Robert Alter

SOURCE: "Fiction in a Stage of Siege," in Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977, pp. 213-31.

[In the following essay, Alter studies the fiction of Amos Oz and Avraham B. Yehoshua.]

One should present the great and simple things,
like desire and death.

—Amos Oz

Something new has clearly been happening in Israeli fiction. Literary generations of course never really correspond to those symmetric schemes in which writers are seen marching past the review-stand of criticism in neat rows two decades apart; but now that twenty years have elapsed since the emergence of the first generation of native Israeli writers, one becomes increasingly aware of new Hebrew writers who have grown up with the accomplished fact of Jewish sovereignty in a state of seige, and whose attitudes toward language and literary tradition, as well as toward the social realities around them, are often strikingly different from those of their predecessors.

The writers who first came to prominence in the later forties are generally referred to in Hebrew criticism as the Generation of '48, sometimes even as the Palmach Generation, and there is a certain justice in the fact that their literary effort should be linked in this way with a historical event and a national—necessarily, military—institution. Historical trauma was a first fact of manhood for many of them; public events had irrupted into their lives with all the imperiousness, the ugly violence, and the moral ambiguity that such events can assume in a time of war, against a background of ideological stridencies. The act of writing fiction, then, was frequently the direct critical response of a troubled individual consciousness to the political and social realities that impinged upon it, pained it, threatened its integrity. Consequently, the most common mode of Hebrew fiction throughout the fifties and early sixties was social realism, usually of a drably conventional sort, however strong the moral impulse behind it. Such writing was often primarily an examination of the problematics of self-definition through a repeated sifting of the various social, political, and ideological materials that were the particular circumstances of the Israeli self at a fixed point in time. Thus, the nature of the kibbutz, the army, the youth movement, the new urban milieus, was sometimes almost as much the "subject" of this fiction as the lives of the characters, or, at any rate, individual lives were conceived in terms of their entanglement in these social spheres, and the social setting in turn was implicated in the destiny of the nation.

Such characterizations of whole generations, to be sure, easily lapse into caricature and in fact one can find a few exceptions to my generalization among books written by members of the Generation of '48, but the broad orientation of the group toward social realism seems to me undeniable. On the other hand, there were a few writers old enough to have fought in the War of Independence whose cultural background, personal experience, or sensibility set them quite apart from this group; who have been attracted to symbolic, parabolic, or expressionist modes of fiction; and whose writing looks beyond the historical situation to trans-historical questions about human nature, value, existence itself.

Perhaps the earliest and most peculiar Israeli book of this sort is Pinhas Sadeh's Life as a Parable (1958), the autobiographical record of a Rimbaud-like spiritual quest beyond the limits of conventional morality. One might also mention Yehuda Amichai's first volume of experimental stories, In This Terrible Wind (1961), his remarkable symbolic novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place (1963),¹ and Yoram Kaniuk's Agnonesque first novel, The Acrophile (1961). Kaniuk's second novel, Himmo, King of Jerusalem (1966),² is an especially clear illustration of the distance between this middle group of writers and the Generation of '48 because, like many of the earlier Israeli novels, it is set in the War of Independence, but with a startlingly different perspective. (It might be noted that both Kaniuk and Sadeh are in their late thirties, while the typical Palmach Generation writers are now in their late forties or early fifties.) The substantive action of the Kaniuk novel—the eery, ambiguous love of an Israeli army nurse for a hideously mutilated casualty—could have taken place in any war, at any time. The novel is actually a kind of clinical investigation into the extreme limits of human love, into the moral ambiguities underlying our ultimate categories of life and death.

Pinhas Sadeh's second prose work—he published poetry earlier—provides an even more dramatic antithesis to the fiction of the Generation of '48. The first volume of a projected longer novel, it is called, apparently without either irony or allusion to Malraux, On the Human Condition (1967). Deploying its characters in a recognizable Jerusalem setting, often with persuasive fidelity to details of milieu, the novel and its protagonists conjure with such terms as the image of God and the image of man, divine jest and cosmic dread, infinity and finiteness, loneliness, lust, the hunger for beauty, and their dialectic interrelation. Sadeh's radically antinomian religious vision—both Sabbatai Zevi and Joseph Frank are invoked in the argument of his novel—is admittedly rather special, perhaps finally private, but his explicit insistence on using the medium of fiction as a means of confronting nothing less than "the human condition" is shared by the two most original and highly regarded of the new Israeli writers, Amos Oz (who is just twenty-nine) and Avraham B. Yehoshua (who is now thirty-two). Like Sadeh, like Amichai and Kaniuk, both Oz and Yehoshua are capable of precise observation of Israeli actualities, but their real interests, too, lie far beyond or below the particular structures of Israeli society.

At first thought, it may seem a little odd that Hebrew writers should permit themselves the "luxury" of contemplating man as a moral, spiritual, or even metaphysical entity rather than as a social-political agent at the very moment when the vise of historical necessity has gripped Israel's national existence more tightly than ever before. On reflection, though, one can see a kind of logic in this whole shift of perspective. For Israelis who have grown up with the State, harsh historical necessity has lost the upsetting impact of traumatic surprise. Statehood and armed confrontation with the Arabs are basic facts of existence, no longer new crises that throw into question the whole moral and political vocabulary with which one has been raised.

There is even a sense, I would argue, in which Israel's continuing existence as a sophisticated technological society and parliamentary democracy in a state of siege becomes a sharply focused image of the general conditions of life in the second half of the twentieth century. Israelis live with a full sense—at times even a buoyant sense—of realized "normalcy," committing their constructive energies to the continuing development of a civilized order of existence, while the contradictory awareness of the menace of the abyss on the other side of the border has itself become a part of normalcy. The insistent presence of the Palestinian landscape, moreover, with its startling topographical contrasts and its complex web of historical associations, amplifies and complicates this sense of looming oppositions in the Israeli situation.

For Amos Oz, and in a more restricted way for A. B. Yehoshua, there is something uncannily semantic about Israeli reality. Topographical, architectural, even institutional actualities allude to things beyond themselves, and though both writers have been guilty on occasion of symbolic contrivance (Oz much more glaringly), one gets some sense that their cultural predicament has made symbolists out of them. One of Yehoshua's narrators in fact comments on the temptations of symbolism which the setting offers: "For everyone here is addicted to symbols. With all their passion for symbolism the Jerusalemites imagine that they themselves are symbols. As a result they speak in symbolic fashion with a symbolic language, they walk symbolically and meet each other in symbolic style. Sometimes, when they lose their grip a little, they imagine that the sun, the wind, the sky above their city, are all merely symbols that need looking into." There is, patently, an acerbic ironic perspective here on the excesses of symbol-hunting and symbol-making; the ironic intelligence points to the admirable artistic restraint with which Yehoshua, in his second volume of fiction, Opposite the Forests (1968),³ develops a distinctive mode of symbolism that is quietly suggestive and for the most part not obtrusive.

Perhaps the best way to see what Yehoshua and Oz do with their local surroundings is to observe an instance of their treatment of Jerusalem. For Jerusalem, as the passage quoted from Yehoshua suggests, is the most portentously "symbolic" of Israeli realities, its streets and sky-line and natural setting a crazy-quilt pattern of all the profound antinomies of Israeli life—modernity and antiquity intermingled; brisk Western energies amid the slow, patient rhythms of the Orient; incessant building on a landscape that remains fiercely unbuilt, or somehow in ruins; the seat of Jewish sovereignty hard against the presence of the Arab antagonist. Here is Yehoshua, in as long a descriptive passage as the taut surface of his writing will permit: "Apartment buildings all around, bared rocks, crimson soil. Half city, half ruin. Jerusalem in her sadness, her unending destruction. No matter how much they build, there will always be within her a remembrance of the destruction." And here is Oz, with somewhat untypical conciseness, reflecting on the same setting in a novel where the presence of the city dominates the action: "On winter nights the buildings of Jerusalem seem like mirages of coagulated gray on a black screen. A landscape of suppressed violence. Jerusalem knows how to be an abstract city: stones, pine trees, and rusting iron." Or, later on in the same novel, when political boundaries—they are those of the period before June 1967—give a special resonance to the symbolism of the landscape: "Through the defiles of the streets in Jerusalem at dusk one can see the mountains growing in obscurity as though waiting for the darkness in order to fall on the drawn-in city."

The opposition between Yehoshua and Oz is roughly that between daytime and night world. Though Yehoshua's first volume of stories, The Death of the Old Man (1962), draws frequently on fantasy, with signs of influence from both Kafka and Agnon, his world is characteristically one of bright Mediterranean daylight, and it is instructive that the principal action in three of the four novellas grouped together in Opposite the Forests takes place during a khamsin, when the pitiless summer sunlight gives an astringent definition to surfaces, contours, colors, people. The swift staccato phrases quoted on the paradox of Jerusalem occur in the first-person narration of an aging, long-silent poet who has just come to leave his retarded son as an apprentice with a Jerusalem bookbinder. The city quite naturally becomes a voice in the frustrated poet's disheartened meditations on the futility of all creative activity, the ambiguity of speech, the eternal dead ground of silence from which language arises and in which it is absorbed again. The harsh peculiarities of the local landscape are a means of giving shape and solidity to the harsh contradictions of being a man, a speaking creature in a universe that cares nothing for speech.

Oz's vision of Jerusalem is also seen through the eyes of a first-person narrator, in this case a young married woman obsessed with death, the passage of time, the threat of violence, and dreams of sexual debasement. The perspective he tries to establish, however, for all his fiction is ultimately not clinical but mythic: Jerusalem the city surrounded by ancient mountains and enemy forces, as it is mediated through the consciousness of his protagonist, becomes the flimsy structure of human civilization perched on the lid of a volcano of chthonic powers, and so the "true" city emerges in the developing solution of darkness as a coagulated mirage, while the sinister darkling mountains all around prepare to pounce, to destroy.

The work of both Oz and Yehoshua raises an interesting question about Israel's peculiar cultural situation. Their concerns, as I have already intimated, are if not quite apolitical then metapolitical, seeking to come to grips with the ultimate facts about human nature and social existence which issue in political events, institutions, and conflicts. But given the explosively charged nature of Israel's political situation, it is not surprising that a good many readers should see directly political, even "subversive," implications in this new kind of Hebrew fiction. Oz's books and the response they have elicited are especially instructive in this connection because his imagination has been powerfully attracted to visions of Dionysiac release which he has repeatedly translated into local social situations and political terms.

The plot of his first novel, Somewhere Else (1966)⁴ is a writhing tangle of adulterous and quasi-incestuous relationships in a kibbutz near the Syrian border. (Oz himself has been a member of Kibbutz Hulda near the old Jordanian border since 1957.) Some reviewers, reading Oz's novel as though it were one of the novels of kibbutz life of the preceding generation, denounced him for sensationalistic distortion, even accused him of attempting to discredit Israel's noblest social experiment. The real function, however, of the kibbutz for Oz is as a focused, dramatically tractable image of the fragile and precarious nature of all civilized order. His fictitious kibbutz sits under the shadow of enemy guns, with the murky realm beyond the border almost a kabbalistic Other Side, or, to use the animal imagery in which Oz delights, a howling, primeval "jackal country"—the title of his first book, a collection of short stories issued in 1965—that both entices and disturbs those who dwell within the tight geometric boundaries of the kibbutz.

The collective settlement, then, is more a convenient microcosm than the "representation" of an actual institution: a small, rationally ordered society, explicitly idealistic in its purposes, where roles and relations are sharply defined, and where forced proximity can serve as a social pressure-cooker for petty jealousies and instinctual urges, the kibbutz becomes in Oz a kind of schematic recapitulation of civilization, its self-delusions and discontents. The Israeli critic Gershon Shaked has stated this same point succinctly in a cogent argument against the conception of Oz as a tendentious social realist: "His kibbutzim are human islands in a 'jackal country' that breaks into the islands and destroys them from within." This process of the symbolic transmutation of the political may become clearer through example. Here is a description of night on the kibbutz, in fact part of a short chapter devoted solely to such description, which occurs about halfway through Somewhere Else:

Now the crickets. The crickets exchange secret signals. The distant motor of the freezer-shed slips in among their voices. The swish of the sprinklers tricks you and falls into the camp of the crickets. The crickets are discovering your hidden places, giving away your fear in sound-signals to their friends who listen to them from the enemy fields.

And what is in the howling of the dogs? There is a dark nightmare in the howling of the dogs. One must not trust the dogs. The howling of the dogs goes whoring after the mountains.

The mountains are unseen but their presence weighs on the valley. The mountains are there. Wanton gulleys descend and charge against this place. Somber masses of rock hang by a thread on the heights. Their connection with the mountain range is suspect. A kind of muted stirring, a restrained patient murmur, glides down from somewhere beyond. The mountains are there. In absolute stillness they are there. In a position of twisted pillars they are there, as though an act of burning lust had taken place among the eternal elements and in the very moment of heat it had petrified and hardened.

This remarkable piece of disquieting prose catches up most of the important elements of Oz's distinctive world. One notes a strange interplay between descriptive specification and looming vagueness, between massive solidity and wraithlike elusive substance and sound. The stately, repetitive, almost incantatory movement of the prose points toward the revelation of some dimly impending cataclysm, prefigured here in the violent image of the last sentence. Oz is a poet of fluid and disruptive energies, and for him the solidity of the "real" world— whether natural scene or man-made object and order or human nature—is illusory, merely the temporary hardening of volcanic lava that seeks to become molten again, or, as in his vision of Jerusalem, merely a mirage of "coagulated gray on a black screen." Significantly, the violent forces locked up in nature are linked with wild sexuality: the gulleys storming down on the kibbutz are "wanton," the contorted forms of rock are testimony to a primordial past of vast orgiastic dimensions. Correspondingly, in the action of the novels and short stories, it is chiefly through his sexuality that man answers the call of the darkness "out there." The howling dogs of this passage are a dramatic model of the human response to the darkness within. In proper biblical language, their cry "goes whoring after the mountains," for one assumes it is an answer to the howl of their untamed cousins, the jackals, out beyond the pale, where human restraint and discipline are unknown, where every instinct to raven and destroy, to sate all appetites, is, quite literally, unleashed.

The scene, of course, has a direct relation to recognizable political realities. The mountains are forbidding not only because of their ontological otherness from man but because they are in Syrian territory, and they hide an armed human enemy waiting for the chance to attack the kibbutz. What should be noted, however, is the way in which the Arab military adversary has been completely assimilated into the mythic landscape, interfused with it. As a matter of fact, actual Arab antagonists do not appear in this passage at all (though they do frequently elsewhere in Oz), but nature here has itself become the invading threat—the spy network of crickets, the treacherous dogs howling up to the mountains—and the Arabs when they are imagined directly are merely extensions, embodiments, of an inimical yet seductive nature. Oz's imaginative rendering of the state of siege, in terms of its origins in his private world of neurosis, is an Israeli's nightmare of life in a garrison-state, but as a component of a realized artistic whole, it has very little to do with the actual conditions of the state of siege, whether political, moral, or even psychological.

All this needs to be clearly stated in order to see in proper perspective Oz's most fully realized book to date, My Michael (1968).⁴ The novel, which was a spectacular best-seller in Israel in 1969—over 30,000 copies sold in a country where the Hebrew-reading public can scarcely number a million—has enjoyed the peculiar fate of being at once a succès de scandale and a succès d'estime. The critical esteem seems to me warranted because My Michael is an arresting novel in itself and represents an impressive advance in artistic control over its author's two earlier books. For Oz's brooding lyric prose, as one might infer even from the passage just quoted, is often in danger of breaking out into purple patches; and his intense desire to connect characters with elemental forces sometimes leads him into blatant melodrama or painfully contrived symbolism. (Some of the early fiction makes one think of the most sophomoric things in D. H. Lawrence, like "Nomads and Viper," the story of a kibbutz girl who, repelled, frightened, and attracted by a dusky, potent bedouin, imagines she has been touched by him and is racked with physical revulsion, then is bitten by an all-too-phallic snake and dies in sweet waves of ecstasy.) In his latest book, Oz demonstrates a new sureness of touch in arranging a suggestive dialectic between fantasy and outer reality through the language of his first-person narrator.

Hannah Gonen, the protagonist, the wife of a graduate student in geology at the Hebrew University, is, as at least two reviewers have observed, a Madame Bovary of the interior world. Trapped in the flat bourgeois existence of a Jerusalem hausfrau, her isolation ironically reinforced by the good-natured devotion of her systematic, practical-minded, "achievement-oriented," hopelessly unimaginative husband, she escapes into an inner realm of fantasy, compounded of early memories, juvenile literature, and suppressed desires, where she can reign as a splendid queen and abandon herself to lovers who exist solely in a subterranean sphere of the imagination. What Oz has done in this novel is to find a fully-justified location within character for that chthonic world to which his own imagination is drawn. As Hannah Gonen's narrative shuttles between outer and inner worlds, the quality of the prose itself oscillates—on the one hand, a parade of brief, factual, elliptic sentences whose flat rhythms and direct unqualified statements precisely define the deadness of the external world for Hannah; on the other hand, in her interior monologues, a haunting florescence of language, highly colored with emotive adjectives and vivid sensory imagery, run-on sentences spilling from fantasy to fantasy through underground caverns out of Jules Verne. It is precisely because Michael, her husband, has no access to this private world, is incapable even of imagining its existence, that conjugal sex itself is finally adulterous for Hannah. She clings to her husband's body in fear and desperation, as Emma Bovary grasped at Rodolphe and Leon, but he cannot release her from the prison of her isolation even when he gives her ecstasy. Thus, after a pyrotechnic description of the heights and depths of orgasm with Michael, Hannah tells us, "And yet I evaded him. I related only to his body: muscles, arms, hair. In my heart I knew that I was betraying him, over and over. With his body."

Hannah's maddening desire to break loose from the trap of her own existence is, like the dark urges of the characters in Oz's previous novel, a response to the basic condition of civilization, but it is presented in a familiar social context, and this is what has given the book a certain degree of notoriety in Israel. For the Israeli, Jerusalem is the political center, the key historical symbol, and since June 1967, the chief non-negotiable fact, of national existence. (One notes that the draft of the novel was completed just weeks before the war broke out.) In My Michael, however, Jerusalem, the illusory, unknowable city of congealed nightmare and suppressed violence, is the principal symbol for the protagonist's state of alienation. The single moment in the novel when she can pronounce the words, "I belonged," is during a visit to a kibbutz in the Galilee, where "Jerusalem was far away and could no longer pursue." But a glimpse of Arab shepherds on an opposite slope is enough to remind her of her lack of connection with the world around her, and at once a vision of the somber, forbidding Jerusalem of her fears rises before her again.

Oz thus puts the materials of the Israeli scene to darkly suggestive use in a mythic drama, but it is clear why some readers should feel at least uneasy with what he has done. Such uneasiness becomes acute in the response to his treatment of Arab terrorism in My Michael. Hannah Gonen remembers a pair of Arab twins, Halil and Aziz, with whom she used to play as a child in Jerusalem during the period before 1948. Halil and Aziz return now in her fantasies to break into her house and violate her, and it is evident that she is far more fascinated than frightened by them. She imagines them as having become terrorists, and it is in this guise that they appear in the climactic fantasy of destruction which concludes the novel, and which more than one reviewer quoted in outrage: Hannah sees Halil and Aziz gliding across the Judean Desert toward their objective within Israel, daggers in hand, submachine guns and explosive devices on their backs, so thoroughly part of the natural setting that their movements are pure feline grace and fluidity, and, like the crickets in Somewhere Else, their communication an exchange of guttural "sound signals," not human language. The alluring alien twins are in some way an uncanny and piquant doubling of the male principle for Hannah; she imagines both their animal grace and their capacity for violence in erotic terms: 'Theirs is a language of simple symbols—gentle touches, a muted murmur, like a man and woman who are lovers. A finger on the shoulder. A hand on the nape. Birdcall. Secret whistle. High thorns in the gulley. The shadow of old olive trees. Silently the earth gives herself." Thus there is an almost exhilarating feeling of release in the explosion that culminates this fantasy, and the chill silence that afterward descends on the land, in the final sentence of the novel, brings with it a curious sense of relief for the protagonist.

Now, it is obvious that this dream of terrorists flowing across the desert in perfect catlike motion "that is a caress full of yearning" corresponds faithfully only to Hannah Gonen's fantasy world, not to the actual motley collection of unstable, deluded, and generally inept types that have tried to carry out the fundamentally ineffectual program of Al Fatah. As some of the response to the novel indicates, Oz is playing with explosive material in more than one sense by pulling these political actualities into the warp of a mythic confrontation. What should be noted is the peculiar double edge of his whole literary enterprise. In one sense, it can legitimately be conceived as a document, and a very troubling one, of Israel's state of seige; but at the same time, paradoxically, it bears witness to the complete freedom of consciousness of the Israeli writer, who does not feel compelled to treat the conflict with the Arabs in a context of political "responsibility" but may reshape it into an image of human existence quite beyond politics.

Avraham B. Yehoshua writes a much cooler, more understated kind of fiction than Oz, sometimes arranging his narrative materials in generalizing designs that place them almost at the distance of parable from the reader; but there are certain affinities in theme between the two writers. Several of Yehoshua's protagonists, like those of Oz, bear within them a deep sexual wound that humiliates them, drives them to acts of hostility. Without a trace of Oz's mythopoeic imagination or his interest in an erotic underworld, Yehoshua also often sees lurking animal instincts beneath the façade of the civilized self; his educated, ostensibly pacific, ineffectual personages frequently harbor a murderous impulse to destroy whatever stands in their way or whatever is associated with those who have given them pain. "Three Days and a Child," the last story in Opposite the Forests, is the account of a bachelor who agrees to take care of his former mistress's son and then struggles—in quiet ambivalence, never melodramatically—with the desire to do away with the child as an act of vengeance against its mother, who has dared to prefer another man.

Peculiarly, but most appropriately, this tersely-reported first-person narrative proves to be a kind of submerged animal fable. If we translate the rather common Hebrew names of the protagonists—all of them are graduate students at the Hebrew University and none is overtly "animalistic"—we find that Wolf the father brings his small son (whose garbled name remains a puzzle) to Bear, his wife's former lover. Bear has a new mistress, Gazelle, a naturalist devoted to the collection of thorns, and he shares with her an odd friend, a gentle, slightly daft herpetologist named Hart, who gets bitten by one of his snakes during the course of events because he refuses to crush it when it slithers away. Near the end of the novella, Bear tells the child a story about a bear, a fox, a wolf, a hart, and their wives who go off to the forest where they carry on "cruel wars." The boy is especially moved by the little wolves that are drowned in the river; and at the end of the tale, when the teller decides to destroy every living creature, leaving only one little wolfcub, we infer that an ambiguous reconciliation has been effected between the man and the child he thought of killing: Bear (is he also the ravening fox of his tale?) identifies with his rival's son, the wolfling, out of self-pity, and so allows him to live, in story and in fact. The scheme of the animal fable here may suggest how Yehoshua deftly defines an intricate constellation of ambiguous motives and relations with great economy of means.

Also like Oz is Yehoshua's fascination with destruction for its own sake, the desires civilization breeds in people to escape its imposed order and rational framework. Yehoshua treated one variant of this condition in an early story, "The Tropville Evening Express," about a quiet little town that is pitifully de trop in a world of vast wars and so its citizens conspire to cause a train wreck simply to make something happen in the dead air of their empty existence. More memorably, this time using materials from Israel's political situation, Yehoshua deals with the same problem in the title story of Opposite the Forests.

A quick summary will reveal the direct thematic connection with Oz. The protagonist, a badly-blocked graduate student in history, has taken a job as a fire watchman at a Jewish National Fund forest so that he can have the uninterrupted solitude to write an essay on the Crusades. (In order to see the full point of the story, one must keep in mind the comparison between Israelis and Crusaders frequently drawn in Arab propaganda.) The man-made forest has grown up over the site of an Arab village that was razed in the fighting of 1948. One of the villagers, however, an old mute, remains as caretaker of the ranger's station together with an enigmatic little girl who seems to look after him. At first the new ranger strains every nerve watching day and night for a sign of fire in order to call in the alarm, but imperceptibly it becomes clear to him and to us that he really wants the fire to break out, and when the Arab mute finally puts the forest to the torch, the watchman is a passive accomplice, exhilarated by the all-consuming flame and by the vision of the long-destroyed village he sees rising in the tongues of smoke and fire.

The political application of the story is transparent, and for anyone accustomed to thinking of Israel in official Zionist terms, it may seem more comprehensively "subversive" than anything in Oz. Yehoshua, let me emphasize, is unswervingly committed to Israel's survival and to the constructive development of Israeli society—he is, of all things, Dean of Students at Haifa University—and the story must properly be seen as an unflinching exploration of the shadowy underside of ambivalence in Israeli consciousness within the state of siege. A more general human ambivalence is also implied in the story's use of the local situation; as we move in a typical Yehoshua pattern from the frustrations of impotence—here, the unwritten paper—to the thirst for destruction, we get a sense of the balked consciousness of civilized man secretly longing for the cataclysm that will raze all the artificial hedging structures of human culture. The steadily generalizing perspective of all Yehoshua's fiction is clear from the opening sentences of 'Opposite the Forests":

The last winter, too, was lost in fog. As usual he did nothing. He put off his exams, and the papers, of course, remained unwritten. Yes, he had long since finished hearing everything, that is, all his lectures. A chain of signatures in his dog-eared registration book certified that everyone had fulfilled his obligation toward him and had disappeared in silence, and now the obligation was left in his hands alone, his slack hands. But words make him tired; even his own words, and certainly the words of others. In the world around him he drifts from one apartment to another, without roots or a steady job.

The unnamed graduate student at once becomes an exemplar of contemporary futility, purposelessness, deracination, but with none of the self-conscious reaching for the effects of a Kafka parable that one finds in some of Yehoshua's earlier stories. The language is unpretentious, the diction largely colloquial, the references to the details of student life factually precise yet formulated to make their paradigmatic implications evident. The first sentences of the story introduce us immediately to the characteristic Yehoshua world, which is, in a word, a world of incompletions. Characters undertake all kinds of projects which they are incapable of seeing to an end—a thesis, a poem, a love affair, the building of a dam in Africa. As this protagonist's fatigue with language suggests, the individual is confirmed in his radical loneliness because the instruments of communication seem so pathetically inadequate, or futile. "Is it still possible to say anything?" asks another Yehoshua protagonist at the end of his disillusioning experiences. Most of Yehoshua's stories are models of the difficulties of communication; as we have seen, he delights in juxtaposing mutually incomprehensible figures—an Israeli student and an old Arab mute, a poet father and a retarded son, a bachelor and a three-year-old, and, in the fourth story of this volume, an Israeli engineer and a hostile, mocking African doctor. In each of these cases, communication of sorts does take place, but it is generally an ambiguous, troubling communication, sometimes with ominous results, destruction becoming the final language. I alluded earlier to Yehoshua's ironic intelligence; one is especially aware of its presence in the wryly comic effects of poignant farce through which he frequently conveys the breakdown of communication, the failure of human relation. An ultimate act of derisively inadequate communication is the visit paid to the fire-watcher in his lonely station by a former mistress, the wife of a friend:

Only toward sunset does he succeed in stripping her. The binoculars are still hanging on his chest, squeezed between them. From time to time he coolly interrupts his kisses and embraces, lifts his binoculars to his eyes, and peers into the forest.

"Duty," he whispers in apology, with a strange smile, to the naked, embarrassed woman. Everything intermingles in the illumination of the far-off, reddish sun. The blue of the sea in the distance, the silent trees, the drops of blood on his bruised lips, the despair, the insipidness, the loneliness of naked flesh. Unintentionally her hand touches his bared skull, and recoils.

Such a bleak view of humanity as this would be utterly depressing were it not articulated with a quality of imaginative wit, as a critique of mankind's inadequacies, a sort of ultimate satire, that is finally moral in purpose. If, as I have suggested, there is some relationship to Kafka in the earlier Yehoshua, he stands at about the same distance from the German writer as Isaac Rosenfeld. Like Rosenfeld, he offers us in place of Kafka's neurotic visionary intensity a critical shrewdness in the manipulation of narrative, a certain muted intellectual verve, an ironic perspective in which sympathy for the characters and their predicaments is continuous with rigorous judgment of them. Because of this effect of broad critical overview in his fiction, Yehoshua is able at times to project with the greatest naturalness a general image of human existence out of the particular tensions, strains, fears, and ambiguities of life in an Israel surrounded by enemies. The suggestive connection between particular and universal is especially clear in a story called "The Last Commander," which is included in The Death of the Old Man. This is how the story begins:

Since the end of the war we have been sitting in gloomy offices, gripping pencils and sending each other chilly notes on matters we regard as important. Had we lost, we would now be cursed. Called to account for murder, for theft, for our dead comrades. Having won, we brought redemption, but they must keep us busy with something; if not, who would get down from the swift, murderous jeeps, piled high with their machine guns and bands of bullets.

At once we are presented with a world that is based on Israeli reality but not a direct representation of it. Reflections and refractions of particular facts of Israeli existence glimmer through the story: the veterans are called on annual reserve duty to maneuvers in a blistering desert where two or three of the enemy, "wrapped in black," are occasionally glimpsed disappearing into the distant hills; a staff officer descends in a helicopter from the pitiless desert sky to supervise the reservists; even the transition indicated in the opening sentence from military service to bureaucracy is an especially characteristic fact of Israeli life. However, only one place name, presumably Arab, is given in the entire story, the few names of characters offered have no clear national identity, and the war that has been fought is not specifically the war of 1948-49 but an archetypal "seven year's war" with an anonymous enemy who remains completely faceless.

The story finally is not "about" Israel's security situation but about human effort, will, and the strain of maintaining the disciplines of civilization in an utterly indifferent cosmos. The veterans are deposited in a completely isolated desert campsite where they find themselves under the command of an enigmatic officer named Yagnon who promptly sprawls out on the ground and goes to sleep, very quickly inducing his men to follow his example. Long undifferentiated days of languid stupor under the hot desert sun are finally interrupted by the airborne arrival of the company commander, who at once begins to put the men through their paces—setting up tents, building latrines, erecting a flagpole, charging, crawling, scrambling in full battle gear across the sun-baked terrain hour after hour in mock pursuit of an imaginary enemy, even forced to bellow out old battle songs around the campfire at night. Six days the commander works the men, and on the seventh day he allows them to rest while briefing them on a week-long forced march across the desert that he has devised for them. But on the morning of the eighth day the helicopter descends out of the empty sky to take the commander back to the base, and in a single impulse, the men wreck the latrines, overturn the tents, pull down the flagpole, throw off their battle gear, and fling themselves onto the ground, to return to their previous state of numbed somnolence. "Seven days he was with us," the narrator comments, "and every day he engraved with white-hot iron. He wanted to make order, and what he brought was fear."

If one tried to restrict the story to a purely political frame of reference, it would emerge as a parable of encounter with a fascist ethos. The writer, however, offers a number of important indications that the meaning of the events demands a broader and more complex perspective. We are made significantly aware of the presence of the elemental desert over against the sky, described at the very end as "the stretches of whitish glare called the heavens"; we note equally the descent of the commander out of the fierce blue like an implacable god, and the six days of creation through which the soldiers labor on their exhausting and futile tasks. The story might usefully be viewed as an ironic inversion of the great desert myth of modern Hebrew literature, Bialik's Desert Dead. In the Bialik poem, the titanic figures who sought to rebel against the Lord of Hosts lie struck to stone, massive granite forms cast by the divine wrath out of the stream of time. In "The Last Commander," rebellion expresses itself not as in Bialik by an assertion of clenched will but in a slackening, a lapse into lassitude. The bodies stretched out on the desert sands represent an ironic victory over the divine imperative in having escaped from the agonizing and abrasive effort of life in history—the seven days of creation—to an unending antisabbath of leaden slumber. The story maintains a fine balance of perspective to the end; the narrator makes us feel the voluptuous attraction of sleep, and more sleep, for the exhausted men, but we are also led to see that this orgy of indolence signifies moral and physical paralysis, is finally a sour parody of death.

Both Yehoshua and Oz, then, achieve the widest reverberations of meaning not when they attempt self-consciously to be universal but precisely when they use their fiction as an instrument to probe the most troubling implications of their own cultural and political reality. One is tempted to see them as a kind of Faulkner-Hemingway polarity of talents, Oz having the greater range—in resources of style, in realization of character, in sheer mimetic ability—and Yehoshua a greater degree of poise, efficiency, artistic cunning. Either of them, I believe, would be an exciting writer in any national literature. Their appearance on the Hebrew literary scene bears witness to the ability of Israeli society to maintain under the shadow of the sword a complex culture that is both a medium of self-knowledge and an authentic voice in the larger culture of men.

NOTES

¹ English translation, Harper & Row, 1968.

² English translation, Atheneum, 1968.

³ An English translation was published under the title, Three Days and a Child (Doubleday & Co., 1971). All translations of Yehoshua and Oz cited here are my own.—R.A.

⁴ An English translation called Elsewhere Perhaps was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., in 1973.

⁴ An English version was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1972.

Nurith Gertz

SOURCE: "Israeli Novelists," in the Jerusalem Quarterly, No. 17, Fall, 1980, pp. 66-77.

[In the following essay, Gertz compares the fiction of the Palmah authors of the 1940s and '50s with that of the new generation of Israeli writers in the 1960s and '70s.]

In Amos Kenan's Holocaust II (1975), written in part before, but completed after the Yom Kippur war, the refugees of a devastated Tel-Aviv live in an immense camp in a tropical region without sky, where there is no day or night, no bird or tree or nature, neither past nor future.

Yitzhak Ben-Ner's story 'After the Rain', which was published in the daily ha-Aretz (1977), also describes Tel-Aviv after destruction—a lawless city where roaming street gangs rule, while frightened solitary people wander through the streets because they are afraid to stay at home, for there, too, fear lurks. All hope for a sudden miracle—the discovery of oil in the desert, a diplomatic breakthrough with China—anything to end the nightmare, to bathe them in a light that will suddenly beam on them all.

A. B. Yehoshua's novel, The Lover (1977) is not about destruction. It concerns a young Israeli garage owner who has lost his capacity to function in a normal human way: Arabs work for him, others go to war for him, he needs someone to love his wife for him, someone to dream for him, to hope for him, while the real dreams in the story are those of an Arab boy who works in his garage.

Amos Oz's last story, The Hill of Evil Counsel' (1976), does not contain a terrifying apocalyptic vision either, but it does portray the destruction of a family in Jerusalem prior to statehood in 1948. The account of this family's disintegration is also a description of the shattering of dreams about the establishment of the state, even before these began to be realized.

From the looks of it, it appears that Israeli literature is reflecting the fear of a new holocaust, or another trauma more devastating than the Yom Kippur War. What is the source of this sense of imminent disaster?

The ready explanation is that it was indeed the Yom Kippur War that shocked the Israeli consciousness out of its sense of inviolability. But this does not apply to the literary consciousness, for in the six-year period between the last two wars, and even previously, when morale was at its peak, Israeli literature constantly dwelt on terror and destruction.

Until recent years this theme was either kept below the surface, treated metaphorically, or relegated to sub-plots. When it did appear undisguised, it was not recognized by critics or readers.

What could be clearer or more explicit than the story of the Israeli student who helps an Arab watchman set fire to a young forest in order to discover beneath it the ruins of a destroyed village ('Facing the Forests' by A. B. Yehoshua, 1972). Or the story of a strange old man who goes from kibbutz to kibbutz warning the Jews of the Russian threat because he fears that the State of Israel stands on too flimsy foundations, like a cardboard stage set, surrounded by hostile forces ('Late Love' by Amos Oz, 1971)? Could there be a clearer socio-political measure than that of an aging Bible teacher who, after the death of his soldier son, awakens to hopes for renewal, by discovering his son's faiths and beliefs as a source of meaning for his own existence?

These and other stories were seen to be not political but psychological studies in political settings. When the politics could not be attributed to the psychology of the heroes the stories were criticized for resembling reality too closely (as, for example, Amos Oz's 'Late Love').

In fact, then, it is precisely when Israel was strongest that its literature dealt with the fears of the persecuted Jew still without refuge, even in his homeland—either because past destruction and disaster must inevitably be repeated (Aaron Apelfeld), or because in Israel past and future belong not to the Jew but to the Arab (A. B. Yehoshua), or because 'this evil land' and its inhabitants, the jackals and the Arabs, are hostile to the Jews (Amos Oz), or because the threat of war is ever present.

Few stories deal with these things explicitly, but rather only allude to them, as in Amalia Cahana-Carmon's The Moon in the Valley of Ayalon (1971).¹ In the early sixties Israeli literature began to evince two new traits: an attempt to avoid political involvement and the use of a symbolic allegorical style. This writing was influenced by Kafka and Agnon and came as a reaction to the political-social writing of the Palmah authors.²

Nevertheless, writers such as Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, Yitzhak Orpaz, David Shahar, and Yehuda Amichai, most of whom were involved in Israel's political life (taking leftist positions), did not avoid grappling with national and social problems. In most cases their social meanings are conveyed by way of symbolic structures, images, allegory or by a world view realized in personal situations weighted with social significance (drawing on leftist Zionist ideology).³ According to the world vision of those years all the trans-individual values with which the hero seeks to link up (another person, nature, divine mystical forces which govern the world arbitrarily, etc.) can in fact be attained, but only through the destruction of both himself and his object. This formula is used in the story of a solitary, forsaken and estranged hero who tries (or, more accurately, is pushed, for these heroes are invariably passive) to establish contact with a woman, or man, or nature or mystical forces. As the plot progresses towards the moment of contact or fulfillment, it becomes apparent (more to the reader than to the hero) that the world with which the hero is trying to establish contact is a deformed one, that the hero himself is either warped or lacks the moral fibre to take a stand. Thus, the moment of attaining the goal is one of unleashed passion, destruction and disaster, in which the hero destroys either himself, the other or both. It is for this reason that the myth evoked by this writing is the sacrifice of Isaac and the story of Jephtah. In modern dress this myth takes the form of the sacrifice or destruction of the son's lives for the parents' dubious goals.

This structure is found in its purest form in the early stories of Orpaz, Oz and Yehoshua. A good example is a story by the latter, 'Night Convoy to Yatir' (1972). It tells of an isolated mountain village whose inhabitants decide to establish contact with the world by derailing an express train that speeds past them twice a day. The insane decision is reached and acted upon without objection; neither from the station-master, who is likened to God, nor the hero who, although he feels that the act is evil, is attracted to the woman who proposed it. The train is derailed. By torchlight and amidst the screams of the dying and wounded the village reaches a moment of true spiritual elevation, the villagers achieve human contact and the hero lies with his love 'on the twisted rocky ground of a beloved country'.

In the early sixties the political content of this type of writing is not yet apparent. The problems are human and personal but even then they are laced with political meanings that will become more dominant later. The quest is for human contact, or contact with nature; symbolic allusions and secondary plots give this quest a national dimension, in which fulfillment can only be achieved through social destruction, i.e., war.

In this writing we may find an indication of trends which took place in Western literature in the twentieth century. In the sixties, writers were influenced by Kafka and the existentialists. Thus, for example, the futility of trying to make contact with an indifferent and alien nature here assumes national significance: nature is alien to a people who have not managed to become part of an alien land. Life appears to be a series of unrelated moments, the meaningless extension of a perpetual present, not only because of 'the dark wind blowing from the future' (in the language of Camus' The Stranger), but also because according to these writers past and future in Israel do not belong to them. The heroes move through their world alone and detached from each other not only because one must die alone but because there is no hope of contact between people who lack a common social past; they have no way of building a common future. The terror is not only the existential one of having been thrown into the world, but of finding oneself in a strange, rejecting land.

On the other hand, while the existentialist hero, on which the Israeli hero is based, discovers the possibility of union with nature through total renunciation and solitude (The Stranger), or through a common but hopeless social struggle (The Plague), the Israeli literary hero, influenced by Zionism's long and bitter struggle, achieves the longed-for union in destruction and war.

A vivid example of this mixture of existential and national themes, of social-political and personal-human situations, is Amos Kenan's Holocaust II

The action is set in a camp, after the destruction of the world. This setting is described in existential terms, in Israeli political terms and in universal social terms. For example, there is a daily execution in the camp. But since neither the condemned man nor his friends know who the victim will be, every day may be one's last. As the hero puts it: 'The truth is that I know that every minute is the last minute of my life. That's a strong physical feeling'. This is the definition of an existential situation, in this case in a political-social setting: national holocaust. Moreover, since every moment is the final one, time is Bergsonian—a series of present moments without past or future. There are no hopes in the camp, but memory too is confounded. The hero repeatedly tries to recall the beautiful Tel-Aviv he knew, but his recollections give way to memories of death and destruction. He tries to remember the golden sands but instead recalls the zealots' last stand at Massada. He wants to picture a camel caravan but remembers the Ninth of Av (the day of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem) and the Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion. Where there is no hope, there is no memory, but that of death. The assumption is familiar although here a Jewish political variant has been added. The death of the individual represents national destruction (also worldwide destruction, for the Israeli holocaust is but part of a world ecological holocaust).

There is no escape through time or space. Dreams of distant, exotic places become thoughts of Massada; memories of pine forests, blue skies and snow-covered landscapes lead to visions of the transports to the death camps. It is almost like the Midas myth twisted so that everything turns not to gold but to blood, war and death. Even the moment of love becomes the moment of execution: a shapely woman opening a door, slipping off a shoe or a silk stocking, is transformed into a naked woman taking her last steps towards the extermination chamber. It is hardly surprising, then, that the intimate dialogue of a tryst is placed in the context of death. For example, the hero meets a pretty girl and asks her, 'Is this your first time?' The conversation ends with her angry reply: 'You men are all the same'. The conversation is not about love but about execution, which this young woman has carried out.

In other words, the concentration camp is a focus of various themes: the human condition, Israel's present and future political reality, and the world political situation. To bind them together, the author employs a mixture of styles: journalistic, to describe Israeli life in almost documentary fashion; poetic, to add metaphorical meaning to the reportage; and fantastic, to heighten the imaginary reality of the story. This imaginary reality is itself composed of several imaginations: that of the author, who envisions the concentration camp of the future and that of the heroes, who envision their own enchanted worlds—two people who dreamed of building a new world, a magician who builds a golden city for children in the forest filled with dwarfs and fairies, people who build a kibbutz with plowed fields and thick woods. The author apprehends these dreams at the moment of their collapse. The imagined kibbutz is slowly sinking into the mud, the two who dreamed of a new world become maimed, the magician's forest is surrounded by tanks and the procession of fairies, children, princes and gnomes begins to march towards death. The combination of poetic and journalistic prose tries to convey both a specific Israeli reality and its general universal significance as well as the connection between present and future and between legend and dreams, clashing with reality and shattering it.

Other authors achieve this blending of themes by attaching diverse meanings to metaphorical situations. Thus, the hero of A. B. Yehoshua's 'Facing the Forest' who is sent to guard a national forest, has his private dreams of human warmth and light. These dreams are reflected in his attraction to fire. When he discovers that beneath the young forest are the ruins of an Arab village, the fire acquires a social meaning: the need to set the forest ablaze in order to discover the true past buried beneath it.

Israeli writing reflects Western literary trends in another way. The change it has undergone within two generations corresponds to developments in Western literature since the nineteenth century. When this transformation takes place over a relatively short time, as in Israel, the social factors that have influenced it are fairly easy to trace.

Israeli writers in the late forties and early fifties, referred to as the Palmah generation, were influenced primarily by socialist realism and in their own way emulated American action literature of the twenties. Their heroes are not isolated individuals, but members of society—usually a kibbutz—and they believe with their fellows in a common social national purpose. The dilemma is how to integrate two ideals—collective fulfillment (in society, work, war) and personal fulfillment (in artistic creation, love, the family). These two goals sometimes clash and the hero is often compelled to sacrifice his individual world for society, for the collective. But even such sacrifice represents a correct value choice, if only partially.

An example of this is Moshe Shamir's story 'Until Dawn', in the collection Women Wait Outside (1952). The hero, who is in charge of giving out work assignments on his kibbutz, is so totally immersed in this task that he forgets himself and his family. His wife leaves the kibbutz because it does not give her the freedom to find artistic fulfillment by teaching piano to the kibbutz children—and because her family life is crumbling under the burden of work. After some serious introspection the hero sees his error and goes to the city to regain his wife. A similar course of events, with some variations, can be found in many of Shamir's stories (in Women Wait Outside), in his novel He Walked in the Fields (1947), and in many stories by Aharon Meged (1957), Nathan Shaham (1960), Yigal Mosinzon (1946), Hanoch Bartov (1962) and others.

Other stories of this period deal with external not internal conflict, in which the enemy comes from without. The hero of these stories (Moshe Shamir's 'With His Own Hands', for example) is a combination of Wild West courage and sabra doggedness. The plot formula is standard: a tremendous challenge is presented, which the hero meets with valour and resourcefulness. The threat to the kibbutz, the woman, the nation, is averted.

The world view that emerges from these stories is analogous to that of the Palmah generation, namely that the social Zionist dream, and perhaps all other dreams, can be realized by war, struggle and work. Ten years were to elapse before major Israeli authors considered the price paid for the fulfillment of this dream.

The poetics of this literature matches its world view and sets it apart from the poetics of later writers. In these stories, the narrator is always reliable, and he is always in harmony with his hero; his attitudes are stated clearly and explicitly. There is no missing his meaning. At most, he is sidetracked by internal conflicts or by external obstacles placed in his path. In He Walked in the Fields, Uri, the first-born son of the kibbutz, knows that he can fulfill himself in love, in building a family, in work on the kibbutz, and if necessary in war. Only because of a weakness of which he is aware, and troubled by the stigma of his parents' failings (his father volunteers for the British army and his mother has an affair with another man), he is incapable of forming a loving relationship with a woman and indirectly this leads to his death in a military training exercise. Uri erred and failed. The work ethic prevails, personified by the parents who are finally reconciled, both with each other and with the kibbutz.

A hero of this sort is inconceivable to the next generation of writers. In stories by Oz, Yehoshua, and Orpaz the heroes prevaricate to a degree that leaves the reader unsure where reality ends and distortion begins, and what, if any, is the moral position—either of the author or his characters. In Amos Oz's My Michael (1968, 1972) the heroine, who dreams of romantic love in faraway places, with strange men, does not know what she loves. For her, love means domination, violence and hatred. This has been her experience in the past, and is the subject of her present fantasies, which include a pair of Arab twins, her childhood playmates. It governs her relations with her husband, a young neighbour and others. But there is no judging her for blocking out a reality which is unrelentingly miserable, empty and bourgeois, killing all. There is no figure in the work who represents a sane alternative.

Since the values of the Palmah generation are clear and easily translated into action, the plot in these stories develops with evident causality. The hero faces problems, takes action to solve them, successfully or not, which accordingly creates a new set of problems, and so on. Such a pattern cannot occur in the following generation, where the stories are merely a succession of eruptions of inner passion and external disaster. The passive hero understands neither himself nor his world, and is propelled by fatal external forces and uncontrollable inner ones. The narrative, therefore, is not constructed as a series of causal events but of recurrent outbursts of violence until the final eruption, at the climax of the narrative (especially in the stories of Amos Oz), or as an unlikely devolution of a destructive idea nearing realization (especially in the works of A. B. Yehoshua).

Even the landscape takes on an altogether different aspect in the two generations. In the earlier generation it is beloved and familiar, the hero feels at home in it and the narrator describes it in colourful detail. In the later generation, the landscape becomes ominous, filled with threatening mountains where jackals, Arabs and other untamed forces lurk. Not surprisingly, this landscape is bare of concrete detail, serving primarily as a metaphor for savage forces operating beyond it.

The generation that fought to end the British mandate and gain independence, created a literature in which the protagonist maintains a tie with the world. This tie is severed in the subsequent generation, when confidence in Zionist values and their fulfillment are in question. It would seem that a complete reversal of world view and literary poetics occurred over the last two generations. In fact, however, signs of this reversal could already be discerned in the earlier generation.

The outstanding example of this is S. Yizhar, considered one of the major writers of the Palmah generation. Yizhar's hero is not the valiant sabra who plants himself firmly in the landscape of his homeland. On the contrary, his is passive, out of place in the toiling or fighting group (although he generally accepts its values). Unlike the heroes of Shamir, Megged, Mosinzon and others, the medium of this type of hero is not action but the lyrical interior monologue. The accepted hero of that generation, the dauntless fighter, is here a secondary figure. He is often described with mocking disdain by the narrating hero, who wants to be part of the group, to be active like the others but whose longings for love, nature, and home set him apart. He expresses the author's beliefs and doubts in the contemporary style: describing the struggle between two sets of values—the public-collective and the private-personal. But there is one small difference: both the hero and the author, rather than feeling any ties with the values of the real world, long for contact with a strange land, of open spaces and undisturbed nature.

They feel estranged from their group. It is hardly surprising that Yizhar had the greatest influence of any of his contemporaries on the writers of the subsequent generation. His two political stories, Hirbet Hiz'ah' and The Prisoner' sparked countless debates in intellectual and non-intellectual circles alike.

Hirbet Hiz'ah' describes one day at the end of the war when the narrating hero and his fellows are ordered to burn and blow up an Arab village and to expel its inhabitants. Of the two groups—the tough Israeli soldiers inured to the suffering of the Arabs, and the victims who do not comprehend the cruel fate that has suddenly been thrust on them—the narrator identifies with the latter. For him (especially at the end of the story) it is the Arabs, not his own peers, who have the values on which he was nurtured.

The progress of Israeli literature of the sixties is actually the story of the consequences of Hirbet Hiz'ah'. There, in Yizhar's village, those who fought the War of Independence severed all meaningful ties with essential values. The open spaces of this country, the eternal cycle of sowing and harvest, memories of a meaningful historical past, the biblical God who commands his prophets to foretell comfort or destruction, the traditional Jewish values of justice and morality—all these and not only the narrator's sympathy, pass over to the expelled Arab villagers. At the end of the story the narrator goes searching among the assembled Arabs.

I passed among them all, among those crying aloud and those gnashing their teeth in silence, regarding themselves and their possessions, among those fighting their fate and those submitting to it mutely, among those shamed by themselves and their disgrace, and among those already making plans to get by somehow. Among those weeping over fields that will be laid waste and among those silenced by weariness, gnawed at by hunger and fright. I wanted to find out whether among all these there wasn't also one somber and blazing Jeremiah, forging a rage here within his heart, calling in a choked voice to an old God from the waggons of exile . . .

Small wonder, then, that the Israeli writer of the next generation wakes up on the morning after Hirbet Hiz'ah' to discover that lo and behold everything that matters has moved to the other side: history, space, nature, meaningful time, social morality and divine force—all are now in the mountains, with the Arabs and the jackals, waiting for revenge.

However, while Yizhar's hero lives in the world of the social Zionist values and his writing accords with the contemporary style, an anti-establishment political group known as Cana'anites⁴ was using an altogether different type of writing (with modernistic forms, some of which were to be adopted by the subsequent generation) to give expression to a marginal and oppositional vision of the world.

The central vehicle of this literature is parody, attacking the stereotypes of the period by presenting the exploits, the heroes, the poems and the songs of that generation in a ridiculous light.

For example, in a story by Eitan Notev, The Battle of Fort Williams' (1950), a skirmish that had actually taken place in the War of Independence is compared to all the great heroic battles in which the hero participated as a child. 'From the Jewish revolt against the Romans to Genghis Khan's invasion of Europe, from the Hundred-Year War to the Chmielnicki uprising, from the conquest of the Wild West to the war between the North and the South'. Clearly, when compared to all these historic battles the skirmish in the War of Independence is minor and paltry and even the hero's possible death in this war is only an unnecessary addition to his most staggering defeat by 'more serious' enemies: the Indians.

This story was in advance of the next generation in that for the first time it shattered the illusion of literary reality. This reality, which was so secure among Notev's contemporaries, here becomes a mere game, a fantasy. It was before its time also in its parodic treatment of the invincible Palmah hero, and in its dealing with a theme that only later would become central in Israeli consciousness and literature: the war with the Arabs as a battle with the ghosts and phantoms of the national memory, peopled by generations of enemies whose sole purpose is to destroy the Jewish people ('Late Love' by Amos Oz).

Another way this marginal group challenged accepted literary conventions was by breaking chronological causal time relations. In contrast to the narrative of the Palmah writers in which past actions influence the present, and present actions determine the future, the writing of the contributors to Alef (a journal published by the Cana'anite group) plays arbitrarily with time. Amos Kenan's story, 'His Big Brother' (1950), is a short monologue about a big brother who has left for distant places with a rifle over his shoulder. The monologue confounds three temporalities until it becomes unclear whether the big brother really existed, whether he exists now or whether he is tomorrow's daydream. This amalgamation of times breaks the reality of which the Palmah generation was so confident, even more than the following generation will be prepared to do.

In this regard the differences between the three types of writing are clear enough. The Palmah writers begin their stories in the heart of the action. The hero is presented to us in the present. Immediately thereafter the narrative goes back in time and presents the problem he will confront. Once that is done the hero begins to grapple with the problem and sets out to solve it. The following generation shatters this kind of plot structure and employs an assemblage of analogous situations or a circular plot in which the beginning is the end and everything that the hero does merely brings him back to his point of departure. The Cana'anite authors break time—and plot—structures (as well as the figure of the hero) much more radically, which is perhaps why to this day this type of writing has not been admitted to the center of Israel's literary world.

Amos Kenan's story 'In the Station' is in fact an anti-story with an anti-hero in an anti-plot. The plot cannot develop because every moment of the present is used by the protagonist to build some kind of dream for the future, but before this dream is transported into the present by being made real it immediately becomes the past. In such a transformation of time nothing has real existence, everything disappears before it happens. For example, in a railway station stretching as far as the eye can see the narrator is heard saying: 'I take a drag on the cigarette. Wait. Something will happen. I think I may fall in love.' In the second paragraph the beloved appears and the hero begins to dream of love: 'We will go together to the riverbank, at dusk. The birds are chirping, the sun is setting, a big red moon will appear above a dense forest.' In the course of the description the dream becomes reality, the future becomes present but immediately thereafter becomes the past: 'You remember that day at the station? he asks'. As the times change so do the protagonists. The woman he loved becomes an old woman sweeping the platform, to be crushed under the wheels of the locomotive. The memories shift from that day of love to a day of disaster. The hero is transformed into an analogous figure, an old man on the other side of the tracks. In all these transformations the only thing that persists is the train that passes and crushes, like the violent destructive voyage through time and space. What sets this book apart from other writing of the sixties is its total disdain of plot, character and literary illusion. While other heroes dream of love and try or are compelled to fulfill their dreams through destruction, with Amos Kenan there simply is no story. As soon as the dream is born it is transformed into destructive action; hopes immediately become memories. Behind all this is the political vision of an author who fought in the War of Independence, but already then viewed events with a sharply critical eye.

At the end of the sixties, in Holocaust II, the social ideology that was latent in the time structure of 'In the Station' reaches full expression. The story of a man and a woman and a dream of love becomes a story of two men and the dream of a state: 'When we grow older, Habakkuk and I', says the narrator, a soldier in a trench in the middle of the war, 'we will build a new country, where people do only what they like'. The dream of a new country is a dream of life without pain, without laws, in cottages dotting the mountain slopes, in a country where death comes gently, and everyone loves his fellow man and hates only one thing—the past. But the dream gradually and imperceptibly becomes a vision of the wounded and dead who will be rehabilitated: 'There they will be made whole again and what can be reattached will be sewn back on. And then they will be taught to speak, to walk, to remember and to piss as they like and also to live again a family life without too much crying out in the night.' The great hope and dream were not distorted in reality but were transformed while they were still only a dream.

In various forms, especially since the last two wars, which made Israeli literature more realistic and its political base more apparent, this sensibility has been expressed by most of Israel's major writers. The protagonists set out towards a lofty goal, to their Jerusalem, and on the way the goal is perverted, their humaneness thwarted, their inner world laid waste and the external world destroyed (Amos Oz, 'Until Death'). They remain alone, beneath empty silent skies.

Since Pascal, of course, the sky has been silent for all mankind, Israelis and non-Israelis alike. Nevertheless, the difference between Israel and, say, the United States, is that in Israel the existential problem is a political one. To be or not to be is not a personal dilemma, but a national one. Israeli writers treat national problems not because they have decided that the writer must be involved, but because their most fundamental existential problems are shared by all Israelis. The personal biography of an Israeli writer is also a social-historical biography.

NOTES

¹ Amalia Cahana-Carmon is a writer who by age belongs to the Palmah generation but was received enthusiastically by the generation that followed because of her unique style and syntax, the richness of her images and her individual-universal subject matter—love stories in which her heroes give meaning and significance to their lives.

² The Palmah was a military arm of the Zionist establishment's defence force, the Hagganah. It had a socialist orientation and its members combined military training with agricultural work on the kibbutzim.

³ Interestingly, for the previous generation that fought the War of Independence the Arab is a political problem to be solved by war or by some kind of accommodation. For the subsequent generation, whose basic experience is not the struggle for independence but its realization and consequences—the expulsion of Arabs and also a state of siege in a hostile region—the Arab becomes a threatening, in some instances metaphysical, figure, a symbol of non-acceptance of Israel's existence.

⁴ The Cana'anites were a political group active in the forties who advocated that the Jewish yishuv in Israel cut itself off from Diaspora Jews and its culture, and that a new Hebrew nation be created in Eretz Yisrael. They maintained that this new nation, to be composed of the local Arab inhabitants and the new Hebrews, should revive the ancient Hebrew culture that had prevailed in the region before the Exile. Among the writers who were associated with the group are Yoram Kaniuk, Aharon Amir, Amos Kenan and Benjamin Tammuz.

Alan Mintz

SOURCE: "New Israeli Writing," in Commentary, Vol. 65, No. 1, January, 1978, pp. 64-7.

[In the following essay, Mintz evaluates the "dual urge toward nostalgia and apocalypse" in contemporary Israeli fiction.]

The state of Israel was conceived by force of a messianic vision, but its existence has been maintained by order, sacrifice, and the rational setting of priorities—and this in the face of another, more ominous vision held by its neighbors. Life under such mixed conditions of ordinariness and dread might well seem cribbed and predetermined, and it is understandable that Israelis would search for various ways of becoming released from it. In Israel's literature, that search has often taken one of two forms, a looking back to happier times, and a reaching forward toward some new vision of an end, either individual or collective, in which the anxieties of history will be dissolved. Indeed, ever since the pioneer period, one of the chief functions of Israel's literature, especially its prose literature, has been to represent and also to criticize this dual urge toward nostalgia and apocalypse in Israeli consciousness.

A recent spate of translations gives the English reader a chance to observe at first hand this tendency in Israeli writing. Of particular interest are two new anthologies. One, Contemporary Israeli Literature, which began as a special number of the journal TriQuarterly, is quite substantial, containing ten short stories and the work of twenty-three poets, and featuring an introduction by Shimon Sandbank and an afterword by Robert Alter, both extremely useful. The second anthology, New Writing in Israel, is a more modest and uneven affair, with an abbreviated poetry section and no introduction. And one should also mention a new novel by Shulamith Hareven, City of Many Days, and a collection of short stories by A. B. Yehoshua, Early in the Summer of 1970.

In recent Israeli fiction, the period returned to most often as an object of nostalgia is that of the British Mandate, a period when the conflict that was to become the Jewish state's lot after 1948 seemed neither inevitable nor irremediable. Jerusalem between the two world wars is the setting of Shulamith Hareven's City of Many Days, a novel whose ostensible focus is the history of a specific Sephardi family but whose real subject is Jerusalem itself, bodied forth in the book through a polyglot cast of eccentrics who make their way through the city's bewildering array of sights and smells. Miss Hareven's Jerusalem catalogue (gorgeously rendered in English by Hillel Halkin) is meant to suggest the idyll of possibility which somehow was allowed to flourish in the years before the rise of intensive nationalism in Palestine. Relations between Arabs and Jews during the early Mandate are depicted as amicable, if standoffish. The British presence is exemplified by an army officer so fascinated by his "colonial" subjects that he throws in his lot with them. And then there is the most vital element of all, the Jews themselves, the half-pious, half-worldly Sephardim whose luxuriant openness becomes all the more precious a quality as it is seen to be eclipsed by the gathering of historical forces.

Unfortunately, the charm of Miss Hareven's picture of Jerusalem—there is no question of the beauty of her evocation—is purchased through her excluding from it anything which is not charming. Miss Hareven's characters are innocent of history, and their innocence attenuates their charm until it threatens to become mere idealization. The Sephardi community has, it is true, been underrepresented in modern Hebrew fiction, but Miss Hareven tends to err in the opposite direction. There is scarcely a trace here of the large numbers of Eastern European Jews, the pioneers and the socialists, who during these same years were changing the face of the Jewish settlement in Palestine and preparing the greater transformation to come. Lacking a dialectical view, which could comprehend what was being created as well as what was being destroyed, City of Many Days remains an exquisite piece of literary nostalgia rather than a full evocation of a historical moment that might instruct as much as it delights.

The Mandate setting is put to a much different purpose in David Shahar's story "Louidor Louidor," which is included in Contemporary Israeli Literature. For Shahar (two of whose books have already appeared in English, a collection of short stories, News from Jerusalem, and a novel, The Palace of Shattered Vessels), Palestine of those years is also a landscape of eccentrics, as it is for Miss Hareven, but his eccentrics are driven by the contradictions of history rather than by private idiosyncracies. Louidor, for example, is a distracted Tolstoyan intellectual who comes to Palestine to realize his rationalist-pacifist principles in a Jewish homeland. Shocked to find the country filled with Arabs, he converts to Islam in order to have the moral right to appeal to his new "brethren" to leave Palestine for the "blessed lands of Arabia." Louidor's eventual fate—he is beaten up and dismembered by an Arab gang—is for Shahar a way of suggesting that imported visions will always be rejected by a land so pocked by historical ironies and crossed national destinies.

Though the tone of Shahar's story is elegiac and nostalgic, what motivates his hero is rather an apocalyptic (and almost psychotic) passion for redemption, a yearning for an impossible future in which all obstacles to moral purity will have finally disappeared. Something of the same passion motivates Joseph della Reina, the hero of a fine story by Dan Tsalka included in New Writing in Israel. The story is based on a kabbalistic legend about a 15th-century mystic who attempted to bring about the messianic age by capturing Satan, but who failed under terrifying circumstances and ended his days as Satan's ally and as the lover of Lilith, the arch-female demon of Jewish folklore. In Tsalka's retelling, the legend takes an eerily modern turn by the addition of an existential context, with della Reina's passion understood psychologically as that familiar kind of moral zeal in which the unacknowledged element of self-aggrandizement insures future corruption and failure.

If messianism, even misplaced messianism, is the "positive" paradigm of Jewish apocalypse, the Holocaust, both as event and as symbol, is its negative pole. Among Hebrew writers of fiction, Aharon Appelfeld is the one who has most unequivocally taken the Holocaust as a field of imaginative activity. Appelfeld, whose work deserves to be better known in English, is a master of obliqueness; rather than describing atrocity directly, he focuses instead on the historical moments just before and just after the Holocaust, and speaks through them of what is in itself unspeakable.

Appelfeld's story, "Badenheim 1939," included in both Contemporary Israeli Literature and New Writing in Israel, is an ingenious and ornate parable about the fall of German-speaking Jewry. The locale is an Austrian resort town whose inhabitants reveal themselves to each other in the course of the story as they are forced to register with the local authorities as Jews. Instead of being panicked and cowed, the Jews assume a kind of calm gaiety. As the registration proceeds and the routine of the resort breaks down, there is an immense sense of relief at being able to confess the deep and troublesome burden of Jewishness, "as if they were talking about a chronic disease which there was no longer any reason to hide." With the resort finally closed and the transports waiting, the Jews, who believe they are being returned to the simpler life of their ancestral home in Poland, express appreciation to the authorities and look forward to their "repatriation." It is characteristic of Appelfeld's laconic and perverse brilliance that the story ends here, with no further comment or elaboration.

Like the state of Israel itself, that ambitious social experiment, the kibbutz, came into being in large part through a messianic drive, and it, too, paradoxically, has been maintained through the anti-messianic values of order, rationality, and institutionalization. As setting and theme, the kibbutz has undoubtedly been overworked in Hebrew literature, but it still retains a rich potential for fictional treatment. The isolation and self-sufficiency of the kibbutz offer exactly the kind of manageable and self-contained world that is so desirable to fiction, and the situation of the kibbutz suggests a microcosm of the larger situation of Israel as nation and society. Among recent Israeli writers, the novelist Amos Oz has in fact used the kibbutz in just this way (as in his 1966 novel Elsewhere, Perhaps); he is represented in Contemporary Israeli Literature by a kibbutz story from the '60s. New Writing in Israel also contains a story with a kibbutz setting, this one by Yitzhak Ben Ner. Both stories are examinations of the price paid by kibbutz members for, precisely, the rationality of kibbutz existence.

Ben Ner's "A Village Death" is a wonderfully told monologue, whose narrator, a forty-three-year-old member of a collective village, has assumed the responsibilities of undertaker and mourner of the dead in order to expiate an affair he had twenty years earlier with the wife of another member. His death-in-life represents one way of dealing with the persistence of two antagonistic forms of feeling: lust for what is alien and dangerous, and love for one's native ground.

Oz's "A Hollow Stone" concerns the honored memory of a kibbutz founder whose brand of romantic socialism led him to his death in the Spanish Civil War. His wife has been left behind to play the role of a sainted widow of the revolution—a role the kibbutz despises. "Martyrdoms, Mediterranean tragedies, emotional arabesques," remarks the anonymous narrator who represents the community's conventional wisdom, "were irreconcilable with the principles by which we guided our lives."

To escape a life hedged in by principles and responsibilities, a life symbolized in miniature by the kibbutz but characteristic as well of Israel's entire national situation, Israelis flee to zones of imagined freedom like the United States, a country where there is seemingly no limit to the romance of individual achievement and where a man has room to pursue private dreams of experience, money, sex. The fragility of such dreams is suggested by the novelist Yoram Kaniuk in "They've Moved the House," one of a pair of stories with an American setting that are included in Contemporary Israeli Literature. With enormous linguistic energy Kaniuk evokes the mixture of wide-eyed naiveté and grandiose ambition that marks his two Israeli schlemiels as they untiringly conceive new money-making schemes.

In "The Orgy," an amusing and cerebral story by the well-known poet, Yehuda Amichai, America likewise serves as a symbol of liberation from the disciplines of history and holiness that are the conditions of life in Israel, but it is a symbol heavily charged with irony. Amichai's first-person narrator is an Israeli student, worn down by his doctoral studies, who comes to New York in search of a new source of transcendence. He finds it in sex, something America has abundantly to offer and a commodity which in Amichai's rendering assumes a kind of Sabbatian appropriateness as the supreme value in a transvalued world, a world in which the orgy has become the means of reconstructing the rituals of collective experience. Amichai's story ends with a jocular account of a road show formed by the narrator and his friends to expound and practice their new Torah.

Nostalgia for an idealized past, the frenzied search for a transcendent future—it is one of the marks of A. B. Yehoshua's achievement as a writer that he refuses to give way to either of these temptations. In his new collection, Early in the Summer of 1970, as in a previous collection, Three Days and a Child, Yehoshua sticks resolutely to the harrowing confines of the present, even though, within those confines, he often works with the touch not of a realist but of a fabulist. The stories in the new collection take place in the period between 1967 and 1973, a time of wearying stalemate between Israel and its Arab neighbors, punctuated by random, sporadic death. In Yehoshua's imaginative reconstruction of this period, the larger collective purposes of the national existence have lost their clarity; his characters struggle on, but the struggle discloses no meaning to them. If there is any heroism in Yehoshua's world, it consists in the courage to face facts as they are and still proceed with the business of life.

The nameless hero of "Missile Base 612" cannot muster such courage. Rather, he persists in demanding some revelation that will explain the disorientation of his existence. Like the aimless fighting between Israel and Egypt along the Suez Canal, his life has become a permanent battle fought from fixed positions: though he and his wife share the same house and the same child, they squabble or ignore each other, and at the university where he works, his career has bogged down. Thus, when he is asked to spend a day lecturing in the Sinai to army troops, he is grateful for the chance to break out of his isolation. Yet he who has come to lecture is actually the one in need of enlightenment. The army is full of people who have adapted to the conditions of uncertainty and attrition, and his fumbling and grandiloquent overtures to the men are met by stupefaction or bemused skepticism.

Finally, he steals a close look at the missiles on the base and is electrified by the spectacle they present of impersonal, erotic power. But he characteristically fails to grasp the nature of this power. Searching for an epiphany that will explain, and release him from, the deadlock of his own life, he cannot understand that the purpose of the missiles is not to be fired, that they are there to prevent an apocalypse by remaining in check.

Loss of meaning, and the baffled search for a way to overcome that loss, is similarly at the center of the title story, "Early in the Summer of 1970," Yehoshua's brilliant recasting of the motif of the sacrifice of Isaac. (This story was first published in English in Commentary, March 1973.) The father here is an aging high-school teacher who has stubbornly refused to retire, to accept the fact that his life is over. He looks to his son, a university lecturer who has recently returned from abroad with a young American wife, for the enunciation of some new message, the banner of a new generation. But the son is remote and ungiving. Then one day, while teaching in school, he is suddenly informed that this son, who is on reserve duty, in the Jordan Valley, has been killed.

When he goes to identify the body, however, it develops that there has been an administrative error: the dead man is not his son after all. There follows a frantic journey to the outpost where the son's unit is on maneuvers, and a face-to-face encounter in which the son shows himself to be completely unresponsive to the ordeal his father has undergone; all he can do is mutter bitterly about his military experience, "such a loss of time .. . so pointless."

The story is told with an obsessive, almost painful, allegiance to the point of view of the father, who returns constantly in his mind to the moment when he was given the news of his son's "death." With each repetition, it becomes clearer that instead of reliving a moment of pain, the father is actually reliving a moment in which his son's life, and his own, seem finally to have taken on meaning. He sees himself, guilty and bereft, but somehow heroic, offering up his son on the altar of national existence, and he sees his son as a willing martyr in the same cause. As in the biblical tale, however, the son is allowed to live. But whereas in Abraham's case it was trust in God that was being tested and revealed, in the case of Yehoshua's story what is being tested is only the father's desperate and misplaced faith in a deliverance wrought by others. And whereas in the biblical story, ordeal is followed by covenant, by the striking of a new redemptive relation between God and His chosen ones, "Early in the Summer of 1970" ends back in unillusioned reality: the ordeal will simply continue.

Yehoshua's stories sound grim and severe when stripped to their moral burden, but as works of art they are marvelously accomplished, rich and precise in language and startlingly inventive in their use of non-realistic modes of narration. As a moralist, Yehoshua is relentless, and he shows his characters no quarter. Conspicuously absent from his work is just that element of sympathy toward the yearning for deliverance which runs like a scarlet thread through so much serious Jewish writing in this century—and not only in this century.

Still, what Yeshoshua does share with almost all Hebrew writers of the modern period, and with many contemporary Israeli writers in particular, is a highly charged sense of obligation toward his material, an obligation not only to depict faithfully but also to evaluate and comment upon the twists and turns of the national consciousness as they reveal themselves in character and incident. That so many Israeli writers have been able to transform this sense of obligation into successful works of the imagination is a remarkable achievement, and in its own way a tribute to the vigor of the Jewish national spirit.