail Hareven (born 1959), a journalist and award-winning author. The author of nineteen books (translated into twenty-one languages), among them novels, short stories, collected essays, volumes of poetry, a play, a children’s book, and a thriller (penned under the pseudonym Tal Ya’ari), Hareven also translated poetry and prose from Polish and English, including works by Dylan Thomas. Often categorized as a feminist writer, Gershon Shaked argues that along with women authors such as Yehudit Hendel and Amalia Khana-Carmon, Hareven is one of the “swallows heralding the spring of the eighties in which women’s literature captured a pivotal place in Hebrew fiction, moving from the margins to the centre.”4 A joint founder of the Shalom Akhshav (Peace Now) movement, Hareven was a forceful advocate for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, based on the land-for-peace formula. Her essays, lectures, and columns (which mostly appeared in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot) shimmered with her secular-humanist philosophy and were gathered in Otzar Ha-Milim Shel Ha-Shalom5 (The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East),6 a penetrating clarion call for pragmatic, rational compromise in the conflict. While casting an impartial eye on the seemingly intractable dispute, she transmitted, 3

4

5 6

The Hagana was the Jewish settlement’s paramilitary organization during the British Mandate of Palestine. Shaked, Gershon. Hasiporet Ha’ivrit 1880–1980: Be’harbe eshnavim biknisot tzdadiyot. Volume 5. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Hakkibutz Hameuchad and Keter, 1998: 340. Hareven, Shulamith. Otzar Ha-Milim Shel Ha-Shalom. Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 1996. Hareven, Shulamith. The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture and Politics in the Middle East. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995. — 50 —

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with piercing understanding, the Palestinian point of view, especially during the first Palestinian uprising, the Intifada — when she reported from Arab villages — using her unique lexicon of empathy to promote peace. The collection also includes Hareven’s meditations on culture, language, literature, philosophy, and the role of the law to tackle hatred and violence. Not surprisingly, she won the Avrech Prize for essay writing in 1989 as well as The Wallenrod Prize and the ACUM Lifetime Achievement Award. Shulamith Hareven died on November 25, 2003, after a long battle with cancer. Hareven’s first work was a volume of poetry, Yerushalayim Dorsanit (Predatory Jerusalem, 1962), and her first novel was Ir Yamim Rabim (City of Many Days, 1972), a sweeping historical saga set in 1936, in a multicultural Jerusalem during the British Mandate period. Charting life against the backdrop of the emerging state of Israel, the central character is the independent and strong-willed Sara Amarillo. Also looming large are Sara’s Sephardic family as well as an assortment of idiosyncratic characters including an Arab family, an English captain who is in love with Sara’s mother, a depressed German immigrant, and a member of the Jewish underground. The novel depicts the simmering tensions between the city’s inhabitants and the explosion of riots that shake the onceprevailing harmony between Jews and Arabs. At the same time, Sara’s clan faces its own internal calamity as it fragments when the father leaves for a Lebanese woman. At the heart of the narrative is Jerusalem, a city in turmoil, lyrically painted as a source of nourishment and comfort for the central protagonist and her gaggle of eccentric friends. One of Hareven’s monumental works are the three novellas in Tzimaon (Thirst: The Desert Trilogy, 1996) that tell of the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt, their wanderings in the desert, and their battles to settle in the Promised Land of Canaan. The triptych rewrites wellknown scriptural episodes from a modern perspective, subverting familiar meanings in reimagining the biblical past. In tandem with the author’s Holocaust tales, it follows the life of outcasts — deracinated characters who are wandering in a physical and spiritual wilderness and are emotionally disconnected from their surroundings. The first novella, "Soneh Ha-Nisim" ("The Miracle Hater"), is told from the perspective of Eshkhar who, very much like Moses, is rescued — 51 —

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at birth from Pharaoh’s edict and given to a young woman who joins the caravan of Hebrew refugees in their flight from Egypt. During the transit across the desert, the boy grows into an embittered man who suffers profound emptiness and despair, and abandons both God and his fellow nomads. On one occasion, the woman promised to him is given to another. He seeks out Moses for counsel to set things right but is told by Joshua, who stands guard outside the leader’s tent, that justice is not their concern. Eshkhar, in his progressive alienation from his fellow Jews, is convinced that it is the deception of miracles performed by Moses that keeps the people “purblind and lost” in the desert for forty years, though the area can in fact be traversed in weeks. According to Hareven, Moses is not the romantic hero that Jewish history and lore make him out to be. Rather, she portrays him in a tragicomic manner as a stuttering, weak-willed, accidental commander, who does not inspire his followers. The Israelites, meanwhile, are a lowly, alienated, and unruly band of impoverished folk whose prime motivation is simply to stay alive, ready to cast aside any belief in God and give themselves over to erecting a golden calf in Moses’s absence, in a scene which resonates in its unity of primal instinct and poetic force. In the second novella, “Navi” (“Prophet”), Hivai, the central protagonist, is a pagan prophet from Gibeon who has lost his ability to foretell whether the city of his people will be attacked by the Israelites. Feeling besieged, the residents are infected with a spreading panic and shut the city’s gates, allowing only a few individuals to smuggle themselves out in search of safety. In the course of the story, the heathen’s primitive brutality is chronicled. Hivai sleeps with his twelveyear-old daughter and, in an attempt to regain his prophetic voice, seizes a slave child and disembowels him, reading the entrails and providing the false prophecy that the city will be destroyed. After the Gibeonites deceive the Hebrews into agreeing to a protective pact, Hivai decides to remain with his captors, The Israelites, for seven years. This narrative device — of putting a pagan among the Israelites — pays off because the observations made by Hivai about the people’s credos and moral code are full of an outsider’s reflections. Hivai cannot understand, for instance, why murder is prohibited, why the mothers care so much for their offspring, and how the Israelites live by one law. Living in their — 52 —

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midst, Hivai slowly comes to realize the true meaning of a prophet, with Hareven judiciously illustrating the shift from paganism to Judaism’s major precept — monotheism. “Aharei Ha-Yaldut” (“After Childhood”), which concludes the trilogy, is set in the time of the Judges a few generations later. In a small stone hut, not far from the valley of Zin, lives a young man whose father once sought to kill him. That young man is named Salu, and ever since that early trauma, he keeps blinking repeatedly. The Hebrews, though still guided by the Mosaic Law, wrestle with the notion of living in an ordered community. Salu, who cannot find a bride among the women of his small village, marries the feisty and assertive Moran, who soon gives birth to a boy. One day the child disappears. Salu has given him to his barren Hittite mistress, telling the distraught Moran that God will fill her womb. Once again, the themes of justice and the absence of God inform the plot — the young mother’s anguish echoes throughout as she cries for her baby, preferring that God stay away. Shulamith Hareven steadfastly eschewed divulging any information about her childhood in Poland. One could cite her conversation with Haim Chertok in We Are All Close, in which she was quizzed about her upbringing. In response, she charted her role in the 1948 War of Independence as a teenage combat medic, calmly ignoring her interlocutor’s plea to elucidate on her pre-Palestine days in Europe.7 That said, in her autobiography, Yamim rabim: Autobiographiya (Many Days: An Autobiography, 20028), comprised of essays and short stories, she recounts the terrifying events that led to the destruction of Warsaw and her entire childhood world. In the piece “Mahogany,” she derides the lack of foresight on the part of the Polish Jews for failing to anticipate the impending catastrophe. Hareven laments their self-delusion: You told us not to talk nonsense, Poland will protect us, and besides, England and France will come to our aid.… So we obeyed and tried not to be frightened. What could we have done? Now, that the whole world knows what idiots you were, and how you had no idea how to protect 7

8

Chertok, Haim. We Are All Close: Conversations with Israeli Writers. New York: Fordham University, 1989: 77–78. Hareven, Shulamith. Yamim Rabim: Autobiographiya. Tel Aviv: Bavel, 2002 — 53 —

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yourselves, not to mention protect us.… Never again will you be able to fool us, dear adults, we were much smarter.9

In a complementary piece to “Mahogany” titled “Hadodot Hagdolot” (“The Great Aunts”), Hareven recalls the naiveté of her aunts, who were startlingly ignorant of the fate that awaited them. In the following passage, Hareven recalls her aunts’ assumptions about the impending German invasion: We are fortunate that it is the Germans who are invading and not the Russians. At least with the Germans we could converse as we did in the previous war. A cultured nation, with respect for a cultured home. The aunts polished their good German, as well as the gold frames of their paintings. They did not hide the crystal and rings, placed Schubert’s Lieder on the piano, prepared tea, and waited for the necessary evil of the war to end, and for the conquerors to enter. They resolved amongst themselves that they would have the colonels over for tea.10

At first sight, maintaining a stern silence over her past may reinforce the well-worn axiom that writers wish to reject any hermeneutical move to adopt a metatextual approach in articulating an interpretation of their work. No doubt, this examination, which partly sees diegesic characterizations as a mirror of the author’s personal life, is an attractive proposition in the case of Hareven. Why? Because despite the fact that Hareven has said that there is little of the “Polish diskette” residing in her system11, and despite her pointed reluctance to discuss her childhood candidly, her literary preoccupation with the Holocaust is on display, front and centre. Most revealingly, Hareven’s stories constantly emphasize the profound estrangement and sadness of life that her immigrant principals experience as they are burdened by a stifling past and a smothering psychological legacy that cannot be shed. Lacking comforting and sustaining relationships, their inner balance is vulnerable to the assault of the indelible European tragedy that is engraved and carved onto their damaged psyche, persistently threatening to unravel their personal 9 10 11

Hareven, Yamim Rabim: Autobiographiya, 13-14. Hareven, Yamim Rabim: Autobiographiya, 11. Halter, Aloma. “Words Well Chosen.” The Jerusalem Post (1 May 1992). n.p. — 54 —

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peace or sanity. Substantively, the fragmented harrowing memories, foregrounded in a constellation of quotidian gestures, accents, longings, and nightmares, deeply overshadow the lives of the characters who are trying to reconstruct a shattered existence in Israel. Homologously, Hareven revels in exploring the irony of a people who left the Diaspora to find a home in Israel, but essentially did not, emotionally severed from society and living as outsiders in their new adoptive country. In alliance with the sorrowful undertow of the tales, the author infuses her settings, in particular Jerusalem, with a wounded landscape, redolent with shadows and inescapable darkness. Hanita Brand, in an illuminating discussion of Israeli women authors Leah Aini, Michal Govrin and Shulamit Hareven, argues that the three writers represent a new trend in Holocaust literature. Brand’s observation is worth quoting at length: …their treatment of their topic is somewhat tight lipped. Rather than dealing with the Holocaust atrocities overtly, they focus more on their aftermath, in the struggle their protagonists have with an unwritten taboo that does not allow them to speak openly about their experience. While they themselves seem mute in this respect, the story leads us to certain moments where the unmistakable odor of the suppressed horror leaks out, permeating and suffusing “normal” everyday reality…the stories show how difficult a task everyday living is for Holocaust survivors.12

Turning to Hareven’s words, we find she employs a pared, terse style of expression that evokes complex, breathtakingly lyrical images of melancholy and ragged souls besieged by earlier scars. Although elusive at times, the tales nevertheless allow a space for the reader to enter and proffer their own meaning, for the stories unfold in a psychological landscape. Told in the first person, in the compact dreamscape “Dimdumim”13 (“Twilight”), a nameless Israeli woman mystically enters a city which she 12

13

Brand, Hanita. “Women’s issues in the Literary Marketplace: Anthologies of Israeli Women Writers”, 144 in Laura Zittrein Eisenberg and Neil Caplan. (eds.) Review Essays in Israel Studies: Books on Israel, Volume 5. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. First published in Hebrew in 1980, Shulamith Hareven. Bedidut. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. I am using the translation found in the author’s 1992 collection, Shulamith Hareven. Twilight and Other Stories. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992. — 55 —

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describes as a city of sorrow. As the surrealistic story opens, the female dreamer says, “Last night I spent a year in the city where I was born. I had long known the password for getting there: Dante’s line, ‘I am the way to the city of sorrow.’”14 In keeping with its disturbingly apocalyptic and Kafkaesque tone, we learn that every night, after the audience watches the opera, its members are taken away to be loaded onto freight trains by the waiting soldiers posted in the square, soldiers who whistle the aria “Voi che sapete”. Attending The Marriage of Figaro, the protagonist asks the man who saves her, and whom she will later marry, why the victims never escape their grisly fate. He explains that this ritualistic rounding up is repeated every night and goes on to say that the next evening the Jews return to the opera house, and again the process is repeated. However, upon their return, the victims are “a little less alive each time. They fade, like pictures in an album.”15 There is no denying the shocking effect of the scenes of mass arrest that Hareven constructs: The floodlights of the soldiers’ trucks came on and suddenly, tearing the darkness, glaring and terrible, and with this evil light came the wails, the shouts, and the curses.… The people in their festive clothes piled up on the trucks, and there was no more telling them apart, batch after driven batch.16

In one telling sequence that seems to offer the subtext of identification with the dead, the narrator, watching her neighbors herded onto trucks, wishes to leap from the tall roof into the courtyard and join them, even though she knows it means certain death. Hareven has remarked that the woman is “working out guilt about the Holocaust and the feeling: why didn’t I go with them…”17 More to the point, it calls attention to the search for identity by the European immigrants who, though absorbed into the new Israeli society, were strangely living a personal diaspora and were drawn to their old homeland. In various ways, Hareven’s “Twilight” articulates a collective, irreducible, and unsettling desire to unplug repressed memories in a pilgrimage toward a clearer understanding of one’s psyche and the postwar individuation. 14 15 16 17

Hareven, “Twilight”, 1. Hareven, “Twilight”, 4–5. Hareven, “Twilight”, 4. Halter, “Words Well Chosen.” n.p — 56 —

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In blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion, the author is alluding to the indescribable nature of the Holocaust and to the limits of representation. Moreover, it is hard not to read the dream as a metaphor for the Holocaust, as the storyline is brimful with rich imagery that absorbs, mosaic-like, into its fabric, multiple motifs that inform and fuel the Holocaust canon. For example, darkness as a repository of menace is deployed in an early arresting image of the city: “The city of my birth was very dark, extinguished because the sun had left it and gone away a long, long time ago…” And later: All that night we wandered through the streets, as there was no telling day from night except for a slight shade of difference in the depth of the darkness; everything was shrouded in the same no-light of the extinguished city.… They never went so far as to break into laughter. They already knew they would live without sun from now on.18

In a chapter entitled “Ani Levantinit” (“I am Levantine”), appearing in her autobiography Yamim Rabim, Hareven explicitly interweaves the motif of darkness into her life story: “I was born in Europe, and it is if all my days there passed in darkness and impatience, like a mistake, like a prison sentence, like a miserable marriage…”19 The ghetto-like universe in “Twilight” is beyond the rational or the normal. It is a hellish field where women and men walk aimlessly, where statues are smashed, where people are eviscerated by smoke. It is a ghastly world where nothing is certain, where in a nightlong year a woman marries, becomes pregnant, and then gives birth to a child who fantastically grows up and disappears into the mantle of evil. By the story’s end, the narrator awakens from her Kafkaesque nightmare in an operating room. The surgeon says, “Turn the light on,” and the narrator is able to flee the perpetual darkness of her hometown back to her family and back to the blistering sun of Jerusalem: I lay still, waiting for my soul to flow full in me again, and I knew it was all over and completed. I would no more go back to the city of my birth, to the lightless city.… My past was commuted. From now on I would find nothing

18 19

Hareven, “Twilight”, 1, 6. Hareven, Yamim rabim: Autobiographiya, 69. — 57 —

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there but the stones of Jerusalem, and plants growing with might, vigor and a vast light. I got up to make breakfast, my heart beating hard.20

This particular passage chimes with Hareven’s previously mentioned essay “Ani Levantinit,” in which she contrasts the European eclipse with the liberating blaze of Jerusalem: I first saw the strong light splashed over rocky fences on the mountain, a stooping summer olive tree and a stone-carved well — and I knew that this is it. That I arrived at some deep, tangible ancientness, the womb of the world, in which everything was created and will be created. That this is the right light, the right smells, the right touch.21

Feldhay Brenner expounds on the import of the surgery scene, arguing that it “indicates the necessity of the excision of the Holocaust memory. For this to happen, the personal ties with the irretrievably lost world must be acknowledged. Even if imaginatively, the Holocaust must be reconstructed before the source of the trauma can be effectively removed.”22 In sum, though one does not want to make too much of the parallels between fiction and fact, one could, however, draft Feldhay Brenner’s observation onto the author’s life story as she was spared the destruction her characters suffer by the fact that her parents fled Europe for Israel. On one level, “Twilight” represents the excruciating attempt by Holocaust survivors to amputate the past from the present through a cathartic revisiting of their childhood in order to lift the enormous burden that transition to a new land brought. In the words of Gila Ramras-Rauch, the woman’s “‘return’ in “Twilight” is a final cutting of the cord, a reaffirmation of life and sun.”23 “Bedidut”24 (“Loneliness”) is a highly revealing tale of sorrow and alienation. The story is structured around Dolly Jacobus, a wealthy, 20 21 22

23

24

Hareven, “Twilight”, 10–11. Hareven, Yamim Rabim: Autobiographiya, 69. Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. “‘Ideologically Incorrect’ Responses to the Holocaust by Three Israeli Women Writers.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11:1 (2009): 1–11 (8). Ramras-Rauch, Gila and Joseph Michman-Melkman, eds. Facing the Holocaust: Selected Israeli Fiction. New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1985: 11. First published in Hebrew in 1980, Shulamith Hareven. Bedidut. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. I am using the translation found in the author’s 1992 collection, Twilight and Other Stories. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992. — 58 —

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middle-aged, childless Holocaust survivor whose husband, a successful architect and scion of one of Jerusalem’s most established families (their origins in the city, we learn, go back nine generations) is at a conference in Malta. While the elegant Dolly enjoys the luxuries of a comfortable existence, she is nonetheless lonely and without love, friends or purpose. Wrapped in ennui, she is mired in a plodding, stifling marriage. Dolly is also frustrated at never feeling at home in Jerusalem, despite living in the city for twenty-five years since her arrival in Israel at age fourteen. Constantly ruminating about the meaning of home (she keeps a notebook in which she scribbles her thoughts), at one point, sitting in the car on the way home, she becomes fearful that: “If she were to return to it this minute, she felt, the key might not fit the door, so that that she would remain trapped outside in impersonal space. And if it did fit, her memories might not.”25 Elsewhere she reflects: Only somebody who had never been a refugee could dare dream of oceans and great expanses of space. And twenty-five years ago Dolly Jacobus had been a refugee. To this day she was astonished by such things as central heating, which kept on burning warmly, really burning, while the rain remained outside. Truly outside, it wasn’t just an optical illusion.26

More than once, the tormenting, rippling effects of Dolly’s Holocaust trauma become evident, as in a brief throwaway passage apprising the reader that she has had four consecutive miscarriages of unknown cause. Her childless state stamps her with a never-ending frustration and with a craving in her soul for a wholeness that has eluded her time and again. Although dreading abandonment, it is significant that it is only when she is home alone, apart from husband (whom she discovers is sleeping with his secretary), that her true emotions emerge and when she begins to gain insight and a sense of her real self. In one episode, after a thin young dark-skinned girl standing next to Dolly in the post office intentionally brushes against her right breast (an encounter which stirs within her an obsessive erotic passion), Dolly makes up her mind to “understand everything about herself once and for all. It

25 26

Hareven, “Loneliness”, 29. Hareven, “Loneliness”, 16. — 59 —

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was time she knew.”27 The portrait of the teenager who tries to seduce Dolly yields a trail of echoes which invoke the image of the Holocaust victim, “emaciated, almost monkey-like appearance of a stunted child… There was something pitifully sharp and shrunken about her, as though privation had caused her to stop growing in the womb… a snuffed out, light-less little child.”28 At home, Dolly yearns to deepen her knowledge of her childhood and establish a nexus with a life that long ago has been buried away: She rummaged through the closet, took out all the albums and began feverishly looking for the few rare snapshots of herself from her refugee days. None lit the faintest spark. She could not find herself in any of them. Perhaps, she thought, if only, if only I had some pictures from my childhood, from the age of four or five, perhaps then. But such a picture was not to be had anywhere on earth. It was as if Dolly had been born twice, and her first, perhaps truer, life had ended abruptly at the age of fourteen. Afterward, another post-diluvian life had begun, with its disguises and new names.29

Ultimately, the exploration of memory and the search of her family ancestry are unsuccessful for, as Yael Feldman remarks, “[h]er (preHolocaust) childhood seems to have been erased without a trace. All that is left is a wrenching pathos, a pathos rendered all the more powerful through Hareven’s circumspect style.”30 It is of note, Feldman continues, that even her first name, Dolly, is a clear marker of foreignness, heightening our impression of the heroine’s detachment from her surroundings.31 We might also infer that the name Dolly hints at a woman whose childhood has been stunted during the war, which would also explain her enigmatic homosexual desire toward the teenage girl who presses her mouth against her breast when the two are in line at the post office. In a sense, Dolly’s upsurge in desire for the girl underscores her attempt to reclaim a stolen childhood, typical of many survivors. 27 28 29 30

31

Hareven, “Loneliness”, 35. Hareven, “Loneliness”, 26. Hareven, “Loneliness”, 35. Feldman,Yael. No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999: 131. Feldman, No Room of Their Own, 131–133. — 60 —

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Visiting her mother-in-law, Grandmother Haya, Dolly observes the eighty-nine-year-old woman confidently gazing out of her window onto the old city, “Yes, yes, she said. It all belonged to her. She could look out on it all, she who had never been a young starving refugee with a funny family name that had to be changed in a new land.”32 For the disenfranchised Dolly, the stern environs of Jerusalem exacerbate her growing sense of isolation. A crucial vignette earlier testifies to the sharply discomforting existential emptiness gnawing at her solitary self. As she stares out of a window, a friend from the university where she attends lectures, asks Dolly how she can go on looking without feeling nervous. As a grin ghosts around her lips, she replies, “‘I must be a butterfly… But I want you to know,’ she added, ‘that being a butterfly is something that I have to work at very hard.’”33 Quite exactly what this comment means is far from clear. Nevertheless, the glimmering symbolism of a butterfly that never lands is of such specificity that the reader cannot help but suspect that they are being nudged toward conclusions that have to do with Dolly’s rootlessness. A story that exemplifies the oppressive prevailing Israeli attitudes toward the survivors in the Palestine of the 1940s is “Ha-ed”34 (“The Witness”). Manifestly, it demonstrates how in attempting to promote the pillars of Zionist dogma, Israeli society stifled real identification with and understanding of the world of Diaspora Jews. Interestingly, Hareven claimed that this was the one tale shorn of an autobiographical base, explaining that its purpose was “to remind us of the atmosphere that existed in Israel, and that in that period — perhaps — [lies] the genesis of the weaknesses that are still in us today.”35 Negotiating various elements, Hareven shows how instead of affording the survivors the respite they so craved, as well as the opportunity for some psychological relief by having someone listen to and believe their personal tales of grief, the Yishuv and its native born dealt the survivors a crushing blow by attempting to obliterate their

32 33 34 35

Hareven, “Loneliness”, 23. Hareven, “Loneliness”, 16. First published in Hebrew in 1980. Shulamith Hareven. “Ha-ed”, Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Hareven, Yamim Rabim: Autobiographiya, 3. — 61 —

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biographies, crippling any opportunity for the survivors to reconcile with the damaged self of the past. The first-person narrative begins in 1941, Palestine, with the arrival of Shlomek, a young Polish Holocaust refugee, at the Drom Yehuda agricultural boarding school. From the outset, Yotam Raz, the teacher and guidance counselor who is entrusted with helping the newcomer with his integration, and whose viewpoint relates the unfolding drama (thirty-five years after the event), stresses to his new pupil the importance of shedding the vestiges of the past: “You will get used to things, and soon you will look like us and talk like us and no one will feel that you are not from here.…Soon you will be a Sabra, Shlomo, don’t worry, everything will be all right.”36 Yotam is himself a Polish survivor. He is in complete denial of his origins, and shows acute thoughtlessness and insensitivity to Shlomek’s anguish, though he initially tells his pupils that he is certain that they will welcome Shlomek “warmly and provide him with a feeling of home.”37 From the moment Shlomek reaches the village, any possibility of sympathy for his past suffering is given short shrift by Yotam. This topos finds fruitful embodiment in a startling sequence that takes place when Shlomek enters the class for the first time. Facing his Jewish classmates, he is asked by Yotam to describe the war in Europe. In his answer, the young man says that there is no war, as no one can fight the mighty Germans. When Boaz, one of the students accuses the Diaspora Jews of cowardice, Shlomek rises to their defense, claiming that it was not impotence but, “the simple inability to stand up to the Germans and display any kind of heroism.”38 It is immediately afterward that Hareven illustrates, through Boaz, the widespread and dominant view of European Jews that was collectively shared by the Yishuv: “‘I’m sure there are,’ Boaz said. ‘I’m sure there are people who fight the Germans like one should even under occupation. I’m sure not all are cowards like some people standing here.’”39

36 37 38 39

Hareven. “Ha-ed”, 38. Hareven, “Ha-ed”, 35. Hareven, “Ha-ed”, 37. Hareven, “Ha-ed”, 37. — 62 —

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Next, Shlomek describes in detail his family’s massacre — his father is hanged, his mother and two brothers shot. The group reacts with sheer disbelief to the newcomer’s honest report, regarding it as an incredible flight of the imagination. One pupil says, “What is he telling here? What is he concocting? Why would the Germans kill citizens who go out to get bread… what is all this nonsense?”40 One girl attributes it to shock while another complains, “Really, he shouldn’t tell tales… it is just his inventions.”41 Worse, later that afternoon, reflecting on the episode, Yotam offers the following assessment of the boy’s testimony: Shlomek’s words attested to a degree of exaggeration and an unrestrained imagination. I surmised that his family perished in the bombings, or that he was suffering from feelings of guilt for leaving them there… maybe he does not know of their fate, and he is making up for it by thinking up shocking stories about their strange deaths…here for the first time as an educator, I came across a child who imagined the killing of his parents in such a way.42

At this moment, we understand that the wish to nullify and eradicate the survivor’s chronicle epitomizes a psychological distance that condemns the remnant of the Shoah as figures that the new Jew in Palestine must shun. Moreover, in the same week, the mistrust continues when one of the high school students protests to Yotam that Shlomek is again lying when he says that during a siege, for two weeks, they ate nothing but potatoes. The student pleads with his teacher to confirm for him that the newcomer’s account is a prevarication, that it cannot possibly be true. Considering the excessive resentment and the bitter reaction to his plight, it is small wonder that Shlomek chooses silence, realizing that there is no way that he can open a dialogue with his peers, whose life experience is far removed from his. Stung by the pressure to forfeit his past, but still yearning to mourn and memorialize his family’s murder, Shlomek clandestinely keeps a diary in Polish in which he records his eyewitness accounts and heritage. Furthermore, 40 41 42

Hareven, “Ha-ed”, 37. Hareven, “Ha-ed”, 37. Hareven, “Ha-ed”, 37–38. — 63 —

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he engraves a secret code on the wall above his bed for all to observe. It consists of four sets of letters and numbers (Y39, B37, E12, Y9) which towards the end we learn represent the ages at which his parents and siblings died. It is no accident that Yotam construes Shlomek’s subsequent curbing of his outbursts and his rejection of help from Ruta, the boarding school's psychologist, as a signal that he has finally adjusted: “As I predicted, with his status in class rising, and with his acclimation, the lies and the fanciful stories disappeared…Maybe it’s a sign that Shlomek has been born again...Shlomek has buried his past and I see in this a positive development. People after all are born anew here and you know this exactly as I do.”43 In the end though, Shlomek does not allow the process of invalidation to continue. He suddenly flees the school and makes his way to the residence of the British commissioner to hand over his testimony about the atrocities. Half a year later, his statements (the very ones that were cruelly discredited by Yotam and his students) are published by a leading newspaper. Despite his reluctant acknowledgment of Shlomek’s story, and despite keeping a newspaper clipping of the news story in a drawer along with other mementos from his students, Yotam insists on reproaching Shlomek for his persistence in communicating his message and for not showing more forbearance. The final passage of “Ha-ed” reveals that the teacher has not abandoned his inflexible ideological posture: Only Shlomek’s arrogance caused him to exclude himself from the group. And why did he run away as if his conscience was not clear?…Don’t pay attention to the fact that I am angry. It is always when I remember Shlomek that I become angry, even now, years later. This boy possessed ingratitude… One needs to know how and when to tell the truth. If he had only waited a few more months, it would have been published anyway, but then he would have added some honour to our school, instead of such an irresponsible act… Very simply, he did not have a measure of patience.44

In offering his assessment of the story’s central tenor, Gershon Shaked labels the teacher an idiot for the way he treats the escapee from Poland, 43 44

Hareven, “Ha-ed”, 44–45. Hareven, “Ha-ed”, 52–53. — 64 —

-------------  Shulamith Hareven’s “Twilight”, “Loneliness”, and “the Witness” -------------

for his emotional frigidity, and for his lack of psychological perspicuity.45 Avner Holtzman offers a similar assessment: Yotam is a caricature of the Hebrew educator. He is arrogant and simple, he clings to stereotypes, spouts clichéd tirades, is dishonest and foolish, blind to his own erotic drives, and perhaps worst of all — he sins in the name of rationalism. Under the guise of patience, logic, responsibility, moderation and reasonableness he mocks “the vanities of psychology,” shuts himself off to the testimony about the German atrocities his student Shlomek brought with him from Europe, and dismisses this testimony by a young adult as a wild exaggeration that is without logic.46

As Rachel Feldhay Brenner contends, the tale “actually rules out the possibility of a mutually acceptable modus vivendi between the Israeli and the Holocaust survivor… The aggressive, practically unanimous, denial of the Holocaust victim’s testimony isolates him in his new home.”47 For Ramras Rauch, the story is a “subtle and ironic incrimination of Israeli society of the 1940s for its sense of smugness and self-satisfaction.”48 In an interview with Haim Chertok, Hareven was asked about “Ha-ed” and its depiction of the teacher’s and students’ incapacity to believe Shlomek. Hareven explained the story in the context of Israel of the 1950s: Israeli society has always been very practical, very goal-oriented. A certain kind of egotism, self-centeredness goes with this — a lack of empathy… In order to start again in this land, the idealists wanted to forget, to obliterate the past. But when you amputate your past, you pay a price. Part of that is the failure of empathy.49

45

46

47 48 49

Shaked, Gershon. Hasiport Ha’ivrit (Hebrew Narrative Prose) Volume 4. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Hakkibutz Hameuchad and Keter, 1993: 130. Holtzman, Avner. Ahavot Tsiyon: panim be-sifrut ha-Ivrit ha-ḥadashah. Jerusalem: Carmel, 2006: 580. Brenner, “Discourses of Mourning,” 73. Ramras-Rauch, Facing the Holocaust, 15. Chertok, We Are All Close, 81. — 65 —

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----------------------------------  Chapter V  -----------------------------------

The Damaged Personhood of Holocaust Survivors

Haim Gouri’s The Chocolate Deal Commenting on the publication of Milim be-dami holeh ahavah (Words in My Lovesick Blood, 1996), Yair Mazor accurately avers that, “Haim Gouri’s role and status in modern Hebrew poetry as well as in the short history of the state of Israel have made him something of a monument.”1 Indeed, Gouri is the quintessential member of the Palmach2 generation, that group of authors that came of age with the establishment of the Jewish state and who wrote about the treacherous shoals it had to cross. Feted as one of the pillars of modern Hebrew literature, Haim Gouri (Gurfinkel), the 1988 recipient of the Israel Prize for Poetry, was born on October 9, 1923, in Tel Aviv, Palestine. Gouri studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his graduate studies in French literature at the University of Paris after winning a French government scholarship. Upon his return to Israel in 1954 he began writing for Lamerchav, the Labor Party’s official magazine. In addition to his poetry and prose, Gouri has translated French plays and other works from the French into Hebrew. His output has been recognized by a slew of awards, including The Oshiskin Prize for Poetry (1961), The Sokolov Prize (1962), The Bialik Prize (1974), The Uri Zvi Greenberg Award (1998) and The ACUM Prize for his life’s work (2005). A longtime resident of Jerusalem, he is married and is the father of three daughters. 1 2

Mazor, Yair. “Review of Words in My Lovesick Blood.” World Literature Today 71:2 (1997): 449. The fighting force of Jewish settlements during the British Mandate period in Palestine. — 67 —

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Haim Gouri first came into contact with the Holocaust universe in 1947, when he was sent by the Haganah3 to a displaced persons camp in war-torn Europe. Dispatched to Hungary and Austria to help the victims reach Israel, the young Sabra (native-born Israeli) became part of the “culture of remembrance”. Memory thus became a recurring theme underpinning a principal segment of Gouri’s chronicles. It was inevitable that this harrowing encounter with the remnant of the Holocaust would have a striking and enduring effect on the young man. Upon returning to Israel to fight in the 1948 War of Independence, Gouri became determined to keep the flame of memory alive through his ars poetica. In a 1996 interview Gouri remarked, “I see myself as an Israeli and a poet of all generations influenced by so much of our past. Meeting the survivors of the Holocaust changed my life. There is hardly a work of mine without images of the Shoah.”4 From 1972 to 1985, at the request of members of Kibbutz Beit Lohamei Haghetaot,5 Gouri collaborated with eminent documentary filmmakers David Bergman and Jacquot Erlich to produce an epic trilogy of historical films. The first, Ha-maka hashmonim ve-achat (The 81st Blow), was nominated for an Academy Award in 1975, and charts the rise of the Third Reich, the German invasion of Poland, and the subsequent attempted destruction of the Jews. The title was taken from a testimony given during the Eichmann trial by Michael GoldmanGilead, who was whipped eighty times by the Nazis. The 81st Blow refers to the doubt and indifference shown by Israelis to his and other survivor accounts. The second film, the 1979 Hayam ha-acharon (The Last Sea), winner of the French Silver Eagle Award, traces the treacherous journey on illegal boats by the liberated remnant of the death camps to Palestine, the confrontations with the British navy, detention at camps on Cyprus, and the survivors’ arrival in Palestine. The final film, Pnei Hamered (Flames in the Ashes)6 documents the various forms of Jewish 3

4 5

6

The Hagana was the Jewish settlement’s paramilitary organization during the British Mandate of Palestine. Scheidemann, Mike. “A Sense of Irony.” Jerusalem Post (26 December 1996): 5. A kibbutz-based organization of Holocaust survivors whose primary mission is to preserve the history of Jewish resistance and the memory of the victims. The direct translation is The Faces of Rebellion. — 68 —

HaimGouri’s Gouri’sThe The Chocolate Chocolate Deal ------------------------------------------------  Haim Deal ------------------------------------------------

resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe. Certainly, Gouri was one of the first Israeli artists to treat the barbaric events of the Holocaust and their aftermath, adopting as his primary concern the psychological trauma inflicted on the survivors by the Nazi inferno. His secondary concern was the influence his fieldwork in Europe had on his initial literary forays. In large part his early verse — Pirhei esh (Flowers of Fire, 1949), Ad alot ha-shahar (Till Dawn, 1950), and Shoshanat ruhot (Compass Rose, 1960) — is pervaded by images of young anti-heroes plunged into the abyss of postwar Europe who, while trekking through the detritus of the European landscape, are disoriented by the ethical bankruptcy of the perpetrators and the devastating fate of their people. The protagonist represents a collective, rather than a fully fleshed individual, a wandering mythical observer for the Jewish people, whose parabolic objective is to collect testimonies about the deracination of Jewish life. Gouri’s work reveals a naturalistic/realist template that studs the poems with references to the historical streets, palaces, bridges, and churches of cities such as Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. The effect is to overlay the text with a mimetic historical patina that anchors it to the specific apocalypse. Furthermore, by melding into the armory of depiction accurate detail in settings and in names, the writer ensures a quality of realism that intermingles finely with the figurative surrealistic ingredients. Leavened by fury, distress, and lamentation for his vanquished brothers and sisters, Gouri’s personal geysers of protestations continually explode with a visceral and tragic dimension, lodging the reader into the shocking frame of history.7 Accordingly, his vast panorama of meditations evokes the horror the Sabra senses upon his exploration of the terrain of genocide. In different ways, Gouri marshals aesthetic and poetic devices to excavate the traces of the vanished dead, deftly showing how their echoes still resonate in the cities, towns, rivers, monuments, and bridges of Europe. Again and again, the poet employs the imagery of nature as a metaphor for darkness, strangeness, and collaboration with the Nazi beast. Walking alone at night among the ruins, the speaker senses a foreign landscape oozing 7

Yaoz, Hana. Ha-Shoah Beshirat Dor Hamedina. Tel Aviv: Ekad, 1984: 105. — 69 —

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cruelty as the deathly snow entombs the corpses and simultaneously masks the footprints of the merciless killers and the flowing blood of the departed. The pilgrimage taken in Gouri’s poems is indeed a somber, ordealladen affair, as the speaker, groping for a nexus with a cultural history from which he is removed by time, is shocked by the menacing quietness of the streets that are saturated with indifference. Above and beyond that, the Israeli visitor, roaming along the barren roads that once transported his brethren, yearns to establish a sense of identification and empathy that his own generation back in the homeland does not feel. The young man, the alter ego of Gouri, whose immediate kin did not perish in the camps, attempts concomitantly to wrestle with the atrocities and to incorporate their cultural identity into his being. The motif of engagement between the naïf Israeli and the survivors finds fertile ground in “Koti Haktana” (“Little Koti” 1960), an overtly allegorical opus. In this poem, the peripatetic hero is approached by a young girl, a phantasmagorical figure who is an archivist of all the survivors’ loss and pain. In the course of their encounter, the girl, who may be a virgin or a saint, transmits to the speaker details of the gruesome murder of Jews that are later recreated as nightmares: “One day, in the lamplight, in the dark December streets / Little Koti told me about the unnatural deaths… Her story darkened the western sky, over the snowy streets.”8 Likewise, in “Yoman Leili” (“Night Diary” 1949) the narrator is steered by an anonymous figure through a kaleidoscopic exploration of the horrible sites of killing, unleashing within him an anguished cry. What is evident to readers of Gouri’s canon is that the remembrance of the victims never strikes a moralizing or condemnatory tone. The speaker never views the slain as passive weaklings who were led to their death like “sheep to the slaughter.” Rather, as he howls into the night Jobian questions, especially in his volume Ad alot ha-shahar (Till Dawn, 1950), the poet is engulfed by a wounding sense of guilt, not only merely for being alive, but also because of the intimidating helplessness he feels in the face of such unimaginable, nameless inhumanity. Given that realization, the young man is gripped by an overpowering desire 8

Gouri, Haim. Words in My Lovesick Blood. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996: 29 — 70 —

------------------------------------------------  Haim ChocolateDeal Deal -----------------------------------------------HaimGouri’s Gouri’s The The Chocolate

to remember, to keep the memory alive, to ensure that the voices of the dead never become silent or forgotten. Gouri traverses similar ground in his semiautobiographical novel, Hachakira: Sipuro shel reuel (The Interrogation: The Story of Reuel, 1980), a barely fictionalized collage of vignettes that mirrors Gouri’s previously mentioned confrontation with the survivors during his mission to Europe. Unsurprisingly, the author is incarnated on the page as an Israeli adolescent, trudging through Prague and Budapest as part of his assignment to rescue Jews. Everything is essayed from the standpoint of the envoy Reuel, who foregrounds his multiple interactions with the Jewish survivors who outlived the carnage. A thematic index of Gouri’s arc of the Holocaust can be found in the poem “Yerusha” (“Inheritance,” 1996). Unarguably one of the writer’s most noted compositions, “Yerusha” adapts the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to draw a link with the European terror, which, Gouri asserts, is the stock element in Jewish history. In the poem’s final two stanzas, we read the following: Isaac we are told, was not offered up in sacrifice He lived long/enjoyed his life until the light of his eyes grew dim But he bequeathed that hour to his progeny They are born with a knife in their heart.9

In its compression, the mythical iconography of the poem encourages us to view the national narrative of Isaac’s descendants as one of endless victimization and persecution, opening up inevitable parallels with the wartime suffering of the modern generation. Additionally, one finds anger leveled against God for not preventing the knife from being lodged so severely during the Holocaust. Indeed, the writing betrays a current of defiance and doubt about God’s mercy toward His people. Gouri’s continuing fixation with the Holocaust was embodied in the 1965 novella Iskat hashokolad (The Chocolate Deal), the poet’s first prose effort. In one of the first reviews to appear after the book’s publication 9

Gouri, Words in My Lovesick Blood, 27. — 71 —

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in English, Arthur Cohen contended that “The Chocolate Deal is the most fully realized and moving novel of the Holocaust written by a non survivor that this reviewer has read,”10 while Abraham Avni lauded the book’s emotional impact and labeled it “a commendable work.”11 Reuven Shoham explains that what differentiated Gouri’s approach to the Holocaust from his contemporaries was that he related to the catastrophe “from without, albeit with sympathy and guilt feelings regarding the survivors...”12 Shoham then adds that The Chocolate Deal is “the first real attempt to overcome this limitation in order to express the horror as seen by the victims themselves, to shed his autobiographical and lyric ‘I.’”13 Notably, The Chocolate Deal appeared immediately after the Eichmann trial, which Gouri covered as a reporter for the newspaper Lamerchav and wrote about in Mul Ta Hazechuchit (Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann 1962)14. Gouri’s riveting account of the testimonies and trial entailed a personal transformation for the journalist, who in the following passage acknowledges the attitudinal shift toward the catastrophe and its victims which he and his fellow countrymen experienced: If a new leaf has been turned over, it is inside us. We now see things differently. We have set aside a Memorial Day for the Holocaust and Heroism, and in doing so we have drawn a subtle distinction between the two, as if we had juxtaposed them as complementary but different. The Holocaust was a source of shame for us, like some awful blemish, visible to all. But the heroism we embraced as a shred of pride, has given us the right to hold our heads high… But we must ask the forgiveness of the multitudes whom we have judged in our hearts, we who were outside the circle. And we often judged them without asking ourselves what right we had to do so.15

10 11 12

13 14

15

Cohen, Arthur. “The Metaphysics of Survival.” Midstream (November 1968): 79. Avni, Abraham. “Review of Iskat hashokolad by Guri Haim.” Books Abroad 40 (1966): 113. Shoham, Reuven. “Haim Gouri and ‘The Jewish People Who Have Been Seriously Injured.’” AJS Review 24 (1999): 99. Shoham, “Haim Gouri and ‘The Jewish People Who Have Been Seriously Injured’”, 99. Gouri, Haim. Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Translated by Michael Swirsky with a foreword by Alan Mintz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 274. — 72 —

------------------------------------------------  Haim ChocolateDeal Deal -----------------------------------------------HaimGouri’s Gouri’s The The Chocolate

Casting his narrative net outside the recognizable social reality of the Palmach generation, Gouri’s novel focuses on the damaged personhood of the survivors and, in the process, creates a psychologically and symbolically driven work. Underpinning this angst-freighted tale is a first-person narration that positions the spectator to observe events and emotions from the survivors’ stance, pulling us tightly into their interior consciousness. It is also of significance that in this gaunt, minimalist, and highly elliptical narrative, any overt referent to the Holocaust is absent, underscoring its naked allegorical and abstract quality as well as eschewing the convention of dramatizing the senseless monstrosity. It is difficult not be swept up by the power of Gouri’s adroit and trenchant observations about the excruciating emotional fissures that torment the central characters and their disparate roads to recovery. As the story opens, Mordechai Neuberg (Mordi) and Reuven Krauss (Rubi), who were friends before the war, chance upon each other at a train station in an unnamed European capital. Both have lost their families and friends to Hitler’s devastating onslaught. The reader immediately feels the spectral bareness haunting the book’s tableaux, which is reinforced by the elusive, diffuse nature of the narrative. The unidentified city, broken and fragmented, stands for the lingering, bloody field of chaos that polluted Europe, and for the mental crippling of the survivors. Explicitly mapping on this geographical canvas several of the different phases of the journey taken by the survivors, Gouri yokes the material and spiritual to enunciate and set the tone for the rest of storyline. Following their meeting, Rubi accepts Mordi’s offer to share his room. It is an empty period where the ordered clock-time of civilization has been displaced by hell. In one heartbreaking scene, we see the two heroes devote endless hours to searching the missing-persons section of the newspaper for remaining family members, only to fail repeatedly in their efforts. More than anything else, Gouri’s strategy is to stress the differences between the two men who represent different approaches to how one can come to terms with inhumanity and how one can go on living in a world shorn of compassion and justice. It soon becomes clear that Mordi is the embodiment of the survivor, who is imprisoned by — 73 —

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scorching memories and is unable to break away from the pangs of guilt and shame. In the early stages of the novel his appearance is telling: A tall man. Bent a bit. Gray suited. He remains behind… he drifts slowly after those who are rushing, like a solitary rear guard.… Unless he’s decided to become a statue, a monument, some sort of action, of movement is expected.… He exploits up to the permissible limit his privilege to stand there, keep silent and make up his mind.16

Once a promising journalist and doctoral candidate on troubadour poetry, Mordi was saved, we learn, by the kindness of his professor who arranged for his student to be hidden in a convent cellar. As a consequence, the teacher was captured and tortured, an event that contributed greatly to Mordi’s own disintegration. In a sense, the emotionally paralyzed Mordi wishes for death, for he has seen the evil that men do and has quietly decided to remain lost in his existential alienation. Given such characterization, it is worth noting that Mordi’s name alludes to death. Afflicted with self-abnegation, Mordi is so emasculated that he settles within the limited comfort of the Sisters of Mercy warehouse — a lodging that is a corollary to his monastic subsistence. Eventually, Mordi’s emotional disrepair builds to a crescendo when Rubi disappears for two weeks without notice so he can be with his lover. Without his friend to prod him toward accepting and rejoining life, dystopian as it is, the defeated hero collapses into suicide under the enormity of his broodings and spiritual stasis. Mordi’s hurtling toward doom is a memorable image that defines the core of the novel, revealing the path of quiet resignation that some survivors opted to embrace. Unlike the forlorn Mordi, Rubi is unwaveringly committed to reengaging with life. Despite his intense woundedness, the one-time math genius has not been diminished by the catastrophe in Europe, channeling his remaining reservoirs of energy (perhaps also rage and yearning for revenge) to go on living. It is a minor weakness that precious little is furnished in the form of a backstory to explain how

16

Gouri, Haim. The Chocolate Deal. Translated by Seymour Simckes. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999: 1–3. — 74 —

------------------------------------------------  Haim ChocolateDeal Deal -----------------------------------------------HaimGouri’s Gouri’s The The Chocolate

Rubi endured. But from the outset it is clear that hunger and action mark his every move, whether it is with women or whether it is in a new enterprise populating his fantasy. Hoping to exploit distant family connections, Rubi actively searches for the affluent Salomons, even though Mordi, who knows they were slain, warns him against such a course. Congruent with his sensitive personality, Mordi counsels Rubi to send his uncle, a rich lawyer before the war, a letter, instead of unexpectedly appearing at his residence. Meanwhile, Rubi takes up with a former lover, Gerti, whom he meets in the streets working as a prostitute. Later he learns that her own claim to moral rectitude is questionable as she is the secretary to a former Gestapo camp doctor named Hoffman. This revelation does not prevent Rubi from seeking pleasure in this tainted woman’s body, further compounding the move away from the shackling eclipse of the past. Midway through the novel, Rubi discovers that his wealthy relatives have been murdered. Alone again, after Mordi’s sudden death, Rubi searches for new ways to actualize his dreams of wealth. He fabricates a scam concerning chocolate, planning to buy enormous amounts of the excess military chocolate left by the departing American troops. He then intends to blackmail the same Dr. Hoffman for whom Gerti works and whose young daughter he saved from a burning building — whether this is a hallucination or fact can be debated — in order to procure a medical opinion that the eating of chocolate weakens the sexual performance of men. Once the price of chocolate is lowered, Rubi counts on buying it cheaply and then inflating the price so that he can sell it at a profit. The specific fraud aside, it is revealed that Dr. Hoffman is not only guilty of horrendous crimes during the reign of the Nazi administration but also of seizing ownership of the dwelling and possessions of Rubi’s uncle’s house. Rubi does not have qualms about taking advantage of the doctor’s guilt, and the physician ultimately consents to Rubi’s offer of silence and the opportunity to disappear. This gesture of authorial enunciation has Gouri making an obvious allusion to the Israeli acceptance of German reparations as well as to the issue of collaboration with the murderers and their accomplices. Should the survivors forgive the agents of the final solution in their — 75 —

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quest to escape the disorienting graveyard of the past and rebuild a fractured existence, even though it may involve an obscene divesting of loyalty to and betrayal of the victims? Or should one maintain one’s fidelity to the sacrificed ones? It is of salience that this sub-plot is only interposed near the end and never reaches fruition, strongly implying that it is either a product of Rubi’s delirious reveries or that he has decided not to go ahead with the deal. On the whole, the shorthand message hammered home is that the survivors have the dilemma of either returning to life, albeit with all its insuperable weight, or retreating from its unfathomable cruelty into oblivion. The novel underlines the sharp polarities between Rubi and Mordi who epitomize antithetical philosophical inflections about how to live in a post-Holocaust world. Hence, thematically, the work provides a cornucopia of observations generated from having two sides of the survivor coin interlocking. Alan Mintz, however, notes of the writer’s “investment of narrative sympathy,” that: [it] is so evenly distributed that it is impossible to say that one is favored over the other. There is little sense of an Israeli writer making an assessment of survivors relative to the values of his own generation.17

The Chocolate Deal has many virtues, most notably, in the words of Gershon Shaked, its ability to understand that “even among the survivors there existed differentiation.…” Shaked then adds, Gouri has given… a crushing answer to the question whether, and to what extent, can the Israeli-born comprehend and tackle the world of the ‘other’… He does not try and observe him from the outside as a narrator or temporary guest, but tries to look at him from the inside. He understands from the inside how his ‘dead brother’ has lived the reality of survivorship, the fear, the renewal and the burden of the past.18

17 18

Mintz, Alan. Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature. New York, 1984: 257. Shaked, Gershon. “Ben ha’aretz vechavayat haShoah (The Israeli-born and the Holocaust Experience).” Iton 77 (1996): 20–21, 46 (46). — 76 —

----------------------------------------------------  Hanoch Bartov’s The Brigade ----------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------  Chapter VI  ---------------------------------Confronting the Incomprehensible Reality

Confronting the Incomprehensible Reality of the Holocaust Universe

Hanoch Bartov’s The Brigade In 2008, when Hanoch Bartov, the author of twenty-three books and one of Israel’s finest novelists, playwrights, and journalists, received the Yehuda Amichai-ACUM Lifetime Achievement Prize, the judges singled out Pitzei Bagrut1 (The Brigade) as one of the novels that exemplified the height of Bartov’s artistic achievement. In its official citation, the panel described the awardee as: One of the pillars of literature in Israel. With personal and public courage, with emotional intensity and the assured hand of an artist that combined humour and deep lyrical sensitivity, Bartov, in his varied corpus, has woven not only the worlds of individuals who wander about within life’s large networks, but has also been able to sketch a multifaceted and complex collective portrait of the history of this land.2

The members of the panel that conferred the Israel Prize for Literature on Bartov on Independence Day 2010, forty-five years after he produced Pitzei Bagrut, remarked that he is “One of Israel’s major authors, representing the best of literature within the generation that battled for independence. In all of his writings he has chronicled the seminal events experienced by this land and by its inhabitants in the twentieth century.”3 1 2

3

Bartov, Hanoch. Pitzei Bagrut. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1965. Yudelevitch, Miriam. “Pras Mifal Hayim Lasofer Hanoch Bartov.” Yediot Achronot (1 January 2008). http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3489191,00.html Karpel, Dalia. “Hanoch Bartov Is Not Angry That Only Now, at Age 84, He Is Awarded the Israel Prize.” (Hebrew). Haaretz (20 April 2010). http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/ spages/1163292.html. — 77 —

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In a career spanning six decades, Hanoch Bartov is one of Israel’s most prodigious and prolific writers, having penned scores of novels, short stories, essays, plays, biographies, novellas, and articles. Hanoch Helfgot was born in the town of Petah Tikva, Palestine, on August 13, 1926 and crafted the name Bartov from the initials of his grandfather’s name — Rabbi Tuvia Dov Bar. A student at a religious school as well at the Ahad Ha’am Gymnasium, in 1943, aged seventeen, he used forged documents to join the Jewish Brigade (part of the British Army) in which he fought for three years in Italy, Holland, and Belgium. He then served in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1948 War of Independence. Bartov studied history and sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1946–1951) and, upon graduation, moved with his wife Yehudit to Kibbutz Ein Hachoresh. He has a son, Omer Bartov, an eminent historian, and a daughter, Gilat Borkhardt-Bartov, a respected psychologist. A hallmark of Bartov’s fiction is realism and the absence of the nostalgic, though his stories are often tinged with humor and irony. Throughout his literary career, Bartov has studded his corpus with autobiographical details and based much of his work on his childhood experiences, having lived through the British Mandate in Palestine and witnessed the consequential and momentous historical events leading up to the foundation of the Jewish state. The locus of his fictions is linked to the theme of the evolving and uncrystallized Israeli identity, its human landscapes and social dilemmas, unfolding in a country that itself is in search of its own steady identity. Bartov served as a cultural attaché at the Israeli embassy in London from 1966 to 1968 and penned columns for the daily newspaper Maariv and Lamerchav, the Labor Party’s official magazine. Bartov’s first story, “Tzel Ha-havar” (“The Shadow of the Past”), was published in the weekly journal Hagalgal in November 1945, and his first novel Ha-Hesbon VeHa-Nefesh (The Reckoning and the Soul), a tract of social protest that depicts the ideological disappointment and disillusionment of the generation of the War of Independence, came out in 1953. Bartov has been honored with numerous awards, among them, The Oshiskin Prize (1955), The Bialik Prize (1985), The Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for Military History (1987) for his study of General David Elazar, — 78 —

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The Agnon Prize (2006) for his novel Mi-Tom Ad Tom (Hand in Hand, Locked for Life), and The Prime Minister’s Prize (2007). He was made an honorary citizen of Petah Tikvah and received an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University. In his posthumously published collection of essays, one of Israel’s greatest literary critics, Gershon Shaked, writes about the impact the Eichmann trial had on Hebrew fiction. Shaked writes that it, “exposed the Jewish community in Israel to the horrors of annihilation and to the terror of helplessness of those who had to confront the liquidation.”4 Shaked adds that in the post-Eichmann years, “[a]n awareness that the victims and survivors are part of Israeli existence and have a social and literary legitimacy —  not less than the ‘New Hebrew’ —  entered the circle of Hebrew literature.”5 One of the texts Shaked cites in his examination of post-Eichmann Hebrew literature is Hanoch Bartov’s 1965 novella Pitzei Bagrut. And indeed, Bartov’s novel is still considered emblematic of the sea-change in attitudes that occurred in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s. Bartov’s Pitzei Bagrut6 (The Brigade), winner of the 1965 Shlonsky Award, sold seventy thousand copies at a time when the country’s population stood at 2.5 million. The success finally convinced Bartov to change his professional occupation from journalist to author. It is a work that asks how one should respond to the Holocaust and then adumbrates the feelings associated with such a dilemma. The Brigade debates whether revenge is the appropriate reaction to the crimes of the Nazis and whether it is even achievable. It is also about the relationship between the native-born Israelis and the European Jews who were the victims of genocide. At the center of the novel is the underlying motif of identity, asking whether Israeli identity differs from Jewish diasporic identity. As one commentator observed, “The Brigade is the first serious inquiry in Israeli literature into the emotions of shame and repulsion towards the survivors of the Holocaust.”7 4

5 6 7

Shaked, Gershon. Modern Hebrew Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000: 128. Gershon. Modern Hebrew Fiction, 128. Bartov, Hanoch. Pitzei Bagrut. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1965. Mintz, Hurban, 245. — 79 —

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In one wide-ranging interview, Bartov revealed that his first brush with Jewish history occurred when, as a soldier, he came face-to-face with concentration-camp prisoners: The encounter was intolerable and it changed my life. Here I was, a soldier from Palestine — The Land of Israel — with a self-image of a cowboy hero à la Buck Jones, and you stand there hearing Jews relate the most horrific stories. I discovered a relative and asked him what his role was in the camp. He made the gesture of a baker inserting a baking tray into an oven in order to illustrate that this was his task, to put bodies into the crematorium. I simply ran away from that place.8

In an essay he wrote for Commentary magazine in 1989, Bartov elaborated on how the Diaspora was perceived in Palestine of the 1930s. According to Bartov, the operative dogma then was that the European Jews were, “‘other Jews’ and ‘polar opposites’” to the Palestinian Jews. For Bartov, this entrenched mind-set had dissipated by the time he, as a nineteenyear-old soldier, confronted the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust and peered into the hollow eyes of the inmates of the death camps. At that life-altering moment, the false walls that Bartov erected between the Israeli and the Jew had collapsed. He knew then and there who he was, both as a man and as an artist: “I am a Jew, period.… I arrived at the deep conviction that Israeli means Jewish or it is utterly meaningless, or worse. To me, to say ‘Israeli, period,’ is to join the long, crooked line of those determined to escape their Jewishness, to cease to be.”9 Bartov reiterated this affirmative conviction in his 2007 book of essays Ligdol Ve-Lichtov Be-Eretz Israel (To Be and to Write in the Land of Israel). Echoing Bartov's public proclamations, Gershon Shaked remarks that a hallmark of Bartov’s bildungsromans of the period is that, while, “Severely judging the exilic failings of diaspora Jewry, Bartov nonetheless conveyed an attitude of charitable forgiveness.”10 In the documentary film In our Own Hands: The Hidden Story of the Jewish Brigade in World War II, Bartov recalls discovering refugees curled 8

9 10

Karpel, Dalia. “Hanoch Bartov Is Not Angry That Only Now, at Age 84, He Is Awarded the Israel Prize.” Haaretz (20 April 2010). (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/ spages/1163292.html Bartov, Hanoch. “Writing as a Jew.” Commentary 87(6) (1989): 26. Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction, 176. — 80 —

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up in a bombed out building in Austria: “We said, ‘We are the Jewish Brigade.’ The Refugees, laughing, replied, ‘What humour young people have. The Jews all went up in smoke.’ Once convinced, the refugees looked as if the Messiah had just entered.”11 In another interview, he explained that the men of the Jewish Brigade were: [n]either saints nor knights. We were simply Israeli Jewish boys who understood that we stand now for the Jewish people and we have to do something about it… We came as an Angel of Life, I would say, to the Jewish people… We found dead people and helped them to come back to life.”12

The Jewish Brigade was the brainchild of Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization, and his colleagues. Marshalling the support of various Jewish and non-Jewish figures in England and the USA, they appealed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to set up a “Jewish army” that could fight, under the Jewish flag, alongside the British forces against Germany. In 1944, the Jewish Brigade was established. The London Times wrote at that time, “The Jewish Brigade group may well prove to the world that the Jews need not always be hunted and persecuted, but their soldiers will now be in the front of a great and winning cause.”13 During his service in the Jewish regiment, while inside the soldiers’ barracks, Bartov heard the gut-wrenching tale of Amos Rabinowitz, a comrade in the brigade, who in the summer of 1945 miraculously found his father, Yitzhak, and fifteen-year-old brother, Shmuel, in a displaced-persons camp in the town of Brasigella, Italy. Unbeknownst to the father and two sons, the mother, Shulamit, also unaware that her husband and sons were alive, had walked for more than two hundred miles from the Baltic Sea to Brasigella, and was reunited with her family. Nearly six decades later, Bartov produced the 2006 novel Mihutz laofek, Me’ever La-rechov (Beyond the Horizon Across the Street) in which he charts the epic tale of the Rabinowitz-Elhanan family, the horrific 11

12

13

Johnson, V. Kevin. “‘Hidden Story’ Uncovers Secret Missions of Jewish Soldiers.” USA Today (26 April 2000). n.p. Kohn, Moshe. “Onward Jewish Soldiers.” The Jerusalem Post (15 January 1999): 26– 28 (27). Kohn, “Onward,” 27. — 81 —

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saga of the Kovno Ghetto, the role of the Judenrat, and the 1948 War of Independence. Bartov received the Yad Vashem Buchman Prize for Mihutz laofek, Me’ever La-rechov. The citation read: The book is worthy of the Prize for its own sake — for the original story it tells, its unique style, the insights it offers, the moral pathos that drives it, and the unusual light it sheds on the Holocaust. The Prize is therefore awarded to Hanoch Bartov for this recent book, with the Committee’s implicit recognition of earlier works by the author, which collectively constitute an important contribution to past and present Holocaust literature.14

In the vein of other novels of this period, such as Yehuda Amichai’s Lo Me-Achshav lo Mi-Kan (Not of this Time, Not of this Place, 1963), the plot of The Brigade15 focuses on a 19 year old Jew, who is plunged into war-torn Europe and confronts, for the first time, the slaughter of his people. Swirling in and out of the pages are questions of vengeance, morality, and the nature of relations between victim and perpetrator. To underline the author’s affinity with the material, one should repeat that Bartov, like his creation Elisha Kruk, was born in Palestine in 1926 and joined the Jewish Brigade in 1943, aged seventeen. The central narrator-hero is Elisha Kruk, and it is through his eyes that events are related. Born in Palestine, the young man enlists in the British Army as a medic, supposedly to do battle with the Germans whom he has learned to abhor, but also to flee the strictures of his father’s home, which he perceives to be socially oppressive. We learn that his parents are Polish immigrants and that his father has immersed his son in the world of the Torah, an education that Elisha wishes to escape. At one point, he ruminates, “I was free of all obligations… Snap it, that damn last string tying you to your father’s wretched world, to fear of sin, pure-mindedness, novelistic romance. Snap that string and float away like a balloon.”16 Principally, Elisha is a delicate, childish teenager, striving for recognition that he is indeed an adult, both from 14

15

16

Yad Vashem. “Buchman Prizes Awarded to Bartov and Aharonson.” Yad Vashem Newsletter (2009): 12. I am using the English translation in Bartov, Hanoch, The Brigade. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Bartov, The Brigade, 170. — 82 —

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his beloved girlfriend Noga as well as from his peers in the unit. The novel, essentially a bildungsroman (made explicit by the Hebrew title, which means Wounds of Maturity), shows how Elisha is forced to grow up and make ethical calls during his stay in post-Shoah Europe, choices that ultimately lead him back to the traditions and mores that he imbibed at his father’s Sabbath table. It is also, fundamentally, as critic Gershon Shaked puts it, about the “complexity of the need both to accept the historical continuity with European Jewry and to affirm the dimensions of the new Jewish existence in Eretz Yisrael.”17 The story opens on the last day of the Second World War, just as news of the Nazi surrender reaches the Jewish Brigade, stationed in Italy and waiting for orders to enter the front and rescue the survivors. Framing his tale within a closely knit group of soldiers of divergent backgrounds, Bartov is able to craft each character as a strict representation of an ideological posture, giving each a philosophical view about how to treat the defeated Germans whom they encounter. The mission of the brigade is to facilitate the transfer of the Jewish refugees from the displaced persons camps to Palestine so they can return to their homeland and join their brothers and sisters. Mostly young, the brigade consists of an extended roster of characters, including kibbutz and Jewish settlement members, students, and former fighters of the various underground Jewish movements in Palestine who have grown tired of their own organizations. Hearing stories of the atrocities filtering in from Europe, the Jewish Brigade soldiers have developed an intense hatred for the Nazi butchers and a deep desire to take immediate retribution on their enemies. Furthermore, they despise being relegated to the role of bystanders, especially since their own active defense of their land against the British and Arabs in Palestine has marked them as different from their passive European Jewish counterparts, who they think accepted their ‘Jewish fate’ with resignation. In a sense, the yearning for revenge can be read as a rebellion by the young men of the brigade against what they perceive as the habitual “Jewish fate” that, in their mind, was concretized ne plus ultra during the Shoah. As Dekoven Ezrahi maintains, the novel 17

Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction, 176. — 83 —

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“reconstructs the brazen, self confident attitude of a generation of Israeli soldiers who regarded the victims with disdain mingled with a determination to avenge their death.”18 Although members of the Jewish brigade did not share in the suffering of the victims, their undertaking is to provide a response equivalent to the crimes committed by the Nazis. From the outset, we are reminded of the contingent’s internal raison d’être for being there: It wouldn’t be much, only one Kishinev, in round numbers: one thousand houses burned down, five hundred killed, one hundred raped. What do you mean one hundred? I have to kill one by one by myself. In cold blood. And rape one woman. In cold blood…That’s what we are here for.19

What is at issue here is that by retaliating against the Germans, even if it is after the fact, the Jewish warriors will differentiate themselves from the submissive European Jews with whom they deny any identification. In the camp of those who hold that an eye for an eye is less important than saving the shattered Jews is the British colonel who alerts the brigade to the difficult moral dilemma facing them. He instructs them to exercise restraint against those who distorted and defaced all morality with their murderous acts. His plea falls on deaf ears. As they make their way to the Austrian-Italian border, with the slogan “The Jews are coming” splashed across their vehicles, the brigade comes across a column of trucks containing groups of German war prisoners. Undeterred by the previous appeal, they hurl tins and tent pegs, hitting and injuring several of the German soldiers (the sequence hums with biblical overtones when the Jewish soldiers fling a cheap figurine of Moses at the German prisoners). As a result, the convoy is stopped by the British soldiers, who rebuke them for their actions, and who make certain that the line of trucks can pass safely. Later, while awaiting a train to take them to their permanent base, Elisha and his comrades decide to seize control of the train station and, in the process, reaffirm their status as conquerors. When the station 18

19

Dekoven Ezrahi, Sidra. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980: 126–127. Bartov, The Brigade, 46–47. — 84 —

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manager, along with two other workers, tries to prevent the violent deed, one of the soldiers points his machine gun at him with the threat of emptying his bullets into the frightened administrator. Yet, for all their bravado, nothing happens. In the end, their nihilistic fantasies of destruction remain unfulfilled. They board the train that takes them back to their camp across the border, feeling impotent for their inability to inflict damage on the Germans. In many respects, the failure of the band of heroes to actualize their longing to fight the Germans (throughout the novel they fail to discharge a single shot and remain stranded in Italy for close to two months) or to retaliate, augments the author’s depiction of the soldiers as onlookers, standing apart from the action, without affecting history. The book’s dramatic climax occurs in a four-hour debate that erupts when the entire company is summoned to a roll call. It transpires that a German mother and a daughter have claimed that soldiers from the brigade broke into their house, tried to rape and kill them, and stole money and other valuables. Bartov deftly draws us into this tense, emotionally charged sequence, through the fiercely delineated opposing arguments made by various members of the brigade. Locked in intense conversation, all the disparate threads are knotted and thrust together in a battering ram fashion. Each voice is allowed its own tonality and its own moral rage, in challenging and thwarting the other’s argument. The brigade leader, Tamari, who insists the two accused men stand up and reveal themselves rather than subject the entire brigade to a humiliating parade before the two German women, rationally contends that no one has the right to pursue their own war, that they are here as emissaries sent for one purpose, which is to rescue the Jews. One of the soldiers, Giladi, in contradistinction, zealously promotes the value of revenge: We don’t believe in turning the other cheek, Tamari, and even if we did, we couldn’t turn it because it no longer exists. They destroyed everything in their furnaces… Only one hand was saved, only one small fist. Us. Here. What should this clenched fist do Tamari, what do you suggest it to do?20

20

Bartov, The Brigade, 116. — 85 —

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Giladi then expounds upon the frustrating possibility that the dead will not be avenged: “The one small fist is still clenched, in a spasm. It will never open up, this fist. It will stay clenched, its fingernails piercing its own flesh, its blood frozen, the memory of vengeance never unleashed, blackening it with gangrene.”21 According to Giladi, the only way to liberate oneself from the abhorrent terror of the Nazis is to respond in a similar fashion. In his tirade, Giladi addresses the question of what will happen if Jews do not jettison their moral code and are not allowed to practice their own brand of justice. He harangues his captive audience, proclaiming that they must pass on the hatred from one generation to the next. He advocates, “one day of wild revenge. Murder for its own sake. Rape for rape. Looting for looting. Innocent victims for innocent victims,”22 Giladi believes that only through such acts will they be able to rid themselves of “this canker, this rot, this nightmare of helplessness — only then, clean and at peace with ourselves can we take our place in human society once more. Then we can forget.”23 In the end, the two assailants, who were accused by the daughter and mother of breaking into their house, own up and are replaced by two other soldiers, but only after a degrading parade formation where the women fail to pick out their attackers. Recollecting the event, the narrator says, “Many years have passed since then, but that day has stuck to me.”24 Germane here is the ironic skewing of reality in that the defeated Nazis are again, momentarily, the persecutors identifying and selecting Jews from a roll call. A parallel theme operating in the book is the contact with the survivors and the reaction it stirs in Elisha. Notably, Bartov sheds light on the attitude his protagonists display toward their diaspora counterparts by first grafting onto the page a meeting with the supposed antithesis of the victims. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the episode where Elisha and his fellow soldiers meet the representative of the greatly lauded partisans. This heroic figure has arrived at the railroad

21 22 23 24

Bartov, The Brigade, 117. Bartov, The Brigade, 117. Bartov, The Brigade, 117–118. Bartov, The Brigade, 128. — 86 —

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workers’ building to ask for directions on how to reach headquarters so as to receive further instructions. Unsurprisingly, the paragon of wartime resistance and courage provokes a geyser of national pride: It seemed unbelievable — all of us squeezed into the room, surrounding the stranger… This stranger, who had come to us from out of the darkness, awesome in his appearance, was actually one of us, speaking our language, coming to us straight from the forest, directing his feet to this spot on the border as though to a star.25

As a result, Zunenshtein, one of the brigade’s soldiers, wants to hug the stranger, whom he calls haver (friend), while another shoves bread into his hand. Nonetheless, the real test comes when Elisha visits a refugee camp in the Italian Alps and confronts the remnant of the Shoah, in a chapter tellingly named “Growing Pains.” What Bartov does here is to pile shock upon shock as the narrator/hero wanders through the landscape of human tragedy. Elisha is startled by the first man he sees — unshaven, bald, lips covered with rusty scales, scraping his dry skin and gripping a bowl of soup. Astonished by the pitiful sight, he confides in the reader, “I was terror- stricken at the thought of his coming over to me and ashamed of that terror.”26 Immediately afterward, he spots a woman, whom he describes as ugly with a swollen belly. Overcome by dismay, the young man cannot bear to look at her wretched appearance and is filled with a revulsion that comes over him and that precludes him from approaching her. Later, in another shattering aside, he remarks, “I kept telling myself that these were the people we had spoken of for so many years — but I was so far removed from them that electric wire might have separated us.”27 In a revelatory moment, we learn that at home Elisha would leave in disgust every time his parents would speak about the family they lost, in effect disallowing any personal connection with the Jews “over there.” Now, ashamed of his feelings, he searches for any lost relative, praying that he could remember a single name. Sagaciously, 25 26 27

Bartov, The Brigade, 139. Bartov, The Brigade, 146. Bartov, The Brigade, 148. — 87 —

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Bartov hatches a subplot to push this theme a step further. Standing in front of the bulletin board that lists the names of the communities of those persons in the camps, Elisha labors to dig up the names of the relatives he heard about at home. As it happens, the young man meets one of his relatives, a twenty-three-year-old named Krochmal. The former Auschwitz inmate is delighted. He links arms with Elisha, who allows him the comfort of family and launches into a surprisingly affirmative declaration: “I felt a wonderful sense of satisfaction at being able to offer protection to this youth who was no longer an anonymous person.”28 Yet, what follows, lingers in the mind far longer than the initial enthusiasm Elisha displays. When his relation discloses that he managed to survive by working in the crematorium, Elisha's sickening and vicious response burns a hole in the memory: More than anything else I was filled with revulsion at the thought of being connected with him. That feeling was more powerful than the terror and the nausea. If only I could get out of there quickly, not remember that jumpy puppet. Not look into his eyes. Not breathe the air around him. And he even said, “You wouldn’t see me here today.” Who wants to see you, goddamnit? Not me, that’s for sure… didn’t want to be there at all, not see, not hear, not remember…29

Like a blast of wind, Elisha has swept into Krochmal’s displaced and barren world, holding out hope for a tenuous nexus to a better future. But despite his relative’s plea that he take a short letter (quickly written) to give his family or provide him with an address in Palestine so he could write to them directly, Elisha is intent on snapping any binding ties. Employing the excuse that he will miss the pickup and that his friends will not wait for him, Elisha runs away, promising Krochmal that he will return the next day. And when the pitiful man extracts an assurance that Elisha will not forget him, we read, “It seemed that the shame engulfing me was visible even in the darkness.”30 In doing so, in turning his back on the survivors, Elisha has violated the most fundamental and basic of commandments — that of remembering. Additionally, he 28 29 30

Bartov, The Brigade, 159. Bartov, The Brigade, 161. Bartov, The Brigade, 162. — 88 —

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has abandoned the military duty he had sworn to: “Dedication, loyalty and love for the remnants of the sword and the camps.”31 To his credit, Bartov provides a seriously dark indictment of the Jewish soldiers’ limitations in identifying with the survivor. In a direct and honest fashion, Bartov never lets any predictability seep into the well-observed scene between Elisha and Krochmal. Altogether, Bartov invests Elisha with a savagely critical attitude toward the survivor that unabashedly illustrates how ill-equipped the outsiders were to absorb and understand such truths. Equally, this remoteness extends to and permeates the collective. This is strikingly dramatized when the convoy of trucks crosses into Germany. As it passes a concentration camp, the gate is opened, and a crowd of freed prisoners streams toward the soldiers, waving their hands, singing and yelling Shalom and Aretz.32 Overwhelmed by the torrents of untamed emotions, the brigade throws candy and cigarette cartons to the masses of people standing by the side of the vehicles. Still, it is a cauterized response. Not once do the Jewish soldiers from Palestine approach, let alone touch the outstretched hands of the crowd, eschewing any act that would suggest that an unbridled, empathic bond has cohered. Swiftly, the convoy moves on, and the soldiers return to stretch out on their gear as though “a sword had severed us from that scene. A strange silence blanketed the truck.”33 Subsequently, Elisha confesses, “I wanted to flee. If I were able… I would look into getting my discharge as quickly as possible, do anything to escape that continent where I could not live either with our dead or with their living.”34 Manifestly, Elisha’s admission chimes with Gila Ramras-Rauch’s remark that The Brigade “is a strong tale of impotence, ambiguity, and self-questioning in a gutted, incomprehensible world.”35 Yet in the end, Elisha shows maturity and acceptance of Jewish values. This is crystallized in a defiant act near the book’s coda, when he repudiates his friend Brodsky’s cry for vengeance. On a night stop in a field near an Austrian town, Kruk and Brodksy seek a place to rest. 31 32 33 34 35

Bartov, The Brigade, 57. Aretz traditionally refers to “the Land of Israel.” Bartov, The Brigade, 217. Bartov, The Brigade, 223. Ramras-Rauch, Facing the Holocaust, 179. — 89 —

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They force their way into the home of a German SS officer, encountering only the wife and daughter, alone after the father has escaped. Sleeping in one of the rooms, Elisha wakes up to the sound of the daughter screaming from the kitchen. He loads his rifle and rushes downstairs, and is unsettled by the smile ghosting around Brodsky’s lips, reflecting his own face. He then discovers a frightening sight: three soldiers from the Jewish Brigade had undressed the daughter and pinned her down, ready to rape her. Although Brodsky implores him to go back to bed because “[t]they’re our boys,”36 Elisha is unwilling to allow the violation and shoots into the ceiling. Stunned, the three men clear out. Before leaving, one of the culprits yells at him, “Kruk, you’re crazy. They’re Nazis. The old whore’s husband is an SS Man.… No German ever stood with a rifle to protect a Jewish girl.”37 The encounter with the Germans sets up for the Brigade members a clutch of fundamental questions that go to the very fiber of their being: “How does one hate? What is the moral price of revenge? Can an individual wage a private war? Is the brigade an army of liberation or an army of retribution?”38 In fact, the novel’s last sentence encapsulates this buried message: “And still I whisper over that memory, over that blood: Thank God I did not destroy myself in Germany, thank God that was beyond me. I am what I am.”39 Interestingly, Bartov has admitted to wrestling with the temptation to seek vengeance on officers of the Nazi regime after seeing the emaciated bodies of his fellow Jews and listening to the chilling stories of the death camps. Yet, according to Bartov, members of the Jewish Brigade turned their attention to helping smuggle Jews to Palestine because, “we couldn’t bring ourselves to kill our perpetrators in cold blood.”40 Robert Alter persuasively argues that Elisha’s high-principled prevention of the crime illustrates that he “has no choice but to go on with his old Jewish self, understanding now its terrible inadequacies, 36 37 38 39 40

Bartov, The Brigade, 229. Bartov, The Brigade, 230–231. Ramras-Rauch, Facing the Holocaust, 14. Bartov, The Brigade, 246. Warren, Jane. “When We Found Nazis We Killed Them, Like You Would Kill a Bug.” The Express (12 May 2000): n.p. — 90 —

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its confusions and cowardice — and, just possibly, its potential for moral sensitivity.”41 In tandem, one can add that Elisha undergoes a maturing process both morally and politically precisely at the moment he boldly protects the German women. Having earlier heard the polarized arguments articulated by Giladi and Tamari during the full-throttle bombastic marathon set piece to expose the guilty brigade soldiers, the conflicted young man reaches a clear-cut position that distances him from the nihilistic and crude worldview of Giladi and the others. On the whole, the reassuring subtext of Elisha's final uplifting act of humanism is that only by exercising restraint in accordance with the code of Jewish morality can one achieve adulthood and integrity when drawn into an absurd and chaotic universe such as post-Holocaust Europe. Bartov’s wartime experiences birthed three companion pieces to The Brigade covering World War II and the Holocaust. In 1970, Bartov published Shel Mi Ata Yeled (Whose Little Boy Are You), a novel which recreates Bartov’s childhood in Petah Tikvah. Set in 1930s Palestine and told through the eyes of a child, Nachman Shpiegler, it is a reconstruction of the small village near Tel Aviv where Nachman lives with his Polish-born parents. Shel Mi Ata Yeled was complemented in 1994 by Regel Achat Bachutz (Halfway Out), a coming-of-age tale of a thirteen-year-old boy living in Tel Aviv who enlists in the British Armed Forces’ Jewish Brigade.

41

Alter, Robert. After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing. New York: Dutton, 1969: 179. — 91 —

-----------------------------------------------------  Aharon Megged’s “The Name” -----------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------  Chapter VII  ---------------------------------

A Clash of Generations

Aharon Megged’s “The Name” The author of over forty novels, short stories, plays, novellas, and literary and political essays, Aharon Megged is one of Israel’s most prolific, gifted, and honored novelists. Born on August 10, 1920, in Wloclawek, Poland, to Moshe and Leah, the family immigrated to Palestine when he was six years old. They settled in the village of Ra’anana, where his father taught in the local school. Megged studied in the Herzliya High School and later joined Kibbutz Givat-Brenner and Kibbutz Sdot-Yam, where he edited the kibbutz movement's publications. In the 1950s he worked as a journalist and literary editor of the biweekly literary magazine Massa (which he cofounded) and the literary section of the daily newspaper Lamerchav. He also worked as columnist for the daily newspaper Davar. Between 1968 and 1971 he served as a cultural attaché at the Israeli embassy in London and was a writer in residence at Oxford and Haifa universities. Aharon Megged is married to the writer and painter Ida Zurit and is the father of the poet Eyal Megged and Amos Megged, a history professor. His younger brother, Matti Megged, is a novelist and a literary scholar. A member of the academy of the Hebrew language since 1980, Aharon Megged was appointed President of the Israeli PEN branch, a role he served in from 1980 to 1987. He has won a variety of awards, including The Ussishkin Prize (1955, 1966), The Brenner Prize (1957), The Shlonsky Prize (1963), The Bialik Prize (1974), The Newman Prize (1991), The Agnon Prize, (1997), The Wizo Prize, The President’s Prize (2001), and The Prime Minister’s Prize (which he won three times). In 2003, Megged received the country’s highest award, The Israel Prize for Literature. — 93 —

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His first story, “Mit’an shel shvarim” (“A Cargo of Oxen”), was published in 1940, and his first book, a collection of short stories titled Ruah Yamim (Spirit of the Seas, 1950), centered on the pioneering achievements of the Zionist enterprise. One of his most acclaimed works is the 1965 novel Ha chai al ha-met (The Living on the Dead), which details the trial of a young writer, Yonas, who stands accused of not submitting the biography that he was commissioned to write of Abrasha Davidov, a Zionist legend of the pioneer generation. After more than a year of collecting testimonies and conducting research, Yonas finds that he cannot produce the book since he has discovered that the revered national legend is in fact a tyrant. Moreover, Yonas concludes that in order for the present generation to live, it must erase the saintly Davidov’s memory from its collective consciousness. In a breathtaking act of literary and historical provocation, Megged was reminding readers and focusing their attention on the fact that the youngsters of the 1960s could not follow in the footsteps of their predecessors or realize their lofty dreams and expectations. Like Yonas, the post 1948 successors to the nation builders were afflicted with a mental crisis and an oedipal complex when confronted with the heroic deeds of their patriarchs and sought to deny that legacy. In an act of art imitating life, the novel is highly autobiographical: in the 1950s, following the death of Yitzhak Sade, one of the legendary Palmah founders, Megged signed a contract with one of Israel's leading publishers to pen Sade’s biography. Like Yonas, he collected a substantive amount of material and conducted interviews with family members and friends of Sadeh. Ultimately the book was never completed. It is worth noting that Megged has examined the theme of the Holocaust, in particular the attitude and behavior of native Israelis toward the survivors, in several of his works, plays, and nonfiction writings. Megged deals with the Holocaust in Moto shel Mendel Efrat (The Death of Mendel Efrat), a story that appears in the same collection as “Yad vashem” (“The Name”) in the play Hana Senesh (1958), the novella Ad ha-erev (Till Evening Falls, 2001), and in the acclaimed 1987 novel Foiglman. In Foiglman, for which Megged won The Koret Jewish Book Award, the nucleus narrative revolves around the relationship between Shmuel Foiglman, a Holocaust survivor and a poet living — 94 —

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in Paris, and Zvi Arbel, a history professor in Tel Aviv studying the Ukrainian pogroms. The haunting novel explores the contrast between the lost and shattered world of European Jewry and modern Israeli society and, by extension, between the New Jew, represented by Arbel, and the Old Jew, exemplified by Foiglman. In Masah ha-yeladim la-aretz ha-muvtahat (The Story of the Selvino Children: Journey to the Promised Land, 1984), Megged, through a series of interviews, tells the story of the eight hundred orphaned Selvino Jewish children who were rescued by the Jewish Brigade. The orphans were settled in a home in North Italy that was converted to a school, which enabled them to recuperate physically and mentally before immigrating to Israel. “Yad vashem” 1 (“The Name”) was published in 1955 in the collection Yisraelim haverim (Israeli Friends or Israeli Folk). It tackles several themes. First, it is a story about a bitter and heartbreaking familial conflict. Second, it dramatizes the clash of values and lack of understanding between the generations in Israel of the 1950s, particularly the relations between Israel and the Diaspora. Third, it details the troubling internal contradictions regarding Holocaust memorialization that struck at the very core of the Jewish state in its first years. Fourth, it depicts two groups, living side by side, who are at a standoff and cannot find a common bond. There is little action or movement in “The Name”. Formally, the story consists of discrete episodes, meetings, and conversations, leavened with complex ideas and ideological inflexions. In essence, the subtext of the work is that a nation which does not embrace its past, that fails to take into account the magnificent foundations of its heritage, will not have a future. The bare bones of “The Name” are as follows. The story takes place in Israel in the 1950s. Grandfather Ziskind is a Ukrainian Jew who left before the systematic extermination of Jews began. He lost his son Osip and grandson Mendele to the Nazi genocide and wants his 1

I am using the English translation found in Ramras-Rauch, Gila and Joseph MichmanMelkman. (editors.) Facing the Holocaust: Selected Israeli Fiction. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985. — 95 —

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granddaughter Raya and her husband Yehuda to call their newborn Mendele after the murdered boy. The couple adamantly resists his imploration. For them, the name Mendele evokes images from Jewish life in Europe and, in particular, the Holocaust. These are images that they would rather efface from the personal and national narrative. In addition, the name Mendele, and the latter alternative Menachem, are for them Yiddish names that are not uniquely Israeli — the identity and cultural cluster they feel most affinity with. It is worth mentioning that in Judaism, naming a baby after a deceased relative is a long-standing custom. The idea of this sacred obligation and practice is to invest the deceased family member with a new life through the cherished child who will serve as a reminder of the departed one. It is also worth examining the meaning of the story’s title within the historical vector. In 1953, the Israeli Parliament established Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. The name of the institution is taken from a biblical passage in Isaiah 56:5: “And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (a yad vashem)… that shall not be cut off.” In Hebrew, yad vashem literally means a memorial and a name. Indeed, part of the authority’s mission statement is as follows: “Yad Vashem has been entrusted with documenting the history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust period, preserving the memory and story of each of the six million victims, and imparting the legacy of the Holocaust for generations to come…”2 Since its inception, Yad Vashem has been carrying out its mandate to safeguard the memory of Holocaust victims by collecting their names — the ultimate representation of a person’s identity. At present, the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names contains over three million names. Aharon Megged borrows the two words (yad and shem) and employs them according to their original import — bestowing a name on a person. In a similar way to the national memorial, Grandfather Ziskind wants to ensure that his grandson’s existence is never erased. Mendele does not have a grave or a known burial site. The third generation, as signified by Raya and Yehuda, are entrusted with the enormous responsibility of 2

http://www.yadvashem.org/. — 96 —

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preserving the legacy of the Holocaust. It is up to them to create a yad vashem for the victims of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, in “The Name” such essential memorialization fails to occur. The commandment to “never forget” does not hold sway with the young generation. There is a disturbingly empty gulf between Raya, Yehuda and Grandfather Ziskind, although the ending of the story subtly implies that this divide may be partly bridged. A few additional words are now in order concerning the mixed message conveyed by the founding of Yad Vashem, Israel’s remembrance apparatus. The critic Yechiam Weitz observes that the establishment of Yad Vashem “expressed the national Zionist aspect of Holocaust memory and also the position which gave preference to national and united Holocaust commemoration over and above the particularistic commemoration of individual movement.”3 As it was originally and officially named the Martyrdom and Heroism Remembrance Authority and in the main commemorated the bravery of Jews in Europe, it put the accent on valor — an emphasis that stultified Israeli attitudes for a lengthy period. To a large extent, this action stifled real identification and understanding of the world of Diaspora Jews, for whom survival in the camps was as much an act of inner heroism as armed resistance.4 Regrettably, most Jews who either perished in occupied Europe or survived were viewed by native Israelis as passive weaklings who were led to their death like “sheep to the slaughter” and never offered resistance to the Nazi persecutors. In that connection Yigal Schwartz writes about the Holocaust’s “theatre of shadows” that clashed with the image of the young, euphoric Israel that reached its apotheosis after the 1967 Six Day War. He refers to the literal and figurative Holocaust victims as entities that although did not occupy an overtly physical space, cast a shadow that followed the generation of Israelis born in the 1960s.5 3

4

5

Weitz, Yechiam. “Political Dimensions of Holocaust Memory in Israel during the 1950s.” Israel Affairs 1(3), (1995): 133. Porat, Dina. “Attitudes of the Young State of Israel toward the Holocaust and Its Survivors: A Debate Over Identity and Values.” In Silberstein, Laurence J., ed., New Perspectives On Israeli History: The Early Years of the State, 157–174. New York and London: New York University Press, 1991. Yigal Schwartz. Ma Sheroim Mikan. Or Yehuda: Zmora Bitan, Dvir, 2005: 225. — 97 —

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The conversation between Raya and her mother about the possibility of Mendele as a suitable name for the newborn dramatically evinces this view of European Jewry. It is pertinent to quote at length Raya’s objections: a ghetto name, ugly, horrible! I wouldn’t even be capable of letting it cross my lips. Do you want me to hate my child...I should hate him. It’s as if you’d told me that my child would be born with a hump… You know mother that I am ready to do anything for Grandfather, said Raya. I love him, but I am not ready to sacrifice my child’s happiness on account of some superstition of his.6

It is pivotal to understand, as Rachel Feldhay Brenner notes, that in the first years of Israeli statehood, the Israeli government consciously sought to “emphasize the regenerative force of the Jewish people as demonstrated in the valiant founding and the heroic defense of the Jewish State.”7 However, modern Hebrew literature was not comfortable with this phenomenon and with the fact that the glorification of Israel “superseded the grief and mourning of the Holocaust destruction.”8 There was concern about the indifference and apathy shown by young Israelis toward the horrible events of the Shoah. As a result, authors such as Aharon Megged attempted to show, through such works as “The Name”, the problems with this ideological position. In doing so, they demonstrated that it was not realistic to assume that Shoah survivors would effortlessly and painlessly integrate into their new home. In fact, Aharon Megged was one of the first Israeli artists to examine the subject of post-Holocaust dynamics and Israel’s attitude to the Holocaust. “The Name” was perhaps the first work in the Hebrew canon to explore the theme of forgetting versus memorialization of the Shoah. 6 7

8

Megged, “The Name,” 29. Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. “Discourses of Mourning and Rebirth in Post-Holocaust Israeli Literature: Leah Goldberg’s Lady of the Castle and Shulamith Hareven’s ‘The Witness.’” Women in Judaism, 1–12. Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. “Discourses of Mourning and Rebirth in Post-Holocaust Israeli Literature: Leah Goldberg’s Lady of the Castle and Shulamith Hareven’s ‘The Witness.’” Women in Judaism (Spring 2002): 1. — 98 —

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During the 1950s, Hebrew fiction had a substantive impact on the formation of Israeli national identity and values. All told, during the formative years of Israeli statehood, writers had a profound involvement in the evolution and construction of the “New Jew.” Robert Alter has observed that “It is hard to think of another field of modern cultural activity that provides, as does Hebrew literature, such a luminous mirror both of the creative élan and of the deep perplexities of Jews trying to define some relationship to an age-old heritage in a radically unfamiliar new world.”9 Thus, in “The Name”, Megged attempts to demonstrate the difficulties inherent in remembering and the negative sentiments of the young Israeli generation. On the one hand, Raya, to some extent, understands Grandfather Ziskind’s wish to give his grandchild a name that will connect him to his family in Eastern Europe. On the other, she, and most acutely Yehuda, seek to find a suitable name for their first child that will link him to the state of Israel, with which they feel a strong bond. Essentially, the young couple is caught between competing kinds of memories. In the end they choose the name they are most comfortable with. In the process, they embrace and celebrate the heroic Sabra ideal, as well as lionize and enshrine the doctrine of the “New Jew” — fierce, strong, courageous, and self-reliant — who broke away from the longstanding lachrymose history of Jewish suffering. Gila Ramras-Rauch, in her introduction to a collection of Shoah stories, explains that one of the consistent themes of Israeli Holocaust literature has been the question of whether Israel should be considered a continuation of the historical Jewish past or a new beginning altogether.10 In other words, should Israelis reaffirm and acknowledge the ongoing tradition of Jewish heritage or disregard what came before and build on the present? This dilemma was heightened particularly following the near destruction of European Jewry and the founding of the state of Israel. The “New Israeli” was shadowed by the troubling past of the Diaspora. The debate in the 1950s, when “The Name” was written, revolved around the subject of a Jewish national character, especially 9 10

Alter, Robert, ed. Modern Hebrew Literature. New York: Behrman House, 1975: XI. Ramras-Rauch, Facing the Holocaust, 13. — 99 —

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its endurance and vitality. Since it was being a Jew that sealed people's fate during the Nazi reign, the pivotal question for Israelis concerned Jewish cultural identity and whether it was “a badge of shame, to be rejected and overcome? Or is it, on the contrary, to be the source of strength for those who have survived?”11 Significantly, many native-born Israelis saw themselves anchored to the land rather than to the painful and somewhat uncomfortable memory of the Shoah. And herein lay the paradox. Israel was a nation that was born in the shadow of genocide and the promise of “Never again.” Yet, afterward, it acted to deny several aspects of that memory so it could renew and reconstruct itself. Clearly, Megged endeavored to demonstrate that by not naming their child Mendele or Menachem (and generally by their negative outlook on the Galut),12 Raya and Yehuda were erasing the dead grandson’s presence. In effect, the young couple, and by extension young Israelis, were throwing away the rich tapestry of life that existed before the state of Israel was founded. Rivkah Maoz offers a sensitive insight into the context and period in which “The Name” was written. She points out that in 1955 the name Mendele was closely associated with the Jewish East European Yiddish writer Mendele Mocher Sefarim because his tales were part of the teaching syllabus in Israeli schools. Maoz observes that the stories were taught with the unequivocal aim of “instilling Zionist ideology — the negation of the Galut and the passive, submissive, wretched ghetto Jew.”13 Moreover, Mendele was incorrectly presented to the students as the “official” chronicler of Diaspora life, even though his stories depicted a few distinct Jewish communities and were satirical in nature. Therefore, for a majority of Israeli teenagers, Mendele functioned as the primary authority regarding the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe. Coupled with Mendele’s work, high school students were also taught the poem “Be’ir ha-haregah” (“In the City of Slaughter,” 1904). Written 11 12 13

Ramras-Rauch, Facing the Holocaust, 13. Galut refers to the historical exile of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel. Maoz, Rivkah. “Ideational and ideological principles in constructing teaching syllabus criteria for selecting literary works and their teaching as reflecting and shaping opinion.” In Janet Aviad, ed. Studies in Jewish education, 65−82. Volume IV, Jerusalem: The Manes Press, The Hebrew University, 1989: 71–72. — 100 —

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by Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the greatest and most influential Hebrew poet of all time, the poem further compounded the negative view of European Jews. Bialik penned “Be’ir Haharegah” after he was sent by the Jewish Historical Commission in Odessa to interview survivors of the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom and to prepare a report. In addition to foregrounding the bloodbath by the Russian perpetrators, which resulted in the death of 49 Jews, Bialik scolds and lashes out at the victims. The poet paints Russian Jews as cowards and weaklings. It is not surprising that young Israeli readers faced a difficult task. They were asked to cast aside the Diaspora and its perceived feebleness and, at the same time, empathize with the Nazi victims who formed the core of Mendele’s literary canvas. As a result of such dissonant portraits, the young generation was unable to neither sympathize fully with the suffering of the victims nor truly understand the enormity of the Holocaust. Grasping the background and prevailing attitudes of the period greatly assists us in coming to terms with the purpose of “The Name.” In an informative interview, Megged explained his motives for penning “The Name”. He revealed that as a teenager he knew very little about the East European Jewish communities. Yet, in contrast to his peers, who viewed Diaspora Jews with contempt and revulsion, he felt a deep kinship to his European brethren. Furthermore, Megged believed that his contemporaries’ attitude was very superficial, that a secular Israeli culture, divorced from the traditional roots of Jewish culture, including literature, folklore, and art, would lead to a shallow and ignorant society. Megged disclosed that it was while working in the Haifa Port that he met Holocaust refugees who spoke Yiddish, and who described the horrors they encountered. Engaging with those people, whom he grew fond of immediately, helped Megged understand the sense of injustice and the pain Israeli society was inflicting on those who had suffered enough.14 Megged then noted that “The Name” should be studied as his own intimate reaction to the prevalent mind-set of the period. Indeed, the figure of Grandfather Ziskind was partly based on Megged’s own father14

Lavi, I. A Conversation with Aharon Megged about Yad Vashem. Reshet Bet, Israel. Retrieved October 10, 2006 from http://msradio.huji.ac.il/wwwroot/ulpanpatuach.htm. — 101 —

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in-law and evolved out of his comprehension of the old man’s grief. After the publication of “The Name”, Megged criticized Israel’s estrangement from European Jewry and from the Holocaust. In the main, he called for a rethinking of the disparaging attitude rendered against the eviscerated European Jewish culture. In an essay published more than thirty years after writing “The Name”, Megged confessed a burning need to come to grips with and understand the Shoah, an urge fuelled by a compulsive engagement with memoirs and diaries written by survivors.15 Correspondingly, the author has admitted that his writing principally remains concerned with Israel’s relationship to the Diaspora. As stated earlier, “The Name” was originally published in a collection entitled Yisraelim haverim (Israeli Friends). The title is ironic, since at the center of the story are division and bitterness between Israeli Jews, rather than friendship and compassion. “The Name’s” nucleus narrative concerns divergent values and beliefs that seemingly cannot be reconciled. Megged seeks to expound on the unfavorable stereotypes about Diaspora Jewry that operated within Israeli society by employing the figures of Raya and Yehuda. Ultimately, it was Megged’s desire that the gulf between the Israeli-born generation and European Jews be bridged. Similarly, he wanted to bring the Sabras closer to their Jewish roots, encouraging the study of literary texts that created a more positive image of the Diaspora Jew and jettisoned the standard ghetto Jew protagonist. There is little question that Megged yearned to influence Israeli thought and opinion about the Diaspora and about those who had gone through the hell of the Shoah. Hence, in “The Name”, we encounter Osip, a successful, warmhearted, and intelligent engineer, and his eleven-year-old genius son Mendele. Both are painted in glowing hues. Mendele was a prodigy, a boy versed in Hebrew, who could declaim by heart poems by Bialik, and who independently read Hebrew’s foremost novelists. It is significant that every time Raya visits her grandfather, he recounts the story of Mendele and shows her pictures of the boy and the letters he wrote. It is to be expected that when Grandfather Ziskind learns that Raya is pregnant, he asks that the baby be named after Mendele, in memory of 15

Megged, Aharon. “I was not there” In Shulhan Ha-Ketivah. Tel Aviv: Am Oved: 158. — 102 —

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his beloved grandson. Rachel, Raya’s mother, then suggests Menachem. The young couple refuses the compromise offered. Ziskind in Yiddish means “sweet child.” And indeed, as the story opens, Grandfather Ziskind is portrayed as good-hearted and gracious, “his tranquil face from which a kind of holy radiance emanated, and his quiet, soft voice that seemed to have been made only for uttering words of sublime wisdom.”16 He is described as a man wholly absorbed in the past and for whom the present is irrelevant. He resists the historical fate forced upon him. When he is informed of Osip’s and Mendele’s passing, his life is arrested. With their spirit forever etched on his soul, he begins a long descent into solitude. We read how Grandfather Ziskind is crushed by the news. He is enveloped by a sense of irreparable mourning and loss: For many weeks afterward it was as if he had imposed silence on himself… Now he seemed to cut himself from the world and entrench himself in his thoughts and his memories, which none of the household could penetrate.17

The story is punctuated with scenes that stress the tense relationship between father and daughter. Aloof and remote, Grandfather Ziskind becomes increasingly rigid and inflexible. Unsurprisingly, when his sonin-law, Rachel’s husband, dies, he exhibits no signs of grief and does not proffer any solace or comfort to his daughter. At one point, Raya and Rachel return home to find Grandfather Ziskind dressed in his best suit, with a festive white shirt and polished black shoes. It transpires that it is Mendele’s birthday. And although he forgets incidents that took place two days earlier, he is able to meticulously recall instances that occurred in his town thirty years earlier. Eventually, Grandfather Ziskind moves to a little house far away from Rachel. Consider also Grandfather Ziskind’s flat. Its furnishing attests to the aging character’s petrified, stony interior state. There is a shelf that houses books with thick leather bindings. There is also an ancient walnut cupboard situated in front of the door, along with antique furniture. In the corner are sooty kerosene burners, a kettle, and saucepans. The 16 17

Megged, “The Name”, 22. Megged, “The Name”, 25. — 103 —

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overall tone of the apartment’s settings and objects reinforces an image of a lonely man shipwrecked on an island of distant memories. We read that even on hot days, Grandfather Ziskind would wear winter clothing with long sleeves, clothes more appropriate to the Ukrainian weather, and emblematic of its culture, than for the blazing Israeli climate. This description, and the passage in which he welcomes Raya and Yehuda to his apartment, still in a sleepy state, amplify and codify the lonely old man’s helplessness and displacement. On another level, one could contend that Grandfather Ziskind surrounds himself with items that further deepen the estrangement between him and Raya. We recall that prior to the murder of his family, Grandfather Ziskind took an interest in his granddaughter. He would help her with her schoolwork and infused the house with his wisdom and humor. It is possible to argue that the asocial behavior displayed by Grandfather Ziskind, following the natural mourning period for his son and grandson, endured beyond an appropriate cycle of grief and evolved into a prolonged fixation that alienated those close to him. The disagreement between Ziskind and Raya and Yehuda intensifies precisely because the old man tries to draw them both into his own world, into his whirlpool of aching memories. To be sure, the confrontation is inevitable. Grandfather Ziskind craves to overlay the new Israeli society and identity with the richness and glory of traditional Jewish life in Europe. More than anything else, the horrors of Auschwitz and the communities it devoured constitute not only a historical record, but for Ziskind they typify crucial Jewish values, vital for the future path of the Jewish people in Israel. The old man so greatly wishes for his granddaughter to honor her forebears from the old country. The young couple recoil from such an attempt. Before long, Rachel nominates the name Menahem, instead of Mendele, to accommodate the warring parties. She assures Raya that Grandfather Ziskind relented after much cajoling to this concession. She also reassures her daughter that this is at once a Hebrew and Israeli name. But it is all to no avail. Tellingly, Raya’s outburst echoes her earlier loathing: “Menahem is a name that reeks of old age, a name that for me is connected with sad memories and people I don’t like. Menahem you could call a boy who — 104 —

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is short, weak, and not good looking.”18 The exchange between mother and daughter soon expands into a discourse about the gravity of eternalizing the murdered. “Perhaps all the same we are bound to retain the name of the dead,” Rachel asserts, “in order to leave a remembrance of them…”19 Mendele, and later Menahem, are both names typically associated with the East European Jewish Diaspora. Because of that the couple ferociously rejects the appropriateness of either. They want a name for their newborn that is purely aligned with the new Israeli society and culture and stripped of European vestiges. In effect, a name that would be more acceptable within the Israeli public sphere. For Raya and Yehuda, choosing Mendele/Menahem would mean choosing an old-fashioned name that connotes shtetl life. It would mean welcoming and picking up the chest of memories allied to that name. Mendele/ Menahem would distressingly recall the narrative of horrors they would rather shun. Raya elucidates her opposition: “But I don’t always want to remember all those dreadful things, Mother. It’s impossible that this memory should always hang about this house and that the poor child should bear it.” (30) Conversely, Ehud (the name Yehuda and Raya ultimately give their newborn son) is a name overflowing with self-definition and vitality. It is a moniker denuded of the weight of history, and one that symbolizes modernity over archaic tradition. The name Ehud can be traced to the biblical judge Ehud Ben Gera, a heroic and capable leader. Also, in Israel of the 1950s and 1960s, Ehud was a very popular name.20 Even though Raya loves and respects her grandfather, this admiration has its limits. Specifically, she is unwilling to ‘sacrifice’ her son to fulfill her grandfather’s desires and make him happy. Another way to think about Raya’s standpoint is to note that that there are multiple ways of remembering the extermination of six million Jews. Naming a child after a deceased relative is only one way to commemorate the tragic past, not necessarily the only way. The reader must determine 18 19 20

Megged. “The Name”, 29–30. Megged. “The Name”, 29–30. Maoz, “Ideational and Ideological Principles,” 71–72. — 105 —

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if the couple’s refusal to give their son a name that would carry the burden of the Holocaust and the death of the eleven-year-old Mendele is unreasonable. If anything, the story makes it abundantly clear that Raya and her husband’s ideological agenda seeks to exclude the historical bond with the Diaspora. The distaste for the Galut is epitomized most acutely in the character of Yehuda. He personifies the Israeli who is devoid of any sense of his connections to his Jewish legacy. From the first pages, his aversion to Grandfather Ziskind and what he exemplifies are emphasized. On visits, he is revolted by the jar of preserves, fruit, and biscuits laid out on the table by the old man. After Raya’s gentle pleas, he tastes a little of the “nauseating stuff.”21 To alleviate Yehuda’s boredom, Raya attempts to keep the conversations friendly. Still, lest we seem to be too unfair, it bears noting that Yehuda and Raya deal with the old man with real fondness, notwithstanding his oft-repeated anecdotes and idiosyncrasies. For example, although adumbrated as irritated and impatient during the visits, Yehuda would time and again give into Grandfather’s request to read the elongated essay, until the final visit. Grandfather Ziskind is dismayed by Raya and Yehuda’s disquieting insistence on forgetting the family’s past, as if what happened in Europe were unworthy of perpetuation in Israel. The aged survivor still clutches to the credo that the collective past matters. When he realizes that it is Yehuda who is especially disgusted by the taint of the Diaspora affiliated with the name of his lost grandchild, he issues a startling warning: “O children, children, you don’t know what you’re doing.… You’re finishing off the work which the enemies of Israel began. They took the bodies away from the world, and you — the name and the memory.… No continuation, no evidence, no memorial and no name. Not a trace…”22 In this connection, some mention might be made of the fact that the moment he hears of Raya’s pregnancy, Grandfather Ziskind, in an act completely out of character, ventures outside his home to call on Raya and Yehuda for the first time. He briefly departs from his 21 22

Megged. “The Name”, 23. Megged. “The Name”, 33. — 106 —

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apartment — a metaphor for the past — to enter Raya and Yehuda’s house, symbolizing the present and future. The possibility that the newborn might sustain the original child Mendele’s fading image activates a change in the old man’s behavior and disposition. Dressed in his holiday clothes, eyes sparkling, the old man walks through the apartment, full of vigor, and is generous with his praise. He does not refer to Mendele during the pleasant conversation, which is peppered with jokes and witty remarks. Finally, for the old man, a possibility has materialized that the unspeakable emptiness will be redeemed and restored by the light of a great-grandson, who, in a way, will be a memorial candle to his murdered grandson. Raya’s mother, Rachel, is drawn as a person who oscillates awkwardly between the polar universes of her daughter and her sonin-law, Yehuda, on one side, and her father, Ziskind, on the other. She is torn between her loyalty and affection both for her daughter and father. During the friction around the naming of the baby, she is constantly pulled in opposite directions. There is little question that she comprehends the respective position of both sides and proposes an alternative name that she feels will satisfy both parties. However, she is unsure who is right: Rachel, midway between the two generations, was of two minds about the matter. When she spoke to her father she would scold and contradict him… but when she spoke to the children she sought to induce them to meet his wishes, and would bring down their anger on herself.23

Gradually, however, Rachel begins to challenge her daughter’s reasoning, viewing her logic as flawed and lacking in depth. To her, it is symptomatic of the malaise affecting the generation of young Israelis. Indeed, Rachel softly tells Raya, “[A]t times it seems to me that it’s not grandfather who’s suffering from loss of memory, but ourselves. All of us.”24 Consider whether Aharon Megged is critical of the Rachel character. Oftentimes, she rudely admonishes her father for forcing the young couple 23 24

Megged. “The Name”, 28. Megged. “The Name”, 30. — 107 —

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to listen to his talk about Mendele and his native town in the Ukraine. If she happened to visit while Raya and Yehuda are there, she would reprimand her father: “Stop bothering them with your masterpiece… if you want them to keep on visiting you, don’t talk to them about the dead. Talk about the living. They’re young people and they have no mind for such things.”25 Rivka Maoz believes that Ziskind’s actions cannot serve as a model for the manner in which ties to the past should be maintained, for they are tedious and monotonous rather than engaging. To support her claim, Maoz cites from an article Megged wrote on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day. She believes his words underscore her contention. According to Megged: Shoah Day is repeated every year against our will, with bothersome pedantry, conforming to a calendar date, but with no consideration given to the changes that have taken place. The ceremony can be compared to the anniversary of a dead relative that was not particularly loved, which forces people to stop urgent business matters and rush to the cemetery to recite a hurried mourning prayer.26

Harsh and trenchant critique, no doubt. Nevertheless, we find direct textual evidence for this worrying detachment in “The Name”. During every visit by Raya and Yehuda, Grandfather Ziskind repeats his eulogy for Mendele, proud that the child had won a scholarship and was an outstanding violinist. The genuinely dedicated exaltation would culminate with a sorrowful, “Not a trace.”27 And yet, notice the effect this agonizing lament solicits from the married couple: “A strained silence of commiseration would descend on Raya and Yehuda, who had already heard the same things many times over and no longer felt anything when they were repeated.”28 Let us now turn to evaluate the role of the clock and what it embodies. In most literature, a clock normally represents multiple levels of time. Here, the clock personifies Grandfather Ziskind’s emotional condition. Like the clock, Ziskind is frozen in time. He does not need to know chronological time. His rhythm of life stopped with the death of 25 26 27 28

Megged. “The Name”, 26. Maoz, “Ideational and Ideological Principles,” 85. Megged. “The Name”, 24. Megged. “The Name”, 24. — 108 —

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Mendele and Osip. He finds comfort in retreating back into the shell of his past. Notice, too, that Grandfather Ziskind does not care to repair the clock that had stopped working a long time ago. The broken clock that Grandfather Ziskind took with him when he left Rachel’s home to live by himself occupies a symbolic place in the narrative. Inside the clock, the old man keeps a “cloth bag with a black cord tied around it.”29 The cloth encloses a long essay, which, over eight pages, records the history of Ziskind’s hometown in the Ukraine and the subsequent liquidation of its residents. It contains all of Grandfather Ziskind’s shattered past. By habitually extracting the essay about his deracinated hometown and reciting its history, Grandfather Ziskind is performing a ritual for the dead. Metaphorically, the clock functions as a shrine for those who perished. Since, for Grandfather Ziskind, the clock epitomizes a moment that has stopped moving, he vehemently safeguards it. After all, his entire life story and precious obliterated memories are enshrouded inside. When Raya mentions to Yehuda during every visit that they should buy her grandfather a new one to replace the damaged item, she is obliquely indicating her desire to replace the archaic with the contemporary. One has to wonder how Grandfather Ziskind would have reacted to a gift of a new clock. Also, the motif of the clock alludes to the fact that the young generation moves according to its own pace, to the rhythms of modernity, and is unwilling to pause and reflect on Grandfather Ziskind’s era. As the story nears the end, Grandfather Ziskind holds back from acknowledging his new great-grandson Ehud. It is not illogical to assume that in his mind he feels that the moment he accepts Ehud, who represents the living, the unremembered Mendele will undergo a second death. In a sense, endorsing Ehud’s presence and name will again destroy the world of yesteryear he so passionately clings to. “You haven’t seen our baby yet,”30 Raya tells him ruefully during one of the visits. Yet Grandfather Ziskind declines her supplication. Instead, as he has done numerous times earlier, he pulls up the chair, ready to climb up to the clock to retrieve the documents. However, at this juncture, Raya loses the patience she 29 30

Megged. “The Name”, 23. Megged. “The Name”, 36. — 109 —

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once had. She cannot bear to once again absorb the horrific details. In a cracked voice, she tells Yehuda that they should leave. Raya is emotionally devastated. She walks out of her grandfather’s apartment and is seized by a fit of ungovernable weeping. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she bends to kiss her son’s chest. It is too late, but Raya, at that instant, comes to grips with the absolute chasm between her son and her grandfather: “At the moment it seemed to her that he was in need of pity and of great love, as though he were alone, an orphan in the world.”31 This particular passage contains a great deal of symbolism. Yes, she closes the door. Yes, she is no longer willing to tolerate her grandfather’s unremitting obsession with the Holocaust. Yet in this delicate scene, her heart opens, and she moves slightly toward her grandfather, perchance propelled by a fear that her son will grow up without any attachment to his history. Suddenly, it dawns on Raya that the complicated matter of the name has far more meaning than she at first believed. Could it be that she undergoes a conceptual and cultural shift? Could it be that she now appreciates that her Grandfather’s appeals and convictions were not just the ramblings of a senile old man? Another of the story’s buried themes is the veneration of the Galut (The Jewish Diaspora), powerfully conveyed in a scene in which Grandfather Ziskind castigates Yehuda. Treating with contempt the younger man’s simplistic and ignorant biases, Grandfather Ziskind tells him that Mendele and Osip were among the finest in Ukrainian society. When Yehuda explains that Menahem is a name from the Golah32 the old man launches into one of the text’s most gripping jeremiads: What do you know about what was there? What do you know of the people that were there? The communities? The cities? What do you know of the life they had there… Are you ashamed of them for having had a hundred times more culture and education than you have? Why… Why, everything here… is no more than a puddle of tap water against the big sea that was there!33

The juxtaposition between the Israeli and the Diaspora Jew is neatly reinforced when we recall that Osip called his son after his dead brother, 31 32 33

Megged. “The Name”, 36. Golah (from the Hebrew) refers to the Jewish Diaspora. Megged. “The Name”, 32. — 110 —

-----------------------------------------------------  Aharon Megged’s “The Name” -----------------------------------------------------

even though he was indubitably aware that such a name would not fit easily in a society of non-Jewish Russians. However, as Grandfather Ziskind explains, Osip, while not a Zionist, was first and foremost a Jew. The story invites the reader to conclude that Osip’s superiority to Yehuda, in all its manifold expressions, is undeniable. It is significant that Yehuda distinguishes between Israeliness and Jewishness. In effect, he does not regard the two identities as links on the same historical chain. The ensuing adversarial dialogue between Yehuda and Ziskind is highly illuminating. Grandfather Ziskind explains that all Israelis came from the Galut, to which Yehuda replies that they were born in Israel, which for him is different and separate. At that point, the wounded old man, seething with anger (we read that he could “wring Yehuda’s neck”34), accuses the young man of ignorance, of being a fool for expressing such opinions. Rightly, he emphasizes that ties are remembrances, that a person is inextricably bound to his people and to his nation because he never forgets his ancestors. Still fuming, Grandfather Ziskind lashes out at Yehuda and accurately zeroes in on his and Raya’s sin of omission: “You’re ashamed to give your son the name Mendele lest it remind you that there were Jews who were called by that name. You believe that his name should be wiped off the face of the earth. That not a trace of it should remain.”35 In the face of such touching agony, Yehuda remains fortified in his obdurate, unsympathetic shell. Lamentably, Yehuda and Raya cannot see through the old man’s eccentric and often infuriating conduct. Both cannot grasp the immense love he experiences for Mendele and Osip. Gershon Shaked appositely remarks that Megged “identifies to a great extent with the grandfather and does not accept the arguments of his grandchildren… The writer takes an anti-Sabra attitude. He accepts the opinion of the survivors that the grandchild who died (Mendele) was and still is a more complex and interesting person than the young Sabras…”36At heart, the underlying educational message of “The Name” is that Jews must continue to uphold, preserve and 34 35 36

Megged. “The Name”, 32. Megged. “The Name”, 32–33. Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction, 280. — 111 —

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memorialize, within the collective record, the disaster that befell their brothers and sisters in Europe.

— 112 —

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--------------------------------  Chapter VIII  -------------------------------The Kibbutz Girl, the Arab, and the Snake

The Kibbutz Girl, The Arab, and the Snake, or Just a Modern Version of the Garden of Eden

Amos Oz’s “Nomad and Viper” By general consensus, Amos Oz is acclaimed as Israel’s most celebrated and best-selling novelist. A short-story writer, nonfiction essayist, editor, and author of children’s books, he is regarded as one of the most original and brilliant contemporary authors of the twentieth century, described by The Times in England as “one of the greatest prose writers in contemporary fiction.”1 According to the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, Oz is the most translated Israeli author in history, having had his works translated into forty-six languages.2 Amos Oz was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem, Palestine, on May 4, 1939, the only child of Yehuda Arieh and Fania Klausner (née Mussman), refugees who fled from the Ukraine and Lithuania during the Nazi onslaught. His father, who possessed a PhD in literature, eked out a living as a librarian in the National Archives in Jerusalem, and his great-uncle, Yosef Klausner, headed the Hebrew Literature Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Oz grew up in the Jerusalem suburb of Kerem Avraham and attended the Orthodox Jewish school Telkemoni. Following the suicide of his mother in 1951, he left for Kibbutz Hulda and changed his name to Oz, meaning “strength” in Hebrew. In a recent interview, Oz said: 1

2

Cited in Louvish, Simon. “Simon Louvish Spots Flaws in an Israeli Hero.” The Independent (2 August 1997), N.P http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ books/simon-louvish-spots-flaws-in-an-israeli-hero-1243283.html N. A. “Amos Oz Is Most Translated Israeli Author” Ynet (2 October, 2010), NP. http:// www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3668919,00.html — 113 —

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I killed my father and the whole of Jerusalem… When I left home… I decided to become everything [my father] was not, and not to be anything that he was. He was a right-wing intellectual; I decided to be a left-wing socialist. He was a city dweller; I decided to become a tractor driver… So I assumed the name of Oz. Because this courage and strength are what I needed most.3

In the kibbutz, Oz worked in the cotton fields, later becoming a teacher at the kibbutz high school, generously turning over all royalties garnered from book sales to the kibbutz treasury. Several of his writings, like his first novel Makom aher (Elsewhere Perhaps, 1966) and Menuhah nehona (A Perfect Peace, 1982) are set in a kibbutz and draw on his closely observed experiences growing up in this agricultural and Zionist community. In 1960 he was sent by the kibbutz to study literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and graduated in 1963 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He later obtained an MA from St. Cross College, Oxford University. Oz fought in the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He is married to Nily Oz-Zuckerman, a librarian, and is the father of three children, Fania Oz-Salzberger, an academic, Galia Oz, an author, and Daniel Oz, a musician. In 1986 the Oz family moved to the southern town of Arad, where the dry desert air was beneficial for his young son’s severe asthma. Since 1993 he has held the Agnon Chair in Modern Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, teaching as a full professor of Hebrew literature. The 1998 winner of the Israel Prize for Literature has been a leading campaigner in the Peace Now movement, which he helped establish in 1977. His first stories were published in the literary quarterly Keshet in the early 1960s. Oz first garnered international notice with the publication of his second novel, Michael Sheli (My Michael), in 1968, drawing comparisons with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for its depiction of the psychological breakdown of an alienated young Israeli housewife. This instant fame gained him a studio in the kibbutz and four days to write (among his other communal duties), though he still handed his paychecks to the kibbutz treasurer. My Michael was included in the modern classics series of great literary works of the twentieth 3

Hari, Johann. “The Outsider.” The Sunday Age (26 April 2009): 19. — 114 —

-----------------------------------------------------  Amos Oz’s “Nomad and Viper” -----------------------------------------------------

century by the Bertelsmann publishing house alongside books by such luminaries as Kafka, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. A dialectician, Oz is without peer in exploring the inveterate divisions within the Israeli populace, limning the conflict between religion and secularism, left and right ideologies in the Palestinian controversy, Sephardi and Ashkenazi tensions, Socialist Zionism and the new generation, and the collision between the individual and community. At the same time, he plumbs the deep recess of the human landscape to depict the interior struggle between the primal and the rational forces bubbling within the soul of man. This in a sense explains his popularity abroad. For despite having his representations rooted in Israeli society, through the lyrical and mesmerizing nature of his prose, Oz weaves a cosmic quilt, foregrounding emotional turbulence and communal patterns identifiable in any modern society. Writing in the Washington Post in 2004, Alberto Manguel has observed that “Both in his fiction and his essays, Oz has proven himself one of our essential writers, laying out for our observation, in everincreasing breadth and profundity, the mad landscape of our time and his place — always enlarging the scope of his questions while avoiding the temptation of dogmatic answers.”4 As a belle-lettrist, Oz is acutely aware of the power of words to stir the emotions and in a propitious climate provoke a spiral of violence. In 1989, in response to the issuing of a fatwā against Salman Rushdie, Oz wrote, “Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and the worst of human nature. We ought to treat words the way we treat nuclear energy or genetic engineering — with courage, caution, vision and precision.”5 In 1965, his first collection of short stories, Artzot Hatan, received the Holon Municipal Prize for Literature, Israel. In 1976, he won the Brenner Prize for Literature in Israel for the novella Har Ha-Etzah HaRaah (The Hill of Evil Counsel). His first children’s book, Sumchi, was awarded the 1978 Ze’ev Award for Children’s Literature, Israel, the 1978 Hans Christian Andersen Medal for Children’s Literature, Denmark, the 1993 Luchs Prize for Children’s Literature, Bremen, Germany, and 4 5

Manguel, Alberto. “In the Land of Israel.” Washington Post (2 November 2004): BW03. Oz, Amos. “Words for Salman Rushdie.” New York Times (12 March 1989): n.p. — 115 —

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the Hamoré Prize for Children’s Literature, France. In 1983 he received the Bernstein Prize for Literature, Israel for Menuha Nechona (A Perfect Peace) and in 1985 he was awarded Writer of the Year by the Lotos Club, New York. In 1986 he received the Bialik Prize, one of Israel’s most prominent prizes. He has been honored with the 1988 French Prix Femina for best foreign novel appearing in France for Kufsah shechorah (Black Box, 1987) and the Wingate Prize, London, for the same work. In acknowledgment of his work as an activist for human rights and peace, in 2002 Oz received the Freedom of Expression Prize, awarded by the Norwegian Authors’ Union, and the International Medal of Tolerance, awarded by the Polish Ecumenical Council. In 2003, he won the Wizo-France award for Israeli Literature for Oto Ha-yam (The Same Sea, 1999), a work described as extraordinary by The Guardian. He has been named Officer of Arts and Letters of France in 1994, and in 1997, President Jacques Chirac awarded him The Knight’s Cross of the Legion D’Honneur of the Republic of France. The same year he was awarded the Lombardia Peace Prize (Milano). In 2005 he was named as the winner of the Goethe cultural prize, one of Germany's top awards, for his lifetime’s output. The prize jury said Oz’s variety of subjects and virtuosity of style made him one of the most important contemporary authors. In 2002, Oz’s autobiographical novel, Sipur al ahava ve-hoshech (A Tale of Love and Darkness), was published, to unprecedented acclaim. Since then, the book has reaped a series of local and international awards.6 Amos Oz has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature for several years running, and as literary critic Asaf Inbary once remarked, Oz is the most representative Israeli author of all time and the ambassador of Hebrew literature. Inbary then added that Oz’s worldwide popularity adds another layer to the prestige Israelis feel for him and that it is nice to know that it is through him that the world is looking at Israel. 6

Beginning in 2004, it won the Prix France Culture, The Catalonia International Prize, The International Die Welt Literary Wward (Berlin), and The Sandro Onofri Literary Prize (Roma). In 2005, the book won The Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political literature (Vienna), The Koret Jewish book awards (San Francisco), and The Wingate Prize (London), and in 2006 Oz received The National Jewish book award from the Jewish Book Council and The Agnon-Jerusalem Prize for that work. — 116 —

-----------------------------------------------------  Amos Oz’s “Nomad and Viper” -----------------------------------------------------

The allegorical tale “Navadim vatzefa”7 (“Nomad and Viper”), written in 1963, appeared in Oz’s first collection of stories Artzot Hatan (translated as Where the Jackals Howl though the direct translation from the Hebrew is Lands of the Jackal) published in 1965. The author rewrote the stories, which were then published in 1976. Writing about the 1981 English edition, A. G. Mojtabi avers that “This is a book of dark shadows and glare and, through the shadows, in and around each story, glides the jackal.… The most haunting issue raised is that of exclusion, dispossession.”8 It is worth noting that the story was written prior to the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War, a time when Israel was seized by a consuming mood of siege and a sense of imminent danger from its surrounding Arab neighbors. This existential angst is intensely reflected in the collection. The seminal motif that pulsates through the stories in Where the Jackals Howl is that of the hungry jackal, lurking outside the compound of the kibbutz. The jackal, embodying danger and imminent invasion, serves as the all-embracing metaphor for the threatening, foreboding, surrounding Arab forces waiting to pounce. At the same time, Oz brilliantly captures, in miniature strokes, the simmering tensions and dramas of kibbutz life, which represents a microcosm of Israel. It is worth recalling that Oz wrote the stories while still a member of Kibbutz Hulda, and his portraitures, as Calev Ben David notes, paint the kibbutzim as, “Seething hothouses of frustrated emotions and tangled ideologies, far from the ideal of utopian Marxist communities they were set up to be.”9 Another subject that permeates the stories is the oedipal rebellion by the sons against the aging generation, fuelled by clashing values and temperaments. Most of the characters in Where the Jackals Howl are isolated individuals, teetering on the verge of explosion, spawned by a 7

8

9

First published in Hebrew in 1965. Oz, Amos. Artzot Hatan. Tel Aviv: Masada, 1965. I am using both the Hebrew version that appeared in 1965 and the 1982 version that appeared in the English translation by Nicholas de Lange. Oz, Amos. Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Mojtabi, A. G. “Perpetual Stranger in the Promised Land.” The New York Times (26 April 1982): 3–4 (3). Ben David, “Review of Where the Jackals Howl.” Midstream, 1998: 4. — 117 —

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sense of loneliness, ambivalence, and unfulfilled desires. Throughout, there are breath-catching moments that showcase Oz’s artistic dexterity in crafting religious intonations and parabolic textural threads. On the surface, “Nomad and Viper's” main subject is the ancient and intrinsically violent nature of Arab-Jewish relations. Told through the eyes of a member of an unnamed kibbutz and an all-knowing narrator, the tale begins with the description of the Bedouins fleeing the famine in the south of Israel, brought about by a savage drought: “The loess was pounded to dust. Famine had spread through the nomads’ encampment and wrought havoc among their flocks.”10 The military authorities, at first reluctant, open the roads and allow the Bedouin tribes, with their flocks of sheep and camels, to camp in the vicinity of the kibbutz and to search for grazing land. From the beginning, Oz calls attention to the nomads’ perceived secretive and mysterious purpose, though it should be remembered that their rendering is transmitted through the subjective, stereotypical lens of the narrator, who is part of the kibbutz. With an atmosphere of specificity that reflects Oz’s poetic sense of place, the nomads are described in creepy, sinister strokes: “dark, sinuous and wiry”; “they meandered along gullies hidden from town dwellers’ eyes”;11 “the nomads’ bearing was stealthy and subdued; they shrank from watchful eyes;”12 “tried to conceal their presence13...among them lies the shepherd, fast asleep, dark as a block of basalt;”14 “the very darkness is their accomplice. Elusive as the wind, they passed through the settlement…”15 Oz has a tendency, generally in Where the Jackals Howl and specifically in “Nomad and Viper” for generating a landscape in which there is perplexity and ambivalence toward the other — in this case, the Arab nomads. Though the nomads are their polar opposites and, by overrunning the kibbutz, have threatened their “serene” existence, the kibbutzniks are nevertheless fascinated by the mystery and primal ferociousness these “savages” encompass. 10 11 12 13 14 15

Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 21. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”,21. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 21. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 21. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 22. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 21–24. — 118 —

-----------------------------------------------------  Amos Oz’s “Nomad and Viper” -----------------------------------------------------

Oz deftly adumbrates the unsettling and disorienting effect the nocturnal alien presence has on the Jewish residents. The Bedouins' unintelligible mutterings, typified by singing, yield constant and unnerving flashes of threat: “And then, their singing at night. A longdrawn out, dolorous wail drifts on the night air from sunset until the early hours. The voices penetrate to the gardens and pathways of the kibbutz and charge our nights with an uneasy heaviness.”16 The Bedouins’ hounds, described as vicious (in the Hebrew version they are referred to as “evil”), drive the kibbutz’s finest dog mad with their barking, so much so that he breaks into the chicken coop and kills the young chicks, forcing the watchman to shoot him. The Arabs’ abnormality in the eyes of the kibbutzniks is emblematized in the following description: “Some were half-blind, or perhaps feigned half-blindness from some vague alms-gathering motive. Inscrutable to the likes of you.”17 Yochai Oppenheimer argues that Oz’s description of the Arab protagonist is consonant with other Israeli writers of the 1960s in that the Arab is “identifiable only by external features, the result of a projection of Israeli fears and desires.”18 Oppenheimer goes on to say that Oz: …radicalized the list of features while producing a latent parodization of the gaze upon the Arab. Parody also concretizes the quasi-automatic association between external appearance and the operative conclusions it is supposed to serve…the Arab’s appearance, expected to reinforce the recognition of a distinction between ethnic groups, functions as justification for an act of revenge against one suspected (because of his appearance) of being a threatening figure, deserving of punishment.19

One passage from the story, in which the narrator justifies the bashing of an Arab shepherd, nicely bears Oppenheimer’s analysis: He was blind in one eye, broken nosed, drooling; and his mouth — on this the men responsible were unanimous — was set with long, curved fangs like a fox’s. A man with such appearance was capable of anything.20 16 17 18

19 20

Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 23. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 22. Oppenheimer, Yochai and Dorina Janko. “The Arab in the Mirror: The Image of the Arab in Israeli Fiction.” Prooftexts 19 (1999): 205–234 (229). Oppenheimer, “The Arab,” 233. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 24. — 119 —

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Gilead Morahg levels similar criticism. Although Israeli literature of the period betrays a stronger acknowledgment of the Arab presence and their hostility toward the Jewish settlement on the land, Morahg contends that, “As awareness increases, however, the scope of Arab representations in the literature decreases. Although the concern with the consequences of the Arab-Israeli conflict moves to the thematic foreground of the later fiction, the use of Arab characters as a means of engaging this concern is greatly diminished.”21 Morahg then refers specifically to “Nomad and Viper” as a quintessential example of works that contain marginal Arab characters. Before long, the simmering tensions between the kibbutzniks and the Bedouins boil over. What follow are crop damage and foot-andmouth diseases that infect the kibbutz cattle and have an impact on milk production, as well as petty thefts. A generational conflict erupts inside the kibbutz concerning the appropriate response. Though the nomads are accused of pilfering and thievery, police raids turn up no evidence of their crimes. Indeed, the narrator admits that not one Bedouin was caught in the act of damaging the crops. Still, the younger men retaliate by beating a shepherd and, in another act of reprisal, stone a nomad boy. A meeting between Etkin, the kibbutz secretary, and the elderly leader of the Bedouins is convened, in part to placate the younger kibbutz members, and in part to try to resolve the escalating crisis between the two groups. The old Arab admits that some of the youngsters have stolen property and offers to return some screws, pruning hooks, a knife blade, a pocket flashlight, and some banknotes. But he denies responsibility for the acts of sabotage and vandalism Etkin has detailed. In light of the unsatisfactory outcome of the meeting and the decision by the police to terminate any investigation, the younger members of the kibbutz (led by Rami) propose “making an excursion one night to teach the savages a lesson in a language they would really understand.”22 Etkin, calmly and coolly, rejects the calls for revenge but agrees to 21 22

Morahg, Gilead. “Images of Arabs in Israeli Fiction.” Prooftexts 6:2 (1986): 147–162 (148). Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 24. — 120 —

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take the matter to a vote of the kibbutz secretariat. At the assembly, a dispute erupts between the old administrator and the young men. The moderate Etkin, who countenances restraint and vehemently opposes resorting to violence, is offended by the attitude of the group advocating retaliation. Rami and the other youngsters storm out of the meeting when Etkin prevents them from further expressing their views. In the end, the unnamed narrator, who vacillated between the two contradictory positions, joins the belligerent young men on their way to a retaliatory expedition against the nomads. Notice that the narrator, who throughout the story disagreed with the use of violence, switches the point of view in the narrative’s concluding scene from “I” to “we” as he joins the gang of attackers. In the wake of the other Kibbutz members’ complete radicalization and oedipal revolt, he forsakes his sympathetic and propitiating stand toward the Bedouins and enlists in the revengeful raid. A parallel plotline involves the main protagonist of “Nomad and Viper”, Geula Sirkin (Geula means “redemption” in Hebrew). Geula is a 29 year old single woman, frustrated at the kibbutz men who have rejected her sexually and socially. On a hot summer evening, she undertakes one of her nightly walks. Her stroll is redolent with sexual desperation and stifled eroticism. Her sensuous actions disclose her attempt to reach sexual fulfillment: By the irrigation pipe she paused, bent down and drank, as though kissing the faucet… she bent her head and let the water pour over her face and into her shirt… Geula picked a plum, sniffed and crushed it. Sticky juice dripped from it. The sight made her feel dizzy. And the smell. She crushed a second plum. She picked another and rubbed it on her cheek till she was spattered with juice.23

Earlier, Geula’s dizzying yearning for release of the erotic being throbbing fiercely inside her is evinced by her attempts to smash a dirty bottle, first by kicking it and then by hitting it twice with a stone. At her fourth attempt she succeeds, but even though there was a “harsh, dry explosion” it brought “no relief. Must get out.”24 Ablaze with a reservoir 23 24

Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 30–31. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 29. — 121 —

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of raw, carnal urges, Geula enlarges a hole in the fence and slips into the adjoining orchard, crossing into another realm, literally and figuratively. Consequently, she discovers a Bedouin nomad who has infiltrated the kibbutz orchard. Finding the Bedouin shepherd repulsively attractive (despite him being blind in one eye), she sets out to seduce and ensnare him. Accepting his offer of a cigarette, she asks him for another, hoping to prolong the encounter, and wants him to disrobe, excited by the prospect of physical contact, “The girl eyed his desert robe. Aren’t you hot in that thing? The man gave an embarrassed, guilty smile.”25 She twice repeats his earlier claim that he is still young and therefore has no girlfriend (intimating that she is available) and persists in asking him personal questions. Emboldened by the Arab’s compliment that she is beautiful — a compliment, which, critic Gita Avinor argues,26 is a figment of her imagination — she touches his arm, hoping for a commensurate reaction. Throughout the encounter, Geula is nervous and thrilled by the potential for a sexual liaison. She smiles at the nomad and mistakes a narrowing of the eye for a flirtatious wink: “His blind eye narrowed. Geula was momentarily alarmed: surely it was a wink.”27 The young man, however, is not interested in her advances, sustaining the conversation only in an attempt to ingratiate himself to Geula and avoid being reported for trespassing to the kibbutz authority. As the encounter draws to a close, it is clear that the young nomad is uninterested and therefore does not reciprocate her advances. Finally, he retreats with his herd back to the nomad camp “as though from a dying creature”28 (foreshadowing the fate that awaits Geula). Disappointed and humiliated by her failure to lure the young, virginal pilferer, Geula is enraged and about to scream, though no sound comes out. The rejection by the nomad of Geula’s seduction brings to the surface all the fallow hatred so patently fermenting inside her. Although it is clear that no sexual or physical contact occurred (apart from Geula touching

25 26 27 28

Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 32. Avinor, Gita. “Sipurim Acherim.” Moznaim, 3–4 (August-September 1974): 264. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 33. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 35. — 122 —

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the Bedouin’s arm), the young woman slowly convinces herself that she was attacked and behaves as though she was the victim of an attempted rape. The 1965 Hebrew version of the story is explicit in affirming that no incident has taken place: “The young girl’s body is filled with disgust, although the nomad did not touch her.”29 Geula is filled with disgust not because the nomad touched her but because he did not. As such, she devises a more salacious dénouement that befits her expectation. At this point, her imagination takes such a strong hold of her that the supposed particulars of the attempted rape in the orchard become actual. Fantasy intermingles with reality. Immediately after the goatherder leaves, Geula begins running in panic as if pursued, certain that she was attacked, “Give him a kind word, or a smile, and he pounces on you like a wild beast and tries to rape you. It was just as well I ran away from him.”30 She similarly imagines that she had to fight him off to escape the rape, kicking and biting the nomad as he thrust her to ground and choked her: “those black fingers, and how he went straight for my throat… It was only by biting and kicking that I managed to escape.”31 Michael Wilfe contends that it is not only the refusal by the Bedouin to submit to Geula’s temptation that precipitates the false accusation but the shattering of the young woman’s anticipation of an actual rape: “It is clear she yearns for sexual contact with him, for an actual rape, in order to be redeemed.”32 Geula returns to her room to make coffee for the meeting. No longer able to contain her rage, she schemes to accuse the goatherder of a violation he did not commit as revenge for his rejection. Tellingly, at a meeting held to discuss an appropriate response to the nomads’ incursions, one of the male members maliciously suggests that Geula desires to be raped by the Bedouins, reaffirming her status as a sexual

29

30 31 32

Oz, “Navadim Vatzefa”, 36 (in the 1965 edition). Given this limpid statement of events it is hard to understand how Ramras-Rauch can ask, “What has happened between the two?… has a rape occurred? we do not know with any certainty.” (Ramras-Rauch, Gila. The Arab in Israel Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1989, 155). Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 37. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 37. Wilfe, Michael. “Geula ve Ha-bedouim: Beshuley ‘Navadim Vatzefa’ Le Amos Oz.” Moznaim 47:2 (1977): 148. — 123 —

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pariah in the kibbutz: “Hereupon Rami broke in excitedly and asked what I was waiting for. Was I perhaps waiting for some small incident of rape that Geula could write poems about?”33 Afterward, in the showers, filled with physical revulsion and disgust, Geula washes herself and plots to inflame and incite the already-hottempered young men of the kibbutz to attack the Bedouin camp as retribution for the invented assault. Thus, Geula, who was expected to calm down the combative mood of the general meeting and discourage any violence, is now planning to instigate hostilities to assuage her wounded pride. She repudiates Etkin’s humane attitude: I don’t support violence or believe in hooliganism, but this time they have gone too far. What does Etkin think, they steal, rape and vandalise…Etkin is an intelligent man, and I do not doubt his pure intentions. If not for the thing that happened to me, I may have accepted his opinion. But he does not have a clue, he does not have an iota of insight into the psychology of the savage. The nomad smells weakness from a distance. This weakness increases their impudence and pushes them into committing real crimes. I wonder what Etkin will say, when I tell him about the goatherder that tried to rape me in the orchard.34

Whereas before, Geula referred to the nomad as he, her rage and bitterness now turn her speech to them: “Yes, let the boys go right away tonight to their camp and smash their black bones because of what they did to me.”35 Geula’s resentment of the young Arab for rejecting her simplifies and rationalizes the violence that she is about to provoke. Unable to differentiate fiction and reality, the circumstances of the event become so real to her that on the way back to her room, unable to forget her “ordeal,” Geula vomits and cries in the bushes, exhausted from her “trauma” — reactions usually associated with real rape victims. On another reading, one could argue that Geula is so ashamed of the unrestrained and wild sexual drives she exposed in front of the shepherd that her only option is to confect an alternative narrative in which she displaces her raging and ungovernable longings — cravings that she 33 34 35

Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 39. Oz, “Navadim Vatzefa”, 36 (in the 1965 edition). Oz, “Navadim Vatzefa”, 35. — 124 —

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could not make known within the confines of the kibbutz — onto her interlocutor. In effect, she becomes the victim. We may suspect that Oz is again hinting at the unreliability of the kibbutz members’ claims and is again challenging the veracity of their accusations. Lying in the flowering shrubs, Geula begins to whisper poems to comfort herself. She is so entranced with her daydream that she is oblivious to the fact that she has blocked a snake’s hole, preventing it from returning to its lair. After being bitten, she simply removes the fangs from her skin and remains on the ground, absorbing the venom. By extension, the viper, embodying the qualities of temptation, danger, allurement, and the forbidden, is an analogue to the young nomad. Sprawled on the ground, Geula watches the young men, clubs in hands, setting out to exact their revenge. She could easily have alerted the group of youths she notices walking by of her predicament but does not. The sensations Geula experiences as the poison circulates through her veins are depicted through the aid of sexual imagery and are likened to the joy of a climax. Eros and Thanatos meld. Only in death, and only by finally merging with the primal element that was not actualized through her chance meeting with the nomad, can Geula obtain a perfect peace: A pleasurable pain permeates through her blood and calms her body… the shiver of delight tatters her skin… She listens to the sweet wave permeating her body and intoxicating her bloodstream. With total abandon Geula responds to the sweet wave.… The rapture floods the girl and endows her with a calm peace… soft are her fingers, soft and brimming with joy.36

Esther Fuchs remarks that,“with Geula dies her plot to incite the Kibbutz against the Bedouin poachers. There is thus something redeeming after all in Geula’s death.”37 I wish to suggest, contra Fuchs, that, in effect, Geula’s death is senseless — we are told that as she breathes her last breath, the young men of the kibbutz, carrying sticks, make their way to the nomad camp bent on teaching the Bedouins a lesson. At another level, Geula’s death can be read as the treacherous Eve’s comeuppance, 36 37

Oz, "Navadim Vatzefa", 40–41 (in the 1965 edition). Fuchs, Esther. Israeli Mythogynies: Women in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987: 64. — 125 —

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an image sustained by the text’s suggestion that the snake’s biting of Geula is not random or capricious: “Anger permeates the snake, he lifts his head and sticks out his forked tongue. The viper’s rage is not arbitrary.”38 Similarly, if the kibbutz serves as a microcosm of Israeli society, then, according to Oz, any attempt to cross the unbridgeable chasm that divides the two peoples, to initiate dialogue and social interaction is doomed to fail. Indeed, Geula’s death may also suggest that reconciliation is not only illusory — it is risky and fatal. Readers will be able to trace a wide scope of unmistakable biblical allusions that underscore the plot’s complexity and mythological patina. The viper that fatally wounds Geula recalls the serpent that tempts Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The young nomad evokes Abel, the innocent shepherd from Genesis who is murdered by his brother. Significantly, and with a dose of irony, the bellicose young men of the kibbutz, tillers of the soil, could be likened to Cain, the crop farmer who felled his brother Abel. Indeed, Etkin references age-old hostility and conflict between herders and farmers when he mentions the narrative of Cain and pleads with those present to “put an end to this ancient feud, just as we had put an end to other ugly phenomena.”39 Oz’s recreation of the biblical elements inescapably recalls an Israeli version of the Garden of Eden (amplified and enhanced by the later appearance of the snake) with Geula as Eve the troublemaker. The following exchange magnifies and emphasizes the scriptural connections. At one point, Geula suddenly shifts the tenor of the conversation and interrogates the shepherd about the real purpose of him being in the orchard. Her questions are interwoven with explicit allusions to the Ten Commandments: “What are you doing here, anyway? Stealing?… No, not stealing, heaven forbid, really not… Forbidden in the Bible,” Geula replied with a dry cruel smile. “Forbidden to steal, forbidden to kill, forbidden to covet, and forbidden to commit adultery.”40

The nomad functions as a trigger for Geula to shed the mask of 38 39 40

Oz, “Navadim Vatzefa”, 40 (in the 1965 edition). Oz, “Navadim Vatzefa”, 38. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 33. — 126 —

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frigidity, allowing her to embrace her own libidinal expressivity that is incompatible with her kibbutz persona. To illustrate the point, early in the story we are told that in the evenings Geula would occasionally stroll in the orchard with the narrator and engage in lengthy discussions about literature and politics. The narrator would sometimes lay a hand on her neck or Geula would lean against him, but ultimately the young woman did not allow the subtle flirtations to flower into a romantic liaison. Strictly constrained by the kibbutz, she wears the mask of a rational, level-headed woman. Yet throbbing through her veins are ferocious, uncivilized, id-like emotions of a soul in torment craving for relief. Like other stories in Where the Jackals Howl, “Nomad and Viper” is constructed around dialectical, concentric rings, focusing on the character’s psychological dramas and the inevitable conflict between the ego and its shadow: Tensions between the different psychic forces are reflected in the struggle between the dull, humdrum, secure existence within society’s borders and the vibrant, alluring, and destructive experiences that lie beyond those borders...the major processes portrayed in Oz’s fiction are typically Jungian: the “self” is attained only when the protagonist is reconciled with the dark aspects of his personality...41

Paradoxically, the woman who rejected the narrator’s stories because of their “extreme polarity of situations, scenery, and characters, with no intermediate shades between black and white,”42 abandons herself to the same state of extreme polarity in her risky flirtation with the Bedouin. For Saul Kirschbaum, the encounter exemplifies a larger motif in the Oz canon: We observe that a feeling of perplexity towards the other pervades his work; the other whom we know little or nothing, which is perceived as a potential threat and, at the same time, as the holder of a mystery that fascinates us, that gives rise to a mix of attraction-repulsion.43

41

42 43

Avraham Balaban. “Amos Oz” in Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd edition) Volume 15. Thomson Gale: New York, 2007: 554-556 Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 28. Kirschbaum, Saul. “Amos Oz: The Perplexity of Inversion of Positions.” Paper delivered at the Association for Israel Studies 2008: 3. — 127 —

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Oz employs the device of “mirror inversing” to impress upon the reader that the young goatherd, who is a national outsider, is Geula’s doppelgänger. Indeed, Geula’s affinity to the itinerant nomads and the one-eyed goatherd is heightened through an array of suggestive and correlative details. For example, she leaves her sandals in her room and walks barefoot on the dirty soil, very much like the Bedouin women who “drift around at night, barefoot and noiseless.”44 The removal of the sandals can also be read as the young woman’s discarding of her cultured, reserved persona. Geula's mastery of brewing coffee equates her with the Bedouins who are experts at this; her whistling an old tune corresponds to the Bedouins’ singing at night. During their interaction in the orchard, the young nomad is about to hurl a stone at the goat he flung to the ground, just as Geula earlier hurled a stone at the bottle.45 Nechama Aschkenasy, in an excellent article concerning the concept of the woman as the double, elaborates: Geula comes to realise that, in a strange way, the Bedouin is her double. Both are outcasts, unattractive and unattached, and both seethe with unfulfilled erotic desires. The recognition that the physically revolting nomad, in his primitive existence, is a reflection of her own raging, uncontrollable self, fills Geula with nausea.46

Furthermore, on a larger scale, the peripatetic Bedouins, roaming northward in search of water and fertile ground, have switched places with the “wandering Jews” who have now become the permanent residents of the land. Aside from polemical strands, also obtrusive in the tale are themes related to the stereotype of the single woman, often found in male dominated constructs such as the Kibbutz. The prescient narrator loads his characterization of Geula with condescension and pity, depicting her as a figure of mockery in the kibbutz and repeatedly nullifying, in the guise of sympathy, any positive attributes she may possess. As Deegan found in the portrayal of the unmarried woman, “The most 44 45 46

Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 23. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 34. Aschkenasy, Nehama. “Women and the Double in Modern Hebrew Literature: Berdichewsky/Agnon/Oz/Yehoshua.” Prooftexts 8 (1988): 125. — 128 —

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marked characteristic… is the repeated reference to unattractive physical qualities, more often than not to ugliness of face or angularity of form.”47 And indeed, from the very outset, Geula’s unpleasant appearance is accentuated: “Her face was pale and thin...A pair of bitter lines were etched at the corners of her mouth… On hot days, when faces are covered in sweat, the acne on her cheeks reddened and she seems to have no hope.”48 In another story in the collection titled “Kodem Zemano” (“Before His Time”) in which Geula appears, the emphasis on the young woman as homely and graceless continues: Her nails are cracked, her hands are rough and scabby, and there are two bitter creases at the corners of her mouth. Her legs are thin and pale and covered with a down of black hairs. That is why she always wears trousers, never a skirt or a dress. And although she is now more than twenty years old, there are still adolescent pimples on her cheeks.49

In kibbutz matters, Geula is a cipher. Her contribution is confined to that of preparing coffee for cultural and social meetings, a participation which is not unnoticed by the narrator. With a dollop of irony he points out that although she is still without a husband, her ability to make the finest coffee whenever needed is always appreciated by the members. Importantly, in the main introduction to “Nomad and Viper”, the narrator fleetingly refers to Geula's age — twenty-nine — implying that with every passing day her plight worsens, which explains why she is such an embittered and morose character: “I avoid her glance, so as not to have to face her mocking sadness.”50 And in “Before His Time”: “Geula Sirkin, the surviving child of Zeshka and Dov, wakes up in hatred and rises to wash her face under the cold water faucet.”51 Rightly, author and critic Yonah Bachur remarks that Geula represents the epitome of loneliness in the kibbutz.52 47

48 49 50 51 52

Deegan, Dorothy Yost. The Stereotype of the Single Woman in American Novels. New York: Octagon Books, 1975: 105. Oz, “Navadim Vatzefa”, 27–28. (in the 1965 edition). Oz, Amos. ”Before His Time”, 70. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 28. Oz, ”Before His Time”, 69. Bachur, Yona. “Olam shel sin-ha,” Haaretz (28 May, 1965): 13. — 129 —

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In contrast to his sister, Geula’s late younger brother is proclaimed as a legend in the army, promoted to a commander of his own battalion at twenty-three. Indeed, even after his death, his military exploits are still spoken of with reverence: how he partook in all the reprisal raids, how sick with pneumonia he blew up an Arab police station, and how alone he captured a notorious terrorist and six of his crew. His few visits to the kibbutz “had been a delight to the unmarried girls. And sometimes to the married girls as well.… He just burst out laughing and asked why they were all hanging around him, as if they had no homes to go to, as if they had nothing to do.”53 In the course of “Nomad and Viper,” the male narrator makes it clear that Geula’s solitary state is a situation she alone is responsible for, since she has spurned his attempts at companionship and has rejected any intimacy: Sometimes I would rest a conciliatory hand on her neck, and wait for her to calm down. But she never relaxed completely. If once or twice she leaned against me, she always blamed her broken sandal or her aching head. And so we drifted apart.54

Thus, what befalls Geula is the fate of all unwed literary heroines, who, having rejected marriage, are left to be scolded and chastised by society. Characteristically, Geula is also segregated and delineated as the ‘social other’, as different: “Geula is not like the rest of the girls in the Kibbutz.”55 In a similar vein, the youngsters of the kibbutz maliciously snicker at her nocturnal walks in the orchards. Oz probes the complex dilemma a woman such as Geula faces being unmarried in a community like a Kibbutz, where the institution of the family is paramount. Oz shows how the Kibbutz has outfitted Geula with the archetypal qualities associated with the spinster: sour disposition, spite and lasciviousness.56 A related concern is that as Geula’s story is refracted and filtered through a subjective male view, 53 54 55 56

Oz, ”Before His Time”, 70. Oz, “Nomad and Viper,” 28-29. Oz, “Kodem Zemano”, 62 (1965 version). Rogers, M. Katherine. The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature. (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1966),\: 203. — 130 —

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what we are left with is a clichéd take on the life of a single woman – a portrayal that certainly has the ring of the stereotype. Returning briefly to the story’s coda. Although the mission to punish the Bedouins appears to be disproportionate, considering the transgressions they are accused of, there are bigger forces at work here. The unlikely cast of unwanted primitive invaders, who inhabit and signify the untamed landscape, burgeon gradually into a subversive, destabilizing element that enters the bloodstream of the kibbutz. The Arabs in the story function as a chaotic catalyst that disrupts the seemingly tranquil, sane, and disciplined nature of the kibbutz. Their arrival unleashes a geyser of suppressed sexual, uncontrollable vicious impulses — normally attributed to the exemplum other, the Arab — that heralds the collapse, or perhaps the weakening, of the kibbutz’s moral order. Nurit Gertz remarks on this running subtext, evident in the overall bric-a-brac of all the tales in the collection: In all of the stories in Where the Jackals Howl there is a struggle waged between the representative of civilization (usually a kibbutz member) who lives under the shelter of Zionist ideology and the menacing land and its agents — the jackals, the Arabs, the mountains. This is not a simple conflict between clashing spheres, but a battle between two worlds, each containing the same contradictions: the cultured member embodies wild impulses, and nature is not only a universe of threatening drives but also a world that is meaningful, real and captivating. As the story unfolds, the hero, who is imbued with those very tensions, is pulled between violent interactions with the forces of nature and a return back to the barren life of culture. This occurs until the coda of the narrative, when the destructive encounter ends in catastrophe or resignation. All the protagonists in Where the Jackals Howl are unable to find a home in the lands of the jackal and in the lands of the cultured. They cannot live in the upright world of rules and clichés, but they cannot violate these laws and boundaries since this breaking out brings with it death and devastation. Out of the two choices — death in life or life in death — they cannot choose neither.57

Two images at the end of the story sum up nicely the motif of a battle being waged between the Arab and the Jew, between the seemingly 57

Gertz, Nurit. Amos Oz: Monografia. Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1980: 93. — 131 —

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cultured kibbutz life and the savage Bedouin tribe. The first is the band of stick-carrying youngsters marching toward the Bedouin encampment, aflame with an almost bestial drive: “Excitement was dilating our pupils. And the blood was drumming in our temples.”58 To be sure, this irrational remedy signifies a regression to a physical primitivism and infantile aggression not usually associated with the ethical and civilized image of the kibbutz. The second is obscured within the fabric of the text and is easy to overlook. As Geula rests among the flowering shrubs, military planes sweep through the night sky, preparing perhaps for a shadowy bombing exercise. The blinking red and green lights of the jets, symbols of Israel’s modern might, are contrasted with the earthy singing and drumming of the nomads. An analogy is drawn between the destructive nature of both the planes and the youths on their way to “even the score with the nomads.”59

58 59

Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 40. Oz, “Nomad and Viper”, 40. — 132 —

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---------------------------------  Chapter IX  ----------------------------------

And the Righteous Shall be Rewarded

Dvorah Baron’s “Sunbeams” Often hailed as one of the greatest Hebrew fiction writers, Dvorah Baron was born in Ozdha, near Minsk, Belorussia in 1887. Her father Shabtai Eliezer, a Hassidic rabbi, recognized early on his daughter’s artistic genius and gave her the rabbinic education usually reserved for boys. As has been observed, Baron was fortunate in having an extraordinary father who had a radical and generous approach to his gifted daughter’s education.1 While her father conducted classes in the study hall for the boys, the young girl, ensconced in the woman’s section, would occasionally shout a question to her father or brother through the partition.2 Naomi Seidman cites from a study by Nurit Govrin, a renowned Baron scholar, in further explicating the confluence of circumstances that enabled the young woman to obtain an education in Talmud and Midrash: The rare combination of understanding parents, a brother who was also a spiritual guide, and a girl who was blessed with talents, eager for learning 1

2

For several excellent studies about Dvora Baron’s corpus and life, see: Jelen, Sheila E. and Shachar Pinsker. Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron’s Fiction. Bethesda, Maryland.: University Press of Maryland, 2007; Seidman, Naomi. “Baron ‘in the Closet’: An Epistemology of the ‘Women’s Section.’” In Naomi Seidman A Marriage Made in Heaven. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; Lieblich, Amia. Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; Jelen, Sheila. E. Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007; Adler, Ruth. “Dvora Baron: Daughter of the Shtetl.” In Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, edited by Judith R. Baskin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Seidman. “Baron ‘in the Closet,’” 67–68. — 133 —

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and iron-willed, was what made possible the very existence of a Rabbi’s daughter becoming a Hebrew-writer, for whom knowledge of Hebrew and grounding in the religious sources were natural and primary. The way for her to acquire the Jewish-Hebrew education normally given to a boy was to make a necessary compromise, which allowed her to receive an education without seriously overthrowing accepted social convention.3

Baron wrote a Yiddish play at the age of seven and began writing Hebrew stories that first appeared in 1903 in the magazine Hamelitz and later in the daily Hatzfira. She achieved wide acclaim among Hebrew authors of the time, as eminent author Hayyim Brenner wrote in a 1906 letter: “My sister… you can write.”4 With the encouragement of her parents, she moved to the city of Minsk with her brother Binyamin, who was a medical student, to complete her high school education. There, she was for a time engaged to the author Moshe Eliezer. After the couple ended the relationship, the Baron family immigrated to Palestine in 1911. The same year she married Yosef Ahronovitz, a leading figure in the Labor Zionist movement and editor of the newspaper Hapoel Hatzair, whom she met in her role as editor of the paper’s literary supplement. Their daughter Tziporah was born in 1915, the same year that the couple was deported to Alexandria, Egypt, under orders from the Ottoman authorities. The young family was to remain there for four years before returning to Tel Aviv. Their sojourn in Egypt formed the basis for the novel Hagolim (The Exiles, 1970), published 14 years after her death. Shaken by the death of her brother from typhus after the First World War, and devoted to caring for her epileptic daughter, for the next thirty years Baron did not leave her Tel Aviv apartment, not even to attend her husband’s funeral in 1937, though she did edit his collected works. From her bed, she continued to write, to edit the newspaper Hapoel Hatzair until 1924, and to translate masterpieces such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Intensely involved in public life, her first collection of stories, Sippurim (Stories), was published in 1927. 3 4

Seidman, “Baron ‘in the Closet,’” 68. Pagis, Dvora Baron, 198.

— 134 —

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Sara R. Horowitz draws parallels between the author’s name and what we know of her own life: Baron spelled her last name in the Yiddish rather than the Hebrew manner, with the letter aleph following the bet. Later readers… would note the unintended punning created by this spelling, of Baron with ba’aron, in the closet. This play on words encapsulates her life, which she lived out literally as a recluse in the confines of her apartment for several decades, as well as the fate of her writing, metaphorically, in the closet, unread and underappreciated until recently.5

The first recipient of the Bialik Prize in 1934 (she won the award twice), she also received the Rupin Prize for her novel Le-et Ata (For the Time Being 1934) and the Brenner Prize for Parashiyot (Chapters 1951). Dvora Baron died in Tel Aviv on August 20, 1956. Although Baron lived in Palestine and saw firsthand the attendant upheavals and dislocation of migration and statehood, she chose to anchor her portraitures in the Lithuanian small town. Wendy Zierler explains that, “Baron’s fiction seems perennially and statically rooted — as if outside time — in a mythified version of the shtetl, ensconced within its sacred texts and genealogies.”6 Zierler further argues that despite the fact that Baron’s stories depict and memorialize the traditional Jewish Diaspora, rather than being outdated and ignorant of modern themes, her tales “clearly respond to the problematic of early twentiethcentury Jewish women’s experience, providing significant insights into the phenomena of change, disjuncture, alienation, and immigration from a female point of view.”7 Two eminent scholars, Nurit Govrin and Rivka Gorfine, each furnish their own elucidations on Baron’s fidelity to the Lithuanian shtetl. In a chapter titled “Deborah Baron: Ignoring the Reality of Eretz Israel,” Govrin writes: “Another possible reason was her feeling that life in the small Jewish shtetl, as she had lived and known it, was fast vanishing, and that she had to preserve for future 5

6

7

Horowitz, R. Sara. “Voices of Jewish Women.” Canadian Jewish News (13 September 2001): n.p. Zierler, Wendy. “In What World?”: Devorah Baron’s Fiction of Exile” Prooftexts, Volume 19(2) (May 1999): 128. Zierler, Wendy. “In What World?”: Devorah Baron’s Fiction of Exile” Prooftexts, Volume 19(2) (May 1999): 128. — 135 —

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generations a past reality which was never to be again.”8 Govrin then goes to explain that Baron saw her literary undertaking as that of a photographer and interleaves a passage from the story Ma She-aya (The Thing that Has Been, 1939) to amplify her claim, “For I see myself as a photographic lens which remained alone after the photographed object has vanished. Is it not my duty — in order to maintain the memory of these things — to print my impressions on paper?”9 Rivka Gorfine suggests that Baron felt compelled, berthed amidst the ebullience and rapture that enveloped those involved in the creation of a Jewish state, to unmoor herself from her current reality and create a separate narrative of a long-vanished Diaspora. Gorfine opines that Baron knew that: [a] day will come when we will retrace our steps and explore our roots of yore. And perhaps for that very reason her contribution within the revolutionary enterprise of her contemporaries is so special… here, within the flurry of building anew, of forming a city from the sands, she kept depicting all that we, and she, had abandoned. Through a unique and individual lens, utilizing delicate power and an almost lyrical beat, she erected a monument to the past — for the generations to come.10

Remarkably, for an author who has been dead for more than five decades, and who was virtually forgotten after her death, critical appraisal of her corpus has increased, with a new generation of scholars unearthing multiple levels of meaning in her work. They assert, in brief, that her writings betray not only a feminist concern with the role of women in Jewish society, but also trenchant criticism of Zionism and a challenging of the masculine dominance of the Hebrew canon. What makes Baron’s works so delicately astute, for one, is their stark honesty and empathy in seeing the frailty of her characters, in pointing out their errors, and in her championing of the downtrodden, the marginal, and the weak. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, her vignettes of small Jewish East European communities that were destroyed, assume heightened documentary and historical importance, beyond their mere 8 9 10

Govrin, Nurit. Alienation and Regeneration. Tel Aviv: MOD Books, 1989: 131. Cited in Govrin, 1989, 131. Gorfine, Rivka. Bikriah Kashuva. Ramat Gan: Masada, 1969: 132. — 136 —

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literary value. At the same time, despite her own provincialism, Baron’s appeal lay in the stories’ worldly, universal sensibility. Baron's fictions display psychological complexity and ambition in tackling woman-centered issues that hitherto were shunned by Hebrew literature or existed in meager supply. What is clear is that Baron felt that only a woman could offer a psychic identification and tenderness in confronting such issues as sexuality, abortion, divorce, abandonment, marriage, and autonomy. By orchestrating narratives revolving around female protagonists, Baron liberated the muted voices of Jewish women who often, due to social circumstances, were bitterly robbed of an outlet to articulate their frustrations and anger. “Shavririm”11 (“Sunbeams” 1948) is a story shorn of sentimentality, nostalgia, and clichés, underwritten by a style that chimes with the author’s fictional matrix — “disciplined, sober and realistic, without embellishment, restrained and enclosed in a well-defined artistic frame– and yet realism and lyricism blend well within it.”12 Fellow author Yaacov Fichman called “Sunbeams” one of Baron’s greatest achievements.13 Intermingling realism with impressionism, a la nineteenth-century letters, “Sunbeams” is about a quest by a heroic, resourceful woman, who hits rock bottom and wins back her self-respect by transcending the belittling, negative space in which she has been trapped. The young girl of “Sunbeams” is perhaps the finest expression of Baron’s lifelong sympathy for women on the margins. As the story opens, the five-year-old orphan Haya-Fruma (Haya means animal in Hebrew, and Fruma means pious in Yiddish) is brought from the village of Bikhov in Belarus to an unnamed town with a “bundle of bedding and a little warmth from her mother’s last caress,

11

12

13

First published in Hebrew in 1948. Baron, Dvorah. Shavririm. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1948. I am using the English translation by Joseph Schachter, which appears in The Oxford Book of Hebrew Short Stories, edited by Glenda Abramson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997: 85–93. Yoffe, A. B. “Introduction.” In Dvorah Baron, The Thorny Path translated from the Hebrew by Joseph Shachter and edited by Itzhak Hanoch, ix–xiv (xii). Jerusalem: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and Israel Universities Press, 1969. Yaacov Fichman cited in Ada Pagis, ed. Dvora Baron: Mivchar Ma-amarim al Yetizrata. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1974: 64. — 137 —

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which was soon dissipated in the alien chill.”14 Her only belongings, the last remnant of parental love and a home, are handled with disdain by the strangers who see the helpless child as a nuisance: “For days she was passed from hand to hand like an unwanted object… she trembled in the chill blast of orphanhood like a leaf whose sheltering parents-tree had been felled.”15 Relegated to a corner near the stove, she is checked for skin disease, and her pillows are stripped of their pillowcases and beaten to make certain they are clean. No thought is spared for HayaFruma’s feelings. The first sliver of hope is presented by an old woman who symbolically pulls Haya-Fruma out of the depths of despair (down at the village) and takes her upward to her home on a hillside quarter. It is not long before the old woman recoils from the girl’s ferocious appetite and returns her to the valley’s slum, to the unremitting coldness of the community. Because of her outward appearance — “she roamed about in her peasant smock, her faded hair tangled and unkempt, her face devoid of a single endearing feature”16 — the forsaken girl is exiled and denied any type of affection or sympathy by the townspeople. It is only when, at the age of eight, she breaks a leg, that the Jewish townspeople show any pity. Lying on the ice, crying, she is cared for by various families who, “with eager willingness of dogooders,” ensure that she receives medical attention and food.17 Yet, the instant her broken leg heals, she is again, “left to her own devices. Again she became a street urchin, eking out her existence as before, by doing chores for the local housewives.”18 To be sure, the physical injury foreshadows the chain of emotional blows that will strike the orphan as the story unfolds. Because her leg was not properly set, she walks with a severe limp, and is assailed by a barrage of insults from the children who, never once rebuked by their parents, would shout, “There goes crooked Haya-Fruma.”19 14 15 16 17 18 19

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 85 Baron, “Sunbeams”, 85. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 86. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 86. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 86. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 86. — 138 —

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Yet above all, it is the compassionless adults who inflict the cruelest and most painful of scars on the soul of the neglected child. Outside, they avoid glancing her way, “...the grown-ups, who appear to ostracize those of unlovely appearance, would not so much as look at her.”20 In their homes, their stony and unfeeling attitude compounds her loneliness and isolation. In one episode, just before the Sabbath, amidst the intoxicating smells of the cooking and the friendly smile of the housewife, Haya-Fruma hopes that she might be invited to partake in the tender homely atmosphere. Such elevated expectations are immediately and mercilessly crushed: “No sooner had she finished her work than she would be given her pay in unmistakable dismissal.”21 Baron delineates a world that she knows intimately, vividly recreating daily life in a small Jewish shtetl with all its customs and affairs. Baron’s evocations ring true because, “She wrote only about things that were within the bounds of her own experience and never touched any subject with which she was not familiar or which was not sufficiently clear to her.”22 Thus, we read about the ritual of fasting before a Jewish wedding, the sitting of shiva (the weeklong period of grief and mourning), the division of dowry, and the celebration of the Jewish New Year. Baron condemns those religious leaders who mistreat her female protagonist and is highly critical of the hypocrisy of those who were seen to be the paragons of the community. Gnawing at the conscience of the reader, she shows the malignities that lurk behind the facade of piety, and forcefully drives home the message that the actions of the townspeople contradicted and violated the ethical code of Judaism. For instance, while at the beadle’s home washing the dishes, Haya-Fruma is intensely drawn to the beadle’s daughter, whose face and warm eyes remind her of her late mother. Seeking to connect with a distant memory, to once again experience human affection, she touches the girl’s golden locks that gleam from the bath she had just taken. The beadle’s daughter retreats in a “gesture of mild distaste,”23 but it is the wife who viciously

20 21 22 23

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 87. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 86. Yoffe, “Introduction,” x. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 87. — 139 —

--------------------------------  Chapter IX. And the Righteous Shall be Rewarded --------------------------------

rejects the orphan’s heartrending attempt for a modicum of closeness: “Her mother who was standing near the oven, advanced on Haya-Fruma in a towering rage, brandishing her baker’s shovel. ‘How dare you crawl all over her with your clumsy paws!’ she screamed.”24 Haya-Fruma’s plea for support from the neighbor who witnesses the degrading reproach is predictable– a hollow refusal to meet her gaze. Overwrought, Haya-Fruma walks out, never to return. That scene captures the alienation and rootlessness that envelop the orphan, who from then on keeps her eyes down, aware that she will never be granted a welcoming, kind look. Instead, she accepts her dispossession and chooses to withdraw into the oppressive shadows of the kitchen or the yards, and to merge with the inanimate objects around her. Shut out from those around her, she derives pleasure from polishing the kettle that would in return “send back a kindly gleam”25 or the stove that would transmit “a gay, dancing flame.”26 As time passes, she “gradually mouldered, like a dark, dank cell that has long been kept shut.”27 In a purgatorial state, condemned to remain mute, Haya-Fruma demonstrates her inner strength as she diligently proves her worth as a cleaner and then as a worker in the bakery. In one passage, HayaFruma’s almost alchemical skills — “the gleaming window-panes, after she had washed them, reflected the splendour of the world”28  — are overlaid with a religious patina as people remove their shoes before stepping onto the floors she had just scrubbed. Baron’s delineation of her protagonist’s magic-like regenerative qualities are phrased in a lyrical prose that sweeps the reader along emotionally and emphatically: With a few deft strokes she would restore to wooden benches their original colour, as yellow as the yolk of an egg, make the brass candlesticks glitter like gold, beat out the feather pillows till they bellowed and reared up like towers at the head of the bedsteads.29

24 25 26 27 28 29

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 87. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 87. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 87. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 87. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 86. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 86. — 140 —

------------------------------------------------------   Dvorah Baron’s “Sunbeams” ------------------------------------------------------

The young girl is eventually matched with an old widower, who is taken by her strength and excited by the prospect of a maid he will not have to pay. Concerned that the young woman would be distracted by the news and neglect her duties, the baker’s wife waits an entire week, telling Haya-Fruma of the proposal only on a Sabbath afternoon. One might recall that for Haya-Fruma the Sabbath is something ineffably larger than for those she briefly encounters. It is on the Sabbath eve that, like an alchemist, she returns the dazzle to household furniture and floors. And it is on the Sabbath eve that she prayerfully aches to partake in the family meal, emboldened by a housewife’s sympathetic smile, but ultimately is rebuffed and sent away to vanish into thin air. This uncaring attitude, which defines Haya-Fruma’s condition, continues with the marriage, which becomes a study in abasement. The baker’s wife explains to Haya-Fruma that she would now prepare her own bread, and the other women present venture the following lacerating remark, “Surely you can’t go on grubbing on other people’s dung-heaps all your life.”30 The nameless groom betrays a similar objectifying attitude toward his bride-to-be. He arrives at the wedding ceremony with a cartload of vegetables and in his work clothes, a sight that embarrasses even his relatives and underscores the impression that for him this is simply another business transaction. After the wedding, the townspeople are relieved to have finally gotten rid of the orphan, a collective feeling that does not escape the eye of the allknowing narrator, “…the children…accompanied her with loud hurrahs, which were this time possibly longer and more significant than their usual jeers.”31 Haya-Fruma’s unjust suffering is exacerbated when she arrives in Kaminka, at the home of the villager, who is so preoccupied with his trade that he barely acknowledges his new wife. Unable to find a place to store her belongings, Haya-Fruma’s sense of dejection and anguish worsens when she realizes that she has little hope of escaping the misery which lies at the core of her being: “The darkness inside her very soon permeated her whole being, filling her with the dark desolation 30 31

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 89. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 88. — 141 —

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of a long-forgotten dungeon.”32 Deprived of an affectionate look or gesture, in the evenings she would lie on a bench near the stove while her husband tended to his accounts, or stare outside, transfixed by the fields. Baron foregrounds the existential and all-enveloping communal wilderness the heroine is trapped in with the following passage: “After he had left she would go outside, only to be confronted by the same indifference there. The houses all along the street turned blank, windowless walls to her, just as their occupants cold-shouldered her.”33 As the tone becomes more bleak and grim, there are flashes of sunbeams that provide some relief from the gritty and impersonal. The rebirth of hope, and the beginning of a new life for the perennial outsider, is provided by the appearance of a milking cow (Rizhka) who turns out to be Haya-Fruma’s first friend. Warned by her husband not to approach the agitated animal, Haya-Fruma enters the cowshed, drawn by what she believes is the cow’s weeping. At that point, the cow looks at Haya-Fruma as if seeking her sympathy. It is noteworthy that in the Hebrew version Baron deploys the exact phrasing “as if asking for her support” for the scene in which Haya-Fruma and the cow first meet and the scene where Haya-Fruma looks to the neighbor for protection when she is so viciously put down by the beadle’s wife. It is no accident that Haya-Fruma and Rizhka immediately bond — both have lost their beloved (Haya-Fruma, her parents, Rizhka, her calf), both have been uprooted from their birthplace, and both have been forcibly brought to a strange, uncaring place. Together, the orphan and the bereaved mother give birth to a new pact. Rizhka is the means to Haya-Fruma’s salvation, restoring the broken woman’s dignity and infusing her crushed soul with light and joy. The two find in each other energies and emotions of immense solace: “For both of them this was an hour of silent communications, as it were, a reciprocal bond between them, wondrously precious, such as only those who are doomed to silence can savour in their hearts.”34 In this connection, it is worth noting that silence permeates “Sunbeams”. Baron’s characters 32 33 34

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 89. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 89. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 91. — 142 —

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are portrayed through their actions. There are hardly any conversations, and the only ‘unspoken’ dialogue of any substance occurs between Rizhka and Haya-Fruma through their interactions. Undergirding the whole of “Sunbeams” is Baron’s adroit and haunting creation of a terrifyingly indifferent Jewish society that tramples on a young girl’s selfhood. The author loads the narrative with the mordant irony that an animal is the means by which this character renews her faith in humanity. Baron juxtaposes the “bestial,” deformed treatment by the town’s residents, which brings Haya-Fruma to the lowest and darkest point of her being, with the cow’s “human” kindness, which elevates her to spiritual heights and brings about her redemption. At one point, the cow licks Haya-Fruma’s hand, and “she — who had never known laughter — felt as though her inner being were pervaded by a broad smile, and the dark dungeon was suddenly filled with dancing sunbeams.”35 Equally, the cow “seemed to have calmed down and no longer looked sad…”36 The sunbeams, of course, serve a larger symbolic purpose here. They should be read as the resurfacing of human warmth and affection that were buried with the death of Haya-Fruma’s parents. Scene after scene unfolds with a relentless movement toward the metamorphosis of the heroine. The turning point comes when her husband dies. Haya-Fruma forfeits her entitlement to the inheritance, asking only to keep Rizhka. One might also mention that in keeping with her earlier habitual theme, Baron continues to contrast the petty behavior of the village people and Haya-Fruma’s graceful deportment. During the seven days of mourning, the old man’s three sons and daughter argue about the splitting of the inheritance. At such times, Haya-Fruma quietly leaves the room, and while serving the mourners with dishes she has prepared from the vegetables she picked from the garden, she looks away when the offspring place items of value into their suitcases. Afterward, Haya-Fruma moves out of the house (in which she never felt at home) and into an abandoned wooden shack, located symbolically outside the village. In order to support herself and Rizhka, 35 36

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 90. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 90. — 143 —

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she goes back, without hesitation, to cleaning and scrubbing floors in the valley. Slowly she lifts herself out of poverty, battling to escape the virtual prison in which the community would confine her. Likewise, a more assertive woman emerges, a woman who takes control of her life. With a shrewd business sense, she buys a churn and vat, installs her own oven, and begins selling bread, butter, and cheese. The physical changes in Haya-Fruma are remarkable — any trace of the limp is hardly noticeable, and in sharp contrast to her previous appearance, she now dresses in a matronly apron and a colored kerchief which frames her beaming face. This transformation leads the villagers to wonder, “Can this be Haya Fruma?”37 The all-knowing narrator then adds into the brew the story’s capstone motif: “What they did not realize was that even the salty, arid soil of the desert, if only it be watered from living springs and fertilized, will eventually become enriched and burst into bloom.”38 Haya-Fruma’s struggle against rigid social conventions and exclusion results in the triumph of the spirit. Baron employs numerous touches to build the affecting and touching portrait of this unusual woman who does not accept her fate and who eschews any retributory yearnings. The story is filled with striking moments of charity propelled by the arresting heroine whose benevolence is the stark inverse of the community. Free of any seething anger, she forgives those who mistreated her. Now owning the shack and a plot of land, she finances the construction of a banister for the steps of the synagogue, purchases a candelabrum for the women’s section so that they are no longer reliant on the dim light that escapes from the men’s area, and extends her generosity to the blind old scholar who becomes her mentor and to the destitute of the village. One of the operating motifs in “Sunbeams” is the absence and presence of light. As the title indicates, throughout the successive shocks Haya-Fruma suffers, from the tragic loss of her parents to the terrible obstacles placed in her path, the female principal searches for light in the ever-looming darkness. References to light permeate the 37 38

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 92. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 92. — 144 —

------------------------------------------------------   Dvorah Baron’s “Sunbeams” ------------------------------------------------------

fabric of the tale. The beadle’s daughter’s eyes are likened to “sunny sparkles,” and her hair forms “glittering locks.”39 En route to her husband’s home, Haya-Fruma glimpses the “green glow of the luxuriant fields”40; serving her husband with various dishes, she would look at him sitting at the dining table “like someone climbing out of a dark pit towards the light…”41; While strolling with Rizhka along the riverbank, she sees that the cow’s reddish coat would be “gleaming gold in the rays of the setting sun.”42 And in one of the most poignant passages in the story, Haya-Fruma’s face is analogized to a “long empty lantern in which a lighted candle has been placed.”43 Another recurring motif that informs the narrative is that of the hand, which on the one hand symbolizes the deprivation of maternal love, but on the other also represents attachment and the coming together of two outcast souls. In the story’s first sequence, the hand is intimately tied to the deceased mother: “a little warmth from her mother’s last caress, which was soon dissipated in the alien chill… Her own hand, missing the one she was accustomed to clutching, hung limply at her side.”44 Later, it is closely aligned with the crude, “disdainful” hands of the townspeople who rip apart her pillows and who pass her “from hand to hand like an unwanted object.”45 Similarly, when Haya-Fruma stretches out her hand to stroke the glittering locks of the beadle’s daughter, it is the hand of the beadle’s wife holding the shovel that threatens to strike her. At the same time, the coldness of the strangers’ hands is juxtaposed with references to Haya-Fruma’s hands (referred to as “bear-like paws” in one passage), which diligently scrub and scour household items and repair their shine and color. One of the story’s widest themes, the search for happiness, is stated most clearly through the mechanism of the hand, when Haya-Fruma first caresses Rizhka’s side and the cow licks her hand — a gesture that animates the 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 87. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 88. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 89. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 91. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 92. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 85. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 85. — 145 —

--------------------------------  Chapter IX. And the Righteous Shall be Rewarded --------------------------------

young woman’s being with rippling joy. The keen and sensitive reader will also notice that Baron ties the landscape and the changing of the seasons to the chronicling of the heroine’s plight and subsequent growth and self-betterment. Thus, it is during the frostiness of winter that the demoralized Haya-Fruma fractures her leg and is subjected to the social injustice depicted so sharply early in the story. In spring, she is matched to the widower, a development that contains a kernel of hope and transcends her momentary reality. That optimism is expressed through the fields Haya-Fruma observes on the road to Kaminka, a vista which stirs up submerged memories: She gazed around her with wide-open eyes, as if seeing some distant reflection of her native village: the same green glow of the luxuriant fields, the same song of birds merging with the blue stillness seemingly charged with far-away undertones of her mother’s voice.46

It is in spring that Haya-Fruma forms the sharing experience with the cow. It is in summer that Haya-Fruma’s gripping transformation is captured in the flowering of radishes and onions in her garden, as the entire yard overflows with the scent of a village farm. Central to the narrative is Haya-Fruma's relationship with the blind, elderly sage, who tellingly, despite his disability, “was able to pave a path of light to the dark recesses of the woman’s soul.”47 The fellowship with the seer, who lacks sight but is possessed of insight, infuses the brave woman’s being with spirituality and holiness. It is the old man who reawakens her belief in the redeeming comfort of community and charity. Because of his teachings, she regularly attends synagogue services and spends her time caring for the impoverished. Toward the end of the novel, eight years after returning to her town, Haya-Fruma is afflicted with a terminal illness, a fate she accepts with a noble simplicity, drawing on her wellspring of inner strength. With her usual sense of careful management, she puts her affairs in order. She hands over the bakery to the neighbor, stops the production of milk, 46 47

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 88. Baron, “Sunbeams”, 92. — 146 —

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and sells Rizhka to an affluent family, only after satisfying herself that they have a properly built cowshed. The story’s transformative tenor reaches its apotheosis when Haya-Fruma closes her eyes for the final time. At last, the righteous woman has attained sublime happiness and fulfillment: “As she sank into slumber, she felt as though she were becoming enveloped in the golden haze of an unseen sunrise. This radiance that dawned on her… awaits all those who have been refined and burnished by suffering in this world.”48

48

Baron, “Sunbeams”, 93. — 147 —

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Index of Names and Works

Abramson, Glenda, 29, 31, 32 Ahronovitz, Yosef, 134 Aini, Leah, 55 Alter, Robert, 98 Amichai, Yehuda, 23-33; Achshav u-beyamim acherim (Now and in Other Days), 25, 28; Be-merhak shtei tikvot (Two Hopes Away), 25; El male rachamim (A God Full of Mercy), 28; Elohim merachem al yaldey hagan (God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children), 27-33; Kinot al hametim bemilchama (Seven Laments for the War Dead), 25; Lo meachshav, lo mikan (Not of This Time, Not of This Place), 25, 82; Masot Binyamin haacharon mi Tudelah (Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela), 26; Me-adama ata ve-el adama tashuv (Of Man Thou Art, and Unto Man Shalt Thou Return), 24; Me-ahorei col ze mistater osher gadol (Behind All This Hides a Great Happiness), 25; Pa`amonim verakavot (Bells and Trains), 25; Pirhei Bar (Wildpeace), 27; Yerushalayim 1967 (Jerusalem 1967), 27

Anacreon, 15 Arbel, Zvi, 95 Aschkenasy, Nechama, 128 Auden, W.H., 24 Averbach, Manya, 37 Avni, Abraham, 72 B Bar, Rabbi Tuvia Dov, 78 Barak, Ehud, 23 Baron, Dvorah, 133-147; Hagolim (The Exiles), 134; Hamelitz magazine, 134; Hapoel Hatzair newspaper, 134; Hatzfira newspaper, 134; Le-et Ata (For the Time Being), 135; Ma She-aya (The Thing that Has Been), 136; Parashiyot (Chapters), 135; Shavririm (Sunbeams), 137-147; Sippurim (Stories), 135 Baron, Shabtai Eliezer, 133 Bartov, Hanoch, 77-91; Commentary magazine, 80; Ha-Hesbon Ve-Ha-Nefesh (The Reckoning and the Soul), 78; Lamerchav magazine, 78; Ligdol Ve-Lichtov Be-Eretz Israel (To Be and to Write in the Land of Israel), 80; Maariv newspaper, 78; Mi-Tom Ad Tom (Hand in Hand, Locked for Life), 79;

— 156 —

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Mihutz laofek, Me’ever La-rechov (Beyond the Horizon Across the Street), 81-82; Pitzei Bagrut (The Brigade), 77, 79-80, 82-91; Regel Achat Bachutz (Halfway Out), 91; Shel Mi Ata Yeled (Whose Little Boy Are You), 91; Tzel Ha-havar (The Shadow of the Past), 78 Bartov, Omer, 78 Ben David, Calev, 117 Ben Gera, Ehud, 105 Bergman, David, 68 Berlin, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda, 36 Bialik, Dinah, 36 Bialik, Hayyim Nahman, 35-47; Al ha-shehitah (On the Slaughter), 40-46; Almanut (Widowhood), 36; Be’ir haharegah (In the City of Slaughter) 47, 100-101; El hatzippor (To the Bird), 36; Shirati (My Song), 36; Ha-brekha (The Pond), 38; Hamatmid (The Diligent Student), 36n2; Hashiloh (editor), 37; Levadi (By Myself), 37; Megillat ha-esh (Scroll of Fire), 37-38; Metei midbar (The Dead of the Desert), 37; Poems of Wrath, 40; Shirim (Poems), 37; Yatmut (Orphanhood), 39; Zohar (Radiance), 35 Bialik, Yaakov Moshe, 36 Bialik, Yitzhak Yossef, 35 Bloch, Chana, 28 Borkhardt-Bartov, Gilat, 78 Brand, Hanita, 55

Brenner, Hayyim, 134 Brenner, Rachel Feldhay, 58, 65, 98 C Chertok, Haim; We Are All Close, 53, 65 Chirac, Jacques, 116 Churchill, Winston, 81 Cohen, Arthur, 72 Cohen, Joseph, 29, 32 D Davidov, Abrasha, 94 Deegan, Dorothy, 128-129 E Eichmann, Adolf, 68, 72, 79 Elazar, General David, 78 Eliezer, Moshe, 134 Eliot, T.S., 24 Erlich, Jacquot, 68 Ezrahi, Dekoven, 83-84 F Feldman, Yael, 60 Fichman, Yaakov, 40, 137 Flaubert, Gustave; Madame Bovary, 114, 134 Foiglman, Shmuel, 94-95 Fuchs, Esther, 125 Gertz, Nurit, 131 Gold, Nili Scharf, 23n1 Goldman-Gilead, Michael, 68 Gorenberg, Gershom, 32 Gorfine, Rivka, 135, 136 Gorky, Maxim, 40 Gouri, Haim, 67-76; Ad a lot ha-shaher (Till Dawn), 69, 70-71; Ha-maka hashmonim ve-achat (The 81st Blow), 68;

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Hachakira: Sipuro shel reuel (The Interrogation: The Story of Reuel), 71; Hayam ha-acharon (The Last Sea), 68; Iskat hashokolad (The Chocolate Deal), 71-76; Koti Haktana (Little Koti), 70; Lamerchav magazine, 67, 72; Milim be-dami holeh ahavah (Words in My Lovesick Blood), 67; Mul Ta Hazechuchit (Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann), 72; Pirhei esh (Flowers of Fire), 69; Pnei Hamered (Flames in the Ashes), 68-69; Shoshanat ruhot (Compass Rose), 69; Yerusha (Inheritance), 71; Yoman Leili (Night Diary), 70 Govrin, Michal, 55 Govrin, Nurit, 133, 135-136 Grossberg, Daniel, 46 Gussow, Mel, 25 Guttman, Tuvia, 13

Tzimaon (Thirst: The Desert Trilogy), 51-53; Yamim Rabim: Autobiographiya (Many Days: And Autobiography), 53-54, 57; Ani Levantinit (I am Levantine), 57, 58; Hadodot Hagdolot (The Great Aunts), 54; Mahogany, 53-54; Yerushalayim Dorsanit (Predatory Jerusalem), 51 Hendel, Yehudit, 50 Hirsch, Edward, 23, 24n3 Holtzman, Avner, 35, 42, 65 Homer, 15 Horace, 15 Horn, Tamar, 27 Hughes, Ted, 26

H Ha’am, Ahad, 36 Hareven, Alouph, 50 Hareven, Gail, 50 Hareven, Shulamith, 49-65; Aharei Ha-Yaldut (After Childhood), 53; Bedidut (Loneliness) 58-61; Dimdumim (Twilight), 55-58; Ha-ed (The Witness), 61-65; in Yediot Ahronot, 50; Ir Yamim Rabim (City of Many Days), 49, 51; Navi (Prophet), 52-53; Otzar Ha-Milim Shel Ha-Shalom (The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East), 50; Soneh Ha-Nisim (The Miracle Hater), 51-52;

J Joyce, James, 115

I Ibn Ezra, 39 Ibn Gabirol, 39 Inbary, Asaf, 116 Isaiah, 40

K Kafka, Franz, 115 Karp, Bila, 13 Khana-Carmon, Amalia, 50 King David, 23 King Saul, 14, 15 Kirschbaum, Saul, 127 Klausner, Fania, 113 Klausner, Yosef, 13,16, 113 Klausner, Yehuda Arieh, 113 M Manguel, Alberto, 115 Maoz, Rivkah, 100, 108 Mazor, Yair, 30, 32-33, 67

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Megged, Aharon, 93-112; Ad ha-erev (Till Evening Falls), 94; Davar newspaper, 93; Foiglman, 94-95; Ha chai al ha-met (The Living on the Dead), 94; Hana Senesh, 94; Lamerchav magazine, 93; Masah ha-yeladim la-aretz hamuvtahat (The Story of thee Selvino Children: Journey to the Promised Land), 95; Massa magazine, 93; Mit’an shel shvarim (A Cargo of Oxen), 94; Moto shel Mendel Efrat (The Death of Mendel Efrat), 94; Ruah Yamim (Spirit of the Seas), 94; Yad vashem (The Name), 94, 95-112; Yisraelim haverim (Israeli Friends or Israeli Folk), 95, 102 Megged, Amos, 93 Megged, Eyal, 93 Megged, Matti, 93 Mintz, Alan, 76 Mojtabi, A.G., 117 Morahg, Gilead, 120 O Oppenheimer, Yochai, 119 Oz, Amos, 113-132; Artzot Hatan (Where the Jackals Howl), 115, 117, 118, 131; Har Ha-Etzah Ha-Raah (The Hill of Evil Counsel), 115; in Keshet, 114; Kodem Zemano (Before His Time), 129; Kufsah shechorah (Black Box), 116; Makom aher (Elsewhere Perhaps), 114; Menuhah nehona (A Perfect Peace), 114, 116;

Michael Sheli (My Michael), 114-115; Navadim vatzefa (Nomad and Viper), 117, 118-132; Oto Ha-yam (The Same Sea), 116; Sipur al ahava ve-hoshech (A Tale of Love and Darkness), 116; Sumchi, 115 Oz, Daniel, 114 Oz, Galia, 114 Oz-Salzberger, Fania, 114 Oz-Zuckerman, Nily, 114 P Plato, 15 R Rabin, Yitzhak, 27 Rabinowitz, Amos, 81 Rabinowitz, Shmuel, 81 Rabinowitz, Shulamit, 81 Rabinowitz, Yitzhak, 81 Ramras-Rauch, Gila, 58, 65, 89, 99, 123n29 Ravnitzky, Y.H., 36, 39 Roskies, David G., 41, 42 Rudman, Mark, 23 Rushdie, Salman, 115 Ryftin, Abraham, 49 S Sade, Yitzhak, 94 Schwartz, Yigal, 97 Sefarim, Mendele, Mocher, 100 Seidman, Naomi, 133 Shaked, Gershon, 50, 64, 76, 79, 80, 83, 111 Shrayer, Maxim, 17 Shneur, Zalman, 40 Shoham, Reuven, 72 Silberschlag, Eisig, 16 Sokolov, Hanna, 27 Steinberg, Yaakov, 40

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T Tchernichovsky, Shaul, 11-21; Ani ma-a-min (I Believe), 13; Anshey chayil chevel (A Band of Valiant Men), 14; B’Ein Dor, (In Ein Dor), 14, 15; Bachalomi (In My Dream), 13; Baruch mimagenza (Baruch of Mainz), 14; Book of Medicinal and Natural Science Terminology (editor), 15; Chezyonot u-manginot aleph (Visions and Melodies A), 14; Chezynot u-manginot bet (Visions and Melodies B), 14; Hakaf hashvura (The Wooden Spoon), 14; Hechalil (The Flute), 15; Jewish Encyclopaedia, 15; Kochvei shamayim rechokim (Distant Stars in the Sky), 15; Lashemesh (To The Sun), 12; Lenochach pesel Apollo (Before the Statue of Apollo), 12; Levivot (Dumplings), 16-21; Masat nafshi (My Ideal), 13; Shloshim ushlosha sipurim (ThirtyThree Stories), 15 Thomas, Dylan, 24, 50

U Uriah the Hittite, 13 V Van Gozias, Melanie Karlovna, 13 Vardi, Dov, 24 W Weitz, Yechiam, 97 Weizmann, Chaim, 81 Wiener, Natalia, 49 Wilfe, Michael, 123 Whitman, Walt, 27 Wilson, Jonathan, 23 Woolf, Virginia, 115 Z Zierler, Wendy, 135 Zurit, Ida, 93

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