|
Era |
Period |
Length of Period |
|
The
Ancient |
Biblical Literature |
The Bible, the apocrypha and the Hidden Scrolls in
Hebrew: 2,000 years ending at the start of the Common Era with the
destruction of the Second Temple. |
|
Hebrew
Literature
Era |
Literature of the Sages |
Information on the activities of Tana’im, Amora’im,
Savora’im and Ge’onim. A period of approximately 1,000 years, from the
start of the Common Era until the middle of the 10th century. |
|
The
Intermediate |
Medieval Literature |
A period of approximately 550 years, from the
middle of the 10th century until the end of the 15th
century. |
|
Hebrew
Literature
Era |
Rabbinic and Hassidic Literature |
A period of approximately 300 years, from the 16th
century until the end of the 18th century. |
|
|
Enlightenment (Haskala) Literature |
A period of approximately 100 years, from the
mid-18th century until the mid-19th century. |
|
The
Modern
Hebrew
Literature Era |
Renaissance (Tehiya)
Literature |
A period of approximately 50 years, from the mid-19th
century until the beginning of the 20th century. |
|
|
Immigrations (Aliyot)
Literature |
A period of approximately 50 years, from the
beginning of the 20th century until the establishment of the
State of Israel in 1948. |
|
The Literature
of Renewed Sovereignty |
Israeli Literature |
The first 50 years of the sovereign period – from
1948 onward. |
1.1 Hebrew Literature
The complete continuum of Jewish literature
written in the Hebrew language from the Bible until today. It is customary to
divide this continuum into three eras: The era of ancient literature (in which
there are two periods – Biblical literature and literature of the Sages), the
intermediate era of literature (in which there are also two periods – medieval
literature and rabbinic and Hassidic literature), and the era of modern
literature (in which there are three periods: enlightenment, renaissance and
immigrations). The recommendation of this position paper is to delineate a new,
fourth, era in the history of Hebrew literature – the era of renewed sovereignty
(1.2).
1.2 Modern Hebrew Literature
The title characterizes the
periods belonging to the third era in the history of Hebrew literature.
Conventional wisdom in the research of Hebrew literature attaches the literature
written since the establishment of the State of Israel (henceforth: Israeli
literature) to that period, and thus, it spans 250 years. In this position
paper, a suggestion is proffered to restrict the period to just 200 years, from
the mid-18th century until the mid-20th century, and on
that basis to demarcate a fourth era in the history of Hebrew literature: the
era of renewed sovereignty. According to this suggestion, only three periods are
included in the modern era of Hebrew literature: the literature of the
enlightenment – from the mid-18th century until the mid-19th
century; the literature of the renaissance – from the mid-19th
century until the beginning of the 20th
century; and the literature of the immigrations – from the beginning of the 20th
century until the establishment of the State of Israel. In research, the
tendency is to accentuate the secularist characteristic which typifies the
periods of this era, but this position paper recommends the addition of another
distinguishing feature: the periods of this era constituted a gradual transition
towards the period of renewed sovereignty which marks the beginning of the
Israeli period.
1.3 The Era of Renewed Sovereignty
From the establishment of the State of
Israel in 1948, at which point the Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel was
renewed, a new era in the history of Hebrew literature commenced as well. Today,
it is not yet possible to estimate how long this era (1.1) will last and how
many periods it will encompass. Future researchers of Hebrew literature will be
faced with the task of charting this era. The characteristics differentiating
between the periods of the early era, the new era of Hebrew literature (1.2) and
the era of renewed sovereignty will be defined later in the discussion (see
chapters 4 and 6 below). Research hesitates from demarcating this period in
Hebrew literature continuum for ideological and political reasons (see the
paragraphs of chapter 4) and by doing so, conceals and even eliminates the
significance of renewed sovereignty on the development of Hebrew literature
during the years of the State’s existence.
1.4 Israeli Literature
The term connotes the first period in the
era of renewed sovereignty (1.3). It is impossible to estimate at this point how
long the Israeli period in this era will last. The period includes to this
point, the State’s first 50 years, and researchers of Hebrew literature in the
future will determine how long it will last. The unique aspects of this period
will be characterized later in this analysis (chapters 3, 5 and 7).
Appendix
When did the Modern Hebrew literature era
begin? This is the question, which has been elucidated thus far in the research
of Hebrew literature. This proposed outlining, as opposed to the above, raises
the following question: When did the new era of Hebrew literature end? The
answer provided here is that it ended with the establishment of the State of
Israel. The most significant event in the history of the Jewish people in the
modern era is the establishment of the State of Israel and its influence
engendered decisive changes – both ideological (in terms of vision) and literary
(in terms of topics, the character of the hero and language) – in Hebrew
literature. These differences justify the demarcation of a new era in the
continuum of Hebrew literature, the era of the renewed Jewish sovereignty in the
Land of Israel and to designate the first period in this era as the “Israeli
period”, in order to underscore the absolute connection between the literature
of the first years of this era and events which transpired in the State during
those years. The following table cites some of the reasons, which justify
separating the Israeli period, the first period of the era of renewed
sovereignty, from the three periods of the previous era, the era of Modern
Hebrew literature:
|
Period |
Ideology |
Theme |
Hero |
Language |
|
Enlightenment
(Haskala) |
Secular Consciousness |
Jewish |
Intellectual
(Maskil) |
Language of |
|
Renaissance
(Tehiya) |
Consciousness of Earthly Salvation |
Condition
or
Human |
Detached
(Talush) |
Study
and
Literary |
|
Immigrations
(Aliyot) |
Inverting the Pyramid |
Condition |
Pioneer
(Halutz) |
Sources |
|
Israel |
Israeli
Consciousness |
Israeli Condition |
Native Israeli
(Sabra) |
Language of Life |
An explanation of the ideological
difference between Modern Hebrew literature and the literature of renewed
sovereignty: During the three periods of Modern Hebrew literature, national
literature conducted a dialogue with Judaism. It was a dialogue whose topics
varied in correspondence with the exigencies of the period. During the
enlightenment period, the argument between Hebrew literature and Judaism focused
on literature’s demand to accept secular values (language, education, dress,
behavior and occupations) and to permit their introduction into Jewish religious
life in order to actualize the vision of Jewish integration in their Diaspora
places of residence, until messianic salvation eventuates. During the
renaissance period, Hebrew literature placed a different troublesome demand
before Judaism in light of the exacerbation of the danger of anti-Semitism in
Europe: to abandon waiting for messianic salvation and to sanction earthly
salvation, which would be facilitated by Jewish emigration from their Diaspora
lands of residence back to their homeland in Zion. In the immigrations period,
the argument between literature and Judaism revolved around the demand to bring
about a change in Jewish society’s obsolete structure in order to make it
suitable for the realization of the renaissance undertakings in the Land of
Israel, by encouraging the passage of Jews from non-productive, limited and
parasitical occupations, which were the only ones feasible under the conditions
of a community locked in a ghetto, to occupations which provide all means of
existence necessary in a sovereign society. This process can be described
figuratively as inversion of the pyramid. In the past, it was customary in the
community to encourage the fortification of the top level of Jewish society’s
pyramid by directing talented individuals to study halls and yeshivas in order
that they become rabbis and scholars and providers of religious services for the
community. This attitude placed manual laborers at the bottom of the pyramid.
The demand to invert the pyramid constituted a revolutionary idea. It demanded
to place that stratum of society, which produces means of existence at the top
of the pyramid, and to reinforce it by directing the most talented individuals
towards agriculture, manufacturing and all other occupations, which economically
strengthen society.
During the two later periods of the modern
era of Hebrew literature, the argument with Judaism on behalf of national
renaissance and Zionism was already being conducted in the national literature.
Subsequent to the establishment of the State, which signaled the victory in all
three of the demands addressed to Judaism, the polemic dialogue with Judaism
ended and a dialogue with Zionism began. Hebrew literature conducted a graduated
polemic dialogue with Zionism as well during the first 50 years of sovereignty.
The dialogue began with criticism, in other words, by raising doubts about the
morality of the vision because of the manner in which it was realized (in war,
conquest and dispossession of Arabs from their land), and developed into
skepticism regarding the feasibility of the comprehensive vision’s realization,
in other words, recommendations to abandon Zionism. One can indicate the
boundaries of the dialogue between Israeli literature and Zionism as the
transition from a Zionist to a post-Zionist orientation.
Note: The other columns in this
chart, which emphasize additional differences between the Modern Hebrew
literature periods (enlightenment, renaissance and immigrations) and the Israeli
period, will be explained below in the subsequent chapters of the position
paper.
Chapter 2: Facts
A summary of Hebrew literature’s
characteristics (1.1). These characteristics distinguish Jewish literature from
world literature.
2.1 Constancy
Throughout the history of Hebrew
literature, the wondrous fact that literary activity in the Hebrew language was
never interrupted, is noteworthy. The creation of literary works in the Hebrew
language was never interrupted even during periods when the majority of the
Jewish people did not speak Hebrew, but, in day-to-day life, used other Jewish
languages (Yiddish among the Ashkenazi communities and Ladino among the Sephardi
communities), or the languages of the countries in which the Jews lived in the
course of their stay in the Diaspora instead. The Hebrew language was accorded
special status as the language of national creativity throughout the generations
and under all circumstances. It was accorded the title “the holy language” – a
title which delineated the rules of permissible and forbidden uses. During most
of the periods it was determined that the Hebrew language may be used in order
to perpetuate the religious works of the previous generations, but may not be
used in mundane, secular circumstances.
2.2 Continuity
Throughout the generations of Hebrew
literature’s history, a consistent relationship of continuity was extant. Each
later generation interpreted, updated and expanded upon the works of its
predecessors. This is the relationship of the Mishna to the Bible and of the
Talmud to the Mishna. This characteristic of continuity remained extant even
when, in the course of the development of Hebrew literature, the collective
creations phase (which included the works of the authors of the Bible, the
Mishna and Talmud) ended, and Hebrew literature entered a new phase of
individual works written by people who identified themselves by name as the
authors of their works. This continuity existed at this point in time in all of
Hebrew literature’s manifestations: in the extensive exegetic literature,
religious philosophy, Kabbalistic literature, ethical literature and all types
of fiction.
2.3 Values
Throughout the generations, Hebrew literary
works reflected the Jewish authors’ serious approach to writing. The effort in
improving the methods of expression was expended in order to enhance the ability
of the literary works to express the moral meanings that the authors intended in
their literary creations. The values were primarily moral and related both to
the morality of the individual’s life as well as the morality of the community’s
life in each of its contexts: the national (communal) and the universal
(inter-communal). At no stage in the history of Hebrew literature did the
esthetics of writing supercede these values and esthetic accomplishments of a
literary work never alone determined its standing within national culture.
2.4 Vision
Hebrew literature, throughout the
generations, was forward-looking. The demand for values (2.3) mandated this. The
reality was always perceived as a stage in the path, which strove to rise to the
height of perfection, which had not yet been achieved – the vision. The vision
in all of its detail was first portrayed in the words of the Biblical prophets
who also articulated the central, leadership role which the Jewish nation is
destined to play in the realization of that vision. The vision included two
central ideas: A demand addressed to the individual to strive for moral
perfection (“Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Leviticus 19:18) and a demand
addressed to the collective to strive for world peace (“A nation shall not lift
up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Isaiah 2:4).
Ever since the vision was first articulated and throughout its history, Hebrew
literature maintained its commitment to that vision. This commitment was
manifest in the myriad forms of literary activity: In the effort to explain and
interpret national and universal visions to the readers; in the effort to
disseminate and endear it to them; in the mobilization to defend the vision
against doubters and cynics who sought to diminish its perfection; and in a
struggle against its deniers and opponents. The commitment to this vision
provided Hebrew literature with intellectual depth and moral originality
rendering its seriousness unique in the context of world literature.
2.5 Optimism
Hebrew literature consistently articulated
its faith that words, ideas and books have the power to improve the individual
and humanity and to motivate them to act individually and collectively to take
action in realizing the vision (2.4) as articulated by the prophets. The
sobriquet, “People of the Book”, which was accorded the Jewish people by the
nations of the world throughout history, after identifying this optimism in the
Bible, the only work of the Jewish people with which they became familiar,
reflected the nations’ admiration of this characteristic of Hebrew literature
and of the nation which believed with all its heart and all its might in that
power of literature.
2.6 Uniqueness
Hebrew literature established the borders
of its internal expanse to the range of thoughts and opinions which continue to
maintain fidelity to its vision within the context of general culture – borders
beyond which the threat of the loss of its originality and character looms. The
history of Hebrew literature recounts the continuous effort of the generations
to maintain the borders of this internal expanse in the face of the penetration
of values (2.3) and visions (2.4) foreign to those values and visions to which
the national literature decided to devote itself long ago.
2.7 Centralization
In order to maintain its uniqueness in the
context of general culture, Hebrew literature employed means of acceptance and
rejection both regarding literary works which were created from within and those
which attempted to penetrate from without. In order to establish whether or not
new literary works were worthy of acceptance or rejection, they were put to the
test of continuity (2.2), values (2.3), vision (2.4) and optimism (2.5).
Literary works, which did not live up to those criteria, were cast out of the
borders of Hebrew literature and found redemption under the rubric of other
cultures. This was the case with agnostic works and messianic works by various
sects, sects that were expelled from Judaism together with their works because
they threatened the uniqueness of Hebrew literature.
Chapter 3: Assumptions
Detailing the unique characteristics of
Israeli literature (1.4) in the history of Hebrew literature (l.l).
3.1 The Center Assumption
The only active live and effervescent
literary center of Hebrew literature exists in Israel. All Jewish writers, who
compose Hebrew language literary works in any other country in the world, rely
in every sense on the center in the State of Israel and on all of the components
which provide the literary center with its animation and vitality: the book
industry (printers, publishers and businesses which distribute and sell books),
literary periodicals, book surveyors, critics, scholars and a permanent reading
audience.
3.2 The Identity Assumption
The Hebrew literature written by Jewish
authors in the State of Israel and abroad is the only one which perpetuates the
continuum of Hebrew literature in the present generation. Writers who write
their works in Hebrew, but are not Jews (a phenomenon which is gradually
expanding among non-Jewish citizens of the State of Israel), express different
values (2.3) and vision (2.4) and, therefore, their writing does not constitute
an extension of Hebrew literature in its national sense. Their writing is part
of the literature of the nation to which each of them belongs, despite the fact
that their works are written in the Hebrew language and that some of them have
an amazing mastery of the language which, at times, surpasses that of Jewish
authors in Israel and abroad.
3.3 The Secular Assumption
Israeli literature is secular literature.
It is not subordinate to religious authority and is not limited to topics
permitted by religion or to the norms of religious faith. The separation between
religious and secular writing, which began in Hebrew literature with the
Enlightenment movement approximately 250 years ago, was fully actualized in the
course of the State’s existence. The secular character of Israeli literature is
apparent in every aspect of its creation: genre, theme, content, means of
expression and freedom in the use of the assets of the Hebrew language.
3.4 The Openness Assumption
Due to the totally secular character of
Israeli literature, it possesses conspicuous and at times even dangerous
openness to the influences of world literature. In fact, throughout the
existence of the State, tensions magnified between two trends which were also
active in Hebrew literature in the past: The more conservative trend which
demanded a significant measure of insulation from outside influences of that
sort, and the more liberal trend which promulgated complete cultural openness
towards other nations’ literature and hoped for reciprocal relations with them.
Despite the fact that the trend towards openness won out in this argument, the
rule whose validity was proven in the past is still valid, according to which
only some of the influences borrowed from the outside actually become an
integral part of Hebrew literature (2.6). As a result, the authorization to be
influenced and to freely borrow and be influenced by outside influences undergo
control processes which filter the unfamiliar, based on the Hebrew culture’s
assimilative strength (2.7).
3.5 The Polemic Assumption
Over the course of the State’s existence,
an old and stimulating phenomenon has perpetuated: disputes over its character.
The most famous among them were: The dispute in the Land of Israel during the
Second Temple period between Hillel and Shammai on stringency and leniency in
Jewish law, the literary product of their time and the dispute in medieval Spain
between Donash ben-Labrat and Menahem ben-Saruk regarding the integration of the
Arabic poetry esthetic into Hebrew poetry. Intra-Jewish disputes regarding the
character of Hebrew literature continued during all other periods as well. The
phenomenon did not, of course, neglect Hebrew literature. The internal dispute
regarding its character revolves around the following question: Is it desirable
that the literature serves as the impetus for a national-secular culture or is
it preferable that it promulgate a cosmopolitan-secular culture? Though this
dispute kept up the argument which had already ignited in the modern Hebrew
literature period (1.2) between the openness trend and the insular trend (3.4),
a debate which peaked in 1896 in an argument which was publicized in the pages
of Hashiloah between the “ze’irim”, led by Micah-Yosef Berdichefsky, and
Ahad Ha’am – it was greatly exacerbated under conditions of sovereignty (4.1),
after the rival political parties co-opted it. The parties in the State of
Israel radicalized the literary dispute and caused it to degenerate into a
cultural war within the secular community in the State of Israel, between the
right which sides with Israeli literature of a secular-national nature and the
left which cultivates an Israeli literature of a secular-cosmopolitan nature.
3.6 The Influence Assumption
From time immemorial, history has had an
extremely powerful influence on Hebrew literature (events, personalities and
ideas that developed in its course). The dispersion of the exiles and the living
conditions, which the Jews experienced in each exile, are examples of one form
of influence exerted by historical events on the goings-on in Hebrew literature.
The intensification of anti-Semitism or its reduction are additional examples of
this influence. The literary influences of general literature on Hebrew
literature were also not independent, but they were always accompanied by
extra-literary historical changes in the countries in which Jewish authors
functioned in the course of the Diaspora. The most significant event in modern
Jewish history is the renewal of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel in the
mid-20th century, in other words: the establishment of the Jewish
State in Zion. This is the justification to demarcate a new literary period in
the continuum of Hebrew literature beginning with the establishment of the State
of Israel and to name it for the historic event itself – the Israeli period
(1.4) in the annals of Hebrew literature, and to signify it as the first period
in a new literary era – the era of renewed sovereignty (1.3). Beginning in the
mid-20th century, sovereignty influenced the development of Hebrew
literature in every way. In other words: The influences of events which
transpire within the State, which take place in proximity to the State, in the
Middle East and the events which take place around the world but affect the
State, are the most conspicuous on Israeli literature.
Chapter 4: Thesis
Enumerating the forces which shape
sovereignty in the State of Israel and explain its special character. Those
forces influence Israeli literature’s content and trends.
4.1 Sovereignty
The establishment of the State of Israel is
the most significant event in Jewish history in the modern era (3.6), and, as
such, its influence upon Hebrew literature has been significant as well. Since
the establishment of the State, Hebrew literature is being once again written
under conditions which have been non-existent since the destruction of the
Second Temple – conditions of political sovereignty. The conditions of
sovereignty have rendered obsolete a complete array of topics which Hebrew
authors wrote about in the past, all of which dealing with Jewish existence
under conditions of exile and national dispersal in many countries. The
sovereignty experience redirected the writing to aspects of existence in
conditions of political freedom and the reconvergence of the exiles in the
homeland (see below – 6.1 – Topics of the Israeli Condition), and encouraged the
abandonment of the language of study, the language of the literary sources
throughout the generations, and the adoption of the colloquial, living language
in the Land of Israel, as the written language (8.7).
4.2 Normalcy
Sovereignty was perceived first and
foremost as an aspiration for normalcy. In the period of national renaissance,
the extended Jewish existence in exile conditions was, justifiably, represented
as contradicting the nature of a healthy, normal nation. The modern national
ideology, Zionism, expressed the longing of the Jewish people in the modern era
to regain the normal way of life which had been denied them beginning 2,000
years before upon their exile from Zion. Beyond the consensus that the
restoration of normalcy was only possible through the renewal of sovereignty in
the Land of Israel, a consensus which distinguished the Zionist movement from
all other movements which functioned among Jews contemporaneously (autonomists,
Bundists and socialists), the disagreements proliferated within the Zionist
movement regarding the definition of the normalcy which would be engendered in
the Jewish State. One definition: To develop an existence similar to the
existence of other sovereign nations and thereby be like them. An additional
definition: To shape life antithetical to life in exile but to establish a
unique national-Jewish sovereignty (3.5). Wittingly or unwittingly, in the
course of the existence of the State, literature expressed the aspiration
towards normalcy – in its various definitions – as the exclusive interpretation
of political sovereignty. Therefore, Israeli literature can be read as
literature, which takes pains to shape the concept of normalcy for the continued
existence of the Jewish people.
4.3 Religion
For the first time in Jewish history since
the destruction of the Second Temple, sovereignty enabled the complete
manifestation of Jewish identity through the fulfillment of a religious
lifestyle without disturbances and harassment. However, the secular trend which
intensified since the enlightenment movement, the substantive contradiction
between the Zionist-earthly salvation and the religious-messianic salvation, and
the great attraction of the socialist idea for the members of the various
immigrations, contributed to the almost total disconnection of literature from
the Jewish religion throughout the existence of the State. Furthermore,
sovereignty was perceived by the authors of the old guard, the “Generation Born
in the Land” (5.1), as an opportunity to delineate a new definition of identity
without religion (4.4). Hebrew literature is, at this point, indubitably secular
literature (3.3). The activity of a few religious authors, especially since the
1970s, does not negate the validity of this assertion. The emphasis that this is
the situation at this point relates to the increase in the number of authors
whose religious outlook is an important basis of their writing, their attempts
to converge in certain journals (Maboa and Zehut which closed and
Dimui which is still published), in order to influence the rejuvenation
of faith – related values in modern Hebrew literature and the softening of the
stance which rejects these values, extant among various secular authors.
4.4 Identity
The renewed sovereignty accelerated the
resolution of the identity question. This question was, in fact, first placed on
the national agenda in the Hebrew enlightenment movement’s efforts to dissociate
the religious aspect from the national aspect in the definition of modern Jewish
self-identity, however, a separation of that sort was dangerous under exile
conditions as it accelerated assimilation and conversion. Sovereignty provided
the sense that the State could serve as a sufficiently powerful support for the
determination of an identity based only on the national element. And, indeed,
after 200 years of delaying the resolution of the issue, suggestions were raised
which attempted to define Jewish identity based on sovereignty. Three
definitions developed and each was manifest in Israeli literature: Canaanism
(establishment of a new national-political entity in the Middle East region),
Sabraism (the separation of native-born Jews from Jews of the
Diaspora and the definition of the State as the State of the Jewish people
limited to those residing within it) and Israelism (a secular, democratic
State of all of its inhabitants rather than a State of the Jewish people which
integrates within it citizens who are not Jewish as well and guarantees them all
of the personal freedoms and civil rights granted to Jewish citizens). In the
course of the State’s existence, Hebrew literature has continuously struggled
with the question of identity and the question will apparently continue to
occupy us for many more years to come.
4.5 Immigration
The aspiration for normalcy with its two
contradictory definitions (4.2) confronted the immigration movement in
dimensions unparalleled in other countries. The use of the terms “ascent” and
“descent” deemed the direction of immigration as positive when it was from the
countries of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel and as negative when it was from
Israel to other countries. Immigration to Israel enhanced the sense of
sovereignty (4.1) but also delayed the stabilization of normalcy (4.2). Each
Jewish community, which immigrated to Israel, arrived with the heritage of its
exile (see below 7.3). The proliferation of communities, which gathered in the
State quickly, transformed it into an encounter of different Diaspora heritages,
a meeting so fraught with tension that no unifying recommendation could possibly
have succeeded, neither the idea of statehood nor the idea of assimilation into
Israelism. Hebrew literature throughout the State’s existence has reflected the
conflicts in all walks of life which developed due to the immigration process,
between Jews of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, while at the same
time, assumed that those conflicts were destined to disappear within a
generation or two.
4.6 Holocaust
The Jewish Holocaust in the Second World
War influenced Israeli literature in two contradictory manners. On the one hand,
it stimulated and accelerated the striving for normalcy (4.2), but on the other
hand, it delayed the disengagement from the most traumatic memory in modern
Jewish history. Many Holocaust survivors immigrated to the State and began
rehabilitating their lives. They, themselves, attempted to downplay the terrors
of the exile which they brought with them when they immigrated to Israel, and
the native Israelis expected them to do just that as they perceived the
Holocaust as an extreme example of Jewish existence in the Diaspora, an
existence which they strove to put behind them. The assimilation of the
Holocaust was so slow because it contradicted the yearning for normal
sovereignty to such a great extent. The minimal treatment which the images of
Holocaust survivors and the events of the Holocaust itself received, attested to
the recoil from the subject in the early stages of Israeli literature, just as
the expansion of the writing about the Holocaust and its survivors over the
years, attests to the acceptance of the presence of the historical event – which
above all symbolizes the weakness of existence under conditions of exile –
within the fabric of sovereign life. The emphasis on Jewish helplessness in the
Holocaust, which was manifest in the expression “like sheep to slaughter”, and
the attempt to counter that by emphasizing the ghetto uprising, exemplify both
the difficulty to assimilate the event and the attempt to deal with the burden
the Holocaust placed on the existence of Israeli sovereignty in its early
stages.
4.7 Wars
Wars, which were imposed upon the State by
its Arab neighbors, clouded the sense of sovereignty and the longing for
normalcy. Though all of the wars ended with the State succeeding to maintain its
sovereignty, each one of them, in its early stages, aroused the sense that
sovereignty had not fundamentally altered Jewish fate. The influence of the wars
on Israeli literature was decisive. In variable intervals after the end of each
war, literary works were written about each of the wars in which the emotional
and conceptual reaction to its experiences and results were expressed. Under the
influence of the wars, the political composition grew, consolidated and thrived
(see below 7.2), and in the positions expressed therein, the changes
vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict among the authors in the State of Israel
can be discerned. Under the influence of the results of each war, the death of
soldiers, the wars produced an additional literary theme – bereavement, which
continuously draws the analogy between the ancient trial of the binding, which
Abraham successfully passed when he bound Isaac, and the trial of parents today
who send their sons to the front in order to defend the sovereignty of the
State.
Chapter 5: Historical Development
But first three comments:
-
The description of the historical
development of Israeli literature will be accomplished through the narrative
genre which, in the course of the State’s existence, became the leading
genre in Hebrew literature and the genre most influential on its readers.
The outstanding growth of the narrative form renders it appropriate to
represent Israeli literature more than the other genres (poetry, plays and
essays) because all of the phenomena characterizing literature throughout
the existence of the State are conspicuously concentrated within it.
-
The history of Israeli literature can
be most reliably described through a cross-section of the guards, which is a
linear and therefore, consistent cross-section. Thematic, conceptual,
stylistic and poetic cross-sections, which would enable description of the
development of literature, do not serve our objective well, because they do
not develop in a linear, but rather in a spiral fashion, rising and falling
with no fixed regularity.
-
There have been four literary guards,
to this point, in the history of Israeli literature (1.4). It is true that
the writings of the authors of the later immigrations (Avraham Shlonsky,
Leah Goldberg, Natan Alterman in poetry, and S.Y. Agnon and Haim Hazaz and
others in prose) continued into the first decades of the State’s existence,
but only the authors belonging to the four guards detailed below completely
coincide with the years of the State’s existence and are totally influenced
by its experience.
5.1 “The Generation in the Land” Guard
That is the name which the authors of the
1940s and the 1950s chose for themselves in the first literary anthology in
which most of them were included (1958). They borrowed the name from a line from
Tchernichovsky’s poem “I Believe”, in which he prophesied that a new, native
generation would arise in the Land of Israel: “A generation in the Land is
indeed alive.” Additional names were ascribed to the guard: “The Palmach
Generation”, “The 1948 Generation” and “The War of Independence Generation”.
From the large group of writers who expressed their War of Independence
experiences and in doing so, expended their talents, the definitive authors of
that guard remained. In prose: Yizhar Smilansky (S. Yizhar), Moshe Shamir,
Mordecai Tabib, David Shahar, Natan Shaham, Aharon Meged, Hanoch Bartov, Shlomo
Nitzan, Yehudit Hendel, Yonat and Alexander Sened, Yigal Mozenson, Binyamin
Tammuz, Naomi Frankel, Aharon Amir, Ida Zurit, David Shaham and others. In
poetry: Amir Gilboa, Zerubavel Gilad, Haim Guri, A. Hillel, Binyamin Galai,
Yitzhak Shalev, Abba Kovner, Yehiel Mar, Ozer Rabin, Tuvia Ribner, T. Carmi,
Avner Trainin, Shlomo Tanai, Natan Yonatan, Sandou David and others. In drama:
Nissim Aloni, Yigal Mozenson, Moshe Shamir, Binyamin Galai, Natan Shaham, Aharon
Meged and others. The central experience of “The Generation in the Land” authors
was their experience in the War of Independence. For most, realism was the
preferred writing style. Some were caught up in the Canaanite outlook which they
later abandoned in favor of the Sabraist-Nativist point of view. This
guard, that opened the Israeli period in the history of Hebrew literature with
great momentum, was responsible for its innovative breakthroughs (in terms of
genres, themes, poetic and ideas), and despite the denials of this fact, all of
the subsequent guards benefited from the guard’s sweeping dissociation from
everything that was conventional in Hebrew literature until that point. Several
reasons effected the incommensurate appreciation of this guard: The different
reservations regarding their breakthrough expressed by the veteran literary
critics: Dov Sadan, Ariel Ukmani, B.Y. Michli, Shalom Kramer, S.Y. Penueli,
David Canaan, and others (Baruch Kurzweil’s sweeping opposition to the guard’s
authors’ writings was especially influential), the small number of critics among
the members of the guard (A.B. Yaffe, Mordecai Shalev) and their almost total
absence from the literature departments in academia. Even the courageous
admission of “The Generation in the Land” authors of their mistakes committed
during the storm and the upheaval at the beginning of their path (such as their
submission to socialist realism and their impulsiveness in placing Zionism in
quotation marks in their writings about the War of Independence) did not
engender until now, a renewed and balanced appreciation of the guard.
5.2 “The New Wave” Guard
Aharon Meged was the first to call the
authors of the guard by this name, however, the name was reinforced by Gershon
Shaked, one of the most significant critics of this guard, in his attempt to
summarize the 1960s’ authors guard for the first time. An additional name which
was used to refer to that guard’s authors was “The State Generation” which was
employed by additional critics who emerged from within the guard (Dan Meron,
Gavriel Moked and others), who utilized their influential standing in academia
and literary journals to pave the way for the guard to assume its senior
position in Israeli literature. The activity of the guard’s authors concentrated
primarily on two genres: prose and poetry. The guard’s outstanding storytellers
are: Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Aharon Appelfeld, Yehoshua
Kenaz, Shulamit Har-even, Yitzhak Or-paz, Yoram Kaniuk, Dan Tzalka, Pinhas Sadeh,
Rahel Eitan, Yeshayahu Koren, Ehud ben-Ezer, Dan Shavit, Sammy Michael and
others. The guard’s poets are: Yehuda Amihai, Moshe Dor, Moshe ben-Shaul, Aryeh
Sivan, Eldad Eldan, David Avidan, Dan Pagis, Natan Zach, Dalia Rabikovitch,
Yisrael Pinkas, Asher Reich, Yona Wallach, Meir Wiesaltier, Yair Hurvitz, Eitan
Eitan, Yehiel Hazak, Yisrael Har, Itamar Yaoz-Kest, Ya’akov Besser, Israel
Eliraz and others. In both genres, a poetic, conceptual and thematic effort was
expended to unite Israeli literature with changes, which transpired in Western
literature. In prose, avant-garde writing styles (symbolic, allegoric, absurdist
and ironic) were preferred over the realistic style. Topics dealing with the
human condition (6.3) were preferred over topics dealing with the Israeli
condition (6.1). The individualist character, the anti-hero, was tailored for
these topics, one which, in its weakness, expresses existential fear, skepticism
regarding the chance to improve one’s personal condition and pessimism regarding
the general condition of human existence. In poetry, the lyric poem dominated
the existential experiences. A major transformation transpired in the esthetics
of poetry: the rhythm was preferred over meter, internal rhyme over closing
rhyme, metaphor over simple imagery, expressionistic phrasing over
impressionistic expression and everyday, mundane subject matter over delicate,
inaccessible materials available only to the few. In drama, Yosef bar-Yosef,
Yosef Mundy and Hanoch Levin were the stars. Western Europe’s existential
philosophy had an influence on this guard’s writers, but the major influence was
domestic – the events during Israel’s second decade: the Sinai War, the Lavon
affair and the sense that the veteran leadership of Ben-Gurion’s generation was
delaying the transfer of responsibility to the younger leadership of Moshe Dayan
and Yigal Allon. Their activity as a guard was especially conspicuous between
the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, when they reacted to the changes which
transpired in the country during that period with symbolic and allegorical
writing containing social-democratic political philosophies which most of them
shared. This guard’s authors primarily internalized nativist and Canaanite
philosophies (4.4) and viewed themselves as shapers of the secular Israeli
identity (4.4). Most possessed a political orientation more radically left wing
than the Labor movement consensus at that time. Their written language aspired
to be more conversational and communicative. They compensated for the common,
colloquial level of the written language, by means of figurative expression.
5.3 “The Disillusioned Wave” Guard
Researchers of Israeli literature tend to
overlook the existence of this guard and usually ascribe the authors of the
1970s to the previous guard – “The State Generation”. Only during the last
century’s final decade, with the advent of “The New Voices” guard (5.4), twenty
years after the Yom Kippur War, the Yom Kippur War’s substantial influence on
all aspects of life in the country, including the development of literature,
were reassessed. This guard coalesced in the course of the 1970s, influenced by
the results of the Yom Kippur War, which was uniformly characterized as a war
which engendered an “earthquake”. It accelerated revolutionary political and
sociological processes in Israeli society, including the appearance of
extra-parliamentary movements, the accumulation of massive power by the media
and the transfer of the power locus from the military and party elite to the
academic and the economic elite. A wave of disillusionment swept Israeli society
and the new literary guard expressed this disillusionment through indecisive
characters undergoing decadent experiences, descending into situations of
self-degradation and neglect influenced by a deterministic attitude towards
life. I first originated the name of this guard, in essays in which I discussed
works which reacted to the Yom Kippur War and a decade after the war, were
compiled in my book, Disillusionment in Israeli Prose (1983). The
storytellers who heralded the advent of this guard were Ya’akov Shabtai and
Yitzhak ben-Ner. Both had already begun their publishing careers previously.
That is the reason why many researchers tend to attribute these writers to the
“State Generation” (5.2). Additional storytellers belonging to this guard are:
Haim Be’er, Ruth Almog, Eli Amir, Yisrael Hameiri, Ya’akov Buchan, David Shitz,
Aryeh Semo, Avraham Haffner, Yitzhak Laor, David Grossman, Meir Shalev and
others. Most conspicuous of all was the guard’s collective treatment of topics
relating to the Israeli condition (6.1) and its spiritual reaction to the
aftermath of the Yom Kippur War: The demand to conduct a thorough housecleaning
and get rid of all of the visionary-messianic rubbish which accumulated between
the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. The demands for a sober view and to furl
the messianic banners which prevent a realistic examination of the possibilities
extant for the State to resolve its conflict with the Arab countries were
expressed either as a direct reaction – satirical or ironic – to the Israelis’
eagerness to brandish prophetic flags or an indirect reaction with storylines
expressing sober, realistic attitudes towards life. In poetry, the development
of urban poetry (Maya Begerano, Yosef Sharon, Roni Somek, Amir Or, Alon Alteres
and others), homosexual poetry (Yotam Reuveni, Hezi Laskly, Ilan Sheinfeld and
others) and modern religious poetry (Hava Pinhas-Cohen, Meron Isaacson, Admiel
Kosman and others) were conspicuous. In the field of drama, the development of
the local-documentary play (Yehoshua Sobol, Hillel Mittelpunkt, Shmuel Haspari
and others) was noteworthy.
5.4 “The New Voices” Guard
In the second half of the 1980s and
throughout the 1990s, a fourth literary guard in Israeli
literature began to consolidate. The reference is to writers in their 1930s and
1940s whose writing moved away from subjects relating to the Israeli condition
(6.1) and began dealing with subjects relating to the human condition (6.3). In
this guard, the massive presence of women and the utilization of biographical
materials are noteworthy. The influence of cinema, television, comics and clips
– the dominant forces in the visual-kinetic culture on most of the writers in
this guard is apparent. Their writing was influenced by the post-modernist
outlook, which raises doubts regarding eternal philosophical verities and
unchallenged literary norms. Among many of them, the effort to write fantasy
prose or to integrate fantastic elements into story lines which are
fundamentally realistic, in which they combine extra-literary materials from the
media or daily life is apparent. Similarly, they move the plot from concrete to
virtual reality. The language used is colloquial and replete with figurative
phrases. I suggested the guard’s name in essays about the guard’s authors’ first
books, which were compiled in my book, New Voices in Israeli Prose
(1997), in which I attempted to note their affiliation with the previous guards,
a decade after the appearance of their first books. This guard’s writers are:
Dan Benaya-Seri, Savyon Liebrecht, Yitzhak bar-Yosef, Itamar Levi, Gavriella
Avigur-Rotem, Leah Eini, Hana bat-Shahar, Orly Kastel-Blum, Yehudit Katzir,
Yuval Shimoni, Ronit Matalon, Dorit Abosh, Albert Suissa, Mira Magen, Gidi Nevo,
Hagai Linik, Yael Hedaya, Zeruya Shalev, Alona Kimchi, Etgar Keret, Dorit
Raninian and others.
Chapter 6: Thematic Development
There are three thematic areas in which
Israeli literature is active. There are very few authors who have remained
constant throughout their writing careers to the topics of one of the three
thematic areas. Most authors moved their writing from the topics of one thematic
area to another influenced by events that transpired in the country and personal
changes in their lives and outlooks.
6.1 The Israeli Condition
This phrase characterizes those works which
deal blatantly or by implication, with the essence of Israeli life and the
unique human distress which life in Israel in conditions of political
sovereignty engenders. This is the area of local topics: The Arab-Israel
conflict, the wars, the political parties (right or left) and the competition
between them, the forms of government in Israel nationally and communally, the
ethnic schism and additional internal Israeli conflicts – between religious and
secular, native Israelis and immigrants, Jews and minorities, residents of the
country’s center and the residents of kibbutzim and development towns on the
periphery, and more. This thematic field was regenerated with the establishment
of the State and provided the Hebrew author with an additional option.
Previously, throughout the exile, only two thematic options were available to
the Hebrew author: the Jewish condition (6.2) and the human condition (6.3). The
works of two guards’ authors at the start of their careers were almost totally
devoted to the topics of the Israeli condition. The authors of “The Generation
in the Land” (5.1) united as a guard around the central experience of their
generation – the War of Independence, and most of their works during the first
decade of Israeli literature were written about it. A similar phenomenon was
repeated in the third guard – “The Disillusioned Wave” authors’ writings (5.3)
who, under the influence of the Yom Kippur War, reacted almost exclusively to it
in their writings, for an entire decade.
6.2 The Jewish Condition
The literary flow in this channel is much
less rich than in its two counterparts. The writing on topics of the Jewish
condition examines life in Israel on the backdrop of the life of the Jewish
people in the past and the present. The historical novel belongs to this area,
both those which attempt to illuminate a chapter in the life of the Jewish
people in the past and those which employ the past in order to draw an analogy
to Jewish life today. Works about the Holocaust (4.6), works which integrate the
subject of Jewish self-identity (4.4) in modern times under conditions of
sovereignty, and works which explore ties and relations between residing in
Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews world-wide belong to this area. Various writers
occasionally turned their writing to topics relating to the Jewish condition
such as: Moshe Shamir, Aharon Meged, Binyamin Tammuz, Dan Tzalka, Ya’akov Buchan
and others, however, only Aharon Appelfeld’s writing remains consistently
involved in this thematic channel attesting to the potential latent in its
topics for the continued development of Israeli literature.
6.3 The Human Condition
The topics of the human condition run the
gamut of human problems: father-son relations, family problems, disease and
death, male-female relations, the feminine condition, love and separation,
hatred and jealousy, desire and lust, youth and old age, beauty and ugliness,
success and failure, etc. The topics of this thematic stream are universal and
understood by readers the world over. Readers in other countries readily accept
works of Israeli literature, which are written on these topics,, after
translation. The authors of two of the guards concentrated on topics of this
sort at the start of their careers: “The New Wave” authors (5.2), whose writings
on the topics relating to the human condition underscored their isolation from
the realistic style and from topics relating to the Israeli condition which
exemplified the writings of “The Generation in the Land” authors (5.1); and “The
New Voices” authors (5.4), who in their almost absolute turn towards the human
condition topics, manifested their isolation from the authors of the previous
guards who all began dealing with topics relating to the Israeli condition after
the Yom Kippur War.
Chapter 7: Trends in Israeli Prose
Special thematic orientations developed in
Israeli literature in the course of the State’s existence. A literary trend can
be characterized as a situation in which an aspiration to achieve some objective
through their works becomes obvious in a considerable number of writers, whether
the objective is to further an idea or any other cause – poetic, political,
social or commercial.
7.1 The Ideological Trend
All of the works which struggle to right
the wrongs in Israeli society belong to this trend: to ameliorate the condition
and status of women (for example, Amalia Kahana-Carmon’s works); to alter the
attitude towards downtrodden groups in society like – those helpless from birth,
elderly who are at the mercy of others, those discriminated against and
exploited by the powerful and others (for example, the works of Yehoshua Kenaz);
works which fight for values which, in the opinion of the writers, are likely to
make society more humanistic, equal, democratic and moral (for example, the
works of S. Yizhar); works which openly express various ideologies – Aharon Amir
– the Canaanite ideology; S. Yizhar – the Sabraic ideology; Moshe Shamir,
Aharon Meged and Natan Shoham – the Zionist ideology and Meir Shalev – the
post-Zionist ideology.
7.2 The Political Trend
Works which take sides in the political
disputes between the parties and advocate either an all-encompassing philosophy
of some political orientation or the adoption of one component of that approach,
belong to this trend. The political works are not mobilized directly for one of
the parties, but always towards a general orientation (either of the political
right or the political left). None expresses support for any political
orientation in so many words, but it is always there in the guise of a family
plot or social story line. The tensions between the polarities in family or
society in plots of that sort exemplify political disagreements. The political
trends in these works can only be revealed through the implementation of a
system of allegoric interpretation. The authors who sustained this trend in a
series of works were: S. Yizhar, Yoram Kaniuk, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Yitzhak
ben-Ner, David Grossman and Meir Shalev.
7.3 The Ethnic Trend
This trend includes works which tell of
life in Jewish communities that completely ceased to exist with the
establishment of the State of Israel or in the course of its existence. In these
works, the writers do not suffice with an ethnographic approach (documenting
customs, culture and life-values of the defunct community) but they introduce a
cultural approach: To provide the community’s decrepit culture – decrepit
because even its descendants have difficulty preserving its cultural attributes
in the Israeli pressure cooker – an independent and influential presence in the
crystallization of Israel’s culture from all of the cultures which assembled in
the State of Israel during the immigration process (4.5). Two reasons explain
the appearance of the ethnic trend exclusively in the works of Israeli writers
from Oriental communities: A. Until the Yom Kippur War, the lives of Ashkenazic
Jewish communities from Europe were identified as Diaspora life worth replacing
with normal, native life which was exemplified in literature in the image of the
Sabra, an image which was cultivated by Ashkenazic Israeli authors. B.
Even after the Yom Kippur War, Israeli authors of Ashkenazic backgrounds felt no
need to ethnographically or culturally revive the Ashkenazic communal life,
which was obliterated in the Holocaust, because its values dominated and
monopolized the developing culture in the State of Israel anyway. The arousal of
the ethnic trend in the works of Oriental Israeli writers after the Yom Kippur
War can be explained in the shattering of the native ideal, which until the war
was represented by the native Israeli. As long as that ideal was at its peak,
the possibility to express ethnic aspirations of any sort was nonexistent. The
storytellers whose work is influenced by this trend are: Sammy Michael, Shimon
Balas, Eli Amir, Amnon Shamosh, Shelomo Avayou, Yitzhak Gormezano-Goren, Dan
Benaya-Seri, Ronit Malaton, Dorit Rabinian and others. The presence of this
trend in poetry is similarly impressive: Shalom Katav, Aharon Almog, Yoav Hayek,
Erez Biton, Moshe Sartel, Balfour Hakak, Herzl Hakak and others.
7.4 The Trivial Trend
This is a commercial trend which is
manifest in works which seek to be sold in large numbers of copies with maximal
circulation by lowering all possible standards in creating literature: Unique
characters, unfamiliar sites, non-routine problems, styles which do not
correspond with realism in its most simplistic form and language which is not
conversational and unambiguous. The trivial composition is written formulaically
(the romantic story, the detective story, the adventure story, the mystery,
etc.). In order to facilitate achievement of its commercial objectives, it
attempts to be reader-friendly by channeling its contents to the mundane,
average, simple, understandable, middling and familiar. Therefore, it does not
pose any special problems in the reading and it does not place any challenge or
struggle before the reader. The reader can race through the text, which is
readable, easily absorbed, entertaining and pleasurable, and does not exhaust
him with deep emotions and new and original ideas. The trivial novels of Ram
Oren and Irit Linor were especially well-publicized and had astounding
circulation relative to the standard circulation of Israeli literature, however,
while these are considered non-canonic literature, there is a trivial tendency
at various levels in the writings of many writers who have pretenses of being
considered writers of canonic literature. The three previous trends, about whose
canonic qualities there is no doubt, are in great competition with the trivial
trend, which is clearly non-canonic. This competition can be characterized as a
competition, which is now taking place in Israeli literature between quality
literature (masterpieces) and popular literature (bestsellers).
Chapter 8: Conclusions
What are the achievements of Hebrew
literature over the course of the State’s existence and what role has literature
played in the life of the State? Where is Israeli literature heading? What
should its attitude be towards Hebrew literature from previous eras?
8.1 Strength and Status
Literature has succeeded in the course of
the State’s existence to establish itself as a leading art form. It is equipped
with the complete support system which facilitates the writing, publication and
reading of the literature. In the course of 50 years, it has grown to the point
where it has overcome the provincialist tendencies which were dominant in the
nascent Israeli society to prefer translated literature over original literature
and to overcome a more common phenomenon in an immigrant society: The
longstanding preference of literature from the immigrant’s land or origin over
literature in the Land to which he immigrated. In content and quality, Israeli
literature is capable of satisfying readers’ demands and has a responding to the
reader’s every preference or need. Concurrently, Israeli literature became an
influential and fascinating literary focal point for readers throughout the
Jewish Diaspora. During the years of the State’s existence, Israeli literature
has achieved an honorable reputation in the world as well, and for years now, it
is considered one of the most significant and vibrant centers of modern
literature. This fact is manifest in the two-way translation enterprise: The
books of Israeli authors are eagerly translated into many languages throughout
the world and authors from other countries seek to have their books translated
into Hebrew in the State of Israel.
8.2 Involvement
Hebrew literature has, throughout the
State’s existence, served the role of representing all aspects of Israeli
reality. It reflects all of the significant events which occurred in the life of
the State, the problems which arose, the perplexities which troubled its
citizens, and the fears and nightmares which influenced life therein. This was
literature involved in the life of the period and it expressed the primary
influences on Israeli and Jewish lives throughout the State’s existence:
sovereignty (4.1), immigration (4.5), the Holocaust (4.6) and wars (4.7).
8.3 Activism
Israeli literature did not avoid taking
stands regarding the reality, which it reflected. It criticized, took satirical
swipes, stung with irony and exposed its mistakes, errors and failures, the
malfeasance of personalities, the elite and simple people in their confrontation
with the challenges afforded them by history with the renewal of Jewish
sovereignty in the Land of Israel. In many of the works of Israeli literature,
one can find explicit solutions or general directions leading to solutions for
these challenges. This was an activist literature, which attempted to the best
of its ability to influence the lives in the present and on the development of
the nation’s history in the future.
8.4 Visionary Decrepitude
In the course of the State’s existence, the
moral-visionary enthusiasm which had always burned in Hebrew literature faded.
The deterioration of values (2.3), the diminution of vision (2.4) and the
subversion of optimism (2.5) are the conspicuous signs of the negative process.
The visionary enthusiasm was still extremely powerful in the State’s first
decade but it gradually diminished as years passed. An additional process, which
transpired in Israeli literature, is manifest in the increasing abandonment of
the national vision and Jewish values and their replacement with a cosmopolitan
vision whose values are universal. The damage caused by this exchange primarily
affected two historical characteristics of Hebrew literature: uniqueness (2.6)
and centralization (2.7). Anyone familiar with the history of Hebrew literature
ought to be concerned that sovereignty encouraged writers in this generation to
primarily express the immediate experiences of the Jew as a place-centered
Jew, while the hope of the generations was that the renewal of sovereignty
would greatly encourage the expression of the Jew as a time-centered Jew,
having a portent and vision for the entire course of history.
8.5 Circumventing the Great Questions
Modern Hebrew literature (1.2) bequeathed
to Israeli literature open questions regarding fundamental issues, which were
portentous for the continued national existence. For example: Clarifying the
relationship between the national aspect and the religious aspect in Jewish
self-identity in the modern age; establishing the common national denominator
between Jews who believe in various levels of secularism and live accordingly;
defining the connection between the Jewish State and the Jewish Diaspora around
the world and the significance of the modern national renaissance movement,
Zionism, on the lives of the Jewish people in Israel and abroad, after the
establishment of the State. Israeli literature circumvented the profound and
fundamental clarification of these significant questions and systematically
avoided a serious confrontation with their complexity.
8.6 Upsetting Balances
Culture is wary of the damages of
extremism. Under the influence of sovereignty, the various balances, which had
been traditionally maintained throughout the generations, were increasingly
upset in Israeli literature. The most serious balance upset was the balance
between the trend towards openness and the trend towards insularity (3.4). It is
possible that this balance can never again be identical to that which existed
throughout most of the past periods of Hebrew literature, but there is no doubt
that it must be determined in conjunction with a dual consideration: The needs
of the modern Jew today and the continuity of the Jewish people’s unique culture
within world culture. An additional balance which was violated was the balance
between the moral-visionary content in writing (the “what” of the work) and the
esthetic importance of the writing (the “how” of the work). Extreme admiration
of the esthetic aspect of writing has always exemplified literature at this
dangerous stage, in which it performs experiments with the esthetics of writing
because its reservoir of ideas has been exhausted. This admiration attests to
conceptual confusion more than to any real burst of esthetic creativity. A third
balance whose violation is dangerous in literature, is the balance between the
maintenance of the linguistic legacy of literary writing and the removal of all
limitations on manners of literary linguistic expression (8.7).
8.7 Written Language
The test of sovereignty was manifest in
Israeli literature in changes, which were made in the written literary language.
The desire to draw a parallel between political freedom and freedom from the
“holy tongue” in the perception of Diaspora life is conspicuous in the Israeli
author. The eagerness to coordinate the written language and the spoken language
of the vital Israeli public stems from this. The problem is that the Israeli
public’s spoken language has been drawn to the dregs of world language, that
which is spread by mass media culture and devoid of all national uniqueness (the
television screen, the movie screen and the computer screen). The controversy
over the written language in Israeli literature has long not been between plain,
spoken Hebrew and fancy literary Hebrew, but this is a controversy between
proper Hebrew and Hebrew which is nothing more than an imitation of the vulgar
world language: meager, uncivilized and contaminated. A written language of that
sort is incapable of projecting much beyond existence, and therefore, it weakens
the influence of literature relative to other art forms in Israeli culture.
Furthermore, since this written language drains Israeli literature of its
cultural qualities (from the literary sources and from earlier layers of the
Hebrew language), it reduces its ability to reliably represent sovereignty
itself, as sovereignty seeked to cultivate a nativist, original culture, which
would have the ability to compete and serve as a replacement for the literary
culture written up until that point. A language, which is too dry or empty, just
underscores the superiority of the earlier literary culture.
II.
Israeli Literature and its Judaic Heritage
Through the history of the Jewish people,
the perception of a Judaic Heritage, crystallized only in recent generations,
since the beginning of the Haskala, the Hebrew enlightenment movement
about 250 years ago in European Jewish communities. This perception arose in
order to respond to the distress of the steadily increasing numbers of secular
Jews. The Jewish identity crisis has since not only divided religious and
secular Jews, but also, then for the first time, caused a rift in Hebrew
literature. Before the rift, which began with the enlightenment movement, there
was no distinction between secular and religious works within Hebrew literature.
Those authors who through the generations composed religious and faith-oriented
works also wrote works, which conveyed secular experiences and thoughts. The
works of medieval Jewish authors underscores this fact. Rabbis and other people
of profound faith wrote bold secular poetry, books of entertainment, witty
rhymes and philosophical literature, in which they dealt with secular subjects
examined in works of secular philosophies as well. At the same time, they wrote
commentaries on the holy books (the Bible, Mishna and Talmud), books of Jewish
Law, Midrash, moral compositions and sacred poetry.
It was only in the second half of the 18th
century when Hebrew literature separated into literature which expresses secular
emotions and thoughts and literature which expresses values of religious faith.
Whether Rabbi Moshe Haim Luzzato is considered the facilitator of this rift,
thereby advancing the rift by a few decades or if Moses Mendelson and Naftali
Herz Weisel are placed at the head and the rift, delaying it by a few decades,
it is clear that these personalities who today are characterized as religious
according to any criterion, initiated the division of Hebrew literature into two
streams. And since then, over the course of 250 years, the religious-faith
stream has been separated from the secular-artistic stream. And, indeed, when
speaking today of the New Hebrew literature, the modern era in the history of
Hebrew literature, religious literature is no longer included; only those
secular-artistic works written over the last 250 years are considered.
The schism between sacred and secular
literature engendered artificial limitations in the cultural openness and
tolerance among the two Jewish factions created in modern times. A secular Jew
does not peruse religious literature so as not to create an unenlightened
self-perception, and a religious Jew does not peruse Modern Hebrew literature so
as not to be suspected by those around him as a heretic or as one with
tendencies beyond the confines of religion. The identification of Modern Hebrew
literature as artistic-secular and fictional literature should not cause us to
neglect the fact that it was written by Jews, in the language of Jews and
primarily for Jews. Therefore, it would be appropriate that religious Jews, too,
not turn their backs on it, but rather, read it for their pleasure and to
broaden their horizons. By the same token, religious literature, which was
written by Jews throughout the generations, was written in the language of Jews
for Jews to read. And, therefore, it is appropriate that secular Jews, too,
should not turn their backs on it, but rather read it for their pleasure and to
broaden their horizons.
The Rift and its Consequences
The rupture in the nation is progressively
expanding because neither faction reads the literature favored by the other and
is therefore unfamiliar with its experiences and opinions. Religious Jews
distance themselves from the shelves of Modern Hebrew literature because their
rabbis allow them to own and read religious books exclusively. But we ought not
castigate them if the secular, with no authority forbidding them to read
religious books, also refrain from reading Judaism-inspired works composed over
the generations, reflecting its vision and values, simply because prophets,
Tana’im, Amora’im, Savora’im, Ge’onim and rabbis wrote
them. Indeed, the situation is so illogical that the non-Jewish reader freely
and unabashedly approaches Hebrew book shelves, selecting the Bible, the Midrash
and books of mysticism, peruses the works of Maimonides and our other medieval
philosophers and discovers in them the foundations of his Christian culture, and
only the Jew based on his identity and feelings distances himself from this
hidden treasure, without which his culture is disconnected from its roots and
suffices with what has accumulated on the shelves of “Modern Hebrew literature”.
Why must he relinquish most of Hebrew literature through the generations, filled
with daring and animated Judaism and which expresses the experiences, the values
and the philosophy of his people, merely because the leaders, educators and
intellectuals over the last few generations have inculcated an emotional recoil
from it within him? This emotional recoil is responsible not only for the
ambivalent attitude of the secular Jew towards his national culture, but also to
the weakening of the feeling of national identity within him, after totally
distancing himself from the religious bookshelves, which contain the works that
expressed that feeling throughout most of the history of Hebrew literature.
It is, of course, impossible to turn back
the clock and anticipate the annulment of the rift in the unity of the Jewish
people and in its national culture and literature as well, which transpired 250
years ago. Any present-day discussions about the status of national culture must
begin with the fact that secularism has not diminished over the generations but
rather has spread and proliferated. Nevertheless, the path of the secular Jew
has never been easy and even today, is no bed of roses. Of all of the
distressing problems which arise in the life of a country in which there is no
separation of church and state, the most troublesome – after having opted not to
fulfill the commandments and not to accept the authority of the arbiters of
Jewish law – is the spiritual problem. The question facing every secular Jew is:
Must the price which he pays for choosing a secular lifestyle necessarily be
total ignorance of his rich national literature’s spiritual assets which through
most of its history was religiously inspired? For a brief period in the 1940s
and 1950s, during which the sabra exemplar dominated the nascent State of
Israel, many secularists believed that the realization of the vision of
establishing a native society totally purified of any traces of Diaspora
influence justified paying that price. Furthermore, they then promulgated the
idea that in order to be Hebrew Israelis, purified of the Diaspora influence, an
estrangement from the previous generations’ Judaism-inspired, almost exclusively
religious literature should be encouraged.
As we know, Sabraism was
unsuccessful in surviving beyond the State’s first two decades, among other
reasons, because of its disgrace in this glorification of ignorance, after it
became clear that Israeli culture was incapable of proffering a sufficiently
rich alternative to the assets of Jewish culture and after it became clear that
the little which was so painstakingly produced and compiled was, for the most
part, unoriginal and an imitation – sometimes successful and sometimes totally
failed – of works which were displayed and published by artists in the European
and American cultural centers. Both the secular artist and his audience
recovered from the delusion that a worthy culture could be created here, without
the rich layers of Jewish culture throughout the generations. After wrestling
with the contradiction between secular values and lifestyle and the religious
content and messages of central sections of Hebrew literature throughout the
generations, they reached a solution – Judaic Heritage. The solution was
based on two assumptions. First: It is the secular Jew’s privilege and the
obligation to read, analyze and explore religious literature – the national
Judaism-inspired literature written throughout the generations – as the basis of
his culture. Second: It is the secular Jew’s privilege and the obligation to
investigate and consider religious literature not as a compendium of faith,
requiring him to maintain a religious way of life, but rather as a cultural
asset which would influence the secular values in his life – personal, social,
communal and national.
Two Damage Prototypes
This logical solution, which enables a
secular Jew to overcome the seemingly insoluble contradiction in his life, has,
to our great chagrin, not gained much currency in the 30 years which have passed
since the collapse of Sabraist ideology. The education system has not
adopted it as a policy in training teachers and has not based the school
humanities curriculum upon it. The Jewish people, including those who reside in
Zion, is paying a heavy price for the continued procrastination in adopting so
simple a solution, capable of limiting the damage caused by the 250 year-old
Jewish identity crisis. Any additional delay will increase the price tag and
extend the repayment period. Naturally, this hesitation was manifest in Israeli
literature, the literature written since the establishment of the State. The
first 50 years of the Israeli period in Hebrew literature can be summed up as a
period in which the hostile approach to Judaism – that which ridicules its
values, myths and language symbols (metaphors, images and phrases) through which
its ideas and visions were expressed – dominated. The hostile approach towards a
Judaic Heritage achieved dominant status in Israeli literature not because of
its artistic literary accomplishments and not because of its conceptual
originality, but because of the preparatory work towards its acceptance which
was executed by two damage prototypes, which continue to influence our literary
world today.
First damage prototype – the historical
legacy which was bequeathed to Israeli literature by Modern Hebrew literature’s
three periods (enlightenment, renaissance, immigrations) which conducted a
progressively bitter debate with Judaism. The debate between the enlightenment
and Judaism was over recognition of the legitimacy of secularism itself.
The enlightenment movement demanded that religion recognize that there are two
domains in the life of a Jew, the religious domain which obligates him in his
“tent”, his home, and the secular domain which obligates him when he emerges
from his “tent”. Y.L. Gordon characterized the objective of the enlightenment in
his poem “Awaken My People” in the following manner: “Be a man when you emerge
and a Jew in your tent.” After the first stronghold of religion’s resistance was
conquered, the focus in renaissance literature was over the debate with Judaism
regarding a new demand: religious recognition of the legitimacy of earthly
salvation. In other words, rather than wait for messianic redemption which
requires acceptance of the continued existence of the Jewish people in exile
until the advent of the Messiah, renaissance literature demanded religious
recognition of initiated national activity which would lead to the Diaspora’s
demise. After the renaissance movement conquered that bastion of religious
resistance as well, the immigrations literature transferred the debate with
Judaism to a new plane: recognition of the need to invert the pyramid
through a social revolution which would strengthen the stratum which toils in
agriculture and industry and the stratum which is involved in creating new
sources of income and means of existence while at the same time reducing the
parasitical elite – those who engage in mediation and provide services – despite
their important contribution to society, they merely deplete and recycle the
limited existing sources of income and means of existence. This legacy
encouraged the abuse of Judaism to continue at every opportunity with the
establishment of the State.
The second damage prototype – a
fashionable, dictatorial norm, which anointed academia as the arbiter of
literary criticism and research. This culminated in an extreme, sterile esthetic
approach, which separated perusing the text from any historical context. This
approach developed in our academia from the spell cast upon a generation of
young lecturers during the 1960s by the ideas of the English New-Criticism and
new approaches to textual analysis which received the name, “The Study of
Literature”. They inculcated into generations of students contempt for research
and criticism not only from the esthetic perspective (genre expressions,
coordinating structure and content, phenomena in written language and language
tactics) but also from a moral-ethical, conceptual-visionary perspective. Even
though there transpired in academia an accelerated disillusionment with The
Study of Literature’s narrow-minded reading of the text in the final decade of
the 20th century, under the influence of new – semiotic and
post-modernistic – approaches, a disillusionment which permitted the examination
of a text in its historical-social-conceptual context, in academia they still
appreciate a writer’s inventive antics with form more than the vision he
expressed in the text. Under these circumstances, works are better appreciated
and publicized due to a bit of esthetic freshness even if the writer expressed
conceptually banal or even poisonous ideas.
Had literary criticism and research only
played their roles independent of ever-changing academic fashions, they would
have discovered that the expressions of hostility against a Judaic Heritage did
not produce great visionary literature but rather inadequate literature
conveying shallow thoughts by means of provocative rhetoric. This forum is
inadequate to cite examples of all of the works in which authors expressed
reservations regarding the approach which displays willingness to adopt a Judaic
Heritage, or even demanded to abandon it and cut off all ties with it.
Therefore, we will suffice with two artists whose works are chronologically
distant enough to prove that the hostile tendency towards the integration of a
Judaic Heritage into Israeli secularism is almost as strong in today’s
literature as it was with the establishment of the State. The two authors are S.
Yizhar and Meir Shalev.
Abandonment of Patriarchal Attribution
In his most significant work, the
comprehensive novel, The Days of Ziklag (1958), S. Yizhar
summarized the hostile attitude of the Sabras towards Jewish culture.
Regarding this subject (and this is not the case regarding other subjects), it
is possible to quote the words of the story’s characters without identifying
them because together they represent the collective hero – the 1948 generation
of warriors. And these are the words which S. Yizhar places in the mouths of the
novel’s heroes:
If there is anything
substantial within us – it is precisely the opposite of what they asked of
us...an example: Love of the Jewish people! Ah, yes. Come for a moment and
let’s discuss it. The Jewish people! What Jewish people? Love of the Jewish
people? Who loves them? Aren’t we fleeing as if scalded from anything
Jewish, and that is our glory and pride. Know explicitly, once and for
all, we become sick from anything that even has the slightest trace of it.
From Jewish history lessons, with all of the troubles, until the Jewish foods
and groan, anything which has a Diaspora accent, Diaspora customs and Yiddish
in general – we explicitly wash our hands of any attachment at all, not
only to those things which have a trace of religion or tradition, anything
that is characterized as “Jewish sentiment”, including cantillation, fish
dishes and funeral ceremonies, the whole mix is untouchable due to rancid fat
– but also to anyone who comes to demand anything due to his heritage or
respect for his feelings from the “Second Immigration” until the “history of
the Hagana” (p. 375).
A different Sabra among those who
fought at Ziklag expressed his declaration of disconnection through the resolute
statement that he and his comrades who were born in Israel were “lads with no
patriarchal attribution. They had only paternal attribution. All that
preceded their father’s immigration – darkness, until the days of King David”.
(p. 556) The fighters on the northern Negev hill, which they identify as Biblical Ziklag are, indeed, very proud of their identity which ties them to a
fighting image like King David, who was a Sabra like them and found
himself during most of the years of his kingdom at odds with the religious
establishment of his era, but not before they emphasize that they feel no
connection or belonging to all of the generations of the Jewish people who lived
between King David’s time and their own, the exile generations. Another one of
the Ziklag warriors exposes his generation’s attitude to the Jewish library:
Incidentally, have you ever
heard about Father’s trunk...The box, large and heavy, covered and plated with
copper and sitting on the porch in which there is a load of large, heavy
books, the legacy of our fathers...crowded parchments, wise and
forgotten, silent...they will never be perused again. We just don’t
have the heart to throw them out. And also there is this spark in Father’s
heart of hearts which flashes: Perhaps one day will come and one of my
descendants, perhaps his heart will be spurred to rekindle the coal which has
waned or to drink from the locked waterhole. (p. 876)
Approximately 30 years after the
publication of The Days of Ziklag, an heir was located who opened the
abandoned trunk on the porch and looked through the large, heavy books of the
patriarchal legacy. But, woe unto us, his goal was not to rekindle the waning
coal, but rather to extinguish it altogether. Like S. Yitzhar, this heir, too,
had the dexterity and ability to manipulate the language and produce an amazing
result, but in contrast to S. Yizhar who explicitly expressed his philosophy
regarding his desire as a Sabra to separate himself from Judaism both as
a religion and as a culture in his wonderful Hebrew, the heir utilized his
outstanding mastery over the Hebrew language to systematically shatter the
Jewish people’s myths. Regarding the contradiction between his awesome Hebrew
and his poisonous thoughts manifest in the widely-circulated books of this heir,
we can apply the appropriate lines of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi in his poem “Your
Words in Passing Myrrh”, in which he responded to the efforts of a friend to
dissuade him from immigrating to Zion: “Your words are mixed with passing myrrh,
words which bees attack from within” and they are like the Greek wise-saying,
“They have no fruit but flowers.” Rabbi Yehuda Halevi knew that there are those
authors for whom the flavors of their awesome Hebrew would not produce the
Zionist fruit as one might expect from a Hebrew writer. Meir Shalev views this
phenomenon of spiritual-conceptual sterility as a source of pride.
The Myth of Land Ownership
In four consecutive novels, published by
Meir Shalev to this point, he devised story lines which transpire in the
course of the years of Zionist achievement in the Land of Israel, but took care
to base each of the plots on a central myth in Jewish culture’s book of books.
Meir Shalev’s treatment of the most sacred myths of the national culture is
identical in each: After he refutes their likelihood by means of drawing
parallels with current events, he empties them of their original meaning and
defiles their sanctity by stating that they are false stories. Meir Shalev’s
objective in dealing with the myths in this manner is current, a fact which
becomes clear from an examination of his novels – which are political novels
written in allegorical code, and they, therefore, can be characterized as
political allegories.
Only at first glance does A Russian
Novel (1988) deal with the disappointment of the second immigration’s
members and the village founders from the results of their pioneer actions,
disappointment which they express through Mirkin’s instructions to Baruch, his
slow-witted grandson, to uproot the orchard and to designate the land to serve
as a cemetery. The meaning of this instruction becomes clear to the reader from
the words of Pines, the homeroom teacher, who explained to his students the
essence of the Zionist revolution:
Here, the Diaspora dead came
to be buried in the earth of our land – but we, children, we immigrated to the
Land of Israel in order to live here and not to die here. They believed that
burial in the Land of Israel would purify their sins and bring them closer to
paradise. But we don’t believe in underground rolling and atonement for sins.
Atonement for our sins is working the land and not digging graves (p. 210).
In these words, Pines underscored the
difference between Messianic redemption which commands Jews to wait in the
Diaspora for its advent, to Zionist redemption which encourages them to initiate
the return to the homeland and in that way, through their initiative, end the
Diaspora. When Mirkin and his friends established the village and planted the
orchard, they attempted to facilitate a Jewish revolution. They wanted to
transform the land to which, until that point, Jews had only arrived at to be
buried, into a place to which Jews would return in order to live. The
instruction to uproot the orchard and to return Israel’s earth to the status
which it held in the life of the Jewish people before Zionism – as a national
burial ground – is, therefore, a manifestation of the failure of the Zionist
revolution.
Meir Shalev bases this message regarding
the failure of Zionist pioneer effort, on the shattering of myths in the Bible
which speak of God’s promise to the nation’s patriarchs to designate the Land of
Israel for them and their descendants. Shalev characterizes this promise as a
false myth, to which Zionism clings in order to claim that a special connection
exists between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and that the Jewish
people have special, unchallenged ownership rights to Israel. Shalev attempts to
undermine the myth of the promise of the Land of Israel to the People of Israel
by comparing the land to a woman. Only Adam found virgin land over which he had
exclusivity. All later owners, including the Jews, had temporary ownership only.
The land belongs only to whoever possesses it at any given point, and no one who
possessed it at any point in the past can claim that he has exclusive, eternal
rights to it – not even one whose ancient texts contain mythical and, therefore,
unfounded stories according to which God promised eternal ownership over the
Land of Israel to the nation’s patriarchs on different occasions. The failure of
the pioneer-Zionist enterprise which Mirkin and his friends established in
Eretz Israel proves that it is impossible to acquire ownership over the land
through stories about promises from the days of the patriarchs. And as a result,
it is impossible to rely on mythical biblical stories in the dispute over the
land between the Arabs and us, because they are not historical documents on
which a claim of ownership can be based.
The Myth of the Inheritance Struggle
This is not the only myth which Shalev
shatters in his writing which justifies the well-known verse from the book of
Isaiah, “Your destroyers and obliterators will emerge from within.” The novel,
Esau (1991) describes the extended struggle between two brothers over the
family bakery. In 1948, the struggle over the bakery ended with the following
outcome: Ya’akov got it all (the bakery and the woman) while his brother was
dispossessed from everything and was forced to go into exile from his family’s
property. This story is an obvious parable: In 1948, the struggle over the Land
of Israel ended with the dispossession of Arabs from it, but the struggle
between the brothers did not end with that. The novel deals with the anticipated
beginning of the second round of the struggle over the inheritance which would
remedy the 1948 injustice to the rejected brother. The brother who called
himself “Esau” already has the support of the women (who consistently represent
the Land of Israel’s earth in Shalev’s novels). Leah, Ya’akov’s wife, supports
his desire to renew the struggle over the “bakery” after living in exile – the
Palestinian Diaspora – for 40 years and dreamed there of baking bread. Ya’akov’s
daughter, Romy the redhead (the traditional color of the Left), also exhibits
support for her dispossessed uncle and encourages him to actualize his rights to
the inheritance. After Meir Shalev negated Ya’akov’s historical right to the
land which was promised to the nation’s patriarch in A Russian Novel,
what remained was to confront Esau in the present round with Ya’akov’s
laughable, unfit heir whom he managed to father after raping Leah – Michael –
(the underground nickname of Yitzhak Shamir, who served as Prime Minister when
the novel was published), and that fact points to the resolution which will
eventuate at the end of the second round in the brothers’ struggle over the
inheritance.
Shalev was not content with the crude
political allegory, which he wove in this book, but rather decided to rely on
the biblical stories which described how the disputes over inheritance of the
land between pairs of brothers concluded during the patriarchal period. The
inheritance dispute between the first pair of brothers, Isaac and Ishmael,
ended, as we know, in the following way: Abraham gave “all that he had to Isaac.
And to the sons of the concubines, whom Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts and sent
them away from his son” and they settled in “the east country”. The struggle
over the inheritance between the next pair of brothers, Ya’akov and Esau, ended
in a similar way. Esau was forced to “go from before his brother Ya’akov because
the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together, for their
substance was great, so that they could not dwell together.” Esau wandered from
“the land in which his father had sojourned, in the land of Canaan” and settled
on “Mount Se’ir, Esau is Edom”. The biblical resolution of an inheritance
struggle between brothers is clear: When two brothers have inheritance rights
over a patriarchal estate, it is not divided but rather one gets it all and the
other must relinquish his rights to it. The winner remains to live in the land
and bequeaths it to his heirs, while the son who loses, leaves the land and
seeks an alternative residence for himself and his sons. According to the
biblical stories regarding our forefathers, the division of an estate between
two brothers is not considered an appropriate solution. Both cannot exist
comfortably with the division of the estate and the material distress will serve
as a source of unending dispute between them. The upshot of the stories is that
it is preferable to maintain the estate in its entirety in the hands of one of
the heirs and to force the other heirs to find themselves an alternative
residence. The population transfer solution in the case of an unresolved bloody
dispute, which is also being proffered as the solution to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, is considered acceptable, logical and moral in the Bible, not because
it is the ideal solution but because it is capable of resolving unresolved
disputes and saving lives on both sides.
Meir Shalev, of course, rejects
that solution which was standard in our forefathers’ days in preventing disputes
between brothers over an estate, as a solution to the hundred years struggle
over the land between Jews and Palestinians at present. That political
philosophy is completely legitimate and is certainly equipped with enough
reasons to substantiate it. It was illegitimate to mention the mythical biblical
stories in the novel’s story line just to portray them as fake and to base the
negation of the transfer solution – which some consider to be a moral and
practical solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict – on that portrayal. Had Meir
Shalev desired to express his opposition to the transfer remedy to the present
conflict between us and the Arabs, even though it was accepted in the times of
the forefathers, he should have found a way to sound his reasons as part of the
novel’s plot or independent of it, but there was no need to brutally trample the
truth of these Book of Genesis stories. A respectful attitude towards a Judaic
Heritage should have deterred him from doing so.
The Myth of the Successful Courtship
The hypothesis raised in the novel Esau
regarding the manner in which the struggle between brothers over the inheritance
is resolved, received extensive treatment in Shalev’s third novel, As a Few
Days (1994). The novel’s plot exposits at great length and in an elaborate
manner, why Zeide will not get the woman and will not produce descendants who
will continue the family dynasty, but rather will live a life of celibacy in the
company of the village’s crows. The childless Ya’akov Sheinfeld provides the
explanation: “People named Ya’akov never have an easy time with love.” (p. 112) Sheinfeld’s explanation is based on the devoted love story between Ya’akov and
Rahel, who, as we remember, worked twice seven years in order to win her, and
only because of the depth of his love, the years passed quickly and were “in his
eyes as a few days”. Ya’akov Sheinfeld’s own story proves in an even more
definitive manner, the rule which he articulated, that all Ya’akovs have a hard
time with love. He courted Yehudit for nine years (she was Zeide’s mother, who
thinks that due to the calf “Rahel” whom she is raising, she is parallel to
Rahel in the biblical love story), but ultimately he does not win her but loses
to his competitor, Rabinowitz, the enormously powerful “man of the furrows”.
Once again, Meir Shalev defiled a story
taken from the lives of the fathers of our nation, which was canonized and
became a myth due to the proof that there is a reward for devoted,
uncompromising love. Basing the plot of the novel, which tells of the
competition between Sheinfeld and Rabinowitz for Yehudit’s heart, on the
exemplary love of Ya’akov for Rahel, unnecessarily shatters a central myth in
our national culture. Unlike that legend about the prototypical Ya’akov,
Gluberman, the animal trader, explains to Zeide that in reality, “man plans and
God laughs” (p. 57). And that, indeed, is what actually happened to Ya’akov
Sheinfeld. He, the “tent-dweller”, representing our forefather Ya’akov’s
descendants, is not the one who wins Yehudit – “Rahel” – but rather, it was
Rabinowitz, the “man of the furrows”, who represents the Palestinian, who also
had a claim on the woman (the land on which the State of Israel was
established). In this way, the injustice, which was described in the novel Esau,
is ameliorated in the second round of the struggle over the inheritance.
Shalev advises Zeide (which means
grandfather in Yiddish), who is destined to continue the Ya’akov destiny after
Sheinfeld, not to believe the biblical love story which guarantees the woman to
the devoted suitor in return for his insistent courtship. He was stamped in his
childhood and marked with the “eternal image” of his mother. After seeing her
naked, his fate was sealed. He will never be able to have his mother and produce
children with her to continue the dynasty after him, and no other woman will
ever be able to replace her. Therefore, as it is told in a rabbinical midrash,
Zeide will forever remain the mythical “Grandfather Israel” – a Jew who wanders
the earth and there longs for his “Yehudit”, the state of which he dreamed, and
succeeded in its establishment and even maintained for a brief period, until the
more worthy “man of the furrows” who was not afflicted by the curse of Ya’akov’s
fate, took it over.
The Myth of the Emergence from Slavery to Freedom
In his fourth novel, In His House in the
Wilderness (1998), Shalev shatters the symbolism which the Bible attributes
to the desert in the story of the Jewish people’s emergence from slavery to
freedom. The years of wandering in the desert, in which the Torah revelation
took place at the foot of Mount Sinai, are remembered longingly in the wonderful
verse of the prophet Jeremiah, “I remember in thy favor the devotion of thy
youth...when thou didst go after me in a wilderness in a land that was not sown”.
(Jer. 2:2) And, indeed, in the verses of consolation, the prophet describes the
renewal of the covenant of the nation with God after the destruction with the
words “found grace in the wilderness”. (31:1) God assumes the image of a lover
searching the desert for his bride and redeems her once again from enslavement.
He does not find an old and sinful nation in the desert, but rather a nation,
which has been cleansed from its sin and has been retransformed into a virgin
worthy of God’s eternal love. Shalev imputes this myth because the desert
represents a period of perfect relations between the Jewish people and their God
who are rewarded with special Divine Providence over the nation and the
fulfillment of all of his promises to them, including the promise regarding the
Land of Israel.
Shalev chose to portray the desert in the
plot of his novel, not in the metaphorical sense ascribed to it by the prophet
Jeremiah, as a period of perfection in the relations between a nation and its
God as it emerged from slavery to freedom, but rather as a geographic-concrete
concept which denotes a desolate and remote region whose conditions do not
enable human existence and life. The name of the book relies on the story of the
death of Yoav ben-Zeruya, a well-known security expert who assisted King David
in the establishment of a spacious kingdom and was killed by the order of King
Solomon, a king associated in historical memory with peace and hatred of
militarism – the diametric opposite of his father whose life was a series of
military conquests. After being killed in the Tabernacle, though he held on to
the horns of the altar, Kings I (2:34) relates that Yoav was buried in “his home
in the desert”. Thus the desert was transformed for Meir Shalev from a symbol of
love and renewal between the Jewish people and their God to a concrete place
symbolizing death and destruction fit only for burial.
In the story line of In His House in the
Wilderness, Shalev established for himself a political-actual goal: To
portray the rebirth of the Jewish people in their homeland in the Zionist era as
a failure. And he does this by switching the heroic association engraved in the
national memory regarding the central story of the emergence from Egypt and trek
through the desert towards the homeland with the cynical association implicit in
the peripheral story of the death and burial of Yoav ben-Zeruya. The novel tells
about Raphael Mayer, the last descendant of a dynasty, who decided to wait for
his death in a hiding place in the desert, which is depicted in the plot as a
burial ground for families who have exhausted their vitality and must descend
from history’s stage. In order to substantiate the justice of Raphael’s
conclusions about his “family”, the Jewish people, the novel’s plot expands on
the story of the “family” and the events which it experienced in the Zionist era
of its history. These events were already recounted in Shalev’s earlier novels
and, therefore, it is justified to integrate that which was recounted earlier in
order to complete the family history until its final descendant concluded that
he would be the last in the dynasty.
According to the novel, Esau, the
“family” peacefully resided in Jerusalem for 15 generations and would have been
able to continue existing in a poor and parasitical life for many more
generations. However, the penetration of a Gentile element into their blood,
after Avraham Levi married Sarah, the convert daughter of a Pravo-Slavic pilgrim
who immigrated from Russia to Jerusalem with a group of pilgrims dragging along
a huge bell from his homeland in order to install it at the top of one of the
city’s churches, paved the way for the Zionist course in the “family’s” history.
As we remember, Sarah, the convert, stole the Patriarch’s carriage, loaded her
husband and two children upon it, and took the “family” out of the city walls to
the village. The revolution begins, therefore, with the emergence from Jerusalem
– which represents the lazy, passive waiting for the religious-messianic
salvation – and with the establishment of the Zionist village – which represents
secular-temporal salvation. Abraham and Sarah Levi establish a “bakery” in the
village and the revolution which they engendered could have been a success story
had a dispute not broken out between “Ya’akov” and “Esau” over the inheritance,
a dispute which was resolved in the first round of the struggle between the
brothers by the dispossession of “Esau” from “Ya’akov’s” inheritance. The novel
concluded with the assumption that in the second round between the brothers,
about to commence, the injustice to “Esau” would be ameliorated.
The story of the Zionist village’s failure
was recounted in A Russian Novel and was encapsulated in the order which
Mirkin gave to his grandson to uproot the orchard cultivated by the village’s
founders and to restore the land to its traditional destiny which it had
fulfilled during the course of the Diaspora, to serve as a burial ground for all
of the elderly who decided to wait in the Holy Land for the messianic
resurrection, which, according to tradition, will begin in Zion. The sight of
the failed Zionist village is also described in the novel, As a Few Days.
All of the farm units established by the village founders are abandoned and
eccentric descendants of the pioneers and arrivals from other countries inhabit
the village. The continued history of the “family” is recounted in the novel,
In His House in the Wilderness. The sin of abandoning “Jerusalem”, which is
the sin of impelling the advent of Messiah, led to the sin of dispossessing
“Esau” from the inheritance and to the beginning of the hundred-year dispute
with the Arabs, and they both caused the failure of the “family’s” settlement in
the Kinneret colony. Grandpa Raphael hung himself on a beam in the barn after
falling deep into debt. All of the men who were supposed to continue the lineage
were killed in various strange incidents. Grandma Shulamit, who was widowed from
her husband and grieved after her children, understands, that the attempt to
integrate into the village has failed and that she and her widowed
daughters-in-law must retreat to within Jerusalem’s walls. This return
symbolizes her awareness that the secular-Zionist revolution has collapsed and
in order to preserve the family, it is necessary to go back and grasp the
alternative solution represented by Jerusalem: Passive waiting for the
religious-Messianic salvation. The trek of the family from the “village” back to
“Jerusalem” symbolizes the withdrawal from farming, which failed and return to
its previous parasitical life. The grandson, Raphael Mayer, understands the
meaning of the “family’s” history in the Zionist era and derives from it the
following conclusion: Since the family had exhausted its vitality in the Zionist
adventure in Kinneret and now death awaits it, it is incumbent upon him as the
last descendant of the “family” to bring the family tree to burial in the
desert, which serves as the burial ground for families which have exhausted
their role in history (p. 405). Loyal to that conclusion, he found an
appropriate place in the Judean desert to await his death.
“A Jew is One Who Remembers”
Meir Shalev’s novels are all allegorical
and political, and his treatment of Jewish culture’s myths displays his attitude
towards them. It turns out that the Bible is perceived by Shalev as a compendium
of mythical and therefore, false stories. They are not sacred in his eyes nor
does he accept their authority. He belittles the values emphasized in them:
faith, vision, heroism and pioneering. His books express rejection of a Judaic
Heritage by systematically shattering the national myths. Even by reading each
novel separately, one can detect his anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish philosophy. A
Hebrew author who makes no effort to integrate a Judaic Heritage in his
generation’s evolving national creation, especially during the years of wondrous
accomplishments by the nation – when it renews and reinforces its sovereignty in
its homeland – is committing an act of cultural destruction and decadence. The
actions of an author of this sort are similar to that which Aharon Meged
described in a satiric scene which he integrated in the novel, The Living on
the Dead (1965). The scene describes the gathering of the bohemians on the
eve of the Ninth of Av, the night when the Temple was destroyed, in the
“Hamartef Cafe”. In the middle of the gathering, one of the assembled opened the
Book of Lamentations
and began reading from it in
the traditional tune, trilling the rhymes on each verse. According to his
instructions we sat on the floor and answered accompanied by body movements,
and Levia was stifling her laughs with her hands every time that he produced
an especially funny rhyme.
Aharon Meged was one of the few authors who
consistently battled the frivolity with which many of the authors of his guard
hastened to divorce themselves from generations of Jewish culture, a divorce to
which they attached a presumptuous promise, that they and their disciples would
provide an alternative, native Israeli, culture. Binyamin Tammuz was
another, who, like the hero of another one of Aharon Meged’s novels,
Foigelman (1987), abandoned his Canaanite philosophy – to which he
enthusiastically subscribed in his youth – regarding the establishment of a
homeland of the “Young Hebrews” in the region. In his important ideological
novel, Jacob (1971), Tammuz surprised everyone when he placed words of
admiration for his grandfather in the mouth of the hero:
I am proud of you,
Grandfather. You were a giant, when you woke up in the morning, among the
snows of foreign lands, among the hostile ice, to bring bread to your home,
and when you first took a pamphlet of Spinoza into your hand, your heroism was
more awesome and more beautiful than anything which I might ever perform on
this country’s soil.
And, thereafter, in the novella, Bottle Parables
(1975), he added the following regarding Jewish culture:
Since the Jewish nation has,
more than any other nation, maintained a tie to spirituality, there is no
reason in the world to prevent us from arriving at the following conclusion:
Everything that is spiritual, everything that is culture, is essentially
Jewish. And for that reason, Mozart was Jewish as were Bach, Rembrandt and
many other fine people which are too numerous to list in this forum.
Tammuz’s attachment to a Judaic Heritage
over the last two decades of his life underscored the feasibility of an
apparently impossible possibility: That a secular Jew can be connected to his
Judaism by grasping it as a cultural value. Tammuz expressed his confidence in
the feasibility of this possibility in the following hero’s statement who
attempts to provide a different definition of a Jew with the help of his
cultural identity:
And now I will tell you who
is a Jew. A Jew is a person who remembers the story. Even if he doesn’t know
what is in the story and even if he only knows that a certain story exists.
Aharon Meged and Binyamin Tammuz
represent a very unusual spiritual position in their “Generation in the Land”
guard, and each arrived at it because of a common, apparently consequential
biographical fact, when assessing the attitude of an artist towards his national
culture: Neither was born in Israel, both temporarily adopted the Sabraist
ideology and its deportment until they became anxious and retreated from it. In
the second, “The New Wave” guard of authors, two additional writers were
conspicuous in their attitude towards Jewish culture: Aharon Appelfeld and Dan
Tzalka. In their biographies as well, the same not inconsequential fact
regarding the attitude of the secular Jew to Jewish culture is conspicuous. Both
were born in Europe, came into contact with non-Jews in their youth and arrived
in Israel during their teens. They never attempted to join the Sabras and
did not share their philosophies. As a result, they were conspicuously anomalous
in a guard led by Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and Yehoshua Kenaz.
Memory and the Spark of Brilliance
In the 1970s, Aharon Appelfeld began
to deal with the Jewish identity crisis, a crisis which weakened the Jewish
people and at its weakest point in history brought it to an existential test
during the Holocaust years. At that point, he concluded the early period in his
work, in which he dealt with concentration camp survivors, the monasteries and
hiding places in the forests and began to describe the assimilated in the
provincial and resort towns. In their homes the assimilated Jews employed
non-Jewish maids from the surrounding villages. They cared for the family’s
children, who in most cases knew nothing of their parents’ Jewish origins. It
was these maids who preserved the spark of Judaism in their employers’ families.
They remembered the dates of the holidays and their customs and encouraged the
family members to keep the holiday customs. Thanks to them, the children of
assimilated families like these were able in their adolescence and mature years
to successfully embark upon return voyages to the faith, which their parents
previously rejected.
One can distinguish between two types of
story lines, which describe the voyage of the children of the second generation
to assimilation back to Judaism’s warm embrace. The heroes of the stories which
transpired before the Holocaust (in the novels At One and the Same Time,
Abyss, and All That I Have Loved) carry out a secular return to
the faith of their forefathers: They re-identify themselves as Jews, in a
hostile, anti-Semitic environment by grasping onto Judaism as a cultural asset.
They do not begin to fulfill the religious commandments, but identify them as
human values, which became so rare in Europe in the years surrounding the Nazi
ascent in Germany. Most are overcome at that stage and are even put to death as
Jews, before they manage to complete their trek and reach the Carpathian
mountains’ villages in order to totally repent by accepting upon themselves the
fulfillment of the commandments. Appelfeld’s heroes in stories of the second
type, those which take place during the Holocaust (Katerina, The Ice
Mine, and A Journey into Winter) accomplish a religious return to the
faith of their fathers. Within the ghetto and the forced labor camp, in
incarceration which identified them as Jews, they begin to learn the
commandments and even to fulfill them. It was possible to fulfill very few
commandments under camp conditions, however, prayer, for example, could be
memorized from another prisoner. In this way, prayer was transformed from an
otherwise routine action, to a life sustaining action like bread and clothing.
Fulfilling the commandment strengthens the soul, and one whose soul is steadfast
succeeds in surviving famine and frost.24
In his most comprehensive and significant
work, A Thousand Hearts (1991), Dan Tzalka illustrates the contribution
of a Jew’s commitment to Judaism through the architect Ezra Marinsky. In his
youth, he learned in a “heder” and a yeshiva, however, his uncle
interrupted his religious studies and sent him to study architecture. Soon he
gained a reputation as a successful architect, and before reaching the age of
thirty, he was charged with establishing the Mitridet Hotel, whose construction
continued throughout World War I and the October revolution. Though he could
have established himself as an architect in Russia, he detested the pogroms and
the murderous acts which accompanied the revolutionaries’ progress towards a
better world and in 1919, he and his young wife, Raya, immigrated on the deck of
the “Roslan”, the “Mayflower” of Zionism, sailing from Odessa to Eretz
Israel. Why did he choose to sail specifically to Zion at a time when, because
of his profession and the acclaim, which he had already achieved, he could have
immigrated to any Western country and been successfully absorbed there? A
different author would have been tempted to declare that the hero’s motive was
Zionist, but Dan Tzalka chooses a more original way to explain Marinsky’s
motives to immigrate specifically to the Land of Israel.
As the “Roslan” nears the coast of Eretz
Israel, the omniscient narrator penetrates Marinsky’s consciousness in order to
illustrate the feelings of a Jew returning from exile to his homeland.
Throughout the entire voyage, the architect projected serenity bordering on
indifference and reacted with ironic skepticism to enthusiastic, pathos-filled
Zionist statements made by fellow travelers. The final stage of the voyage,
described through Marinsky’s eyes, portrays him in a different light:
The sea was full of letters,
but wasn’t their form obscured, didn’t their impression pale upon the water?
Rashi’s letters flashed like silver hooks upon the waves for naught,
Maimonides, Rabbi Avraham ben-Ezra and Rabbi Levi ben-Gershom, people who knew
the meaning of the divine voice, what Moshe and the prophets meant, they
elevated themselves like a huge wave and Oh Lord, what did you mean, where did
you take your people, Israel? Rabbi Shmuel ben-Moshe, Nachmanides, Yitzhak
Arame, Abarbanel, Yehuda Halevi – were swept up in the massive wave which
raced to the distant coast, where it crashed with a great reverberation on the
boulders and the sea shuddered again, poorer, scattered, splintered words, and
destroyed letters again rise and spin in its waves. (p. 58)
This is a metaphorical description
integrated in a complete picture which compares the “Roslan” to a chariot of
fire approaching the coast while it is “decorated with torches...pearl drops,
golden tapestries and trails of purple”. The water is a sea of letters from the
books of those at the far-reaches of the West who throughout the generations
missed and longed to reach Zion, letters which safely guide the ship to shore.
From the description, it becomes clear that
Judaism does not only save the individual from hunger and cold, as one can
deduce from Appelfeld’s work, but it has the power to save the Jewish people
from its demise in exile. One who absorbed a Judaic Heritage and studied all of
the writings of the sages, the letters of whose writings Marinsky remembers as
he approaches the shores of Zion (Moses and the prophets, Rashi, Maimonides, ben-Ezra,
ben-Gershom, ben-Shmuel, Nachmanides, Yitzhak Arame, Abarbanel and Yehuda Halevi)
is a Zionist from the start, who at the sight of Jaffa as it appears to him from
within the gray mist, will not be able to restrain himself and will break out in
tears. Marinsky joined everyone and cried from excitement and joy as sons
returning to their homeland. (p. 59) Anyone who, like Marinsky, became a
time-centered Jew by means of the Jewish culture which he absorbed in his
childhood and youth, the national feeling pulsates within him everywhere and
implores him to reach the place destined for the Jewish people – Zion. This type
of excitement will not be felt by one who is only a place-centered Jew
for whom only nativism supports his national feeling. Even Amos Oz was forced to
admit that in his Sabras, Yoni in A Perfect Peace and Boaz in
Black Box, the national feeling is shallow because they are merely
place-centered Jews. The “spark” which shines in the eyes of Azaria and Somo who
were born in the Diaspora is absent in the two Sabras. Azaria and Somo
do, in fact, seem ridiculous in the eyes of the Sabras and their opinions
regarding current events are extreme, however, because they were born in the
Diaspora and are Jews tied to the heritage of the generations, they became
time-centered Jews and the “spark” was preserved in them.
Training Agents to Teach the Heritage
Most of the Jewish people in Israel and
abroad are secular. The anti-Semitism abroad delays the total spiritual
assimilation of the youth, however, as the world becomes more and more open and
the integration into it is simplified, it gets progressively easier for a young
secular Jew to take the additional step, totally freeing himself from
affiliation with the Jewish people. Anyone for whom the continual existence of
the Jewish people is important must understand that time is not working in our
favor. Only by deepening the ties to the spiritual assets created by the Jewish
people throughout the generations and truly studying them, in other words,
through education to maintain Judaism as a cultural asset, at least, can the
threat be thwarted. Over the course of the few decades which have passed since
the establishment of the State, the illusion has been dominant that there is no
need for the wisdom of the generations and that it is possible for the young
Israeli to maintain his national identity with the help of only nativist
elements: Love of the homeland, the Hebrew language, the civic experience
(membership in a youth group, serving in the army and the like) and culture
which was developed in the course of Israeli existence. All of these are
sufficient to provide the youth born and raised in the State of Israel with the
Israeli experience, but they lack the emotional or intellectual depth in order
to keep them in the country and to motivate them to support Jewish nationalism.
The emotional relationship with Jewish culture is capable of preventing our
youth from emigrating from Israel and to be deducted from the register of the
Jewish people, and it is capable of such because it can offer something that
global culture – which is gradually spreading from America to the other
continents in the universe – lacks.
The power of the Jewish culture is in its
authenticity and its original vision and the education system must emphasize
these aspects in the instruction of humanistic subjects. It is not enough to
cultivate the Israeli experience in the Jewish youth in Israel and
abroad, because that only forms a place-centered Jew. In order to motivate a
young person to be a loyal and devoted member of the Jewish people, the
Jewish experience must be cultivated in him which will shape him into a
time-centered Jew, a history and heritage-based Jew. In order to accomplish
this, we require educators who themselves have assimilated the Jewish culture
within them. The obligation of the teacher training seminars is to assist them
by transforming humanistic studies into an impetus for the fashioning of adults’
worldviews as agents of the historical national culture. Only a
teacher-in-training who in the course of his college years acquired sufficient
expertise in Jewish culture, discerned its originality and appreciated its
vision, will feel the moral imperative to bequeath it to his disciples and be
capable of endearing it to them.
III. The Attitude Towards Zionism in Israeli
Literature
Haim Hazaz, among the immigrations period’s
most important authors, managed to formulate the uniqueness of Hebrew literature
within world literature in one of his speeches. He said the following:
Literature in general deals
with the person, the individual and everything that is within him and stems
from him – Love, desire, secrets of the heart, joy, sorrow, regret, lust,
heroism, weaknesses, failures and the like...Hebrew literature is distinct
from all of these literary attributes or from most of them listed before you
here in that...its only hero is the Jewish people, the Jewish collective. The
pathos found in Modern Hebrew literature and the allegories which burst forth
and emerge from it stems from this. It goes without saying that it never
amused itself with literary schools and trends, it didn’t take pleasure in
didactic, sterile and narrow, Jewish intellectualism, nor with the illusions
of mysticism and the other condiments of art and refinement...Hebrew
literature was completely constructive and purposeful, totally directed
inward, completely suffused with a sense of responsibility, concern and
anxiety regarding the fate and future of the nation and was full of
introspection and gravity – especially gravity.
Hazaz also knew that he did not innovate
anything in the characterization of Hebrew literature, as indeed throughout all
of the generations it expressed “concern and anxiety regarding the fate and
future of the nation”, however, when he expressed them before the delegates of
the 25th Zionist Congress, before whom he appeared in Jerusalem in
1961, he expressed his anxiety regarding the transformation which had already
begun to prevail in Israeli literature. And indeed, until his premature death in
March 1973, he witnessed – just as he feared – the visionary impoverishment of
the literature produced within the borders of the nascent Israeli sovereignty
and the alienation from Zionism or the redemption as he referred to it in
his works, was beginning to dominate.
Over the first 50 years of the State’s
existence, Hebrew literature conducted a bitter and obdurate dialogue with
Zionism. At first, it was a critical dialogue, but it later became genuinely
hostile. In the past, I surveyed the development of this dialogue in two
manners. First, I surveyed the content of the claims which literature
raised against Zionism both as an ideology and as a movement actualizing the
prophecy of the Jewish people’s redemption in the Land of Israel. The claims
focused on four failures for which Zionism was portrayed as being responsible.
-
The Visionary Failure – The prognostic failure
of Zionism to correctly predict the manner in which renewed Jewish
sovereignty would be established.
-
The Moral Failure – Its part in the defilement
of the vision’s white flag of the vision with moral injustices
(dispossession and acts of violence) in the process of the establishment of
the Jewish state.
-
The Genetic Failure – Its responsibility for the
progressive deterioration in the quality of the founders’ descendants and in
their ability to adhere to the vision.
-
The Continuity Failure – Its lack of success in
maintaining the desire to continue the vision’s actualization in future
generations.
Second, I traced the historical events,
which most influenced literature’s attitude towards Zionism. This follow-up
underscored the decisive influence of the cyclical wars, which the State fought
against its neighbors since its inception on the attitude towards Zionism. At
this point, I would like to attempt a third, integrated manner which will
describe the worsening in the dialogue between literature and Zionism over the
course of the State’s first 50 years by means of considering the works of three
authors, members of three of the four literary guards simultaneously active at
present in Israeli prose. In each of their works, the dialogue with Zionism
plays a central role and constitutes a section of considerable scope. The three
are: S. Yizhar, among the outstanding members of the first literary guard (“The
Generation in the Land”), A.B. Yehoshua, among the central figures in the second
literary guard (“The New Wave”) and Meir Shalev, one of the most famous figures
in the third literary guard (“The Disillusioned Wave”).
The Disappointment Stage – S. Yizhar
Zionism was portrayed in S. Yizhar’s early
work, which reacted to the War of Independence as that which dispossessed the
Arabs and caused their misery. In his story “Hirbat Hiz’a”, for example, S.
Yizhar bases his indictment of Zionism on hints of the injustice done to the
Jews in recent history (on the Holocaust: “The Spandau never granted any
rights at all”), on an analogy to the fate of the Jews throughout their long
history (“Exile. It played on all of my heartstrings. Our people’s complaint
against the world: Exile! And that apparently became part of me, with my
mother’s milk. What, essentially, have we done here today?”), and on verses from
the Bible which express the eternal moral doctrine of the Jewish people (“when
they reach their refuge it will already be night. Their clothes alone provide
shelter for their skin, in which they will sleep.”). In his story, “The
Captive”, which was written less than a year before “Hirbat Hiz’a”, the warriors
are portrayed, by means of violent verbs, as a gang of aggressors who invaded an
idyllic place and violated the natural harmony and tranquility which existed
there previously:
Among the luxurious golden
sorghum, we sneaked and with our heels trampled truncated bushes of
oaks gnawed at those flocks, our spiked soles touched upon hot, gray
soil...and we broke into a gallop towards the lad who was sitting on a
rock in the shade of the oak.
In this way, S. Yizhar, in his stories
about the War of Independence represents the first stage in the dialogue of the
incipient Israeli literature with Zionism – the disappointment stage. His
works were at the forefront of the expressions of disappointment in Israeli
prose by emphasizing the first two of the four failures listed above: The
visionary failure and the moral failure. Researchers managed to reveal the
expressions of disappointment in S. Yizhar’s texts and those written by others
who followed in the conceptual path which he forged, but they did not provide a
satisfying explanation to the enigmatic connection in those texts between the
War of Independence and the disappointment in Zionism. In addition, due to
this connection, the incipient Israeli literature ignored the 1948 war’s
political and military reality and instead of depicting the magnitude of the
victory and the historical significance of the accomplishment which it produced
in terms of Zionism’s efforts to establish a State for the Jewish people in
Zion, the authors opted instead for a penetrating critique of Zionism.
I want to, once again, suggest an
explanation for the strange connection which was then formed in literature
between the War of Independence and expressions of disappointment in Zionism:
Literature did not reflect the historical substance of the 1948 war but rather
the spiritual anguish which affected the warriors in that war. The 1948
generation absorbed Zionism’s innocent assumption that the Jewish state would be
achieved in a conciliatory fashion, at home, in school, in youth groups and in
the community in which it was raised. Even though the Zionist ideologies
disagreed as to which conciliatory fashion would be employed, they all shared
the common assumption that Zionism would not necessitate establishing the state
through military conquest. Years after I published this explanation in the
literature section of Ha’aretz, on May 12, 1967, and I included it in my
book, Splinters, Professor Anita Shapira characterized this conclusion,
in her book, The Sword of the Dove, as “the defensive ethos” of Zionism.
The disappointment developed among the warriors when it became clear to them
that Zionism had not prepared them for their generation’s central challenge: the
experiences of war. It is possible that had the Jewish people possessed previous
practical political experience and a tradition of orderly military thinking, the
generation would not have been so surprised by the methods employed in its
establishment, and would not have subjected Zionism to criticism so penetrating.
Their disappointment from Zionism and their
revenge against it was expressed by the authors of the 1948 generation in a
number of ways. First, they shifted the discussion from the concrete events of
the war to its moral implications. However, since they recounted the story of
the War of Independence in a realistic style, later readers, those unfamiliar
with the events personally, were under the impression that they read an accurate
description of the 1948 war. Second, they surrounded Zionism with quotation
marks in order to mock it. Zionism had just completed its greatest
accomplishment, however, in the literature of “The 1948 Generation”, it became a
synonym for prattle, for a nice speech composed of words incapable of changing
anything of substance. S. Yizhar’s heroes in Days of Ziklag (1958) speak
of Zionism like a “spitz”. And earlier, the heroine of Yehudit Hendel in
Street of Steps (1955), Erella, thinks in similar terms about her
grandfather, Yeshayahu Dagan: “He has a great love for fancy words and
enthusiastic speeches...and what are those phrases or speeches? They call it
‘Zionism’.” (p. 144, 1998 edition) And the third way in which they accomplished
this, was by abandoning writing about the War of Independence after only ten
years. The appearance of Days of Ziklag, for all intents and purposes,
marked the end of writing about the most significant historical event in the
modern Jewish history.
S. Yizhar did not change his outlook on
Zionism after he returned to writing after almost 30 years. In the five books
that he published during the course of the 1990s, he continued to attack its
nationalist aspirations. In each of them, S. Yizhar identifies “The Land of
Israel” in cosmopolitan terms: “Square”, “Field” and “Land”, in order to make
the claim that he expresses most explicitly in Lovely Malcolmia (1998):
“There was never any homeland here for any one nation...and it always was a
land and there were always nations living here. Each nation had its turn.”
(p. 105) In Zalhavim (1993), S. Yizhar mentioned all of the masters of
the country throughout history in one breath, without ascribing an advantage to
any of them: “Our ancestors and the Philistines, the Byzantines, the Arabs and
everyone”. However, our “ancestors’” invasion in this generation was the most
destructive of all because they came to “develop the backward desolation
with sophisticated Zionist blossoming.” S. Yizhar concealed his resolute
conclusion regarding the renewal of the presence of the Jewish people in the
Land of Israel behind the ironic phrasing. And this is the way it is phrased in
Lovely Malcolmia: “How we are strangers here. How they don’t want us in
this land. And the land itself doesn’t want us. We are nothing more than
another group of invaders who recently insinuated themselves here, after the
interminable series of invaders, sons of invaders, throughout the generations
who constantly came and went in turn, wave after wave, to inherit a land not
theirs.” (p. 177) I am still waiting for the first Palestinian author who
will negate in this way, whether in a direct statement or a polished irony, the
past or the present Arab right to Palestine.
The Rejection Stage – Yehoshua
The succeeding literary guard, “The New
Wave” guard, did not at first challenge the position expressing disappointment
with Zionism as is manifested in the works of “The Generation in the Land”
authors. They invested their initial efforts in enhancing their standing by
means of existential topics and by composing prose in its less realistic forms
(symbolic, allegoric, absurd and ironic). However, the Six Day War forced the
authors of that literary guard to reengage Zionism in dialogue. The most
outstanding authors were the ones who did not wait for the national feelings of
pride which the restoration of additional homeland regions to Jewish sovereignty
aroused to fade as they hurried to accuse Israeli society of small-mindedness
and of an additional dispossession of the “occupied territories” Arabs from
their land. The significant authors from the immigrations and 1948 generations
aligned against them, expressing their belief in “Greater Israel” in the pages
of This is the Land. The debate over the future of the territories did in
fact begin between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War but it still did not
compromise Zionism’s position in the country’s life. The claim that Zionism
failed and therefore its right to influence the State’s direction should be
negated was only proffered in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. This conceptual
position was advocated in the 1970s and 1980s by A.B. Yehoshua who at that point
abandoned symbolic, absurd and ironic writing in the short story literary forms
and moved to allegorical-conceptual-political writing in the novel form.
After the Yom Kippur War, writing which
reacted to current events dominated the works of the authors from the two
younger literary guards, the authors of “The New Wave” (Yoram Kaniuk, Amos Oz
and A.B. Yehoshua) and “The Disillusioned Wave” (Yitzhak ben-Ner, David Grossman
and Meir Shalev). Since then, the political novel has thrived in Israeli prose.
In most political novels, written in the two subsequent decades, the topical
messages relied on a multi-generational story line relating the story of three
generations in the life of a family in order to describe the failure of the
vision towards whose realization the founding father began laboring. The
similarity between the multi-generational plot and the broad epic plot of a
family saga is merely external. Novella-length stories like Requiem to
Na’aman (1978) and Minotaur (1980), both written by Binyamin Tammuz,
sufficed to achieve the conceptual purpose for which they were intended. The
first political novels of Amos Oz, A Perfect Peace (1982) and Black
Box (1987), in which he emphasized Zionism’s responsibility for the genetic
failure were equally long and based on the same model.
Yehoshua, who strove to emphasize the
continuity failure, strayed from the multi-generational novel, preferring the
more limited family saga model. His novels tell of couples whose married life
has run into trouble because of the disparities between them. The disparity,
which Yehoshua stressed time and again in the couple’s life, was between the
spiritual visionary tendency of one to the temporal-practical tendency of his
life-partner. The plots of the four novels, which he wrote during these two
decades, each describe attempts to dissolve the marriage and separate the
elements incapable of peacefully coexisting. In The Lover (1977), Adam
(the couple’s earthly element) attempts to separate from Asia (the marriage’s
visionary element) by searching for a lover to whom he could deliver her thereby
freeing himself from the torments of his conscience, which resulted from a
depressing incident which transpired in the War of Independence and involves
erotic resurrection from the destruction of another. Adam retreats from his plan
when he is surprised to discover that if he wants to separate from the woman,
there is someone who is willing to tie himself to her with bonds of love: the
Arab boy, Na’im, who became the lover of Dafi, the daughter who so resembles his
wife, Asia. The story ends with the hurried return of Na’im to his village in
order to distance him from the anticipated danger. The whole incident transpires
while at the fringe of the drama’s stage, Zionism is depicted, as expected in
allegory, through Veduca’s – an elderly woman who was born the year that Zionism
was born – exhaustion.
In Late Divorce (1982), the
separation between the mates succeeds a bit better than it succeeded in The
Lover. Kaminka (the couple’s visionary element which henceforth will be
represented in the series by a hero of European origin) brings a rabbinical
group to the hospital in which Naomi (the earthly element which henceforth will
be portrayed in the series by the hero’s orientalism) is in order to divorce
her. Naomi’s dementia is manifest in an intense desire to stockpile food as a
result of the doubling of the State – a transparent hint to the economic boom,
which swept the country after its dimensions doubled during the Six Day War. The
novel ends strangely: After Kaminka finalizes the divorce he does not leave the
gates of the hospital in order to fly to his new lover waiting for him in
America, but rather attempts to leave through a gap in the fence and gets stuck
there. The strange end to the novel’s story line expresses temporary reservation
from a total separation between the visionary (Zionism) and the earthly (the
State). It is true that compared to Adam in the previous novel, Kaminka
concluded the legal separation from his first wife, however, he does not take
advantage of his divorce from Naomi and remains with her in the Israeli insane
asylum.
Only in Molcho, his third novel in
the allegoric, ideational, political series, does Yehoshua complete the
separation of Zionism from the State. Molcho’s wife, with her fatal illness,
represents the terminal condition of Zionism. The novel’s story indeed begins
with the death of Molcho’s wife (the couple’s visionary element), but for Molcho
(the story’s earthly element) it is difficult to part from the deceased as she
continues to influence his behavior even after he was widowed from her. This
novel presents a new stage in the severing of the ties between the vision and
the State. The death of his wife already completed Molcho’s separation from her
de jure and de facto. Nevertheless, he must now overcome the
emotional connection, which continues to bind him to her. This is the role,
which the story assigns to three women with whom Molcho conducts erotic
relationships during his first year as a widower. Due to the similarity of each
of the three to some aspect – looks or personality – of the deceased, each of
the courted women assists Molcho to regain the ability to accept separation from
his dead wife. Molcho’s separation from the deceased is completed only when he
meets the new object of his love in the remote Moshav Zerua, the girl with the
leadership qualities who shares his temporal-oriental mentality. Molcho knows
that he must wait until she matures, but thanks to her, for the first time, he
experiences the sense of freedom for which he longed. He feels that he finally
succeeded in liberating himself from the deceased and prepares himself for his
new love. However, he, too, knows that the previous connection with the
deceased, exacted a steep price from him: He was “left back”, in other words, he
lost valuable time due to his temptation-surrender to the ideology which so
enchanted him in his youth, however it squeezed his personality from him and
almost destroyed his masculinity.
After realizing the separation between
vision and State in Molcho, Yehoshua could suggest, in Mr. Mani,
the fourth novel in the series, the Zionist alternative to Western Zionism,
which in his estimation prevented the State from arriving at a resolution of the
Arab-Israel conflict. Through the Mani family lineage, the novel points to the
Oriental Zionist solution (one which never existed, though Yehoshua tried so
hard to ascribe it a dynastic character), a solution which had never been tried.
In contrast to Western Zionism, which was inconsiderate of the national
aspirations of the Arabs when conceiving its solution – the establishment of the
Jewish state, each Mani in his generation attempts to establish the Jewish hold
in the Land of Israel by means of a solution of compromise with the Arabs. In
the three previous novels, Yehoshua first gradually severed the State’s ties
with classic Zionism, the western-Ashkenazic one, and thereby laid the
groundwork in “Mr. Mani” for the solution which he wanted to suggest for the
Arab-Israel conflict: To call the ideology of compromise with the Arabs in
the Land of Israel – Zionism. In this way, Yehoshua moved Israeli literature
from the disappointment stage led by S. Yizhar, to the rejection stage of
Herzl’s political Zionism, which he portrayed as unfit to dictate policy to the
State. His demand to separate the vision from the State was raised in the four
novels in order, at long last, to enable the State to be run in accordance with
the realistic possibilities in the Middle East of the late 20th
century.
The Abandonment Stage – Meir Shalev
The solution of separation between Zionism
and the State was apparently not extreme enough after the Lebanon War and the
intifada. The next, definitive stage, which ordains for Zionism a decree of
post-Zionism, can be found in Meir Shalev’s books. In his four novels, Shalev
tells of the deterioration of the Zionist village from a brief success to a
continuing failure in order to finally establish that it is necessary to
immediately abandon Zionism and be liberated from the death rites which
developed to preserve its memory. One must begin Meir Shalev’s fictional story
about the Zionist village, with that which is recounted in the novel, Esau
(1991), beginning with “the family” departure from Jerusalem. There it is told
that the great-grandmother, Sarah, the convert, despised Jerusalem. She stole
the Patriarch’s carriage, loaded the twins and her spineless husband – an
exemplary descendant of the parasitical life led in the city, which trains its
children to passively await messianic salvation – onto it and brought the family
to the village. In the move from Jerusalem to the village, the whole Zionist
story is encapsulated: Taking fate into one’s own hands and realizing salvation
by means of auto-emancipation. Sarah hopes to initiate the new Jewish dynasty –
supported by manual labor (“inverting the pyramid”) – by settling in the village
and baking bread in the bakery. The significance of the departure from
“Jerusalem” the village is illuminated by Pines, the teacher in A Russian
Novel (1988), the first novel in the series. He explained to generations of
students that at the village settlement, Zionism is changing the history of our
people. In this revolution, Zionism is canceling the Land of Israel’s
traditional role throughout the course of the Diaspora as a national burial
ground. Thanks to Zionism, Israel was to become a national homeland in which our
people would renew their temporal lives like all other nations. The failure of
Zionism is illustrated in the bequest of one of the village’s founders, Mirkin,
to his grandson, Baruch Shinhar, to uproot the orchard and turn the land into a
“pioneers’ cemetery”.
In the novel, Esau, the reason for
the failure of the family’s settlement in the village is articulated. The
temporal-Zionist salvation which was initiated by the great-grandmother in
taking the “family” out of “Jerusalem”, led to a dispute between her two twins
over the inheritance. At the conclusion of the first round of their struggle,
which takes place around the year 1948, Ya’akov gets the woman and the bakery
and the ability to produce children and bake bread, while his brother, who
adopts the nickname “Esau”, is forced to exile himself from the land. Ya’akov’s
acquisition of the inheritance transferred the Jacobean fate to his competitor.
Esau, for the first time, experiences life in exile, a barren life during which
he dreams of returning to the woman stolen from him and baking bread in the
bakery from which he was dispossessed. It is obvious that the Palestinian
narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict is recounted in this parable.
The novel As a Few Days (1994) also
tells of the failure of the settlement in the village. At its center as well, is
the struggle over the woman’s heart, but this time there are three competitors
for her: Globerman, Rabinowitz and Sheinfeld. In this novel, the failure of the
Zionist village is manifest in the congregation of eccentrics who find something
there and in the confusion of Zeide, the grandson of the founders of the
village, who doesn’t know in the footsteps of which of the three men who courted
his mother, Yehudit, he should follow. The dilemma, which confronts Zeide (the
mythological Grandfather Israel), is whether to continue Sheinfeld, the
“tent-dweller’s” Jacobean plight, or to follow the path of Rabinowitz, the “man
of the furrows”. Like all of the grandchildren telling the story of Zionism in
Shalev’s novel, Zeide, too, will not produce a new generation for his nation’s
dynasty and will wait for the end of his life watching the crows and
reconstructing his indefinite past and undetermined future.
The village, which was not identified in
the first three novels, is identified in the novel In His House in the
Wilderness (1998), as the Kinneret settlement, a well-known and significant
site in Zionist history in Israel. The second immigration pioneers founded
Kinneret in 1909. The story begins with the “family’s” abandonment of the
settlement, when their expectations to support themselves through agriculture
were disappointed. The survivors retreat to Jerusalem, which is described in the
novel as a city which absorbs the survivors of the Zionist adventure in three
institutions: A house for the blind, an orphanage and an insane asylum. In this
way, Jerusalem, too, assumes its symbolic significance in the story as a city
representing the stage before the secular-Zionist redemption, the stage of
passive waiting for the religious-messianic redemption. The retreat from the
“village” to “Jerusalem” just eternalizes Zionism’s failure. The grandson,
Raphael, who narrates the story of “the family” in this novel, describes the
death rites customary in the house in which all of the widows – who survived
after the premature deaths of all the men in various catastrophes – raised him
and those which he learned from their neighbor, Avraham, the stone-mason.
Raphael’s education is completed when he
realizes that his destiny is to end the failed Zionist adventure with a
post-Zionist solution: To perform for Zionism the ultimate act of kindness and
bury it in the most appropriate place, the desert, a cemetery for visions of
that sort, which were corrupted in their implementation, and after claiming the
lives of those who implemented it, depress the survivors with death rites in
their memory. This last novel is the most decisive of all. In it, the suggestion
is not only to take Zionism to its appropriate place, burial in the desert, but
also to bear the consequences of having been enticed by its vision. Raphael
accepts the edict and awaits his death in the desert. He does not want to father
a descendant and perpetuate the existence of the dynasty, even though the
continuity of “the family” is totally contingent on his offspring, after all the
men died and after his sister joined the widows and refused to marry. And,
indeed, Raphael relocates to the desert, not as a dreamy representative of the
Society for the Protection of Nature, but as the last descendant of a dynasty, a
descendant upon whom the responsibility to bury Zionism in the primeval desert
was placed, so that it may be swept into the Dead Sea.
The Buds of Return
To this point, we have discussed the
gradual, deepening abandonment of Zionism as manifest in the works of three of
the most influential authors, whose works also represent the conceptual position
of most of their colleagues in their respective literary guards. The few who
strayed from the majority position in their literary guard paid, and continue to
pay, a heavy price for doing so. Their different assessment of Zionism and its
appropriate role in the life of the State remains unheard, or more precisely,
its sounding is prevented. Only a handful of writers protect the eternal light
from being extinguished. These authors stood up to the falsehood in the
post-Zionist philosophy and the frivolity of its proponents in order to warn
against the abandonment of Zionism which threatens the continued existence of
the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people. Their obstinacy only
produced the beginning of an attitudinal change towards Zionism in the course of
the 1990s, the final decade of the 20th century.
The trend opposed to the one described in
the works of the aforementioned three authors, was manifest by the authors
listed below, in the renaissance of the Zionist novel, whose four
characteristics crystallized in the prose of the immigrations period:
Expansive Story Line – the story
line stretches over the Zionist time expanse in the life of the Jewish people.
The Hero’s Image – An image which is
the opposite of the image of the anti-hero so common in Israeli prose for years,
an image capable of leadership and of fighting for the realization of the
national vision of redemption of the Jewish people in their homeland.
Ideological Causality – The heroes’
motives in the Zionist novel are grounded in Zionist ideology, in conjunction
with human motives – psychological, social and economic – which generally
motivate literary characters.
Language Replete with Allusions –
which makes reference to phrases and images from literary sources on which
Zionist philosophy is based.
The renaissance of the Zionist novel was
led by Moshe Shamir in his trilogy Distant From Pearls, the
publication of whose installments stretched over twenty years (1973, 1984,
1991). In this epic wide-ranging work, Shamir continued to develop the central
idea, which he raised in My Life With Ishmael (1968), that the Six Day
War prepared Zionism for its finest hour. Through the wondrous image of Leah
Berman, Shamir tells of the history of the “mini-revolution” and its success in
the shadow of the class-related and cosmopolitan “great revolution” in whose
victory so many believed and contemptuously rejected Zionism as hopeless.
Natan Shoham also compared the two revolutions in his ironic novel Bone
to Its Bone (1981), but continued to describe people’s blindness regarding
Zionism also in Rosendorf Quartet (1987). In his novel, The Heart of
Tel Aviv (1996), he chose to recount Zionism’s success through the
nondescript residents of one house in the first Hebrew city in order to explain
its success through its popular nature as a movement of all segments of the
nation.
Aharon Meged chose the satirical
path to battle post-Zionism in the novel, Iniquity (1996), in the tale of
the poet Levinstein who discovered after the Six Day War that a Zionist poem,
similar to the one which he published after the War of Independence and for
which he was widely lauded, was rejected by all editors because “love of the
land, its expanses, its skies, its contiguity, is forbidden love! It is sinful!
It is permitted to speak of those only with cynicism and irony.” However, Meged
did not suffice with that and in his next novel, Love-Flowers from the Holy
Land (1998), reacted to the blindness of the post-Zionists towards the
success of Zionism with the aid of an English pilgrim, Beatrice
Campbell-Bennett, who arrived in Israel at the turn of the century. Despite her
difficult personal problems, she discerns that an unusually daring enterprise is
developing in the Holy Land by wonderful Jews the likes of whom she never
encountered in England and whom her anti-Semitic father never imagined existed
anywhere on Earth, Jews whom the Diaspora did not cause them to forget their
love of Zion. The influence of Zionism on a native-born Israeli which manifest
itself in his simple love for his homeland was told by Hanoch Bartov in
the novel, Halfway Out (1994). The renaissance of the Zionist novel
specifically in the writings of the authors belonging to the first literary
guard is the most conspicuous phenomenon in the return to Zionist trend, though
the phenomenon already began in the writings of authors of the second literary
guard in A Thousand Hearts by Dan Tzalka (1991) and in two novels
by Eli Amir, the more successful, Farewell, Baghdad (1992) and the less
successful Saul’s Love (1998).
The Moral Choice
Beyond their literary significance, I
appreciate these novels for their contribution in reassessing two accusations
which had also been previously leveled against Zionism: The first – rethinking
the assessment of its morality (challenging the doubt which S. Yizhar raised on
this issue in his works). The second – rethinking the assessment of Zionism’s
success as the movement for the redemption of the Jewish people (challenging Yehoshua’s resolute rejection of the State’s ability to derive any benefit from
its continued affiliation with Zionism). And I believe that the day is not far
off when the errors committed in Israeli prose regarding Zionism, some rashly
and some intentionally, will be corrected by means of a third revision – works
which will perpetuate the Zionist philosophy regarding the realization of the
redemption in its entirety (challenging the declaration in Shalev’s works that
it is “post” and has completed its role in the life of the nation).
And as for the dialogue which Israeli
literature had conducted with Zionism to this point – it can be summed up in a
number of conclusions:
-
This dialogue demarcates the literature
which was written since the establishment of the State as a new literary
period in the history of Hebrew literature, the Israeli period, as distinct
from the three previous periods of “Modern Hebrew literature” (the
enlightenment period, the renaissance period and the immigrations period).
During those three periods, Hebrew literature conducted a dialogue with
Judaism, but since the establishment of the State, the dialogue with Judaism
ended and the dialogue with Zionism began. This dialogue began in 1948 with
disappointed, though still legitimate criticism of Zionism and by the
State’s 50th year, deteriorated to an anti-Zionist, post-Zionist
position.
-
This was not a somnolent and static
dialogue but rather a gradually developing dialogue, depicted through
central sections of the works of three authors from the first three literary
groups in Israeli literature. Three stages can be discerned: the
disappointment stage, the rejection stage and the abandonment stage.
-
The deterioration in the attitude
towards Zionism in the course of this dialogue during the years of
sovereignty was influenced by fluctuations in the national mood, rather than
by Zionism’s actual and objective accomplishments as an ideology and a
movement working towards its actualization by facilitating a reorientation
of the Jewish people from existence in conditions of exile to existence in
conditions of redemption and political independence.
-
The national mood in Israeli society
tended towards fluctuations under the influence of events which were
existentially the most decisive in the course of the State’s existence – the
wars which the State waged with its neighbors – from the 1948 war through
the Intifada war.
-
Each war’s influence on the national
mood did not necessarily correspond with its military outcome. On the
contrary, it almost always deviated from the military result due to the
political influence possessed by those who dictated the national mood at the
time. The deviation from the historical truth had serious ramifications on
the power of the State of Israel, which continues its existential battle
with its neighbors.
-
The role of Hebrew literature in the
State of Israel at this time is to rehabilitate trust in Zionism which,
bottom line, is not only the 20th century’s singular successful
revolution, but it is also the only prospect capable of ensuring continued
Jewish existence in the future. One cannot rule out mobilization in
Zionism’s favor any more than mobilization against it, but as all great
literature is mobilized for some purpose – artistic or principled – the
choice to side with the Zionist vision is a moral choice as it, in and of
itself, is incapable of impeding authors possessing proven literary talent.
It will only add depth and meaning and almost certainly longevity to the
works of writers with that sort of talent. Estrangement from the vision and
its abandonment enable, apparently even those with limited talents to
distinguish themselves with provocative, cynical and banal ideas which are
of no benefit to any nation and certainly not to a nation struggling for
survival.
Bibiliography
Recommendations for expanded readings on
the topics raised by the author in this policy paper which express his outlook
on Israeli literature and his assessments of its accomplishments and its
shortcomings.
Hazaz, Haim, The Right of
Redemption, (1977).
Oren, Yosef, Books in the series “The
History of Israeli Fiction”, published by Yahad, Rishon LeZion:
Splinters
(1981).
The Disillusionment in Israeli Prose
(1983).
The Israeli Short Story (1987).
Zionism and Sabraism in the Israeli Novel
(1990).
A Salute to Israeli Literature (1991).
The Pen as a Political Trumpet (1992).
Identities in Israeli Prose (1994).
Trends in Israeli Prose (1995).
New Voices in Israeli Press (1997).
Israeli Literature – Where To? (1998).
Best-Sellers and Quality Books in Israeli Prose
(2000).
The Feminine Voice in Israeli Prose
(2001).
Shapira, Anita,
The Sword of the Dove, (1992).
Articles by the
author:
“The Fear of the Impulsive Zionism”,
Moznaim, September 1974.
“Language in Bad Shape”,
Ma’ariv Literary Supplement, October 28, 1988.
