Some may consider writing of this sort—Brenner goes on in this manner for a few pages before getting to the story itself—to be good literature, and others may not. But the essential point here is that Brenner’s approach, and not Agnon’s, is what became the standard for contemporary Hebrew-language prose.

Brenner’s imprint is visible everywhere: In the work of S. Yizhar, who covers 1,156 pages with introspective monologues in Days of Ziklag (1958); in the heroes of Amalia Kahana-Carmon, who spend entire novellas looking out the window, absorbed in an endless stream of consciousness; and in the passive Hanna Gonen, the narrator crafted by Amos Oz in My Michael (1968), most of which is devoted to mystical and sexual fantasies. Brenner is present in the tortured monologues of A.B. Yehoshua (“The Continuing Silence of a Poet,” 1970; A Late Divorce, 1982; Mr. Mani, 1990) and of Yoram Kaniuk (Rockinghorse, 1974; His Daughter, 1987), in the confessional literature of Pinhas Sadeh, Josef Mundy and Yotam Reuveni, in the unbridled writing of Yitzhak Orpaz (The Eternal Bride, 1988) and of Amnon Navot (Instrument Flight, 1988), in the verbal inflation of Yisrael Berama (Torn Days, 1991) and of Judith Katzir (Closing the Sea, 1990), in the stylistic rococo of David Grossman (See Under: Love, 1986) and Avram Heffner (Tout Compris, 1987), in the self-analysis of Heffner and of Yitzhak La’or (The People, Food for Kings, 1993), and in the fragmentedness of Yoel Hoffmann. If Israeli prose generally tends to ramble instead of telling a story, if it is focused on the consciousness of the detached “self” and not on the external world, and if it contains neither action nor any sort of historical-national perspective—this is because it is built on the foundations laid by Brenner, not Agnon.⁶⁶

 

The typical hero of twentieth-century Israeli prose is a lonely and detached youth, a self-doubting individualist, who is alienated and in search of himself in a disintegrating world. The “uprooted” individual was the stock hero of Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Uri Nissan Gnessin, Yosef Haim Brenner and Gershon Shofman in the early twentieth century,⁶⁷ and he has continued to play the leading role in Israeli literature ever since. Two key works published in 1958, Days of Ziklag by S. Yizhar and Life as a Parable by Pinhas Sadeh, focus (albeit from different angles) on doubt-ridden young men, rootless and lacking a sense of history, who attempt to “find themselves” ex nihilo. The prominent writers of the 1960s, such as A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Aharon Appelfeld and Yitzhak Orpaz, concentrated in their works on the figure of the detached outsider who is driven by destructive impulses, mystical longings and erotic desires to act in ways that are incomprehensible to him, and who feels no connection to his family, community, people or country.⁶⁸

To take one of any number of examples, Yitzhak Orpaz’s 1962 Skin for Skin presented a figure whose “entire life hung from him like some plucked, worn, superfluous rag. He finds himself nowhere. He himself does not live anywhere. Nowhere does he realize himself.”⁶⁹ The following year, Amos Kenan wrote At the Station (1963), a short novel in the form of a dialogue, which proceeds along the following lines:

And so forth. The hero of Israeli prose is, for the most part, a marginal figure, a misfit, living outside the mainstream of society. He is an unabsorbed refugee, uprooted, the eternal exile⁷¹; he is an “accursed” outcast⁷²; he comes from a socio-ethnic “minority,” living the experience of the peripheral and underprivileged neighborhoods, irrelevant to the “national agenda”⁷³; at times, he is simply insane.⁷⁴ Yehoshua Kenaz, for example, offers us alienated antiheroes in all his books,⁷⁵ and Hanoch Levin is even more extreme in his incessant depiction of ludicrous, wretched characters.⁷⁶

In 1977, sixty years after Brenner wrote his most important work, Breakdown and Bereavement, two books appeared presenting the Israeli experience as a recurring pattern of loss and failure: The Lover by A.B. Yehoshua, and Past Continuous by Ya’akov Shabtai. The family depicted in The Lover is assaulted by invaders from without, and the protagonist cooperates out of an uncontrollable, self-destructive impulse. Shabtai likewise portrays the degeneration and decay of Israeli society as part of “the terrible process of disintegration and decomposition... [which] embodied the very essence of life and its sadness, because it was very hard to accept the fact that what was once one and whole disintegrated and fell apart and receded into the distance and was irretrievably lost, like the galaxies moving farther and farther away from each other in space until they were lost forever somewhere in the infinite darkness beyond all horizons and forgotten.”⁷⁷ As one of Shabtai’s heroes declares: “Life [is] nothing but a journey toward death,... and not only that but also death [is] actually the very essence of life, growing inside it hour by hour until it enclosed and embodied it completely....”⁷⁸

If life is only “a journey toward death,” then there is no meaning to history. For what difference does it make if one lives in one place in the year 500 B.C.E., or in a different place in the year 1977? Either way, life is cast from the same fatalistic mold. Indeed, both Shabtai and Yehoshua—in contrast to the linear, historical plot characteristic of Hebrew poetics from the Bible to Agnon—spin a story that is a kind of matrix, a thicket of personal, encoded thoughts and symbols. In such a world, there is scarcely any sense of before and after, but only a crowded, subjective “present” into which the past occasionally erupts as fragments of turbulent memories, associations and dreams.

One could argue that alienation is the fundamental ethos of all of modern Western literature, and that Israeli writing is simply an expression of what has become a universal mood. Yet the West of the twentieth century did not only produce works like The Stranger by Albert Camus, Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor by John Barth, and Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. It also produced works far more “Hebrew” in their poetics than almost anything written in the Hebrew language during this same period. Works such as The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow and The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago represent the epic, historic, national, impersonal stream, a path that could have been taken by those who wrote in Hebrew as well.

There was one brief period, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, when Israeli prose looked as though it might return to the fundamentals of Hebrew poetics. The literature of the “Palmah Generation,” of which Moshe Shamir is the best-known example, harbored a collective, Zionist ethos and was aimed at a wider public, as opposed to the refined elitism of Uri Nissan Gnessin or David Vogel. Yet the differences between the Palmah Generation’s poetics and that of the Hebrew literary tradition far outweighed the similarities. Authors such as Shamir wrote of an invented “Israeli”—rather than Jewish—nation, without historical roots. Their Zionism was that of the self-made “sabras,” natives of the land of Israel, whose Israeli identity was a substitute for, not a continuation of, their Judaism. “Elik was born from the sea”—this phrase, which opens Shamir’s With His Own Hands (1951), captures the essence of the Palmah Generation, both in terms of what it lacks and what it contains: It lacks any sense of history, and it contains a complete dependence on territory. The protagonist is “born from the sea”—born here, on this strip of coast, in the land of Israel; and his identity is derived from this connection. The sea is a pure, virgin, natural, meta-cultural, meta-historical, meta-national space, a blank page, a new beginning. The land of Israel, and not the people of Israel, is what establishes the sense of identity and commitment in the prose of Shamir and his contemporaries. Conquest of territory, “knowledge of the land” along its length and breadth, laying down roots in it and exalting the young people who fought for it—these, and not the chain of Jewish being, are the themes of the Palmah prose. It was, in a sense, wholly patriotic. But patriotism is not historical consciousness, and for the authors of the Palmah Generation, the first came at the expense of the second. They saw themselves as part of the land and the state which was built upon it, not of the people who built it. They wrote stories that were born from the sea.⁷⁹