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"Hebrew fiction 20th century History and criticism."
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Challenging Contemporary Historiography in Shmuel Yosef Agnon's Only Yesterday
Agnon's Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday) masterfully depicts twentieth century Palestinian Jewish life and responds critically to Second Aliyah narratives popular in his day which lauded seasonal workers and stressed their critical role in Yishuv development. Agnon found the Second Aliyah image contrived; his novel presents an alternative view of the period. His protagonist Isaac Kumer, like other Second Aliyah workers, proves unable to resolve the ongoing tension between Zionist commitment and his lingering feelings of familial obligation. When he fails to participate in the grand redemptive narrative that would enable him simultaneously to persevere as a Zionist and aid his family, he is punished, “sacrificed” as a self-absorbed immigrant whose preoccupation with his own needs prevents him from conceiving a grander Zionist vision that would address the needs of European Jewry. In the wake of the Holocaust, Agnon encourages a broadening of the vision to meet the survivors' needs.
Journal Article
On the Historical Imaginary of Contemporary Israeli Fiction, or, Postmodernism's Aftermath in Novels by Lilach Netanel and Yiftach Ashkenazi
In this article, I argue that Israeli literature of the last decade imagines Israeli history in a different way than its postmodern predecessors of the 1980s and 1990s. Focusing on the way history is imagined in Lilach Netanel's The Hebrew Condition and Yiftach Ashkenazi's Fulfillment, I argue that both novels consciously revolve around a crisis of historicity, or the ability to relate subjective experience to history. This article contends that literary celebration of the dissolution of the so-called Zionist metanarrative during the 1980s and 1990s is dialectically subsumed in the contemporary recognition of this dissolution as a generalized loss of the possibility of narrating history. I conclude by suggesting that this transformation in literary historical imaginary should be seen as part of an attempt to attempt to imagine solutions to the contradictions of Israeli neoliberal capitalism and its social effects.
Journal Article
“His Ancestors Were Calling Him Back to His Origins”: Zionism and the Poetics of Space in the Early Work of S. Yizhar
S. Yizhar's literary persona is known to be central in the making of the Sabra identity. This article offers an interpretation of the role played by his poetics of space in shaping both the spatial and social boundaries of this new elitist identity. These boundaries are read as driven by poetic interests in a Zionist literary context. For Zionist literature, representing the land of Israel as real is the literary equivalent of the theopolitical shift from myth to history. The Sabra generation is expected to overcome Jewish strangeness and to capture the land both politically and literarily. But Yizhar's poetics refuses to grasp the land; it follows modern philosophy and sees the full representation of reality as impossible, hence he creates boundaries for the poetic self. This refusal to fully represent is portrayed here as creating the political sense of boundaries out of poetics. Yizhar's poetics of space is demonstrated in the short stories included in Sipurei mishor and the story “The Prisoner” as well as in his spatial stance both in Jewish-Arab conflict and in questions of nature preservation. His point of view appears as kernel that can explain sociopolitical trends in modern Israel and its quasireligious motivation.
Journal Article
Rereading “Decadent” Palestinian Hebrew Literature: The Intersection of Zionism, Masculinity, and Sexuality in Aharon Reuveni's ‘Ad Yerushalayim
This article asserts that politics motivated Aharon Reuveni to employ representations of psychic fragmentation and dysfunctional social institutions to portray Palestinian Jewish life in his novelistic trilogy ‘Ad Yerushalayim. These purportedly decadent representations helped him foreground individual and collective flaws he saw limiting the early twentieth-century Palestinian Jewish community's development and promote norms he saw as conducive to growth. Thus, as examination of the trilogy's central male figures demonstrates, Reuveni advances a Zionist masculinity grounded in introspectiveness and ongoing commitment to the achievement of communally shared goals. To further support this Zionist masculine form, the trilogy categorizes men who pursue homosocial ties with others who don't maintain this masculinity as homosexuals. Thus gender and sexuality are used to coerce male readers into adopting specific behavioral norms. This attention to gender and sexuality's role in early twentieth-century Palestinian Hebrew fiction offers a way to grasp its long-overlooked political character.
Journal Article
Against Philosophy: Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous as Therapeutic Literature
This essay examines the representation of philosophy in Yaakov Shabtai’s single completed novel, Past Continuous (1977). It argues that while Shabtai was evidently concerned with philosophy as an intellectual activity, and with the philosophizing intellectual as a social type, his novel — contrary to several influential interpretations — does not seek to impart a philosophical view. Rather, the novel’s close depiction of its characters’ intellectual preoccupations and obsessions is cautionary in intent: its aim is not to offer an all-encompassing theory of life but to warn its intellectual reader against the need to search for such a theory in the first place. The novel’s cautionary dimension affiliates it both with what Richard Rorty has described as the post-metaphysical tradition in twentieth-century thought — a mode of writing that he associates with the “therapeutic” works of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey — and with the age-old literary genre of anti-philosophical satire, as practiced by Aristophanes, Voltaire, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. After situating Past Continuous in these contexts, the essay proceeds to discuss the social-historical background that informed the novel’s early reception and influenced the prevalent critical tendency to philosophize its meaning.
Journal Article
“They Spoke in their Tongue”: The Ethics of Partial Deafness in the Poetics of Yehoshua Kenaz
This paper focuses on the frequent use of the linguistic combination “they spoke in their tongue” in the poetics of Yehoshua Kenaz. The use of this phrase in Kenaz's poetics in the 1980s marks, I argue, a profound poetic and ethical turning point in those years. This is a decisive transformation reflected in the way Kenaz formed characters, in particular, in his portrayal of non-Hebrew-speaking immigrants. In contrast to the approach taken by writers such as Amos Oz's or A. B. Yehoshua's approach to non-Hebrew-speaking characters, when characters speak in their tongue, Kenaz's narrator can never hear everything. In Kenaz's work, the asymmetrical relationship between the Hebrew-speaking narrator and the foreign character comes to the fore. This involves the drawing attention to the tense gap between the Hebrew language and the foreign tongue, a gap constituting an impassable barrier and an unequivocal obstacle for the Hebrew speaker who wishes to hear. Unlike with erasure/immersion poetics, Kenaz leaves an impassable obstacle with regard to the foreign character's language, which is a linguistic position that I call the poetics of trace.
Journal Article
To Be or Not to Be an Israeli Arab: Sayed Kashua and the Prospect of Minority Speech-Acts
This essay is dedicated to the writings of Sayed Kashua, the young Israeli Palestinian novelist, journalist, and screenwriter who has become a central, if controversial, figure within the Israeli public domain: a target of both political and literary praise and blame. Specifically the essay examines Kashua's active participation in the Israeli (Hebrew) public sphere and the way in which his writings take part in the construction of a critical minority discourse. By this I do not simply mean the obvious: that, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Kashua occupies a minority position, which is therefore \"reflected\" in his writing. To the contrary, I argue that what is significant about Kashua's writings is that they seem to engage in the destruction of the very perception of coherent and natural \"national affiliations\" as they call attention to the discursive processes through which the Israeli Arab/Palestinian is created
a national minority who as such is also (and necessarily so) a traitor, an inauthentic Palestinian, a wannabe Jew, in short, a failed identity. Indeed, Kashua's insistence on his \"Israeliness\" (by writing in Hebrew, referring to himself as an Israeli Arab, and rejecting the demand that he be more \"authentically Arab\"), while repeatedly documenting the impossibility of actually
an Israeli-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian, draws attention to the limits of any national discourse
to successfully account for the question of minorities. Regarding the experience of the Israeli Palestinian as a site of productive ironic performativity, Kashua's texts, I conclude, break open the monolithic image of the nation, exposing the inherent violence and contradictions involved in positioning Israel as a \"Jewish State\" and in situating Israeli Palestinians as incomplete members of either Israeli or Palestinian (national) collectives.
Journal Article
Literary Passports
Literary Passports is the first book to explore modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. It not only serves as an introduction to this important body of literature, but also acts as a major revisionist statement, freeing this literature from a Zionist-nationalist narrative and viewing it through the wider lens of new comparative studies in modernism. The book's central claim is that modernist Hebrew prose-fiction, as it emerged from 1900 to 1930, was shaped by the highly charged encounter of traditionally educated Jews with the revolution of European literature and culture known as modernism.
The book deals with modernist Hebrew fiction as an urban phenomenon, explores the ways in which the genre dealt with issues of sexuality and gender, and examines its depictions of the complex relations between tradition, modernity, and religion.
eBook