Love, Hate and the sound of a Trumpet

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Love, Hate and the sound

of a Trumpet

About Arab-Jewish relations in 20th century

Hebrew fiction

David-Jan van den Berg Student number: 2133180 Date of submission: 14.07.2015

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Introduction

„Weshalb beurteilen mehr oder weniger erwachsene Menschen mehr oder weniger erfundene Geschichten?“1

As the (sub-) title gives away, this thesis is about Arab-Jewish relations in Hebrew (prosaic) fiction. At the core of the thesis stands the novel Trumpet in the Wadi by Sami Michael. The research question is: How are Arab-Jewish relations depicted in 20th century Hebrew fiction? This introduction will provide a justification for the chosen subject under study. Furthermore, in this introduction, an overview over the structure of this research will be given, as well as an account of the most relevant sources used.

At the start of this endeavour stands the question that resounds in the quotation above: Why to write literature about literature? The point of venture in this thesis is the assumption that the past existed and that fiction is connected to it, although the writer may not intend to represent or reflect on the experienced past. We must, however, understand that a picture, i.e. any idea of that past, is never a complete representation of a past reality. While the complete past is irretrievably gone, a limitless number of pictures of parts of that past may be unearthed and made relevant for a given present. It is comparable to studying a dead body to learn about its past. However much one finds out about it, the dead body will remain dead. This, however, does not preclude it from becoming an actor once again, e.g. through its commemoration by others, or by the impact and influence the knowledge of it (something we call ‘history’) has on the present. How can we study this dead body, or in other words, what is the past to the present? Well, one way is by studying what is inter alia left of that past: Literature. We assume that if the past is the intertwining of biographies of persons and objects, then studying literature, which simultaneously reflects and impacts on these biographies, is anything but of peripheral importance to the understanding of any past whatsoever. Therefore, the approach towards researching Arab-Jewish relations in Hebrew prosaic fiction is a combination of history, biographies and the idea of the subjectivity of the interpretation. Because literary

representations, be they a fictive as can be, are still “imbedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer”2, it is important to view them against the background of the relevant history as well as the personal history of the author (i.e. his

biography). Yet, and that is especially true for literature, the meaning of a given text is dependent on

1

Neuhaus, Stefan, Literaturkritik. Eine Einführung (Göttingen, 2004) 167.

2

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how it is read. Reviewing a text and making this review accessible to others is presenting merely one way to read and understand it. In other words:

“Eine Literaturkritik ist eine Leseart eines Textes, dessen Bedeutungsspielräume nicht vollständig ausgelotet werden können, schon gar nicht in einer einzelnen Kritik.“3

Thus, the justification of this thesis‘ subject is simultaneously its relativisation; the ambiguity of the text, as well as the subjectivity of the interpretation, can only guide the reader through the fields of literary agriculture. It is up to the reader to decide the usefulness of this guide based on its

accuracy with regard to the applied methods.

The thought of writing about Arab-Jewish relations in Hebrew prosaic fiction raises a few questions, which are meant to be answered in this introduction. “Arab-Jewish relations” provides for a broad array of interpretations. For example: Who is Arab, who is Jewish and what kind of relations are to be considered? The question of the identity markers of “the Arab” could be divided into ethnicity, language, geography, culture, or politics. There is no room for this discussion here. The Arabs with regard to this thesis are those identified as such in Hebrew fiction. The same holds for “the Jew”, in his relation to “the Arab”. “Relation” here means any kind of interaction between the two, in thoughts, words and deeds. This includes the depiction of feelings, opinions and attitudes of Jews and Arabs regarding other, as well as any verbal and physical interaction from loving to killing. Why “Hebrew prosaic fiction”? Hebrew refers to the language of the original writing. Prose is a form of writing and fiction is the genre. Fiction is based on imagination rather than on history. However, that does not always preclude the fictive story to be based on, or inspired by, actual memories of the author or his historical knowledge. It is still fiction if these memories, experiences and historical knowledge are in some way reproduced in a way that precludes them from the genre of non-fiction, e.g. historiography or (auto-) biography.4

The first part of this thesis will comprise a concise summary of relevant works in the genre of Hebrew fiction with regard to Arab-Jewish relations. This summary is structured according to the idea that there are different generations of authors, which of course will be elaborated first. This

summary will also feature some biographical background information about these authors in order to support the notion of distinct generations of authors who wrote stories which are relevant to this thesis. A story is relevant when it features Arab-Jewish relations. Since the number of works that pertain to this distinction is quiet large (compared with other languages and also considering the

3

Neuhaus, op. cit., 82.

4_{There may of course be tension and disagreement between the definition of the author of a work and his}

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young age of Hebrew literature in general), this part will be mostly based on secondary literature. The works of Gila Ramras-Rauch, Risa Domb, Ehud Ben-Ezer, Gershon Shaked and Yochai

Oppenheimer stand out because they e.g. dealt with the depiction of the Arab in Hebrew fiction. The time frame of the researched subject, “the 20th century”, is based on the available secondary

literature’s covering of Hebrew fiction.

The second part of this thesis deals with the 1987 novel A Trumpet in the Wadi by Sami Michael. Its aim is to report my own observations with regard to Arab-Jewish relations in this novel and to bring them in context of the first part. It features a brief summary of the plot, an overview of the main characters as well as the translation of chapter 20 and 21 from the Hebrew original (see Appendix). Those chapters have been chosen because constitute a certain climax in the plot with regard to Arab-Jewish relations as depicted in this novel, and display what I believe to be the main subjects of the novel. The rest of the second part will be devoted to what can be called “attempted literary criticism”. I intend to provide understanding, observations and possible interpretations based on biographical, historical as well as bibliographical knowledge. These observations do not always align which results in a discussion of the interpretations of these observations. Good literary criticism should also be entertaining, bringing the reader closer to literature. This is also the endeavour of this thesis.

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Part I: The depiction of Jewish-Arab relations in Hebrew (prosaic)

fiction in the 20

th

_century

1) The beginnings of Modern Hebrew Literature and the pre-1948

generation writers

The emergence of Modern Hebrew literature is, of course, intrinsic to the emergence of Modern Hebrew. Contrary to the romantic myth of “the revival of a dead language”, Hebrew has never really been dead.5 Until the reintroduction of Hebrew in everyday-life usage in the 1880, it had never ceased to serve as a language of written personal, scientific, legal and business communication, besides its use in daily spirituality and liturgy. Moreover, Jews from different vernaculars were able to communicate verbally with each other in Hebrew, on religious grounds or to foil eavesdropping.6 During the middle-age, diglossia, i.e. the use of a vernacular for everyday-life purposes and of another (classical) language for writing, was not an uncommon phenomenon in e.g. Latin Europe. However, while in the course of history many of the classical, written languages gave way to their spoken counterparts, Hebrew remained a written-in language in most Jewish communities.7 According to William Chomsky, the use of Hebrew for writing and even conversation had increased during the middle ages rather than the opposite.8 During the Haskalah9, biblical Hebrew gained status as being purer than its Mishnaic and medieval counterparts.

Its use as written-in language altered with the mid-nineteenth century’s literary trends in Europe, which deemed classical (Biblical) Hebrew inadequate and anachronistic to write modern literature. Ya’akov Abramovich, also known as Mendele Mokher Sfarim, broke with the rules of biblical Hebrew and infused his Hebrew with medieval and rabbinic Hebrew as well as influences from spoken Yiddish. In this context (i.e. the ongoing use of a language that had some obvious limitations in modern times) Modern Hebrew literature emerged, most prominently, but for

5_{I.e. not having living native speakers. Cf. Fellman, Jack, “Concerning the ‘Revival’ of the Hebrew Language”} Anthropological Linguistics Vol. 15 No. 5 (1973) 250-257.

6_{Ibid. 251.} 7

It has been pointed out by Fellman that the decrease of the use of Latin in many European countries was part of a proto-nationalism which the Jews initially did not share. They (i.e. the Jews) already had a language that connected them - Hebrew. That is why Latin lost its importance as a written language and Hebrew did not. Ibid. 252.

8

Chomsky, William, “The Growth of Hebrew during the Middle Ages” The Jewish Quarterly Review 57 (1967) 121-136.

9_{Haskalah (from Hebrew לכש sekhel, meaning „intellect“) is the name of the Jewish intellectual movement in}

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instance, in the Hebrew newspaper articles by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda from the 1880s onwards.

However, the “revival” was not merely a literary development but would also see the rise of Hebrew as spoken language for every-day life. Moreover, the re-emergence of Hebrew was connected to a Jewish nationalism, calling not only for a Jewish homeland, but also for a universal Jewish language.

Instead of being born in a day, Modern Hebrew rather developed into a modern language. In other words, it had to be reinvented through commitment and practice, research and creative solutions, much of which has been attributed to the work of Ben-Yehuda. In Palestine, Hebrew had to prevail against the languages of the Immigrants (especially Yiddish10) and to prove its adaptability, which should rather be attributed to the willingness of the people (especially the immigrants of the second aliyah11) who henceforth used Hebrew in everyday-life and had it as part of primary

education. Thus Hebrew, constructed through its very use, became the native language of a

generation so that by the end of WWI some 40% of the Jewish population of Palestine used Hebrew as their first or daily language,12 and it was not before long that there would be literature written in Modern Israeli Hebrew. However, besides being written in a “language under construction”, there were other odds against which Hebrew literature had to prevail. Like in most literary histories, there was the tension between literary tradition and reform (with regard to e.g. style, genre and subjects), which link and separate groups of writers. In the case of Hebrew, this tension was amplified by the fact that until the 1920s, Odessa (also called the “Russian Jerusalem”) was the centre of Hebrew literary activity, being “replete with Hebrew publishing houses, schools, and periodicals”13. After the Bolshevik Revolution and the outlawing of Hebrew studies and Zionist activities, it shortly moved to Germany, but in the end moved on to Palestine. Thus for a long time Modern Hebrew was without a geographically and temporally contiguous population, notwithstanding the lack of autonomy in either of the literary centres. Secondly, there was the lack of a coherent body of literature, with agreements on subjects, literary forms and even the use of ancient words in order to describe contemporary experience. This time saw the rise of writers such as Bialik, Agnon, Tchernikhowski, Buber and Scholem. With the growing Jewish population in Palestine, the importance of Palestine as Hebrew literary centre increased. The steady growth of the Jewish population - from 10.500 in 1955, to 50.000 in 1898, 75.000 in 1907 and 165.000 by 1930 – in immigration waves, coincided with the

10_{The relation of Modern Hebrew with Yiddish can be labeled: “it’s complicated”. One the one hand, the}

proponents of Modern Hebrew defined it as the opposite of Yiddish in the sense that Hebrew was the language of the Zionist enterprise and Yiddish was decried as language of the Diaspora. At the same time, Yiddish has been the mother tongue of most of these very same intellectuals, thus asserting its influence on a language that contends with it over the Jewish population of Palestine. Cf. Zuckermann, Ghil’ad “A New Vision for Israeli Hebrew. Theoretical and practical implications of analyzing Israel’s main language as a semi-engineered Semito-European hybrid language” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (5) 1 (2006) 57-71.

11

Aliyah means ascension, referring to the ascension to Jerusalem during the pilgrimage feasts. It has become a common term referring to the distinctive immigration waves since the late 19th century.

12_{Fellman, “Concerning” 255.} 13

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mass migration of Eastern European communities, whose out-migration was caused by economic hardships and persecution.14 There remained close ties between the yishuv15 and the cultural centres of Eastern Europe. This is why much of the literature originating in Palestine was also implicitly, if not explicitly, addressed to Ashkenazi Jews outside of Palestine, also because of material assistance the latter provided.16 The first Hebrew publications in Palestine were periodicals and journals like

Moledet (‘Homeland’), Ha’Omer (‘The Swath’) and HaPo’el HaTZa’ir (‘The young worker’), which gave a platform for ideological literature that reflected also on life in Jewish Palestine in an idealized, positivist fashion. These periodicals were a critical step in the development of modern Israeli

Hebrew. Their proliferation was made possible through developments in printing techniques but the creation of Hebrew periodicals was a consequence of the Haskalah. These periodicals, though sometimes rather short-lived, were not only means to spread news but also served the purpose of proliferating the knowledge of Hebrew among the population, as well as ideological convictions.

Modern Hebrew, from the outset versatile, remained “attuned to the major developments of modern literature, [and] enacted its own internal self-revision, both in relation to European

paradigms and in relation to Jewish materials”17. While different generations of writers display varying literary influences from Europe (Russia, Germany, England, Scandinavia) and the United States, Hebrew literature always had its distinct “Jewish” features, evidencing the “conflict between ancient Jewish sources and the humanist secular culture of Europe”18. However, writing in Hebrew in the early 20th century was not a matter of course for a Jew in Palestine or anywhere else. In one way or another, there had to be an, at least tacit, identification with Zionism.19 As a matter of fact, most of the authors of early Hebrew fiction were immigrants from Europe, the exceptions being, of course, Yitzhak Shami and Yehuda Burla. As immigration to Palestine has not been the only option (many Jews also migrated to the United States of America), those immigrants had reason to believe that life in the ancient homeland was not only possible but also opportune due to ideological or economical convictions. What these immigrants found after their arrival was not quite what they had expected due to romanticized images fed by ideological pamphlets and stories. Many immigrants of the first aliyot20 did not expect to find another people living in the “land without a people for a people without a land”. Consequently, the Arab in the Hebrew literature around the turn of the century was

14_{Brinkmann, Tobias: Jewish Migration, in: European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of}

European History (IEG), Mainz 2010-12-03. URL: http://www.ieg-ego.eu/brinkmannt-2010-en URN: urn:nbn:de:0159-20100921536 (retrieved on 22.06.2015)

15

The Jewish settlement in Palestine before 1948.

16

Shaked, Modern Hebrew 64.

17

Ibid. 5.

18_{Ibid. 6.} 19

N.b. While the choice of residence and language of writing does attest a certain commitment, it does not mean that these authors did not struggle with coming to terms with the implications of the ideals that had them make these very choices.

20

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part of a world that was unfamiliar to most authors. The authors of this literature’s romantic fascination by the Middle East, is expressed in the depiction of the Arab, as we shall see by dealing separately with each author.

The next paragraph is devoted to thoughts about how to structure the treatment of this body of literature. While all categorization is artificial, there are some gains (as well as pitfalls) in

structuring the authors and their respective works through these frameworks. One framework is the typology of writings. There were two currents in early Modern Hebrew fiction with regard to “types”. One was concerned with the social context of life, a strand that began with Mendele and amount to social novels.21 A social novel deals with the impact of social problems (e.g. poverty, inequality, social divide) on the character. The other type, whose most prominent advocate and practitioner has been Yosef Haim Brenner, is called a psychological novel, veering toward a more expressionist mode of representation, exploring the human psyche rather than being concerned with the social reality.22 This is of course an artificial categorization defied by the works of e.g. Shmuel Yosef Agnon to whom a unique style of his own can be attributed, intersecting “various currents and continuities of Hebrew literature”23. So, in other words, there were those authors that rather chose to romantically, non-mimetically represent reality, while other chose realism and a more mimetic depiction of life. Gershon Shaked called this dichotomy, after the wording of Brenner, ‘genre and anti-genre’24. While there is no strict dividing line between those that wrote in an idealized fashion about life in Palestine and those that tried to portray the bitter reality as reflected through the psyche of the protagonist, as we shall see, the two trends maintained their “dialectical pull on Hebrew fiction from the 1920s until the 1970s”25.

Besides these diachronical - “vertical” as it were - categories, there were also distinct

generations of writers who share biographical elements that connect them “horizontally”.26 The first Modern Hebrew writers had lived in the Diaspora, with all the experiences connected to it, including pogroms and mass migration. Names like Mendele, Frischmann, Peretz, Berdyczewski and Ben-Avigdor made their appearance in Europe, while their contemporaries (like Barzilai-Eisenstadt and Moshe Smilansky) covered life through the eyes of the first aliyah or the old Jewish settlement in Palestine. The next generation likewise consisted mostly of writers who were born outside of Palestine and started their writing careers either in the Diaspora or in Palestine. Figures like Bialik

21

The mode of the social novel can be traced through Bialik, Shlomo Zemach, Yehuda Burla, Yitzhak Shami and Moshe Shamir.

22

This strand, also called psychological realism, can be followed through Frischmann, Berdyczewski, Yosef Haim Brenner,Uri Nissan Gnessin, Elisheva Bikhovski, David Vogel, Yaacov Horowitz, Pinhas Sadeh to Amos Oz and Abraham B. Yehoshua.

23_{Ibid. 7.} 24

The term ‚genre‘ and ‚anti-genre‘ will be used when relevant in this thesis.

25

Ibid. 80.

26_{Shaked proposed this biography-oriented four-generation-organization of Hebrew literary production. The}

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and Brenner, as well as the native-born Burla and Shami, belong to this generation. Following them is a generation - among them Bistriski, Ever-Hadani, Shenhar and others - that emigrated before the First World War or during the inter bellum, having the two wars and the horrors of the Holocaust concern their literary output to a great extent. The fourth generation consists of those born between 1920 until the 1940s. The Holocaust, as well as the war of 1948 left its footprints on their lives. Prominent writers, like Shamir, Yizhar, Oz, Grossman and Yehoshua belong to this generation.

Instead of by literary style or biographical background, it is also possible to group authors and their works together according to their stories’ respective motifs.27 There is regional fiction that emphasized the link between the community and the soil (Smilansky, Hurgin, Zemach, Reuveni). Another group consists of stories about the brave pioneers and their conflicts with the local

inhabitants (Smilansky and Burla). Again other works amount to documentary fiction that recorded the heroism of individuals (notably Wilkansky). Some immigrant stories depict the alienation of the new immigrants (Brenner, Rabinowitz, Kimhi and Agnon). Finally there are also quasi-romantic legends (Arieli-Orloff and Agnon) and exotic tales that depicted a, for their readers, hitherto unknown world (Smilansky, Shami, Burla, Hurgin). “In all of these groupings, however, the essential tension between genre and anti-genre continues to characterize writers.”28

In this Master thesis I will discusses the portrayal of the Arab-Jewish relations in Hebrew fiction. Therefore we will henceforth deal with the authors that have been made relevant in previous secondary literature, starting with the “second generation”.29 The first one, Moshe Smilansky, is an exception in this respect, since he belongs to the “first generation” of post-Haskalah Modern Hebrew writers, who has in fact written in Yiddish and stories Diaspora-settings, yet has come to write Hebrew fiction in, and about life in, Palestine.30

27

Ibid. 68. N.B.: There is some redundancy to divide between categories of authors that share biographical elements (e.g. pogroms) and the grouping of authors according to their works’ motifs. It should for instance raise few eyebrows when an author, who had immigrated during the first or second aliyah, writes about life in the agricultural settlement in Palestine.

28_Ibidem 29

N.B.(I): Early “first generation” Hebrew dime novels with their locus in the Eastern European Shtetl do not offer much for an analysis of the depiction of the Arab. N.B.(II): The division of authors into pre-state, war-generation and post-1948 is inconsistent with the fact the some authors intersect this division. I took the liberty of dealing with the respective author in the period in which he or she has made his or her appearance most prominently.

30

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a) Moshe Smilansky (1874-1953)

Among the immigrants that came to Palestine in the last two decades of the 19th century (until 1903), an immigration wave consisting of up to 35.00 immigrants31, mostly from Eastern Europe and

Yemen, was Moshe Smilansky, who arrived in Ottoman Palestine in 1891. As a son of farmers from the Kiev Governorate, he also engaged in agricultural work, pioneering in the establishment of several agricultural settlements before himself settling as farmer and landowner in Rehovot. However, unlike most of his co-immigrants of the first aliyah (who, though ideologically motivated, clung to private ownership of means of production), Smilansky was ideologically driven by socialist ideals. He started writing for Hebrew and Yiddish periodical in Palestine and abroad, where he elaborated on his political views, associating himself with Ahad Ha-Am and his views. The Arab-Jewish relations were a prominent feature, also in his fictional works, which could be seen as an extension of his non-fictional work in pursuit of a better understanding of the Arabs.32 For instance, Smilansky believed in mixed labor, i.e. employing Arabs as well as Jews (which he himself did), contrary to the prevailing view of “pure Hebrew labour” by the majority of settler of the second aliyah. This is also reflected in his non-fictional as well as fictional works, e.g. in the collection of stories called Children of Arabia (Bnei Arav)33, were he (the involved narrator) under the pseudonym “Hawaja Mussah” (Arabic meaning “Squire Moses”; this title, that implies a superior position to his Arab tenants, was allegedly given to Moshe by an Arab friend) employs Arab workers on his land. It is well to note that this auto-biographical element, along with the point of view of superiority of the author in his fiction, drew criticism from critics in his time and today.34

Because Smilansky writes about the Arabs for a Hebrew (Jewish) readership, his literature appears intentionally pedagogical. The narrator being in juxtaposition with (yet elevated above) Arabs for comparison, Smilansky’s fiction is in unison with his non-fictional/ journalistic writings which expose his view on Arabs. Thus, his aim was educating his readers and to heighten the awareness of the cultural differences between Jews and Arabs in order to create respect and understanding. One of the sources of misunderstandings and obstacles to harmony between Jews and Arabs, according to Smilansky, were the land laws of the Ottoman Empire, which resulted in the dependence of poorer village dwellers (fellahin) on a few rich land owners as their patrons. When the land, then, was sold at high prices to Jewish settlers, many Arabs lost the basis of their existence.

31

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Immigration/First_Aliyah.html (retrieved 24.06.2015)

32

While Smilansky’s view on aspects of the Jewish-Arab conflict fluctuated over the course of years, his idealist, romantic view on the peaceful coexistence in Palestine through joint labour prevailed. Cf. Gila Ramras-Rauch,

The Arab in Israeli Literature (London 1989) 13. 33

Children of Arabia is the Arabic term used for nomadic Bedouins, but Jewish immigrants used it to refer to all Arabs. Ibidem

34

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Costumes, such as pastoral rights or negotiation practice, were another source of conflict, since the Jewish settlers were unaware and/or callous of the Arab costumes. Arab mentality, according to Smilansky, besides simple misunderstandings due to language, completed the picture of mutual contemptuousness.35

Smilansky’s stories that involve Arabs can be categorized in several groups36: There are the stories that contain illustrations of the rigidity of costumes and traditions in Arab society. Usually they denote the social inflexibility of an Arab society that is in need of social and religious reform, in order to free the individual. Courage, as well as love, is a recurrent theme that appears through the eyes of the emphatic narrator. As mentioned earlier, the implied audience consists of Jews, and it can be assumed that Smilansky hoped to concern his Jewish readers with the problems of Arab society and create sympathy, upholding that the positive elements in Arab society are strong enough to achieve the desired reform. This, in turn, reflects Smilansky’s propensity to radically change the patterns of the life lived prior to immigration and to break away from social and religious

conventions of the Diaspora, which was a common feature of the pioneer generation.

A second group of stories features odd characters that are rejected due to their “otherness”. It has been interpreted that Smilansky tried to explain Arab rejecting attitude towards the Jewish settlers stems from their “otherness”. In other stories, Smilansky tries to show that Jews are necessary to Arab “progress”, which reflects his positivist view that Arabs should be glad about the Jews

immigration from which they would only benefit. Smilansky’s personal contact and familiarity with Arabs provided for the folkloric style and content of some of his stories. They served either the purpose of educating his reader about the Arab culture of which they knew so little, or Smilansky tried to enable his readers to accept and be aware of cultural, social and religious gaps. Either way, his stereotypical, sometimes romantically fascinated and sometimes distantly critical, depiction of the other as individual and as a group, reveals the inner constitution of the perceived self of the Jewish immigrant in Palestine. One the one hand, Arabs were seen as “close to life in biblical times”, speaking a related language but who, unlike the Jew, were free from the constraints of Western life and were therefore important to Jews who wanted to become a “native son” as the Arabs were. At the same time the Jewish settlers, including Smilansky, saw themselves as bringers of modernity, reform and prosperity, of which the Arabs - so they thought - were in need. “This serves to

complicate the Jewish-Arab relation, since the Jewish desire to be native son is connected to love of the land but also to the image of the Arab as model.”37 In other words, ambivalent self-perception and ambivalent perception of the other (i.e. the Arab) are connected.

35

Domb, Risa, The Arab in Hebrew Prose (London, 1982) 23-26.

36_{Ibid. 61-64.} 37

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b) Yehuda Burla (1886-1969)

The Jerusalem-born Yehuda Burla belonged to a respected Sephardic family that had come to Palestine the early 18th century. After having almost completed a rabbinical education, he went to the Ezra Teachers’ college in Jerusalem, where he met his contemporaries Yitzhak Shami and Yaacov Hurgin. He was conscripted as translator into the Turkish army during the First World War, and later taught in several places or worked as civil servant after the establishment of the State of Israel. During his career as prolific writer and translator (from Arabic to Hebrew), he produced a broad range of (modern) literature, such as a novel and many short stories. His uniqueness was the depiction of Sephardi and Arabic life in Palestine, of which he was well aware: “If not I, who will tell the stories of Mussa and Yussuf, Bossa Reina and Bossa Rivka?”38 Although Gershon Shaked placed him within the genrist group of writers, he had close contact to Brenner (an outspoken “anti-genrist”) who encouraged his work and whose writings served as a model for Burla.39 Be that as it may, Burla did not write of introspective protagonists with tormented inner selves but of the individual within a social context with its respective conventions and traditions through authentic speech and plot-oriented narratives. “Burla’s declared literary field was that of the Oriental person yielding to fate and superstition, renouncing all choice and free will.”40 Shaked remarks that many of Burla’s stories are influenced by the Zionist ideology.41 Though influenced by 19th-century literature and European naturalism, he nevertheless wrote in diverse narrative modes, such as the story within a story, a narrator-witness listening to a narrating protagonist, or versed tales “reminiscent of the Arabic maqama”42, with elements of orally passed-down storytelling. Burla depicted the Jewish-Arab relationship as one of natural intermingling and even natural friendship, rather than depicting the emergent reality of mutual animosity. Herein, the Arab is not stereotypically depicted as either “good” or “bad”, rather as individuals whose “nuances of human nature rather than national characteristics as such”43 are of interest, having knowledge as well as respect and love for Arab culture shimmering through the portrayals. Thus, for example, the theme of “love” across the boundaries of religion and culture appears in many of his works. Burla’s novel Bli Kokhav (Without a star), though not matching the literary brilliancy of e.g. Agnon, has been appreciated for its

38

Ibidem

39

Rasmras-Rauch, op. cit. 22. Cf. Shaked op. cit. 72. Shaked claims that Burla’s fiction, “in its naiveté and simplistic characterization, constitutes a variety of genre fiction.” Shaked, op. cit., 72-73.

40

Ramras-Rauch, op. cit., 23.

41

Shaked, op. Cit., 73. N.b. I could find no other secondary source to confirm this statement.

42_{Ramras-Rauch, op. cit., 23.} 43

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“invaluable description of an Ottoman soldier’s experience in the First World War”44, treating Soldiers of different ethnic origin, among them Arabs, with camaraderie and empathy.

c) Yitzhak Shami (1889-1949)

Like Burla, Yitzhak Shami was a born Hebronite from Sephardic descent. Their works share the same familiarity with the Levantine environment. However, unlike Smilansky and Burla, he was no prolific writer, though covering a distinct niche which has been called “Arabic fiction in Hebrew”45. Three of his seven works are stories that almost exclusively feature Arabs as characters with unparalleled authenticity. The “intensely acute concentration of objective detail”46, as well as the stories’ convincing immersion in the ethos of the Arab village, provides for this authenticity. That is why, as with Burla’s stories, the theme of “fate” and the protagonists surrender to it is so prominent. Shami had a religious education, much like Burla, when he went on the same teacher’s college in Jerusalem. Like Burla, he went on as schoolteacher in several places in and outside of Palestine, until his death in 1949 in Haifa. The Polish-Jewish teacher and writer Asher Barash was to Shami what Brenner was to Burla, supporting him, editing the volume that contains all of his seven stories, only that, unlike Brenner, Barash wrote romantic literature. Another dominant feature in Shami’s works (especially in his short novel The Vengeance of the Fathers) is his naturalistic description of human behaviour by use of animal references. It has been pointed out that naturalistic writings, asserting man’s kinship with animals, emphasize the prevalence of external forces (social or natural) over human freedom of choice.47 The depiction of Jews is given from an Arab point of view, which is rather remarkable for a Jewish Hebrew writer, offers unprecedented identification with the Arab, e.g. by the use of Arab idioms, expressing customs and beliefs.

d) Yosef Haim Brenner (1881-1921)

Yosef Haim Brenner, or rather his works, are an example of a shift from simplistic to more complex depictions, a movement from the peripheral to central concern of the Arab in Hebrew prose.48

44

Schneider, Suzanne, „Yehuda Burla’s Beli Kokhav/Without a Star“ World War I in the Middle East and North

Africa https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/world-war-i-in-the-middle-east/seminar-participants/web-projects/suzanne-schneider-yehuda-burlas-beli-kokhavwithout-a-star/ (retrieved on 01.04.2015)

45

46

Ibid. 30.

47_{Domb, op. cit., 46.} 48

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Through his writing, translating, editing and mentoring of younger writers he contributed immensely to the shift of the centre of Hebrew literature to Palestine in the early 20th century. While Gershon Shaked placed Brenner as head of the psychological realist group, he in fact exhibits the above mentioned transition through the development of his writing career, as the Jewish-Arab tension became a major focal point in both his fiction and non-fiction. He was born in rural Russia and after deserting from the Russian army migrated to Palestine in 1909. While he was a proponent of the settlement of Palestine, he can be seen as the literary consciousness of his generation through his severe criticism of that very same idea. In Palestine, he worked as teacher, writer and editor rather than as agricultural pioneer and became the tragic victim of Arab marauders in May 1921.

The soul-searching, self-doubting Jewish characters in Brenner’s fictional works, which drew comparisons of him to Dostoevsky, are marked by a dark despair. The despair is based on the experience of the European immigrant of instability and impermanence of new settlements, the inevitable shadow and memory of life in Europe, the implicit comparison to the disadvantages of the present state (i.e. in Palestine), rooted in the mentality of Diaspora and the characters’ desire to be native like the Arabs amidst the feeling of being actually strangers.49 Thus implicit in his fiction, as well as explicit in essays, Brenner was critical of the romantic idea of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs as envisaged by e.g. the Brit Shalom movement, an utopian ideal that, according to Brenner, could not be realized. His stance towards this irresponsible idealism parallels his gloomy vision of the future, where the mutual hatred would only be perpetuated. Nonetheless, Brenner emphasized the historical necessity of the Jewish return to Palestine.

The Arab in Brenner’s works is indigenous to the surrounding landscape, a feature that would continue to be prevalent in Hebrew fiction in the pre-state literature, wherein the Arab is

representing the “wholeness of the land by symbolizing rootedness and continuity”50.While the Arab an sich does not occupy much space, Brenner depicted the new Jewish life in Palestine in a

juxtaposition against the background of the quiet Arab and the poor religious old yishuv51. In his later works, the Arab developed into something more than mere scenery. “The paradoxicality [sic] of Brenner’s ideas is reflected in his complex relation to the Arab.”52 Like Smilansky, he portrayed the Arab as a role model for the Jewish immigrant, in that the exhibits what the Jew lacks.

Simultaneously the Arab is a source of fear and abhorrence for the Jewish protagonist. In his last major novel, Breakdown and Bereavement, the Arab has become of part of the psyche of the Jewish protagonist. This is the last stage of the periphery-to-centre-movement described above. Half a

49

Ibid. 36.

50

Ibid. 38.

51_{I.e. The Jewish population of Palestine before the first aliyah.} 52

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century later, with authors as Yehoshua and Oz, this would still be the prevalent mode of depiction, together with the inchoate fear of losing the spiritual integrity due to the exacerbating conflict.53

e) Yitzhak Shenhar (1902-1957)

Like Brenner, Yitzhak Shenhar was born and raised in what is today Ukraine. He was a member of the Zionist pioneering movement in the Ukraine even prior to his immigration in 1921, belonging to the group of ideologically motivated immigrants of the third aliyah. Shenhar had studied European literature and was an excellent translator of German, Russian, French and English into Hebrew, and his literary output consists of a wide variety of works including fiction, poetry and plays. His fiction deals with the anti-Semitism of pogroms and the Holocaust in the Diaspora, as well as with the life of Jewish Settlement in Palestine. Much like Brenner and Agnon, Shenhar’s protagonists are self-searching Jews, committed to tilling the soil. Through these protagonists, being quiet aware of Arab presence in the land, “Shenhar poses existential questions as to the nature of the nation that is being shaped and reshaped by the diverse waves of immigration”, making the mentality-shift from

Diaspora to Palestine and the Arab-Jewish coexistence one of the central concerns of his fiction. Typical for Shenhar is the use of biblical topics and motifs through language and story line, in which the Arab appears both in friendly and adversarial contexts. In one story for instance, the Arab

belongs to the natural, desolated state of the land. The Jewish protagonist’s death through the plot is linked to the Zionist enterprise that strives to change this nature of the land, i.e. cultivating it. “The allusionary technique marks Shenhar as a tradition writer, linking the fiction of the interwar period to that of the 1948 period.”54

f) Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970)

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (born as Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, 1888-1970), in his writing career from the second aliyah well into the 1970s, wrote literature that can be seen as the culmination of

everything that preceded him. In his fiction the question of the possibility to achieve the spiritual and material liberation reverberated. In his blending of genre and anti-genre55_{he occupies a unique place} in the history of Hebrew literature, and it is awkward to recognize that he seems to be less

53

Ibid. 44.

54_{Ibid. 50.} 55

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interesting for the question of the depiction of the Arab in Hebrew prose than to the influence he exerted on later writers. The noble price laureate grew up in Galicia, lived a few years in Berlin and immigrated to Palestine at the age of 20. Most of his stories deal with the lost past of Eastern European Jewry and its confrontation with modernity. Though the subject of the Arab in Hebrew fiction does not provide the most fertile ground for an extensive treatment of Agnon’s works, Ben-Ezer included two of Agnon’s short stories in his book on the Arab in Hebrew fiction (Under the Tree and From Foe to Friend). Both stories are set in Mandate Palestine and feature an encounter of a Jewish protagonist (first person narration) with someone. In Under the Tree the protagonist gets into a conversation with an Ottoman pasha who tells, as story within a story, of his encounter with the mythical Jews of Khaibar (Bnei Khaibar meaning sons of Khaibar). The pasha had been on a military conquest for the Sultan when they got lost in the desert. While most of his company died of thirst, he and three other men made it to an oasis where they met these mythical Jews who live like Bedouins in the desert-oasis. They are described as wondrous tall warriors, who took care of him and his companions until they were pepped up again. The point of the story might be that that the reverence the Ottoman dignitary has for the Jews (both the mythical Jews of Khaibar as well as the efficient Zionist agricultural settlement) stands as a symbol for acceptance of the Jews presence in Palestine by its non-Jewish population. A similar interpretation is possible in Agnon’s From Foe to Friend56, in which the (assumably Jewish) protagonist persistently comes to a field just outside of Jerusalem, where he is met by a wind that has a voice. This wind drives the protagonist time and again away, destroying the fragile constructions of the protagonist, until the protagonist manages to establish himself on that field, planting a garden and building a more fortified house. As the wind is unable to drive the protagonist away any longer, he finally comes to accept the presence of the protagonist, even becoming good friends. This turning from foe to friend occurs in the following words:

“One night the wind returned and started knocking the trees about. What did the trees do? They struck back at him. The wind rose again and shook the trees. Once more the trees struck in return. The wind lost his breath. He turned and went away. From that time on the wind has been quite humble and meek, and when he comes he behaves like a gentleman. And since he minds his manners with me, I too mind my manners with him. When he comes I go out to meet him and ask him to sit with me on the garden bench beneath the trees. And he comes and sits by my side. And when comes he brings with him a pleasant scent from the mountains and valleys, and he blows the air around me gently like a fan. Since he behaves like a complete penitent, I never remind him of his former deeds. And when he leaves me and

56

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goed on his way I invite him to come again, as one should with a good neighbur. And we really are the best of neighbours, and I am very fond of him57. And he may even be fond of me.”58

This “happy ending” could stand as a symbol for an ultimate Arab acceptance of the Jewish presence, subsequent to the diligent effort of the Jews to establish themselves in the land. Jews and Arabs, the story suggests, can become friends if both mend their ways, starting with the end of the Arabs’ hostility towards the Jewish inhabitants. Not only does the field turn from a dry empty land into a plentiful garden but also does the Arab contribute to the partnership.

g) Other writers

The Lithuanian born Moshe Stavi (1884-1964) started his writing career in his 20s, switching from Yiddish to Hebrew after his immigration to Palestine in 1911. His stories can be divided into three groups: Stories about Jewish life in towns and villages in Russia, stories about the life of the pioneers in Palestine and oriental tales and fables. In all of the three groups there are animals to whom inner emotions and outward appearance is ascribed, paired with psychological analyses. In this he explicitly followed the example of Mendele Mokher Seforim. In some stories discernible “Arab traits” (such as uncontrollable and irrational anger) are attributed to animals, e.g. in The village in which dogs are the main characters of the story. Stavi works display some good knowledge of life in an Arab village, describing it realistic as well as idyllic. He offered critic to the Arabs’ apathetic way of life and submissive inactivity in the face of poverty.

The Russian-born Nahum Yerushalmi (1890-1961) who had immigrated to Palestine in 1905, worked as teacher and lawyer in Jerusalem and also in Tunisia. His stories treat life in the Jewish Sephardi community, which is unusual for Ashkenazi writers.59 As the scene is set in Jewish ghetto’s (such as in Hebron in his Merkado, the ass-driver), the Arab outside is rather peripheral in the stories, however, the Arab appears in friendly as well as adversarial contexts.

The Lithuanian-born Yaakov Rabinowitz (1875-1948) belonged to a rabbinical family and enjoyed besides religious education also studies of European literature. He wrote in German and Hebrew and displays certain similarities with Brenner in the absence of, or criticism on, romanticism. His stories deal with the disappointment with regard to the idealized imagination of life in Palestine. In one of his stories, the Jewish protagonist longs to become a “Jewish Bedouin” and expresses the belief that the Arabs of Palestine were in fact forcefully converted Jews. In expressing the

57

Literally, „I love him“.

58_{Ben-Ezer, Ehud, Sleepwalkers and Other Stories. The Arab in Hebrew Fiction (Boulder & London, 1999) 56.} 59

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grotesque extreme ambivalence with regard to the Arab, when in the end this enterprise fails and disillusion is all that is left, Rabinowitz uses satire and irony to make his point. However, unlike Brenner, Rabinowitz believed in the writer’s social role as educator.

Israel Zarhi (1909-1947), though a very prolific writer, produced little of interest with regard to the portrayal of the Arab in Hebrew fiction. He had started his writing career when he was twenty-three and worked in the secretariat of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Zarhi was writing a lot on the experience of the new immigrants and their difficulties to integrate. In the book The Silwan Village he turned his attention towards the private lives of Jews from Yemen. The story is in so far of interest as it concerns the destruction of their village destroyed by their Arab neighbours in 1929. Critics remarked that the story line contains irrelevant elements, besides the oversupply of characters. Zarhi nevertheless managed to depict the relationship between the Jewish and Arab neighbour villages and its deterioration due to growing hostility of the Arabs that culminated in the destruction. In that it was based on real events and Zarhi’s emersion into the life of Yemeni Jews, it is less fictive and more historiographical.

h) Summary

Of the above described authors of the pre-1948 war generation, some were born in Palestine, but most of them migrated from Eastern Europe. This shared background, and the fact all of them were belonging to a minority with regard to the Arab majority, provided for some commonalities with regard to topics but also to the way of describing Arab-Jewish relations in that time. Another attribute that unites respectively differentiates between the authors are their professions (famers, teachers, writers). The modes and styles of their writings were also quiet diverse (realist, romantic, plot-driven, stream-of-consciousness). So how can we summarize and contextualize the diverse depiction of Arab-Jewish relations in the fictive prose literature of that time?

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their readership in order to create understanding. Shared motifs are the Semitic origins of both Jews and Arabs, the former’s fascination with the picturesque desert. The ambivalence lies in the use of the Arab as role model for the immigrant with respect to his rootedness in the land (“native son”) and at the same time holding unto the idea that the economic benefits the educated Jews bring will ultimately lead to the acceptance by the Arab (also part of the “Altneuland phantasy” of early Zionism). This can be seen even in Agnon’s From Foes to Friends short story, wherein the Jewish effort to stay creates the necessary opportunity for both people to accommodate with each other. As first step towards a transition has been Brenner’s pessimism with regard to the progressing

deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations. Another motif is the” Arabization” of the inhabitants of Palestine, whose allegedly Jewish roots are to be rediscovered. One example is the idea of the Bedouins being actually descendants from the mythical Jews of Khaibar. Especially the Bedouin way of live fascinated those early immigrants and evoked in them images of the life of the biblical forefathers. Through all of the above described motifs, as well as with regard to the relatively small number of stories that feature Arabs, Jewish-Arab relations remain rather of peripheral concern to Hebrew fiction. The main concern still is the heroically pioneering “new Jew” or the soul-searching, rootless Jew who once in a while looks towards the Arab with both envy and elation.

2) The “1948-war generation”

Secondary literature has set some authors apart for their witnessing and/ or involvement in the events of the 1948-war. This generation has also been dubbed “Generation in the land” (Dor Ba’Aretz), 1948-Generation (Dor Tashach, referring to the acronym of the Hebrew date 1948) or “Palmach generation”60_{, referring to the Haganah’s elite force. Besides 1948 war of independence,} what separated this generation from later ones were the Second World War, General Rommel’s advance towards the Levant and the hardships and struggle against the British Mandate regime coinciding with the emergent Jewish self-confidence. Its writers were active participation in socialist, Zionist youth movements, less academicians and more politically active. Their literary output was consequently distinct from the previous works. The war challenged collective belonging for personal commitment (i.e. the “I” who is fighting) and raised the issue of personal morality, self-doubt (Yizhar) or self-assertion (Shamir). Yizhar himself stands as symbol for a generation of writers (notably

Mossinsohn, Shamir, Bartov, Megged and Shaham), a transition from previous “imported generation” to literature that was genuinely Israeli. Authors like Yizhar, Shamir and Megged contributed to literature that belongs to the “social realist tradition”, which refers to a form of

60

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mimetic representation and to a philosophy of the relationship of literature to life (i.e. the writer’s responsibility to accurately reflect socio-political reality). “Whether or not they obeyed its

imperatives in their personal lives, they idealized the transition from city to country, the return to nature, the youth movement, and the Spartan life. Turning away from religious tradition and other institutions of Diaspora existence, Dor Ba’aretz sought to merge with the people of the region, such as Bedouin.”61_{Typical themes are the portrayal of young sabra}62_{, his love of land and the desire for} self-sacrifice. This theme called ‘akedah63, that is the young (analogical to the biblical Isaac) that sacrifice themselves for the faith of the old (analogical to the biblical Abraham) as a result of upbringing, is contrasted with the portray of the “bleeding heart” character, who is too soft for this life. The sabra is “born from the sea” (i.e. rejecting of “old Jew” and denying any antecedents).64

a) Yizhar Smilansky (1916-2006)

The nephew of Moshe Smilansky, who is better know under his pen-name S. Yizhar, was born in Rehovot and belonged to a family of farmers who happened to be also writers. Yizhar already wrote in pre-statehood times and used biblical language and topics as source for imagery throughout his stories. Herein the Arab is depicted in many-sided characters but always as native son. His

protagonists are usually two dimensional young men, representing young Israeli manhood, devoid of an elaborate personal history. They are either “introverted and ineffectual pioneer-dreamers who cannot fulfil their designs”65 or they are or a positive but simultaneously boring example of a pioneer. Yizhar was a master of stream-of-consciousness technique with simple stories as seen through the protagonists’ eyes. In his pre-war stories (Ephraim returns to the Alfalfa, Paths in the fields, On the edges of the Negev and The grove on the Hill) the Arab appears both in adversarial and friendly contexts (though frequently as attackers of settlements). With each story, the Arab’s presence grows increasingly from periphery (belonging to the environment) to the centre as the Arab gains a voice and active role in the plot. Later, after the war, the protagonists are increasingly thrown into a (moral) dilemma. The two most famous examples for this are The Prisoner and Hirbet Hizah, in which the (at that time quiet controversial subject of) maltreatment of Arabs is a central theme, provoking strong reactions (e.g. censure, which in turn caused heavy waves). The Arab, however, remains voiceless, practically nonexistent except for the virtual presence in the thoughts of the Jewish soldier. For Yizhar, it is not about the Arab an sich but about explaining why it is so difficult for the Israeli

61_{Ibid. 142.} 62

I.e. Native born Israeli

63

Referring to the biblical story of Abrahams near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22.

64_{Shaked, op. cit., 165.} 65

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soldier to display human sensibility in the face of the other’s suffering. Other stories (such as Before zero hour, Midnight convoy and Days of Ziklag) provide perspectives on the war itself, for instance through the thoughts of the combatants, however, Yizhar’s stories never went beyond the war, historically spoken. Despite the fact that some of his stories are based on, or inspired by, real events, Yizhar did not see realistic representation as a function of fiction.

b) Moshe Shamir (1921-2004)

Besides the coincidence of their coming of age with the 1948-war, the writers of the 1948-war-generation shared their political involvement. This 1948-war-generation had fought together with the British in World War II, against the British and against the invading Arab armies. Like Yizhar, Shamir became a member of the Knesset. Shamir, who was born in Safed, also lived in a kibbutz for a few years and became an influential writer with Mapam-affiliation. What distinguishes Yizhar and Shamir is that Shamir’s protagonists are in fact the personification of the “New Hebrew Man”. “While Yizhar’s characters are reluctant colonizer and conquerors who would have preferred to live in peace alongside the Arab noble savage rather than fight them, Shamir’s characters relish the conquest.”66 Instead of being members of mere aesthetic elites with respect to their sensitivity and affection for the land, Shamir’s protagonists were the political and military realization of the Zionist ideal. Shamir also made more use of personal experiences from his own life or of his Brothers’, reflecting the Zionist narrative with these (auto-) biographical elements and also preparing the younger generation for the conquest of the land (Bildungsroman-like).67 In the 1950’s, Shamir wrote increasingly on historical subjects giving expression to national awareness and pride. In his post-1967 book My Life with Ishmael, Shamir recounted his experiences with Arabs, including friendships and general observations. He concluded his book by foreseeing no imminent peace between Jews and Arabs, at least not until the Arabs have reconciled themselves with the Jewish presence.68

c) Aharon Megged (1920-)

Aharon Megged can be seen as storyteller, “addressing a general reading public”69, and writing in various genres, like short stories, novellas, novels and essays. He was also no sabra, since he was

66

Ibid. 149.

67

Ibid. 150.

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born in Poland in 1920 and immigrated with his family when he was five years old. He left the kibbutz at the age of 30 and came to settle in Tel Aviv.

Megged’s fiction, most of it “novels of character”, has been described as moralistic and didactic. The content of moral conflict led sometimes to allegorical or even ironical, satirical forms of fictive writing, in a way creating distance between author and authored. His Kafka-like protagonists are rather antiheros, divided between two polarities (e.g. public and private life). Meged’s depiction of the Arab is connected to the ambivalence of his protagonists. They (the Arabs) appear as the conquered as well as the fear-instilling attackers. One example for the former is his Fortunes of a Fool. In this novel the Jewish protagonist is a typical anti-hero that experiences the “conqueredness” of the Arab after the Sinai war of 1956. The protagonist says after victoriously marching through conquered Gaza City:

“I repeated to myself that I was the conqueror, the ruler of the city, but I felt no joy about this. There was a ht vapour ober the sky, and this was like an ominous portent, like an eclipse of the sun.”70

This protagonist, similar to those of S. Yitzhar, is tormented by the feeling of guilt towards the Arab, the so called “bleeding heart” motif.

d) Nathan Shaham (1925-)

Nathan Shaham, born in Tel Aviv in 1925 as son of writer Aliezer Steinmann, was not very different from his contemporaries, in that he joined a socialist youth movements and lived in a kibbutz. The influence of ideology in his writings can be seen in that he “judged his protagonists by the standards of labour Zionism”71.

In Shaham’s stories, the Arab does appear as inseparable part of the landscape of the land, or as the litmus test for Jewish morality. On the one hand, Arab riots are portrayed in reminiscence of the Pogroms in Eastern Europe. On the other hand Jewish love for the land “is focused on the familiar fragrances of an Arab village”72. Moral concerning life and death are a prominent theme, as in They Were Seven, a story featuring a strategic ridge where a number of hidden mines question the soldiers’ team spirit and morality. Like Yizhar’s Day of Ziklag and Hirbet Hizah, it was written during

70

71_{Ibid. 157.} 72

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the war and shortly afterwards and also created fierce discussions about the position of literature vis-à-vis the collective.

e) The Canaanite Movement

The name “Canaanite movement” refers to a group of thinkers formed in the 1940s that pursued a kind of revisionist, non-Judaic Hebrew nationalism, renouncing all ties to Judaism and Zionism. They saw Judaism as a religion that could be practiced anywhere, and Zionism as a European invention that serves only the needs of European Jewry. The name “Canaan” refers to the pre-biblical name of the area, which the members of this movement wanted to see united under the banner of a new Hebrew nation, its inhabitants being the “original inhabitants”, or “Canaanites”. Among its proponents were writers, such as Yonatan Ratosh (born as Uriel Shelach, 1908-1981) and Aharon Amir (1923-2008) that produced a number of fictive works. They were all but a small minority73, and its members were frequently found in the small right-wing revisionist factions that dissented from the mainstream left-wing parties.

As the movement had its own right- and left-wing, the answers to the Arab question could range from separation to rapprochement or even absorption. The latter presumes that a non-ethnic, non-denominational political entity could be the home for Arabs, Druse, Maronites and the new Hebrews. Ratosh, who is seen as the founder of this movement, foresaw three wars that would be fought in the future: one between secular and religious forces; the second between pan-Arabism and the new Hebrew nation and the third against external imperialism. Thus depending on the specific nuance the author the Arab-Jewish relations were depicted. One famous author influenced by this ideology was Benjamin Tammuz, which will be treated separately belonging to the following group.

f) Summary

As a consequence of the 1948 war, the Arab became a minority inside the new born State of Israel. Recognition of this new circumstance is already visible in the literature of this period. The Arab ceased serving as “native son” role model for the Jewish immigrant as the Arab himself became an exile. Admiration for the noble savage turned into guilt and pity for his predicament. The picture of a submissive, inferior being powerfully impacted on the Jewish conscience, by way of analogy to the image of the defenceless Jew in the Diaspora. However, the Arab remained voiceless and the stories

73_{The constant immigration from Europe strengthened the Jewish character of the new-born state of Israel,}

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rather focused on the inner monologue of the Jewish protagonist, thoughts that undermined his moral and the values of that generation.

3) The statehood-generation and the literature of the 1980s and 1990s

The name “statehood-generation” (Dor HaMedina or New Wave74) refers to the writers of the 1950s, 1960s and 70s. While the timeframe that distinguishes this generation from the previous one is small, the difference between the “Palmach Generation”, or “Dor Ba’Aretz”, and this new native generation are profound, though they asserted mutual influence on each other. In fact, the latter sometimes even predated first.75 Thus, the divide runs along generational as well as non-generational lines. The writers of the previous generation were deeply involved in the values of the pioneer generation and active participants in the struggles of the Jewish Community before and during the war of 1948. The Israeli establishment, which until the war in 1948 had felt rather homogenous, which discouraged dissent and deviance from the norm, radically changed as waves of new

immigrants poured into the now open country. The sabra suddenly was a minority in the country he had fought for. Another current was the decline of pro-USSR socialism (reflected in the Mapam-split) and with it the decline of Russian influenced social realism literature (though realism continued in various guises) and mimetic representation (although writers like Amos Oz wrote in a no less pictorial manner) as individualism grew and consensus disintegrated.76

The statehood-generation featured authors (many of whom are still alive today) that were influenced by Kafka and existentialist fiction77, continuing on what had been rather exceptional in the previous generation: The reversal of the roles in Jewish-Arab relations. Like already in Yizhar’s Hirbet Hizah and Prisoner, the new generation displayed the tendency to give the role of the victim to the Arab, “the uprooted native son whose plight is in essence ‘Jewish’”78, i.e. a reflection of the Jews in the Diaspora. The dilemma of “right versus right” is a reflection of the complexity of life in Israel and a trend in Israeli fictive literature of interdeterminacy79, i.e. leaving the moral judgment to the reader. Gila Ramras-Rauch wrote:

74

Shaked used the term „New Wave“ interchangeably with “Dor HaMedina” to describe a group of writers that revolutionarily differed from the “Dor Ba’Aretz”.

75

Shaked, op. cit., 140.

76_{Ibid. 143.} 77

78

Ibidem

79_{Meaning “the multiplicity of possible interpretations of given textual elements}_”._{Encyclopædia Britannica}

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“The 1948 generation of Israeli writers were blessed with a sense of the rightness of Israel’s claim and the certainty of ultimate victory. Their connection to the Jewish past served to strengthen that feeling. For the generation of A.B. Yehoshua, however, no such certainty is forthcoming. Instead, he and the writers of his generation have become increasingly aware of the complexity of Israel’s claim; the surely dubious justification of the present by linking it to the past; the ambiguity of Israels’s situation in the light of the Arab counterclaim; and the consequent ambiguity of the position of the individual Israeli.”80

For the establishment, i.e. secular, leftist, Zionist elites of Ashkenazi decent, the atmosphere has been described as a “crisis of conscience”, of a “state of siege” and the “existence in the shadow of war” and the moral implication of being Israeli, which has also found its way into the literature of the decades succeeding the 1948 war and subsequent independence. This self-questioning and crisis of values is rather particular for the centre-left establishment, however, not so much for the more peripheral, nationalist and religious parts of the population. In 1977, these parts brought about a political change in the form of a centre-right government.81 The decline of the centre-left parties as well as Likud’s failure to establish a “new centre” has been called the “crumble of the centre”.82

The Arab-Israeli conflict, rather than being impartially the underlying condition of existence for everyone, became political, especially since Lebanon war in 1982 (being seen as a “war of choice”, vis-á-vis e.g. the necessity to strike first in the light of an imminent attack), which had its polarizing effect on literature as well. What changed, too, were the subjects of fictive writing, i.e. the vanishing of the old subjects (such as assimilation, immigration, settlement, finding national identity)83, giving way to a plethora of diverse social settings and characters. Something that, though considerably slower, found entrance into Hebrew fiction was the use of spoken language. Colloquial Hebrew appeared only in direct speech, e.g. in dialogues, whereas the narration continued to be written in some elevated language, rich in biblical and Mishnaic allusions and connotations.84 The renunciation of mimetic representation of social realism did not result in less pictorial description and allegorical language.85

Unlike Labour parties, Likud appealed to oriental Jewish electorate. Abramovich, Dvir, Back to the Future.

Israeli Litearture of the 1980s and 1990s (Newcastle, 2010) 113. 82

83

Though not completely. Also the new generation wrote on migration and settlement, like Amos Oz’s

Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966) or A Perfect Peace (1982). 84_{Shaked, op. cit., 164.}

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The line of continuity and discontinuity between Dor Ba’Aretz and Dor HaMedina, as has been argued by Shaked, is most visible in the fluctuating yet mutual influence writers of the one

generation had on the other, even between genres (poetry and prose).86 Depending on the

respective biography, the Sinai Campaign, the previously neglected issue of the Holocaust, its victims and its reverberations in the weeks before the Six-Day War, were influential on this generation, as they “cast their shadow retrospectively over earlier Israeli history”87_{. However, having studied at the} same university, rather than serving in the same army unit, was formative to the writers of the new wave generation. That is essential seeing that the previous generations, though diverse in profession, was not one of academics but of youth movements, agricultural settlement and fighting in WWII and the War of Independence. It was also the anti-genrists (and Agnon) of the previous generation that have been rediscovered by the “New Wave” writers. Brenner’s and Berdyczewski’s psychological realism and Agnon’s non-realism thus established a line of continuity amid the separation of literary revolution. The Arab characters in the literature until 1977 remained rather voiceless, being a symbol or a metaphor, a specific predicament as example for a more general problem. This changed with Sami Michael’s Refuge and Yehoshua’s The Lover, being the first in giving a real voice to three dimensional non-Jewish characters, which marked a further diversification of subjects and characters.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the deconstruction and revision of the Zionist narrative, which “went up in smoke in the implosion of difference”88, giving way to new literary developments as well. As a result, Hebrew novels written by Shoah-survivors, Mizrahi Jews89 or Israeli Arabs could be

increasingly found on the bookshelves. As the cultural spectrum of the authors diversified, so did the subjects of Hebrew Literature whose stories do not merely feature the estranged and inward looking Israeli, much less the native-born, male Jewish hero. In his book Back to the Future. Israeli literature of the 1980s and 1990s, Dvir Abramovich sees in the result of the influence of this heterogenisation of society “a move away from an identity constructed by a national collective myth to a multiplicity of narratives situated in many zones and peoples” 90, nothing short of a literary revolution.

86

Shaked, op. cit., 162.

87_{Ibid. 229. In this, the fiction reflects the historiographical and sociological trend in the academia to revise}

history.

88

Abramovich, op. cit., 11.

89_{I.e. Jews from North Africa or the Middle East.} 90

Love, Hate and the sound of a Trumpet