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Israeli prose of the 1980s, and even more so of the 1990s, brought to fruition the decades-long process of alienation from the Hebrew poetic tradition. As one of Avram Heffner’s protagonists proclaims:
I believe that there is no God. One. I believe that history has no meaning. No meaning. Two. I believe that there is no sublime purpose that mankind must attempt to fulfill.80
Elsewhere, Heffner writes: “We were cast headlong into a cosmos lacking meaning, lacking order and method.”81 Similarly, Yoel Hoffmann writes: “The days are interconnected like cogwheels. One day rolls into the next. And in Bernhard’s body there are bones, and he carries these bones around, every day of his life, by his own strength alone.... In Palestine the air is transparent most of the time. No one gives a thought about Bernhard’s bones.”82
No one gives a thought about Bernhard’s bones—but does anyone in Israeli literature give a thought about anything other than the immediate, arbitrary, sensual present in which “one day rolls into the next”? The banal existence depicted in Israeli prose from the mid-1980s onward reflects an outlook that contrasts more sharply with the Hebrew worldview than did either the pagan approach in the time of the Bible or the Hellenistic approach at the time of the Talmud. The clash, this time, is total: Nothing remotely resembling Hebrew narrative prose can ever be written by those who believe that “history [and, therefore, national identity] has no meaning,” and that “we were cast headlong into a cosmos lacking meaning, lacking order and method.”83
What content can a contemporary Israeli author offer, if history has no meaning for him? What kind of language will he use, if the rich historical resonance of language says nothing to him? What can the narrator “know” about reality (and about the people who take part in it) if the author himself knows of nothing beyond his own experiences as an alienated individual—unmarried, wandering around in Tel Aviv, depressed? The following three passages written in the past ten years (the first by Uzi Weill, the second by Yosef El-Dror, the third by Etgar Keret) typify the sort of answers currently being offered up:
She finished her studies and began getting jobs in all sorts of places. When I saw her, I wouldn’t mention the word love. I couldn’t believe how long she lived without it. I couldn’t believe that anyone could, not to mention her. But somehow she didn’t become a nun, or a desert. Sadness taught her to look deeper than what she was accustomed. Since she didn’t have anything else to do, she spent all her time looking.84
She turns over onto her back and looks at the ceiling, shifting a detached gaze between the two of us. I move from my knees to lean against the wall. He lowers his gaze to her and looks at her, bemused.... She caresses her left breast, the one closer to me, relatively, and lets out a sort of short “ah.” He looks at me in despair.85
So now she wants us to part, because she decided that I don’t love her. What can I tell her? If I were to shout at her that she is stupid and that she should stop talking nonsense, this would only be proof for her. “Do something that proves to me that you love me,” she says. What does she want me to do? What? She should just tell me. But she doesn’t. Because if I really love her, then I should know on my own. What is true is that she is willing either to hint, or to tell me what she doesn’t want. Either way, I can choose. So I told her that she should say what she doesn’t want, and at least we would know something. From her hints, I certainly can understand nothing.86
The stylistic uniformity that causes these passages to read as if they were written by the same hand is not limited to the work of these three writers. It is typical of most of their contemporaries, who share the same impoverished language (their Hebrew is readily understood by any Israeli schoolchild or new immigrant), and whose narrative voice is always a narrow and pathetic “self.”87 Indeed, if there exists a passage which captures the essence of today’s Hebrew-language literature, and which demonstrates the degree to which this literature has broken away from the classic Hebrew poetics, it is the following, from Orly Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City (1992):
Dolly City—a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world. All the people in Dolly City are usually on the run. Since they’re always running, there’s always someone chasing them, and since there’s someone chasing them, they catch them, execute them and throw them in the river.... All the babies in the city are adopted (the little bastards).... There are two big parties: Bureaucracy and Procedure. The parties have gangs of street boys who take the law into their own hands. The soldiers of the Bureaucracy party are the Trashers—revolting unhygienic types who spend their time picking pockets, coughing, wiping their noses on their sleeves and relieving themselves in their trousers.
A Trasher never says “hello”; he only does things, especially scribble graffiti on walls where there’s a strong smell of urine.... There are other people in Dolly City too, like the Apostrophes. Whose slogan is as dumb as their faces. They sing a reggae beat: “The state is me, go on and decapitate me.” And there are the Cowards, the Archetypes, and the Bonbons.... Luckily for me, I managed to avoid falling into the traps of any of these groups and I learned to keep a low profile. I learned that the trick is to pretend to be asleep—and undermine.88
Never has there been a literature called “Hebrew” that was so removed from Hebrew poetics as today’s Israeli prose. One can, of course, blame post-modernism for current esthetic fashions—just as the melancholy that has dominated Israeli literature since 1967 can and should be understood not only as a response to the occupation of the territories, but also to everything that has accompanied the rise of the “New Left” in Europe and the United States: The student revolts, the sexual revolution and the wave of protests against the Vietnam War. Israeli culture is not impervious to the currents of world culture, nor can it be. The question, however, is whether Israeli literature, in responding to the currents of Western culture, should fashion itself as a shallow reflection of these trends—or see them as an opportunity to formulate an original, Hebrew response.
Post-modernism is not the first challenge to face Hebrew culture in the long history of the Jewish people. The Bible was written as a response to paganism, and the Talmud, in great measure, as a rejoinder to Hellenism. Exposure to alien cultures allows us to sharpen our own identity as Jews: As we come to understand these cultures, we may not only learn what they have to offer us, but also come to appreciate how and why we differ. Yet if our encounter with the West yields nothing more than assimilation, we have consigned ourselves to self-destruction.89 Many, of course, rejoice at the prospect,90 but those who hold Jewish cultural identity dear should understand to what extent its future depends upon the question: Will the literature that is written by Jews in the coming century renew its link with the Hebrew literary heritage? Jewish civilization looks to the authors of the current generation as both its heirs and as a guiding light for the next generation. The unfinished canon of Hebrew literature calls upon us to add to it new works, works that will impart to the past a relevance for the present—and to the present, a future.
Assaf Inbari is an author and literary critic living in Tel Aviv.
Notes
1. This is the way “Hebrew literature” was perceived in practice by four prominent Israeli literary critics over the past fifty years: Dov Sadan, Baruch Kurzweil, Dan Miron and Gershon Shaked, along with the poet-ideologue Yonatan Ratosh. Despite the pronounced differences in outlook between them, they all shared the perception of “Hebrew literature” as Jewish literature; that is to say, they share an ethnic, and not artistic, definition of Hebrew literature. See Yonatan Ratosh, Jewish Literature in Hebrew (Tel Aviv: Hadar, 1982), p. 39 [Hebrew]; Dov Sadan, Introductory Essay: On Our Literature (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 1962), p. 9 [Hebrew]; Baruch Kurzweil, Bialik and Tchernichowsky (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1972), pp. 168-169 [Hebrew]; Dan Miron, Le Medecin Imaginaire: Studies in Classical Jewish Fiction (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 1995) [Hebrew]; Gershon Shaked, Works of Art and Their Audience: Four Chapters of the Theory of Acceptance (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1987), p. 17. [Hebrew]
2. The ethnic or racial definition of the Jewish heritage is unacceptable, because the Jewish people, from its very beginning, has been a mixture of Semitic peoples: The four Matriarchs were Arameans; Osnat, the wife of Joseph, was an Egyptian; Tzipora, the wife of Moses, was a Midianite; the Davidic line was descended from Ruth the Moabite; tribes from the Israelite kingdom married Canaanite women; and King Solomon took numerous non-Jewish wives.
The religious definition of our heritage is not suitable either, since the Jews have never agreed among themselves regarding the meaning of the Tora. The Judaism of the First Temple period is not that of the talmudic Sages (and among the Sages themselves there are endless disagreements); the Judaism of Philo is not the Essene version of Judaism; the Judaism of Maimonides is not the Judaism of R. Judah Halevi; the Judaism of the Ba’al Shem Tov is not like that of Hermann Cohen. As a religion, Judaism is a multiplicity of controversial interpretations (and every such interpretation, from the perspective of the others, seems wildly deviant); the difference between “religious” and “secular” Israeli Jews in our time may not be as great as the chasms that have always separated the different streams of diaspora Judaism.
The lingual definition of our heritage is similarly intolerable, because the fundamental works of this heritage were written in many different languages. Some of them (beginning with portions of the Bible, such as part of the books of Ezra and Daniel) were written in Aramaic, others in Arabic, others in Yiddish and some in German or English. And Hebrew itself, it should be recalled, always contained elements of other languages.
The religious definition of our heritage is not suitable either, since the Jews have never agreed among themselves regarding the meaning of the Tora. The Judaism of the First Temple period is not that of the talmudic Sages (and among the Sages themselves there are endless disagreements); the Judaism of Philo is not the Essene version of Judaism; the Judaism of Maimonides is not the Judaism of R. Judah Halevi; the Judaism of the Ba’al Shem Tov is not like that of Hermann Cohen. As a religion, Judaism is a multiplicity of controversial interpretations (and every such interpretation, from the perspective of the others, seems wildly deviant); the difference between “religious” and “secular” Israeli Jews in our time may not be as great as the chasms that have always separated the different streams of diaspora Judaism.
The lingual definition of our heritage is similarly intolerable, because the fundamental works of this heritage were written in many different languages. Some of them (beginning with portions of the Bible, such as part of the books of Ezra and Daniel) were written in Aramaic, others in Arabic, others in Yiddish and some in German or English. And Hebrew itself, it should be recalled, always contained elements of other languages.
3. See, for example, Gershom Scholem, Explications and Implications: Writings on Jewish Heritage and Renaissance (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 105-123. [Hebrew]
4. Only five such prose works are known, the most famous of which is Daphnis and Chloe by Longus.
5. See Odile Kaltenmark, Chinese Literature (New York: Walker, 1964), pp. 105-106.
6. See Ben-Ami Shiloni, Traditional Japan: Culture and History (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1995), p. 77. [Hebrew] The most famous of the works that initiated Japanese prose is The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu.
7. See Yitzhak Y. Goldtziher, History of Arabic Literature (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1952), p. 76. [Hebrew] The most famous literary work from this period is obviously The Arabian Nights.
8. The Buddhists, who borrowed from popular folktales in order to adapt them to stories about the life of Buddha, used prose as an alternative to the ritual, philosophical, and epic poem, which was representative of the spiritual and cultural domination of the Hindu priesthood. In other words, prose is not a product of the original Indian culture, but, on the contrary, an internal reaction against this ancient culture, whose literature was demonstratively poetic.
9. Probably the only case is that of thirteenth-century Iceland—a fascinating, relatively late phenomenon which drew heavily upon the Hebrew monotheism that had been bestowed upon Europe by Christianity. The fact that an originally pagan culture like that of Iceland chose to express itself in prose may seem to run against my argument concerning the necessary connection between paganism and poetry (and, in contrast, between monotheism and prose). Yet by the time they began to write prose, the Icelanders had long abandoned their paganism in favor of Christianity. Christianity was accepted as the official religion of Iceland around the year 1000, while the sagas were written in the thirteenth century.
10. Psalms 19:2.
11. Joshua 10:12; Genesis 21:1, 2; Genesis 19:24-25; Exodus 3:2; Exodus 7:20; Exodus 14:21-22; Exodus 16:13-14; Joshua 6:20; Judges 16:29-30; I Kings 18:38; II Kings 2:11.
12. The contrast between the Hebrew and pagan conceptions of time is illustrated by the Bible in the narrative of Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams in the book of Genesis 41:25-34. One may wonder what is so great about Joseph’s interpretations: They are, after all, rather straightforward readings. Joseph interprets the combination of cows, sheaves and the river in a most banal way, as representing the abundance and lack of food. The striking element in the narrative is not Joseph’s interpretive abilities, but rather the inability of the sorcerers to come up with the same interpretation. How were all the king’s magicians and diviners, undoubtedly men of high intellectual rank, rendered helpless by such a simple metaphor? The answer, perhaps, is that as pagans, the magicians could not conceive of the possibility of change and innovation. From their perspective, the Nile could not suddenly go dry for seven years, since this had never happened. Only someone who does not perceive reality with the cyclical eyes of a pagan could imagine the change over time—the violation of the rhythms. The key word in Joseph’s response to Pharaoh is, therefore, the word “behold.” “Behold, there come seven years....”; “behold,” that is, in contrast to the routine. Pagans cannot imagine a disturbance of the routine, consequently, “none could interpret them for Pharaoh.” Genesis 41:34.
13. The same “effective moment” of which Gotthold E. Lessing speaks in his book Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1962), p. 19. Consequently, it is not surprising that Lessing draws the examples with which he illustrates this point from Greek literature and art.
14. As does Thucydides, who explains the fictitious nature of the speeches that are incorporated in his book both by the partial nature of his sources and by the limitations of his memory and that of his interviewees. See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin, 1954), pp. 24-25.
15. Accordingly, the emergence of the realistic novel in the nineteenth century was paralleled by the flourishing of the nonrealistic genres of ghost stories, vampire tales, fairy tales, and other types of Gothic fiction that have occupied a large portion of European literature since the rise of the romantic movement. At that time there was a clear distinction between “realism” and “fantasy.” The meaning of this separation, from a cognitive perspective, was that what a narrator was allowed to “know” in a work of fantasy exceeded the limits of “knowledge” (and reality) in the realistic novel.
16. See, for example, the following passage from a novel by Diderot: “This is the demonstrative joy of the freedom of invention, in which effort to attain the narrator sacrifices any trace of a claim to truth.” Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (Oxford: Oxford, 1999), p. 4.
17. Meir Sternberg writes that the biblical narrator “establishes himself in the strongest position conceivable, one unrivaled in the annals of literature since, again, it uniquely combines the sources of authority attaching to otherwise incompatible models of narration. For he wields the authority of supernatural knowledge and of empiric evidence, of inspiration (or convention) and tradition, of the divine performer and of the human observer, of the mentor and of the ‘son’ meeting other sons on their common ground.” Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana, 1985), p. 117.
18. For example, the narrator characteristic of the novels of Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Honore de Balzac or William Makepeace Thackeray.
19. For the Sisyphean attempt by Flaubert to formulate his personal style, see Henri Troyat, Flaubert (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1996), pp. 96-99. [Hebrew]
20. The earliest of which is, apparently, the Song of Deborah in Judges 5.
21. History, in the words of Hayden White, “is always written as part of a contest between contending poetic figurations of what the past might consist of.” “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in Clio, June 1974, p. 300. The degree of self-presence of the scholarly historian (Plutarch, Gibbon, Tuchman) is even less than that of the experiential historian, who gives us personal testimony regarding events that he witnessed or even in which he participated (Thucydides, Xenophon, Julius Caesar, Albert Speer).
22. In order to prove this, mention should be made of the text that competes with the Bible for the title of the “father of Western literature”: The Homeric epic. The epic appears before us as presented by a popular narrator whose consciousness, like that of his biblical counterpart, is merely the sum total of all the cultural, military, agricultural and ritual assets that his forefathers accumulated, and his memory does not contain a personal biography, but rather the archives of the civilization in which he is immersed. Already, however, in the opening verse of the Iliad, and likewise in the opening of the Odyssey, the narrator makes his presence known by the use of the first person singular, and reveals his identity as a professional poet who needs the aid of the muses in order to fulfill his literary task. He also makes his presence known every time he links a subjective evaluatory adjective to his characters (“Aegistus the fair,” “Telemachos the wise,” “Titonos the wondrous,” “Ergaipontes the mighty”). Homer reaches the height of personalization when he attributes the central story line of the Odyssey (Odysseus’ wanderings over the course of a decade among the islands of the Aegean Sea) not to an external narrator, but to the hero himself, who recounts his memoirs (or, perhaps, invents them) to the hospitable Phaeacians who saved him (Odyssey, books ix-xii). The main literary unit of the epic is, therefore, a private “memoir.”
23. The individualism of Greek literature is embodied in the institutionalization of the competition among the playwrights (and among the poets in general): Literature, like athletics, was perceived by them as the venue of competition between gifted individuals; a tragedy by Euripides is a personal victory by Euripides in the present, and everlasting glory in the future, for the work and the credit are inseparable. For competitions by poets, see, for example, the beginning of the dialogue of Ion. Dialogs of Plato (London: Oxford, 1924), vol. 1, p. 497. Herodotus’ statement at the beginning of his book: “What Herodotus the Halicarnassian has learnt by inquiry is here set forth: In order that so the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time, and that great and marvellous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners,” attests that Herodotus, like every other Greek author, hoped that his name also would not be forgotten, and that by “preserving the memory of the past” that was replete with “amazing achievements,” his memory also would be preserved, by merit of the achievement of his book. Herodotus, trans. A.D. Godley (Cambridge: Harvard, 1975), book i, p. 3.
24. The clearest example of this phenomenon is provided by the poem of Horace, “Exegi Monumentum,” in which the poet extols himself and proclaims his immortality. Horace, The Odes of Horace (Hamondsworth: Penguin, 1964), book iii, p. 207. Nineteen centuries after Horace, Pushkin writes his version of the same poem, with the same title, in order to reserve for himself the literary immortality that, in his opinion, he deserves: Alexander Pushkin, “Onto Myself I Reared a Monument,” in The Poems, Prose and Plays of Alexander Pushkin (New York: Random House, 1936), p. 88.
25. Exodus 20:15. Cf. the scene of the reading of the Tora depicted in Nehemiah 8:1-8.
26. Gershom Scholem, Opening Address at The Study-Conference, Jerusalem, July 14-19, 1968, in R.J. Zwi Werblowsky and C. Jouco Bleeker, eds., Types of Redemption: Contributions to the Theme of Study-Conference Held at Jerusalem, July 14-19, 1968 (Leiden: Brill, 1970), pp. 1-12.
27. Scholem, Opening Address, p. 12.
28. Isaiah 2:22.
29. For example: Hamlet, Don Quixote, Tartuffe, Candide, Tom Jones, Faust, Emma, Père Goriot, David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
30. In works such as The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910), In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1927), Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934), The Fall by Albert Camus (1956), Something Happened by Joseph Heller (1966), The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963), My Life as a Man by Philip Roth (1970), or The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster (1982).
31. It therefore is not coincidental that the only biblical narrative that is an exception to this rule tells of a person who is not an Israelite: “There was a man in the land of Utz named Job” (Job 1:1).
32. This narrative technique, of a gradually accumulated meaning generated through the intertwining of anecdotes, has no parallel in the literature of the ancient East. See Sternberg, Poetics, p. 47.
33. Precisely for this reason, the Bible tells us not only of the successes of individuals, but also of their failures. “Private” matters such as the episodes of Samson and Delilah, of Saul and the medium (I Samuel 28), of David and Bathsheba, or of Ahab and Navot (I Kings 21) always go beyond the realm of the individual and leave their mark on history. The Bible shows us how any man, in any action that he does, is likely to influence reality, for better or worse. There is no exemption from responsibility.
34. Genesis 38:1-10.
35. For more about the technique of indirect characterization adopted by the Bible (that is, the characterization of figures by means of their actions), see Sternberg, Poetics, p. 119.
36. Erich Auerbach shows the contrast between the Homeric practice of linking to each character an evaluative adjective, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the abstention of the Bible from doing so, as can be seen, for example, in the Binding of Isaac. Isaac “may be handsome or ugly, intelligent or stupid, tall or short, pleasant or unpleasant—we are not told. Only what we need to know about him as a personage in the action, here and now, is illuminated, so that it may become apparent how terrible Abraham’s temptation is....” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton, 1974), pp. 10-11.
37. Scholarly literary research commonly attributes the term “naturalism” to the style of writing that was prevalent in France in the second half of the nineteenth century (Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourt brothers), which was characterized by more detailed descriptions than those typical of European prose until then. Naturalism, however, did not begin in 1857 with Madame Bovary, and did not end in 1890 with The Human Beast by Emile Zola. As an artistic ideal, it is found in the basic texts of Western literature from Homer and Hesiod to the present, and in fact the development of Western literature may be defined (if we think about the development of prose from Boccaccio and Cervantes, continuing with Fielding and Sterne, to the realistic novel of the nineteenth century, and from it to Flaubert and onward) as a constant rise in the level of naturalism, until its radical realization in the twentieth century in works such as Ulysses by James Joyce, Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, or The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body by Peter Weiss, in which, in place of a narrative plot, the text is devoted to segments of a precise, visual and aural description that mirrors experienced reality. If naturalism was once relegated to observable reality, the stream of consciousness technique of Joyce (and of Virgina Woolf, William Faulkner, Alfred Doeblin and others) resulted in a naturalism that now penetrated the consciousness of the characters, and made them an object of description no less accessible than objects or bodies.
38. Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 7, in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. I. Bywater (New York: Modern Library, 1947), p. 635.
39. Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9, p. 636.
40. The Marxist literary scholar Georg Lukacs was a vigorous opponent of the naturalism that had dominated European prose since Flaubert and Zola, and he called for a return to the social realism of Balzac, Dickens and Tolstoy. Naturalism, according to Lukacs, killed the story for the description; in place of concern for the actions of people and the moral significance of such deeds, naturalism diverted the focus of literature to morally neutral, passive observation. Georg Lukacs, “Narrate or Describe?” in Georg Lukacs’ Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1978), p. 116. Lukacs is correct in his argument regarding naturalism, but errs in his perception of early nineteenth-century “realism” as the opposite of naturalism. French “naturalism” is nothing if not a product of this “realism”; it is an extreme version of “realism,” and not a revolution against it. Lukacs, whose discussion is confined to the nineteenth century, does not have the historical perspective necessary to identify the literary tradition truly and directly opposed to naturalism: The Hebrew tradition.
41. And therefore the Greek name of the Bible, Biblia (“books,” in the plural), is a fitting appellation. Jewish tradition divides the Hebrew Bible into thirty-five books, each of which is considered a separate text. They include the five Books of Moses, the seven “major” and twelve “minor” prophetic books, and the eleven Writings. Samuel, Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles are each considered to be a single text, even though Western tradition has dealt with each as two separate books.
42. Micha Josef Berdyczewski, for example, makes much of the biblical men of valor, expressing a quasi-Nietzschean nostalgia for the physical and mental courage that, according to his worldview, was lost by Judaism when it went into Exile. This neo-biblical approach was continued by David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, who perceived the rebirth of Israel as the revival of the heroic life in the pattern of the First Temple period, accompanied by a sweeping denial of two thousand years of galut (exilic) Judaism. See Moshe Dayan, Living with the Bible (New York: Morrow, 1978). For Ratosh and his fellow “Canaanites,” the denial of the galut mentality went so far as the rejection of Judaism itself, in favor of the revival of a “Hebrewism” that not only preceded Judaism, but in practice even preceded the Bible: A Mesopotamian, pagan “Hebrewism” that was rooted in the “Semitic expanse” between the Nile and the Tigris. The prose of S. Yizhar and Moshe Shamir is a softer version of this Canaanism; they did not see themselves as Canaanites, but the indigenous “sabra” myth they fostered was not fundamentally different from the more explicit (and more refutable) Canaanite ethos.
43. Ta’anit 21a.
44. See David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Harvard, 1991), pp. 19-20.
45. Pinhas Sadeh, ed., An Anthology of Jewish Folktales (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1983), p. 280. [Hebrew]
46. Probably R. Moshe de Leon, who lived in Spain in the thirteenth century.
47. Psalms 29:9.
48. Zohar (New York: Beit Hasefer, 1975), vol. 4, p. 219. [Hebrew and Aramaic]
49. For the poetics of the Zohar, see Matti Megged, A Darkened Light: Esthetic Values in the Book of Splendor (Zohar) (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapo’alim, 1980). [Hebrew] Megged writes: “The author of the Zohar ascribes decisive importance to a situation that makes possible the revealing of sublime secrets. Conclusions may be drawn from this regarding the central role of the narrative in the Zohar as a whole, and the reason for the need by the author of the book for a narrative framework” (p. 26).
50. The stories of the Zohar do not occur in “nowhere,” but in various locations in the land of Israel (Tiberias, Sepphoris, Usha, Caesarea, Lod); this “land of Israel” is not the actual, historical land, but a mythical place that contains the hills, caves, fields and forests through which the narrative’s main characters undertake their mystical journey.
51. Shabat 33b.
52. Attempts were made to formulate Hasidism in a methodical fashion (the best-known of which is the Tanya by R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady, 1797), just as efforts had previously been undertaken to systematize the Kabala (the outstanding example of which is Pardes Rimonim by R. Moshe Cordovero, 1548). Yet it was not through these theoretical compositions, but rather via the works of narrative prose, that Kabalistic-Hasidic mysticism was absorbed into the public consciousness and engendered a broad popular movement. If Hasidism had not adopted the communicative strategy that characterized the Hebrew culture from the time of the Bible and the Talmud—that is, the presentation of a story, and not doctrine—its teachings would have remained esoteric and without influence.
53. For the “sanctification of the story” in Hasidism, see Yoseph Dan, The Hasidic Novella (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1966), pp. 11-12. [Hebrew]
54. Keter Shem Tov (New York: Kehos, 1987), p. 3. [Hebrew]
55. Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz, trans. and eds., In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov: The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism (Bloom-ington: Indiana University, 1970), pp. 15-17.
56. As H. Shmeruk has shown in his article, “Tales about R. Adam Ba’al Shem in the Versions of Shivhei Habesht” in Zion: A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History 28, 1963, pp. 86-105. [Hebrew]
57. S.Y. Agnon, “And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight,” in Collected Stories of Agnon (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1959), vol. 2, p. 57. [Hebrew]
58. In addition to this reference to the biblical verse “and they shall atone for their iniquity” (Leviticus 26:41), and the commentary by Rashi on this verse, it should be recalled that the title itself of the story, “And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight,” is also drawn from the Bible (Isaiah 40:4).
59. Agnon, “And the Crooked,” pp. 89-90.
60. Such as The Legend of the Scribe, Two Torah Scholars Who Were in Our City, and the cycle of stories: Eternal Generations, The Book of Deeds, The Ba’al Shem Tov Stories, Sabbath Stories, Stories of Poland and Stories of Eretz Israel.
61. For the importance of these anthologies for Agnon and his total devotion to their editing at the expense of many years of personal creativity, and for his rejection of protests by friends and literati who were angry at his wasting his time and energy on such “minor matters,” see Dan Laor, S.Y. Agnon: A Biography (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998), p. 282. [Hebrew]
62. A.B. Yehoshua attested in different interviews that his early stories were written under the influence of The Book of Deeds. He defined his first published story, “The Death of the Old Man” (1957), as “a clearly surrealistic Agnon story.” A.B. Yehoshua, “Country Generation’s Literature,” in Keshet, 1998, p. 21. [Hebrew] In the same year in which “The Death of the Old Man” was published, Gabriel Moked published the essay “In Praise of Adi’el Amza,” which provides an existential interpretation of Agnon’s “Edo and Enam” and “Forevermore.” The intensive, one-sided occupation with the surrealistic, Kafkaesque Agnon gave birth to a multitude of interpretations in this spirit such as Agnon and Kafka: A Comparative Study by Hillel Barzel (Ramat Gan: Bar Uriyan, 1972) [Hebrew], which culminated in a book by S. Yizhar, To Read a Story (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1982) [Hebrew], that is primarily devoted to an analysis of the story “The Candles” from The Book of Deeds by Agnon.
63. This is attested by the title of the book by Dan Miron that is devoted to this novel: Under the Motley Canopy: A Study of S.Y. Agnon’s Narrative Art in “The Bridal Canopy” (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 1979). [Hebrew] (The Hebrew title of the work is a pun which translates, roughly, as “Reading a Worst-Seller.”) Miron had already argued about twenty years earlier that in all its central manifestations, “prose was advancing in directions distant from and foreign to the world of Agnon,” and “Agnon’s work is pushed aside and finally is relegated to the shelf of sterile classics—material for boring study in school and for seminar exercises in colleges.” Miron, Motley Canopy, pp. 98-99.
64. S.Y. Agnon, Only Yesterday (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1945), p. 7. [Hebrew] The reference to land, homeland and city is a loose paraphrase of Genesis 12:1.
65. Y.H. Brenner, From Here and There: Writings (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 1978), vol. 2, p. 1265. [Hebrew]
66. An example of identification with Brenner, along with rejection of Agnon, can be found in an editorial opening the inaugural issue of the literary journal Siman Kri’a (September 1972). The title of the editorial, “Around the Point,” is the title of one of Brenner’s novels; the article’s lead-off quotation is that of Brenner, from the journal Ham’orer, which Brenner himself edited; and in the issue there is a translation by Brenner of Tevye the Dairyman by Sholom Aleichem. The editors, Menahem Peri and Meir Wieseltier, apparently felt that the latter was the most important piece in the issue, as it was the only article that they mentioned in the editorial. Immediately after singing the praises of this translation by Brenner, Peri and Wieseltier inform us that the young writers contributing to the issue (Yehoshua Kenaz, Hanoch Levin) are “free from the Agnon torture rack and are distant from its idiosyncrasies. Their stories are not a crossword puzzle of meanings, they do not contain the crude, ironic winks, and they do not possess a heavily burdened system of allusions. They contain observation of the objects of existence...,” and their language was not “fried in its own oil.” Brenner, therefore, is the model to be followed; Agnon is the “torture rack” from which one must liberate oneself (twenty-five years later, in the autumn of 1997, Devir Intrentur and Erez Schweitzer founded a new literary magazine, also called Ham’orer). In 1966, when Agnon won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Nathan Zach said that Brenner was more deserving of this prize than Agnon; Nissim Kalderon, who quotes this statement by Zach, maintains this opinion to the present. “Within a Snail Shell,” Ma’ariv, June 5, 1998.
67. See Yitzhak Bacon, The Solitary Youth in Hebrew Fiction (1899-1908) (Ramat Gan: Tel Aviv University, 1978). [Hebrew]
68. Gershon Shaked defines the literary course of the 1960s as a “return to the detached.” “From the 1960s to the 1980s,” he writes, “there occurred a decline from a high level of imitation to a low level of imitation to the ironic, from hero to antihero and to subhero.” Gershon Shaked, Hebrew Narrative Fiction (1880-1980) (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 1998), vol. 5, pp. 72-73. [Hebrew] The detached, alienated figure, writes Nurit Govrin, “not only did not vanish, but rather was strengthened, and appears, in various forms, in Hebrew literature to the present.... Generations of writers... to our time have continued, against the clear backdrop of the land of Israel and against the backdrop of the State of Israel, to describe the figure of the alienated, rootless hero, who wonders about his identity and finds no anchor in any world.” Nurit Govrin, Alienation and Regeneration: Hebrew Fiction in the Diaspora and the Land of Israel in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1985), p. 22. [Hebrew]
69. Yitzhak Orpaz, Skin for Skin (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1962), p. 247. [Hebrew]
70. Amos Kenan, At the Station (Tel Aviv: Ledori, 1963), p. 32. [Hebrew]
71. In the writings of Aharon Appelfeld, Yehudit Hendel, Yossl Birstein, Dan Zalka, David Schutz and Yoel Hoffmann.
72. The one who has lost his religion and has been cast out by the religious society in which he grew up, for Yehoshua Bar-Yosef; the homosexual, for Yotam Reuveni; the eccentric in a rural settlement, for Yitzhak Ben-Ner and Yeshayahu Koren; the Palestinian, for Yoram Kaniuk and David Grossman.
73. In the stories by Nissim Aloni, Dan Benaya Seri, Amnon Navot, Albert Suissa and Ronit Matalon.
74. “We have turned this country into the largest insane asylum on earth,” Yoram Kaniuk writes in a novel that describes Israel as the “cuckoo’s nest of nightmare-ridden refugees.” Yoram Kaniuk, Adam Resurrected (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 52. The hero of the novel Late Love (1971) by Amos Oz is a lunatic whose brain is held by a single obsessive thought: Russia must be destroyed. The novel A Late Divorce by A.B. Yehoshua (1982) describes a family almost all of whose children are deranged. The characters that populate the books of Yeshayahu Koren’s Letter in the Sands (1967), Funeral at Noon (1974) and Those Who Stand at Night (1992) suffer from mental distress, an inability to communicate, muddled consciousness, and frequently, actual madness (see, for example, the story “Boats of Matches,” or the novella Shot). Orly Castel-Bloom invariably presents the Israeli experience as completely demented, and the narrator who speaks to us is no more sane than the reality she depicts; her characters are, intentionally and consistently, disturbed, hysterical, sadistic and sickly. The novel Barbarossa by Eyal Megged (1993) draws an analogy between the relationship of a contemporary Israeli couple and the people who carried out the insane campaigns of conquest of Frederick Barbarossa and Adolf Hitler, and thereby creates an equality of value between these “pathologies.” Several works were published in the second half of the 1990s that are concerned with nervous breakdown and psychiatric hospitalization. See I, Anastasia by Alona Kimchi (1996), Sixty Milligrams of Prozac by Idan Rabi (1995), April Season by Sh’va Salhuv (1996).
75. Beginning with After the Holidays (1964), continuing with the wretches of The Great Woman of the Dreams (1973), the confused adolescents in Musical Moment (1980), the failing and intimidated boot-camp trainees in Infiltration (1986), the nursing-care elderly in On the Way to the Cats (1991), and concluding with the despairing figures of Returning Lost Loves (1997).
76. The Eternal Invalid and His Beloved, 1986; A Man Stands Behind a Seated Woman, 1992.
77. Ya’akov Shabtai, Past Continuous, trans. Dalya Bilu (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), p. 214.
78. Shabtai, Past Continuous, pp. 351-352.
79. Additionally, the socialist orientation of the Palmah Generation authors, who were raised in the Labor movement, found expression in their adoption of the principles of socialist realism prevalent in the 1940s in the Soviet Union (and to a certain degree in the United States as well, among authors such as Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck). Socialist realism is opposed to Hebrew poetics in several respects. First, socialist realism does not perceive of man as part of a nationality, but as part of “society” or a “social class,” and is therefore suitable to describe a given situation (of a sector or community), and not for the portrayal of a larger historical process (that is necessary for a national narrative). The stories of the Palmah Generation are concerned with isolated events (the description of a battle, the establishment of a new settlement, the conflict among members of a kibbutz, and the like) and not with a process extending over several years. Second, socialist realism is characterized by a concern for current events that at times borders on journalistic writing; it has no perspective of an extended period of time, which is a prerequisite for Hebrew, historical writing. Third, socialist realism is not epic by nature (as is the Hebrew poetics), but rather dramatic (as is the practice in the art of the Western popular novel); it is fundamentally based on scenes, not on narrative continuity. Fourth, the “reality” portrayed by socialist realism is an empirical, materialistic, worldly reality, lacking in mystery; the Hebrew poetics, by way of contrast, as we have seen, is not limited to the empirical, but ranges between the revealed and the concealed, between the familiar and the wondrous.
80. Avram Heffner, Tout Compris (Jerusalem: Keter, 1987), p. 103. [Hebrew]
81. Avram Heffner, Alleles (Jerusalem: Keter, 1993), p. 269. [Hebrew]
82. Yoel Hoffmann, Bernhard, trans. Alan Treister (New York: New Directions, 1998), p. 15.
83. The heroes of present-day Israeli prose, writes Avraham Balaban, “no longer seek meaning for their lives, since they do not believe in the existence of meaning.” Avraham Balaban, A Different Wave in Israeli Fiction: Postmodernist Israeli Fiction (Jerusalem: Keter, 1995), p. 33. [Hebrew] “Tangibility itself,” writes Hanna Hertzig, “has almost vanished” in current Israeli prose, and is “presented as a collection of linguistic metaphors and cliches.” Hanna Hertzig, The Voice Saying ‘I’: Trends in Israeli Prose Fiction of the 1980s (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1998), pp. 26-27. [Hebrew] “This is prose,” Hertzig continues, which is characterized by “a lack of selectivity and ‘everything goes,’ dilution, fragmentation, superficiality. The belief in the possibility of coherent literary molds that fashion coherent meaning no longer exists here.” Hertzig, The Voice, p. 29.
84. Uzi Weill, “Almost Sweet Life,” in The Day They Shot the President Down (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), p. 249. [Hebrew]
85. Yosef El-Dror, “Hunger,” in Yedi’ot Aharonot, September 19, 1999.
86. Etgar Keret, Missing Kissinger (Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1994), pp. 13-14. [Hebrew]
87. Note should be taken of the limited knowledge of the narrator in the cited passage by Weill (“somehow”) and the overtly limited knowledge of Keret (“From her hints, I certainly can understand nothing”). Balaban notes that even in those contemporary works that are related in the third person, the perspective of the narrator is no broader than that of his characters; current prose, he concludes, “restricts to a minimum the authority of the narrators.” Balaban, A Different Wave, pp. 49-50.
A lucid, insider’s formulation of the assumptions of today’s prose can be found in a collection of essays by Gadi Taub, A Dispirited Rebellion: “The language that served the craft [of writing] in the past has lost its meaning,” Taub writes. “The past has been closed off to us.” Gadi Taub, A Dispirited Rebellion: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 1997), pp. 59-60. [Hebrew] “A certain new vagueness envelops everything,” “banality and lack of purpose” that give birth to “a tendency towards the instinctive, towards the immediate.” Taub, A Dispirited Rebellion, pp. 69, 70, 77. Taub maintains that we live with “emotional torpor, a sense of insipidity, lack of meaning, in which only strong colors, mighty blows, fierce stimuli, have sufficient power to cause us to forget for a moment the dust of despair that weighs down on all and empties everything of content” (p. 78). This is the “distress of a sense of floating in a vacuum” (p. 82), “a lack of orientation, the inability to distinguish between good and evil” (p. 84). “The narrator himself [in current prose] does not know, because he is not capable of knowing why what happens does so” (p. 92). Taub links the limitations of the narrator with those of the language: “The splendid, elegant language articulated by the narrator of the previous generation simply is not a comfortable vehicle for the transmission of an experience that begins with disintegration” (p. 154).
A lucid, insider’s formulation of the assumptions of today’s prose can be found in a collection of essays by Gadi Taub, A Dispirited Rebellion: “The language that served the craft [of writing] in the past has lost its meaning,” Taub writes. “The past has been closed off to us.” Gadi Taub, A Dispirited Rebellion: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 1997), pp. 59-60. [Hebrew] “A certain new vagueness envelops everything,” “banality and lack of purpose” that give birth to “a tendency towards the instinctive, towards the immediate.” Taub, A Dispirited Rebellion, pp. 69, 70, 77. Taub maintains that we live with “emotional torpor, a sense of insipidity, lack of meaning, in which only strong colors, mighty blows, fierce stimuli, have sufficient power to cause us to forget for a moment the dust of despair that weighs down on all and empties everything of content” (p. 78). This is the “distress of a sense of floating in a vacuum” (p. 82), “a lack of orientation, the inability to distinguish between good and evil” (p. 84). “The narrator himself [in current prose] does not know, because he is not capable of knowing why what happens does so” (p. 92). Taub links the limitations of the narrator with those of the language: “The splendid, elegant language articulated by the narrator of the previous generation simply is not a comfortable vehicle for the transmission of an experience that begins with disintegration” (p. 154).
88. Orly Castel-Bloom, Dolly City, trans. Dalya Bilu (London: Loki Books, 1997), pp. 88-90.
89. It should be obvious to the reader that I am not claiming that all Hebrew literature is inherently superior to that which employs other poetics. Nor is the writing of prose intrinsically more worthwhile than the composition of poetry, plays or philosophy. Historical, national, action-based narrative prose is not always preferable to other kinds of narrative writing. When I noted that poetry—like philosophy, science and technology—is a product of the pagan culture, I did not thereby say anything detrimental regarding it; on the contrary, pagan culture is deserving of our full respect and gratitude for what it produced. And when I stated that Brenner’s prose is not “Hebrew” in its poetics as is the prose of Agnon, I did not mean that the prose of the former is necessarily inferior to that of the latter. It is entirely possible that new authors will arise, dedicated to the spirit of Hebrew poetics, and will in so doing produce substandard work. Hebrew prose, like any other, can be enthralling or enervating, profound or superficial, original or hackneyed. The criticism that I leveled here has little to do with taste, and everything to do with ideas. My point is not to show how bad the prose written in Israel in recent decades has been, but how distant it is from the Hebrew heritage.
90. For examples of those offering their blessings, see: Yigal Schwartz, “Hebrew Prose—The Era After,” Yedi’ot Aharonot literary supplement, October 14, 1994; Hanan Haver, Literature Written Here (Tel Aviv: Yedi’ot Aharonot, 1999), pp. 7-10. [Hebrew] An especially vivid example of just how much pleasure may be derived from the demolition of Hebrew literature can be found in Haim Deu’el Lusky, who praises Dolly City with the following words: “Hebrew literature, which is still in its romantic diapers, sunken in glorifying and aggrandizement, in sanctimonious self-examination or in preoccupation with ‘great’ questions, such as the attitude toward the state, the nation, the subject and history, is saved by Castel-Bloom, who casts it down toward the total disintegration of values, desires and appearances, and transforms the private non-language into the language of the masses. Like a skilled alchemist, she breaks down the vertical gaze into particles, softens the closed categories of accepted terms and meanings, and they are transformed from a solid to a thick liquid, and from a liquid to a gas that soars to the realms of unlimited imagination, to time that has no temporality.” Fifty to Forty-Eight: Critical Moments in the History of the State of Israel, a special issue of Theory and Criticism (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 1999), p. 359. [Hebrew] Although I confess I find some of Lusky’s expressions inscrutable (what does it mean to “break down the vertical gaze into particles”?), his ecstatic gyrations over that “total disintegration of values” are clear enough.
