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Karen Grumberg sets down anchor in contemporary theories of the vernacular landscape, then embarks on subtle close readings of recent Israeli fiction that demonstrates how literature in practice can complicate those discourses.

The fact that Esther's story is told in confrontation with the photographs lends fluidity to the characters' identities. Because there is a gap between visual representation and the verbal-narrative plane, the photos do not allow character to be fixed. The very act of photography, the moment it takes place, is an identity-building moment (for the demanding Boucherat, the restrained Sicourelle, and the rebellioussubmissive child). [...]exposure of the conditions under which the picture is taken (and the mechanism of photography) also exposes the way these identifying features-unique each time a photo is snapped-are produced. According to the logic of the novel, if the aura was lost during the photographic process, it is possible to restore it by returning to the mechanism of its destruction: to find the place where it might have been constructed differently, and the aura saved or reconstructed. [...]with Benjamin, for whom the cult exists and blurs the political, in Matalon the return of revelation in the photo portrait, along with its aura, not only does not obscure the political aspect, but also returns the aura to ritual through photography, through reproduction, paradoxically via the film itself. Because what is photographed-the face-marks the return of the unique revelation, but also a political moment.

This essay explores one of the central issues in Ronit Matalon's writing from its inception: the home, especially as it manifests itself in her recent novel,Kol tse'adenu(2008). Matalon is known as one of the dominant voices in the Israeli literary sphere following the disintegration of Israel's hegemonic centers of power in the late 1970s. However, her position in the critical domain concerning Zionist identity in the 1980s and 1990s is extremely complex. On the basis of a philosophical analysis of the interrelated concepts ofhome, identity, andalterity, this essay considers the political implications of a perception of home that attends to the chaotic as an integral part of the domestic sphere, and approaches the tense inner dialectic by which Matalon puts the category of home and its necessity on one line with her incisive critique of Zionists' notions of identity.

This article examines the poetic and visual representations of the novelThe One Facing Usby Ronit Matalon via reading the famous novella of Joseph Conrad,Heart of Darkness. The importance and originality ofThe One Facing Uslie in the development of a representational language, and hence of original and daring coping mechanisms that define identities within a post-colonial situation that has residual colonial aspects. Matalon links an investigation into earlier colonial or post-colonial journeys and a search for the “truth of lineage” via the tale of Esther's journey. The truth of lineage is inseparably intertwined with colonial and post-colonial situations. Matalon uses the art of photography for which light is essential, inserting photographs into the narrative as a way of struggling against physical, emotional, and ideological blindness about a space tainted by oppressive and racist ideology as well as blindness to the outcomes of men's personally and politically motivated actions. Home is created from a memoir and constructed as a collection of visual and lexical images that combine to create complex arabesques of identity with varied and fragile constituents. Language is key in the establishment of this fragile entity, alongside visual art. Hebrew language, despite the definitive rejection of its exclusivity here, is an inseparable part of that nonterritorial home.

In her article \"The Female Best-Friend Novel: Narration and the Reconsideration of the Political Act,\" Neta Stahl argues that twentieth-and twenty-first-century women novelists borrowed the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century best-friend narrative, reintroducing it for the purpose of challenging the very concept of the political act, namely, what modern, liberal society considers as a political action and what stands behind it. The article focuses on four novels written by novelists from four different countries: the American novelist Toni Morrison's Sula (1973); the Israeli novelist Ronit Matalon's Sarah, Sarah (2000); the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale: Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (Book 3 of The Neapolitan Novels: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2013); and the British novelist Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016). It demonstrates that in these novels, the political act is reconsidered, against the gaze of the best-friend and against the role of a supposedly female 'prince charming'. Further, Stahl argues that the modern female best- friend novel is not a 'female counterpart' to the male best-friend novel, but rather a new take on a female literary tradition associated with a genre that is often dismissed by the intellectual elite as popular literature, thanks to its use of low-brow devices borrowed from the nineteenth-century novel.

Kol tse-adenu (2008), The Sound of Our Steps is Matalon's most personal novel. It is not defined as an autobiography, although it incorporates major experiences and descriptions that hint at the life of the author. The novel describes the problematic coming of age of the protagonist as a Mizrahi woman by implementing a new discursive approach to space and language that works to question the pillars of the Israeli Zionist literary canon.In terms of its political and gendered stance and its innovative writing style, The Sound of Our Steps gains from being read in conjunction with the discourse of African American women's autobiographical writing as exemplified by bell hooks, and as a form of deterritorialization of the autobiographical genre, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. The novel is structured in a rhizomatic way that undermines causality and linearity and vitiates the notion of a singular life narrative. It describes mother-daughter relations in a way that is not aimed at a fixed normative identity, but rather constitutes a constant search for a \"line of flight\" from her restricting surroundings. Reading the novel in the light of hooks and Deleuze and Guattari helps highlight the unique artistic nature of the book, which constitutes a critique of race and gender-based oppression in the margins of Israeli society, and offers an unconventional clue for reterritorialization.

In her essay “The Materiality and Embodiment of Violence: Ronit Matalon’s Poetics of Responsibility” Shiri Goren discusses Matalon’s novel Bliss (Sarah-Sarah, 2000) as a complex and bleak account of domestic and political decline. On the backdrop of the first Intifada, a Tel Avivian marriage falls apart and a lifelong powerful and intimate friendship between two women ends abruptly. In another geographical location and slightly different timeframe, early November 1995, a French-Jewish family prepares for the cremation of one of its sons, who died of AIDS. Rejecting potential interpretations of national allegory, Goren argues that one of the foundational assumptions of the novel is that the realms of political public trauma and personal calamity are ultimately not far apart. The harsh outcomes of violence become entwined with intimate, personal stories and are expressed in every realm of private and public life. The metaphor of malaise and the physical disintegration of the private and social body in Matalon’s narrative reflect both the internal and external experiences of living in Israel during such troubled times. Matalon’s poetics, Goren suggests, aims at mapping brutality and inquiring into the origin and anatomy of violence both in and beyond the Israeli context.

Abramovich talks about Ronit Matalon's first novel The One Facing Us, a work of immeasurable originality and force about cultural displacement and the search for roots. The novel synthesizes the staple mechanics of the ethnic novel which values the atavistic ancestral elements and the rich tapestry of traditions and folklore as a source of artistic inspiration with the treasury of postmodern modulations. She succeeds by deploying a non-linear plot line and a sagacious device to probe the cultural displacement of an Egyptian family, its disintegration and dispersal to Israel, New York and Africa after the Second World War.

[...]a fiction writer, essayist, and literary critic, she is currently professor of comparative literature at the University of Haifa and at the Sam Spiegel Institute of Cinema and is a member of the Forum for Mediterranean Cultures at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. Instead of a linear autobiography, Matalon offers readers an impressionistic portrait of each of the family members in numerous short chapters loosely connected by the last word of one to the first word of the next. Because this had been destructive to the family, I was afraid of writing.

Matalon's stories deal with the core problems of Israeli culture-such as the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and inner-colonialism in Ashkenazi-Mizrahi power relations-and simultaneously with universal issues such as love, friendship, family relations, domestic violence, moral responsibility, and the scope of art. The capacity or incapacity to speak out about sexual violence prescribes the characters' identities (In Bliss, Ofri has her mouth stuffed with earth and weeds; when as an adult she brings the subject up with Sarah, Sarah stops the conversation by stating that it doesn't matter; in Galu et paneha the deserting lover touches the narrator's legs under her skirt as he silences her and tries to coax her to leave without burning his house down). [...]it is. The repetition of images, such as the formative image of the roofless kitchen under renovation that appears in Ze im ha-panim eleinu, and is granted an illuminating reading in Tsal's article, or the refigured scene of the father's shocked and pained response to Egypt's loss in the Six Day War in conflict with the mother's Zionist response in both novels, attests to Matalon's dynamics of repetition and revision that enable the continuous flow of destructive and constructive views of the endlessly intricate terrain before her.