ISRAEL’S DIVERSITY CELEBRATED
THROUGH ITS LITERATURE
Why There’s More to Israeli Literature Than Just Hebrew: Aviya Kushner, The Forward, Aug. 11, 2017 — An unusual session at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem chaired by prominent literary critic Dan Laor celebrated the contributions to Israeli literature of writers writing in languages other than Hebrew.
Filling the Artistic Void: Meir Y. Soloveichik, Commentary Magazine, Dec. 2018 — In 1966, the word went forth from Stockholm that Shmuel Yosef Agnon was to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Israeli to be so honored. Journalists, and the Swedish Consul, excitedly assembled at Agnon’s home in Jerusalem to mark the moment.
How the Mighty Have Fallen: Ayelet Tsabari, Foreign Policy, December 31, 2018 — When I first heard the news of Israeli literary giant Amos Oz’s death at the age of 79, I was devastated and stunned. Stunned, because in my mind he remained younger than he had been in reality, infinitely strong and resilient—the epitome of the sabra (native born Israeli).
Etgar Keret’s New Book: As Witty as a Good Holocaust Joke: Maya Sela, Haaretz, June 10, 2018 — In many ways, Etgar Keret is the writer of my generation.
On Topic Links
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Recommends the Best of Contemporary Israeli Fiction: Emily Rhodes, Five Books, 2019
11 stellar Israeli novels that cry out to be read: Howard Freedman, The Jewish News of Northern California, April 10, 2018
Aharon Appelfeld: The Ticho House Café Interview: TLV 1 Israel in Translation, Podcast, Feb. 20, 2019
Broad Lessons to be Learned from the Polish Imbroglio: Isi Leibler, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 25, 2019
WHY THERE’S MORE TO ISRAELI LITERATURE
THAN JUST HEBREW
Aviva Kushner The Forward, Aug. 11, 2017
An unusual session at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem chaired by prominent literary critic Dan Laor celebrated the contributions to Israeli literature of writers writing in languages other than Hebrew. For anyone familiar with Israeli literary history, the subject itself is a big deal — because for decades, non-Hebrew writing was discouraged in the drive to build a new, modern and monolingual national literature in Israel.
But that attitude is changing, Laor said. “The fastest decision I have been a part of as a judge for the Israel Prize in Literature was when we decided to award it to Ida Fink,” Laor told the conference session, which was held in Hebrew. “It took about fifteen minutes for us to unanimously award it to Fink, who wrote in Polish.”
Fink was suffering from dementia by the time she received the award, Laor noted, and it is quite possible that she did not process the significance of the prize. But the Israeli public did.
This session, celebrating writers writing in Yiddish, Arabic, English, and Russian, is an example of the new attitude, Laor said. He said he hoped the attendees, mostly professors and critics, would bring this positive attitude back to their home institutions.
Yiddish writers were among those who famously suffered because of the Hebrew-or-nothing attitude. Gali Drucker Bar-Am, a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University, discussed the fate of Yiddish writers, both major and minor, in the early days of Israel, from statehood to the Six-Day War. She noted that in the 1960s, half a million Holocaust survivors lived in Israel, or an astonishing one of every four residents. There were Yiddish writers actively writing and publishing, and the great Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever edited a literary magazine. But Yiddish writers were far from a major part of the cultural conversation, and they were often left out at key junctures.
“The Eichmann trial was an interesting moment for Yiddish literature in Israel,” she said. “They didn’t broadcast it in Yiddish, and the survivors said, for whom is this intended? Not for us, because we don’t understand Hebrew.”
Sutzkever did not serve as a witness in the Eichmann trial, though he did do so at the Nuremberg trials. But after the Eichmann trial, Sutzkever wrote a reaction. “Sutzkever saw himself as a national poet, next to Natan Alterman,” who wrote in Hebrew, Bar-Am said.
Israeli writers who write in Arabic were also discussed. One of the most intriguing parts of the session was a discussion by Professor Amer Dahamshe of “Ikhtiyyah,” a 1985 novel by Emile Habibi, who wrote in Arabic and won the Israel Prize in literature; the novel was translated into Hebrew by Anton Shammas three years later. In the novel, Dahamshe explained, Habibi remembers Haifa street names, as they were before the War of Independence, or what Dahamshe called “Al-Nakba,” the catastrophe, which is how 1948 war is referred to among Palestinians.
“For example, Al-Jabbal Street became Zionism Street, and King Faisal Square became Golani Brigade Street,” said Dahamshe, a lecturer in the Hebrew department at the Arab Academic college of Israel-Haifa, and a researcher at The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The novel and the translation had entirely different intended audiences. “Habibi wrote for an Arab reader. Shammas wrote for a Hebrew reader, and so he looked at the Hebrew-reading public,” Dahamshe explained. “Habibi wanted to share the Arab names of streets in Haifa with the Arab public. It is an elegy of sorts on the loss of Arab Haifa.”
“It is possible to destroy names and streets but not literature, which is eternal,” Dahamshe said.
Another highlight was a passionate talk about American poet and translator Robert Friend, who lived most of his adult life in Jerusalem, given by Professor Yaakov Ariel, of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Friend translated the great poet Rachel into English, among other major contributions. But he was always a somewhat uneasy figure in Jerusalem, Ariel explained, as both a gay man and an American in a time when Americans in Israel were rare. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
FILLING THE ARTISTIC MOLD
Meir Y. Soloveichik
Commentary Magazine, Dec. 2018
In 1966, the word went forth from Stockholm that Shmuel Yosef Agnon was to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Israeli to be so honored. Journalists, and the Swedish Consul, excitedly assembled at Agnon’s home in Jerusalem to mark the moment. According to the New York Times, Agnon has an unusual reason for feeling “special pleasure” at the prospect of receiving the prestigious prize from the hands of the Swedish king. The Talmud, he explained, prescribes that a specific blessing be pronounced in the presence of a monarch. “There is a special benediction one says before a king, and I have never met a king,” he reflected. The closest he had come was “once when the Emperor Franz Joseph was being visited by kings [and] I was splattered by mud when the carriages went by.”
It was an odd comment, unless one understood how important the texts and liturgy of halachic life were for this Orthodox Jewish writer. In his Nobel address, Agnon, true to his word, began by pronouncing the obligatory blessing, and then he spoke about what rabbinic writings meant to him. “Who,” Agnon asked, “were my mentors in poetry and literature?”
First and foremost, there are the Sacred Scriptures, from which I learned how to combine letters. Then there are the Mishna and the Talmud and the Midrashim and Rashi’s commentary on the Torah. After these come the Poskim—the later explicators of Talmudic Law—and our sacred poets and the medieval sages, led by our Master Rabbi Moses, son of Maimon, known as Maimonides, of blessed memory.
It was because of the loves and longing of his Orthodox childhood, Agnon explained, that modern Israel meant so much to him: “I was born in one of the cities of the Exile. But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.” The address is one of the great speeches in the history of Zionism—but its power derives precisely from the fact that it joins the texts and traditions of Judaism with the miracle that is modern Israel.
This aspect of Agnon’s art was appreciated by his contemporaries, but it was also believed to be unrepresentative of Israel’s cultural future. “As an artist,” Gershom Scholem reflected in Commentary in 1967, “Agnon is unequaled, a classical master; but, because of the circumstances of his time and his position, he is also the last of his line.” Because Agnon’s writing was so profoundly affected by the belief in the normative nature of scripture and rabbinic texts, Scholem believed, his approach was outmoded.
“Today’s writers,” Scholem continued, “for whom the Bible is no longer a holy book but a national saga, and to whom rabbinical and medieval literature is virtually unknown, are in a happier situation than Agnon and his contemporaries. They are free to wrestle with the words in a completely new emotional setting and on a level of freedom previously unattainable.” For Scholem, Agnon’s anchoring of his literature in rabbinic texts was an artistic approach that would not be seen again.
Scholem were wrong. Today, one of the most interesting cultural phenomena in Israel is that of Orthodox Jews—in both the national-religious and Haredi communities—engaging in artistic endeavors that are fueled by their study of Talmud texts and their experience of rigorous Judaic observance. A half century after Agnon’s Nobel address, Haim Sabato published Adjusting Sights, a novel drawn on his own experiences in the Yom Kippur War. The book was received with much acclaim in Israeli cultural circles, and to this day, because of the power with which Sabato brings war to life, the novel is used by the IDF for soldiers suffering from trauma. But Sabato’s résumé is unusual for a novelist; he leads a yeshiva in Ma’aleh Adumim, where he teaches Talmud and Jewish law, and his own intimacy with rabbinic texts pervades the pages of his story. In one powerful passage, Sabato ponders the transformation his autobiographical protagonist has experienced from Talmud student to soldier whose only duty is to focus on killing. Maimonides had codified the rabbinic ruling that soldiers are forbidden to fear when entering battle. Preparing for war, he realized how unrealistic this seemed. Then, rethinking “Maimonides’ always impeccable language,” he understands that the rabbis meant to forbid a moral fear of engaging in violence: “It is this that the Torah forbids. And the truth is that as soon as we were in combat, we thought only of destroying the enemies’ tanks.”
Paragraphs such as these show that the power in Sabato’s prose comes not despite his faith, but because of it, and his faith is made more sophisticated through his artistic expression. In the war, Sabato reflected in an interview, “a wondrous thing happened to us. The innocent religious belief of youth, which the sights and sounds of the Yom Kippur War lacerated so brutally, and filled with questions, did not shatter. True, it changed. It is filled with pain and sadness, but it’s more mature, deeper—and intact.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN
Ayelet Tsabari
Foreign Policy, Dec. 31, 2018
When I first heard the news of Israeli literary giant Amos Oz’s death at the age of 79, I was devastated and stunned. Stunned, because in my mind he remained younger than he had been in reality, infinitely strong and resilient—the epitome of the sabra (native born Israeli). In all of his pictures, Oz appeared robust. In Israel, we’d say, “yefey hablorit vehatoar” (literally translated as “handsome of forelock and countenance”) to describe the young men of Oz’s generation, heroic and innocent in their youthful devotion to the country, beautiful inside and out.
Oz was my first literary crush. I was a young teen when I came across his first book, Where the Jackals Howl, a collection of stories published in 1965, when he was only 26. I was deeply moved by it, swept up by the tales of life on a kibbutz, mesmerized by the haunting sense of disquiet and melancholy that threaded the narrative, astounded by the beauty of the language. Oz was young then and more prone to metaphor and poetry than he’d become in his later years, and I fell head over heels in love with his prose—and with him. I’d read certain lines over and over again, mouthing them to myself, hoping his genius might rub off onto me. I knew then that I wanted to write short stories just like his. Soon, I was mimicking Oz’s style in my own writing, the atmosphere, the richness, even the settings; I wrote short stories that took place in a kibbutz, a place with which I’d had no personal experience. That Where the Jackals Howl was, in fact, a critique of the kibbutz movement went over my head. I became fascinated by it; I wanted to live on a kibbutz too. This group of stories and Oz’s subsequent books presented to me an Israeliness I aspired to, wished to inhabit. An Israeliness that for me, a young girl of Yemeni descent who grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv, felt foreign, unattainable.
In high school, I read My Michael, first published in 1968, and was enthralled by protagonist Hannah Gonen’s feverish, mad hallucinations, her alienation and vulnerability. I was carried away by the lyrical descriptions and impressed by Oz’s ability to write an entire novel from a female point of view (though 40 years later, in the introduction for the reissue of the book, Oz admitted he wouldn’t have dared to attempt that today). The first line in that novel remained one of the strongest and most evocative I’d ever read: “I am writing this because people I loved have died. I am writing this because when I was young, I was full of the power of loving, and now that power of loving is dying. I don’t want to die.” (Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange.)
The more I learned about Oz, the more I admired him. There were his unapologetically left-wing politics—he was long an advocate of the two-state solution—which, as a young woman just developing her own political worldviews, I found inspirational. I discovered that he lived in the southern desert city of Arad—how exotic! —that he was blue-eyed and devastatingly handsome. At 17, when I visited Arad for the first time, I walked the dusty streets he had walked in, breathed in the dry desert air, and dreamed about running into him.
Oz’s books travelled with me when I, as a young adult, moved to a kibbutz with a gentle, blue-eyed boyfriend. (A coincidence?) And, years later, when I migrated to Vancouver, Canada, I scoured the city’s bookstores for translations of Oz’s books for my then-boyfriend. It was a means of introducing him, I thought, to the place I had come from.
It wasn’t Oz’s fault when I fell out of love with him. After all, questioning and re-evaluating the heroes of our youth is a part of growing up; Oz himself had gone through an ideological transformation as a young man, abandoning his revisionist background to become a labor Zionist. At some point, as a Jew of middle Eastern descent—a Mizrahi, not Ashkenazi—I began to realize the Israeliness he depicted was not my own. The realization made me feel excluded. As I grew older and developed a strong Mizrahi identity, I started to think of the superficial, sometimes stereotypical depiction of Mizrahi characters in some of his early work, and I craved books that resonated within my own experience. I grew weary of the lionized literary canon in Israel of which Oz was a part, so I rebelled against it. I searched for other voices and thus discovered writers such as Sami Michael, Eli Amir, and Ronit Matalon. I finally started publishing my own Mizrahi stories…. [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
ETGAR KERET’S NEW BOOK: AS WITTY AS A HOLOCAUST JOKE
Maya Sela
Haaretz, June 10, 2018
In many ways, Etgar Keret is the writer of my generation. We were born into the same world, we rode the same roads, we watched the same TV shows. When his first two books came out – “Pipelines” in 1992 and “Missing Kissinger” in 1994 – it was the first time that a writer from our generation wrote in our language.
People called it lean language, but I’m not sure this was an apt description. The language was devoid of flowery rhetoric and gave voice to a generation that scorned poetical writing and no longer believed in it.
We understood Keret and the path he was taking, outside the mainstream that was captivated by lofty words and “important” literature that dealt with Zionism and the pain of the shooters and criers and spoke at such a high level when we knew we were really so small. We hated yuppies and their early SUVs, we weren’t about to commit to anything – certainly not to talk seriously or pretend that we were important and that anything we said mattered.
Twenty-six years have gone by. Keret became an international star, a little matter that keeps a lot of Israelis up at night, for we can’t stand people who are successful. Actually, we already hated successful types 26 years ago, because, as we saw it then, successful folks were also the ones writing important things, maintaining a serious expression, speaking on behalf of the tribe or the generation.
But the way Keret wrote was different – short, absurd, with sorrow buried deep inside and not named aloud because to do so would instantly render it fake. He was funny, but the way that Holocaust jokes are funny. We liked it, though I’m not sure we understood that these were Holocaust jokes, even if we didn’t miss the horror that was in there. The horror was always there, but there was also a perspective, an understanding of the little things, a distancing from the drama. That’s still the same. In that, he hasn’t changed.
The title of his latest Hebrew-language collection – which translates as “A Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” – nudges us to acknowledge that there’s a galaxy and we’re minuscule stars that are burning out in it. Any kind of serious talk, therefore, betrays a lack of awareness. We’re pathetic, small, hurting and smoking weed sometimes to help us bear this existential truth. Such are Keret’s protagonists, walking around in the world while a past or future little catastrophe lurks in the background.
Years ago, I met an American writer at the International Writers Festival at Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem. We were chatting, I don’t recall about what, and I said something about Holocaust jokes. He froze and then slowly repeated my words back to me: “Ho-lo-caust jokes? Ho-lo-caust jokes?” What’s a Holocaust joke, he asked, completely stunned. And it hit me that Holocaust jokes are a dirty little secret that I’d unwittingly revealed. I declined to tell him. I come from a family in which people take their secrets to the grave.
But he was charming and eventually persuaded me to tell, and he was also Jewish so I thought it might do him good to know about his people’s rich and secret body of knowledge, and I assessed that he was old enough to enter this orchard. So, I told him my favorite Holocaust joke. I was wary of what his reaction would be, but to my surprise, he roared with laughter. It sounded like a laugh that was letting go of 2,000 years of exile, and it occurred to me that maybe this is what Keret does in his work.
This kind of thing used to be done in Hebrew literature, before Zionism came and surgically removed our sense of humor. Now we’re very serious and a very threatened people. The first thing people tend to say about Keret is that he’s funny, and it’s true, but he’s funny in precisely this way, with a grim laugh in the face of horror.
When he published his first book and spoke in a language we understood, the idea was to deflate all the balloons and never blow them up again. As the years went by, he and his contemporaries were criticized for this – for not being ready to assume the portentous role of observer of the House of Israel.
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends and Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
On Topic Links
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Recommends the Best of Contemporary Israeli Fiction: Emily Rhodes, Five Books, 2019 — The Middle East is so dominated by war and politics that all literature must be viewed through this prism, says Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. She recommends the best Israeli novels.
11 stellar Israeli novels that cry out to be read: Howard Freedman, The Jewish News of Northern California, April 10, 2018 — As we mark Israel’s 70th anniversary, I remain awed that a small country with a reconstructed language should produce a literature that is so rich.
Aharon Appelfeld: The Ticho House Café Interview: TLV 1 Israel in Translation, Podcast, Feb. 20, 2019 — Aharon Appelfeld passed away just over a year ago. He was one of Israel’s most well-known authors abroad, and one of the generations that came of age around the same time as the founding of the State of Israel.
Broad Lessons to be Learned from the Polish Imbroglio: Isi Leibler, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 25, 2019 — Emotions and realpolitik do not mix.
