Dror Abend

SOURCE: "Solipsism in Israeli Feminist Poetry: The Great Male Writer, Toni Morrison," in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 505-08.

[In the following essay, Abend assesses the influence of American literature and culture on Israeli feminist poetry.]

Individualism, a distinctly Western ideal, is a concept one often associates with personal freedom, privacy, and control over one's life choices. But within the consumeroriented structures of the West, individualism is also a solipsism, as one is often more interested in one's own wishes and sentiments than in the greater issues of society. In the exportation of this ideal to the cultural provinces of the United States, one wonders which of its two facets will prevail: that of individual freedom—supposedly freedom for all—or that of social solipsism. In the case of feminist writings and practices, the interpretation of individualism is significant. An earlier call for women's rights by privileged women in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s was well received by other privileged women in different parts of the world. Current association of the plight of women with that of American minorities, and even that of unprivileged people in the Third World, may pose a problem to women in countries that practice various forms of social injustice.

A look at the development of a feminist tradition within Israeli poetry in the last forty years provides an opportunity to realize the extent to which cultural provinces of the United States are influenced by American ideas and ideologies. In this respect, poets such as Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath are presented as cultural role models who, much like the movie stars of the 1940s and 1950s, serve as ambassadors of American culture. It is important to realize, however, that it is not only the projection of ideals that is examined here, but also the willingness of the receiver to be influenced by certain messages, as well as the receiver's unwillingness to be influenced by others. In the poetry of Israeli women, the concept of the individual and her right to personal happiness was easily received by a society that imitates the consumer-oriented mechanisms of American economics. Feminism, as a result, was translated into the idea of the individual woman's right to the pursuit of happiness in terms of education, life opportunities, and equal pay—that is, so long as she lives in a Tel Aviv suburb. In a country that limits one's choice of food—not to mention the choice of Palestinian children to become Palestinian adults—the values of freedom and equality, under the assumption that they are applicable to all, certainly constitute a weaker message. Moreover, in the political reality of Israel, feminist poetry not only failed to protest the shortcomings of society, but was actually the bandwagon of solipsism for male poets who could no longer deal with the social reality. Certainly the recent announcement on Israeli national radio that the famous male writer Toni Morrison had won the Nobel Prize in Literature reflects on the Israeli image of feminist writings, as it tends to eliminate facts and notions that may stretch beyond one's own realms of individualism.

In its political, economic, and cultural aspects, Israeli society was first intended as a socialist structure, modeled after the turn-of-the-century ideals of Eastern Europe. Hebrew poetry in Palestine, and later in Israel, was, accordingly, highly prophetic, society-oriented, and considered the individual only in relation to his—and seldom, her—role in society. Despite certain influences of European romanticism, highly significant in turn-of-the-century Hebrew poetry, and early translations of modern American poetry, available in Yiddish as early as 1927,¹ the main influences on Hebrew poetry until the 1950s were largely those of such Russian writers as Chekhov and Tolstoy and the poet Pushkin, who helped win the hearts of many young women when properly read on dark Oriental nights. The 1950s, characterized by such American symbols as James Dean, Coca-Cola bottles, and, finally, the shutdown of the Israeli embassy in Moscow in 1952—only four years after the official declaration of the State of Israel—unleashed a group of young poets who, well beyond the bounds of rhyme and meter, swept through the streets of Tel Aviv with what would then be considered subversive poetry, speaking of individualism, hedonism, love, and sex. David Avidan's poem "Apropos the Wretched Love of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which he attributes little or no advantage to old age, is part of a poetic revolution that preferred the individualism of young poets in the culture of a new world to the authority and tradition of national poetry. Certainly the political reality of Israel did not change overnight. Nevertheless, the poetry of the 1950s and 1960s offered a haven from the national effort and encouraged the reader to consider aspects of life beyond the common values of society.

The history of individualism in women's poetry begins much earlier, for, as Lily Ratok of Tel Aviv University claims in her article 'The Portrait of Woman as an Israeli Poet," the development of a feminine tradition within Hebrew poetry is a development by default. The highly moral and authoritarian tone of male writers, claims Ratok, left women to a discussion of intimacy, silence, and a concentration on the individual and her seemingly mundane world.² For example, the turn-of-the-century poet Rachel Bluwstein entitled one of her poems "Only of Myself I Knew How to Tell." In a different poem she addresses the homeland: "Indeed, very wretched is the gift of thy daughter." In her 1988 article Ratok takes Elaine Showalter's concept of women's culture in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" as the wild zone of women's experience, a territory that lies beyond the reach of patriarchal dominance, and views it as an appropriate characterization of the culture of Israeli feminism.³ Certainly the inability of women to define themselves within a prior "heroic" or even prophetic tradition of Hebrew poetry has led to what Ratok defines as a binary choice of subject matter. In opposition to a masculine, heroic tradition, women had to create a different poetry that is more intimate, with a greater concentration on the individual and possessing little or no pathos.⁴ The retreat into less authoritarian, more reflexive themes and subject matter added up to what Julia Kristeva names in Revolution in Poetic Language as the generation of new significance within society. The initial discourse within the poems has finally developed into a more coherent, at times explicit tradition of poetry that not only excludes itself from a "heroic" and "prophetic" mainstream but is finally able to refer to and even criticize the mainstream and its hierarchical implications.⁵

There is little wonder, then, that the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson served as an important influence on Israeli women poets even before her wider publication in the 1950s and 1960s. Dickinson, whose poetic method is described by Adrienne Rich in "Vesuvius at Home" as a resistance to patriarchal laws and taboos, was certainly helpful to poets who tried to define themselves beyond the mainstream of authority and absolute statement.⁶ One example of this influence is provided by the comparison of Dickinson's poem 289 with the poem "The Old House" by the Israeli poet Zelda. Zelda—usually referred to by her first name alone—is a descendant of the famous Rabbi Shneerson from Lubavitch. Born in 1914, first published in 1967, and buried in 1984, she is, like Dickinson, a unique poet who served as a major influence on modern poetry in general and women's poetry in particular. Also like Dickinson, Zelda did not confine herself to the authority of a strong patriarchal household and tradition; both her attending a secular institution of higher learning and her writing of poetry were, according to her family tradition, unbecoming of men and women alike.⁷ In fact, after her death, Zelda's relatives attained a court order which forbids any form of public access to her files. Also, as in Dickinson's case, the publication of Zelda's poems was delayed for many years, and her voice, talking of loneliness and of unsatisfactory communication with the world, carries little or no authority in poems that speak of individual bewilderment and limitations. In "The Old House" Zelda inserts the traditional symbol of the house—a symbol of a family, its honor and hierarchy—and uses it as a synecdoche for the predicament of a lonely individual within a spiritual desolation. She writes:

There, beyond the house,
On the horizon,
Their silent lives
The hemstitched mountains live, wearing
Their gray scarf secrets,
And under the floor of the house
Its enigmatic life,
Its special life, lives
The dirt,
And all that is buried within—
Seeds, roots, streams . . . 

Dickinson also places the house in a physical and psychological wilderness: "I know some lonely Houses off the Road / A Robber'd like the look of—/ Wooden barred, / And Windows hanging low, / Inviting to—/ A Portico." Certainly, for both Dickinson and Zelda, the house is an ambivalent symbol, as both poets wish to free themselves from the authority and artistic silence imposed by family, tradition, and anonymity while simultaneously wishing to enjoy their protection.⁸ The issues of publication, communication, and love in these poems, as well as in others, became a popular theme in the poetry of Israeli women, who largely ignored social and national themes. Moreover, the choice of short, enigmatic poems pertaining to such themes became the trademark of women's poetry, which, unlike the male poetry of the 1950s, did not have to preach its individualism; for within the heroic tradition of the 1930s and 1940s the individualism of women was a given and, in fact, a must.

It is difficult, of course, to prove that Zelda actually read Dickinson. The research conducted for this article in the summer of 1993⁹ leads to the conclusion that Dickinson's influence is possible and even probable. Dickinson was available, translated, and highly praised at a very early stage, and Zelda, a studious reader of world literature—an admirer, for example, of William Faulkner—quite likely read this "new" American poet. Moreover, little documentation is available in regard to the influences on modern women poets such as Leah Goldberg, Yocheved Bat Miriam, and Zelda in the 1930s and 1940s. However, if Dickinson's poetry was not an absolute influence, it certainly was not an isolated phenomenon as far as Israeli poets are concerned. Yona Wallach, possibly the most significant woman poet since the 1960s, is the author of "Absalom," a poem that discusses abortion and the special relationship of the would-be mother to her dead fetus. "Absalom" is certainly influenced by a tradition of abortion poems such as Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song," "The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks, and Adrienne Rich's "Night-Pieces: For a Child." In the 1970s a poem by Rachel Chalfi entitled "A Witch Without a Coven" reminds one of Anne Sexton's "Her Kind." Tzipy Shachrur, a contemporary poet, published in 1987 a poem called "Grudge," a blunt accusation directed against the heroine's father and clearly influenced by Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," a poem directed against a father, fatherhood, and patriarchal hierarchy in general.

Interestingly, the title of the collection in which Shachrur's poem appears is Common Language, recalling the title of Adrienne Rich's book Dream of a Common Language. Certainly the influences of American women poets contributed to the formation of a common language, at least within an international community of women, when the individual as a woman, and the woman as an autonomous individual, became a subject well preferred over earlier themes of national strife and Zionist revival. This tendency, as mentioned before, was actually followed by male poets who, after the westernization of the 1950s, and the gradual development of Israel from a pioneering society to a relatively prosperous economic entity, searched for new themes and poetic instruments beyond the national tradition and the heritage of Russian poetry. Poets such as David Avidan and Nathan Zach, and later Yair Horowitz and Meir Viziltir, presented the individual as an outsider, indifferent or even hostile to his environment. Verse that dealt with the economic scene, the political predicament, and the reality of war was, and still is, considered naïve, unesthetic, and unfitting within the canon of modern and postmodern poetry.

Certainly one must consider exceptions, such as Dalia Rabikovitz, a woman poet who has been well accepted into the canon since the 1950s. Over the last decade Rabikovitz has published many poems protesting the political scene in Israel and the West Bank and has actually identified her predicament as a woman with that of social and racial injustices. Of course, these are not the poems which won Rabikovitz her popularity in the 1950s. Her earlier verse addresses certain women's issues but does not view them in relation to other social and political realities in the Middle East. Another example is Yehuda Amichai, who, although better received in other countries than in his own land, has certainly been able to express himself on subjects connected with the reality of Israeli life.

Another necessary disclaimer, to be sure, is that feminist discourse and the theme of individualism are in themselves political stands of undeniable value. However, as Kristeva suggests, the displacement of "socially established signifying practices" does not necessarily equal a revolution¹⁰ Within the deplorable reality of Israeli society, poetry has failed to pick up on a second lesson in American feminism, a lesson taught by the later works of Adrienne Rich as well as by poets such as Audre Lorde, Marlene Nourbeze Philips, and Ntozake Shange and by novelists such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Not that every American writer is a conscious feminist. American poetry has its own share of solipsistic writers. Nevertheless, this essay deals with the reception of a particular message, which, best put by Rich in "Blood, Bread and Poetry," is that the predicament of the individual, or even of a particular group, is tied to the predicament of others and can only be helped through a general resistance of power systems in society.¹¹

In order to appreciate the lack of multicultural and socially critical influences on Israeli women's poetry, it is necessary to recognize the prior influences of American poetry on a tradition that held no significant place for women poets. In the 1950s and 1960s a number of themes were made available through poems on women's issues such as abortion, rape, parenthood, and sexual and social deviation from female stereotypes. Such themes not only legitimized women's poetry but actually placed it in a leading position within a modernist celebration of individualism. Dalia Rabikovitz's poem from the 1950s, "Vanilla," is a declaration on behalf of a heroine who yearns for vanilla ice cream. This call for individualism can be traced back to a number of sources, but ice cream, one must remember, is an American symbol as well. It stands not only for simple hedonism but also for an ideology that allows free choice of purpose, occupation, and flavor of ice cream. However, Israeli women did not retain their leadership position as social innovators. Their poetry, which was finally acknowledged after a long period of silence, was naturally reluctant to embrace new voices of racial, cultural, social, and economic plights that might be denied acceptance by both the public and literary circles. The refusal of women's poetry in Israel to go beyond a certain ideological step well served a literature that embarked on an idea of individualism that is solipsistic and stationary.

One also needs to consider that, unlike the movies and poems of the 1950s, the influence of contemporary American culture is no longer as direct and certainly not as univocal as it once was. Peace and prosperity, presented in the movies of the 1950s, turned American cultural heroes into role models admired all over the world, and the image of white, urban, well-to-do America presented in those movies, as well as within the recent context of upper-middle-class feminism, is a projection that is well delivered and well received. Here not only does the colonizer wish to bestow an ideology, but the colonized are eager to be bestowed upon. Individualism, in such a context, is perceived as one's liberation from the ideologies of one's society rather than one's obligation to the liberty of other individuals. Such a reception is more difficult in the case of works such as the novels of Toni Morrison or even television programs such as "Roseanne," which tell certain unpleasant truths about the United States. In countries surrounded by war and economic catastrophes, one has to believe in the existence of a rich, universally literate, universally employed America. The reference to "the great male writer, Toni Morrison" is certainly a part of the tendency to resist new and, to some, unexplained phenomena in the United States such as the recognition of African American women writers.

Such changes in the image of the United States, as well as Israel's own political reality, provide additional difficulties for women poets, who must decline a second revolution in Israeli poetry. For although American benefits such as individualism and vanilla ice cream were easily adopted forty years ago by a society eager to embark on an American myth, contemporary themes such as the painful consideration of social inequality and actual criticism of the American dream are, at this stage, rather difficult to accept.

NOTES

¹ Michel Licht, "Modern American Poetry" (a series of translations), in Our Book, vol. 2, 1927.

² Lily Ratok, "The Portrait of Woman as an Israeli Poet," Moznaim, 2-3 (May-June 1988), p. 58.

³ Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," in Modern Criticism and Theory, David Lodge, ed., New York, Longman, 1988, p. 347.

⁴ Ratok, p. 59.

⁵ Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, Margaret Waller, tr., New York, Columbia University Press, 1984, p. 13.

⁶ Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, New York, Norton, 1993, p. 195.

⁷ Hamutal Bar-Yosef, On Zelda's Poetry, Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988, p. 15; Yedidya Zhaki, "Zelda's Poems in Vast Retrospect," Iton 77 Literary Monthly, May-June 1985, p. 14.

⁸ For further discussion of the house as an ambivalent symbol of confinement and protection, see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas, tr., Boston, Beacon, 1969; and C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Sir Herbert Read, ed., Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1968. See also Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, Christopher L. Carduff, ed., New York, Addison-Wesley, 1988, pp. 127, 130, 386, and 524 for further discussion of Dickinson's relationship to her father's house as a relationship of resistance and as a usurpation of patriarchal authority.

⁹ See Reuben Avinoam, A Hebrew Anthology of American Verse, Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 1953; Michel Licht, "Modern American Poetry" (preface to a series of translations), in Our Book, vol. 1, 1927, p. 1519; Michel Licht, "Modern American Poetry," in Our Book, vol. 2; N. B. Minkow, "Introduction," in Modern American Poetry, Michel Licht, ed. & tr., Buenos Aires, 1954, p. 913.

¹⁰ Kristeva, p. 16.

¹¹ Gelpi and Gelpi, p. 249.

Yael S. Feldman

SOURCE: "Feminism under Siege: The Vicarious Selves of Israeli Women Writers," in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 493-514.

[In the following essay, Feldman explores feminist themes in Shulamith Hareven's A City of Many Days and Shulamit Lapid's Gei Oni.]

I live on the top floors now, she summed it up to herself, where there is a constant commotion, workrooms, children's rooms, the kitchen, the living room, all kinds of things. [Only] the cellar is locked, and I don't even know where the key is [any more]. Perhaps one should not know.

A City of Many Days, Shulamith Hareven, 1972

The imagery underlying this self-examination is age-old, almost a stock metaphor—the house as the image of its tenant and vice versa. Yet what gives this particular metaphor an added twist is its specific psychological edge, one that is implied by the vertical division of this human house: the upper floors full of movement and light in contrast to the locked cellar—a clear analogue to Freud's topographic model of the human psyche. However, the female voice using this metaphor seems to question the very foundation of the Freudian quest: Does one have to unlock the inaccessible, unconscious if you will, underground room?

This questioning grows out of the experience of Sarah Amarillo, the protagonist of the novel A City of Many Days (1972),¹ in which Shulamith Hareven reconstructs life in Jerusalem under the British mandate, before and during World War II. Although the impulse for self-knowledge is quite palpable here, it clearly stops short of breaking into the locked psychological "cellar." Introspection is thus displaced to externally observable facts, and a potentially psychological exploration turns into a socio-cultural inquiry.

Situated as it is a few pages before the end of the narrative (p. 184; 199), this arrested introspection functions as an interpreting sign, almost as a closure. It highlights retrospectively the cultural code underlying this novel—the uneasy co-existence of modern psychology within a society of collective persuasion.

This inherent tension is not unique to Hareven's narrative. Rather, it is characteristic of a whole range of contemporary Israeli novels that come very close to introspection and self-analysis but exhibit ambivalence when approaching the "forbidden zone." This is particularly true of a modality that I have elsewhere called "the arrested autobiography in Israeli fiction."² As a rule, these novels are the products of writers in mid-career who try to make sense of their life and art by constructing a real or fictive "self whose life-story they tell in retrospect, as viewed from the vantage point of the present (e.g., novels by Shahar, Bartov, Tamuz and Oz). Yet a close look at this group of narratives unravels an additional common feature: In these personal stories—all authored by male writers—psychological introspection is checked (or "arrested") by the pressure of socio-political realities, usually condensed into particular historical moments. While this pressure, which often takes the shape of an ideological crisis, is the moving force behind the need to construct a "self and fix it in language, it also undermines any attempt to live up to the ideals of the (male) "subject" as conceived in classical western thought—autonomy, privacy and psychological individualism.³

If this observation is correct, then these Israeli lifestories may add a new dimension to the contemporary debate over the construction of the "subject," and especially to the question of gender distinction: To the extent that they collapse the conventional oppositions between the individual and the communal, the private and the public, the psychological and the ideological, they seem to undermine some of our most cherished concepts about subjectivity and gender. If we remember in particular that for certain gender psychologists it is the female subject who is relational rather than autonomous, her identity—in life and on paper—is generally conceived as mediated through "others," and her "self" is viewed as communal and collective rather than purely individual—then the Israeli corpus could cast grave doubts on essentialist definitions of gender. In fact, it should encourage culturalist approaches, as it unambiguously demonstrates how gender boundaries may be crossed given the pressure of similar sociocultural conditions.⁴

Yet this is not the whole picture. If features of female selfhood may be found in male subjects, one should rightly ask if the reverse is also true: Do Israeli women writers create cross-gender subjects in their life-stories? To what extent are they free to imbue their imagined selves with "male" features, to cross traditional gender boundaries?

The answer to this set of questions is not readily available. First of all, because contemporary Israeli women seem to shy away from telling their life-stories directly.⁵ This absence is doubly surprising in view of the intimately autobiographical Hebrew prose written by women at the beginning of the century.⁶ In this they did not differ, of course, from their sister autobiographers in English, and perhaps the world over.⁷ But this resemblance is only superficial, pertaining to noncanonic texts. For unlike the English tradition, the Hebrew canon has featured a long list of women poets but no women novelists. Until the last decade Hebrew prose was mostly the domain of male writers. The few women who excelled in fiction mostly wrote short stories and novellas, mainly in the lyrical-impressionistic mode (e.g., Devorah Baron, 1887-1956).

Does this mean that we have come full circle to bedrock gender differences? I suspect not. Rather, as early as the turn of the century women were cast in a well defined role by the arbiters of the renaissance of Hebrew: "Only women are capable of reviving Hebrew—this old, forgotten, dry and hard language—by permeating it with emotion, tenderness, suppleness and subtlety." This generous, as well as limiting, evaluation was offered in 1897 by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the first propagator of spoken Hebrew; and it is not easy to determine today which was more effective: the encouragement or the limitation. For although a number of women graced Ben-Yehuda's journals (including his wife, who was actually trained in chemistry!), not one of them left her mark on the canon of Hebrew literature. Predictably, the breakthrough of women into the canon took place—two decades later—in poetry, where it was easier to accommodate the stereotypic ideal cut out for them by their male patrons.⁸

It took more than half a century for the old barriers to begin crumbling. And it was only in the last two decades that a number of women made the shift from short stories to novels, some of which are of almost epic proportions. Until very recently, however, none of these narratives came close to the fictional autobiography, even in its "arrested" form, as found among Israeli male writers. I would nevertheless argue that it is in these novels that one is to look for the (indirect) representation of the "self of the Israeli female author. Moreover: As we shall soon see, the generic choice is neither accidental nor arbitrary; for these quasi-historical novels camouflage a contemporary feminist consciousness and express, in different degrees of displacement, their authors' struggles with questions of female subjectivity and gender boundaries. That they do this "under siege," in a society that is fundamentally inimical to their quest, is part of the explanation of their literary choices, but also part of the paradox. For it is precisely those very pressures, which have rendered Israeli male subjectivity different from its western counterparts, that have also prevented the direct expression of Israeli female subjectivity. For contemporary women, issues of selfhood and gender definition are inextricably bound up with feminism; as such they automatically become politicized, a process the American scene clearly bears witness to. But in Israel such an agenda would per force collide with the larger political issues that are always at the center of attention. Israeli women writers are therefore trapped in a double bind: Unwilling to relegate themselves to the marginalized "women's journalism" and "female thematics," they are obliged to enter the mainstream "in disguise," registering their critique vicariously via their presumably historical protagonists.

I first suspected that this was the case when I saw the term "feminist" on the jacket of Gei oni, a "historical" novel published in 1982, whose narrated time is early⁹ The transparent anachronism of the usage set me on the detective trail. (In the Oxford Dictionary, composed between 1884 and 1928, "feminism" gets the briefest treatment of all female-related entries—"The qualities of females"—and it is accompanied by the qualifier "Rare" . . . ) I soon discovered a pattern: In several recent novels by Israeli women, contemporary concerns are projected into "liberated" heroines of another time or another place. In fact, one can point to a process of regression in the choice of historical settings, from Jerusalem of the 1920s and '30s in A City of Many Days (1972, quoted in our epigraph)—a period the author, Shulamith Hareven, could not have experienced directly, since she arrived in Palestine as a child only in 1940)—through Palestine of 1882 in Shulamit Lapid's Gei oni (1982), to the vaguely and poetically defined European past (17th century) in Amalia Kahana-Carmon's novella "The Bridge of the Green Duck" (in Up on Montifer, 1984).¹⁰ However, this regression is counter balanced by a diametrically opposite progression in the "feminist" consciousness of the protagonists of these novels. As a group, they move from traditional gender roles in a patriarchal society to a Utopian new womanhood, paradoxically projected back into the historicomythical past.

If this analysis is correct, then Hebrew literature is still at the stage that Carolyn Heilbrun charted out about a decade ago. in Reinventing Womanhood: "Women are only recently taking up autobiography in the attempt to show themselves . . . (though the autobiographies are often in the form of novels)."¹¹ But why should this be so? Why should contemporary Israeli women be incapable of facing their personal selves directly? Moreover, why can't they, to quote Heilbrun again, "imagine women characters with even the autonomy they themselves have achieved" (p. 71)? Why isn't one of these Bildungsromane cast in the mold of the Künstlerroman? And why isn't there even one "portrait of an artist" among these novels of development? Is it because of the precariousness of their writers' self-image as "artists"? Or is it because this aspect of their recently gained autonomy is subsumed by more communal—and perhaps more basic—concerns and achievements?

The answer is "yes," I am afraid, to both questions. The first will take us back to woman's problematic place in the Jewish tradition, which by-and-large excludes her from participating in man's public roles.¹² The second "yes," on the other hand, will highlight the cross-gender correspondence apparent in the Israeli corpus: For just like their male counterparts, these novels of development are motivated by socio-political pressures and organized around major historical events. And although the latter function as the pivotal moments in the heroines' "voyages in," they also embed their subjective experience within a larger, collective order. It is precisely this embeddedness, however, that is at odds with any feminist aspiration; and it is the slow and vicarious realization of this unavoidable conflict that is the subject of the following analysis.

For Sarah Amarillo, the protagonist of A City of Many Days, the pivotal historical moment is the breakdown of the Jewish-Arab equilibrium in Jerusalem of World War II. As the tension heightens, the narrative is permeated by a sense of an ending: "Something was ending, and something was about to begin" (p. 136; 146; cf. p. 75; 77). The oriental design which Jerusalem had been—and which the novel recapitulates in its lyrical impressionism—is doomed to oblivion, except in the literary reconstructions of its mourners (David Shahar, Hayyim Be'er, and, to some extent Amos Oz).¹³ Jerusalem's polyphony of voices will be replaced by the "first person plural" of the next generation, as the male protagonists wistfully observe:

"All these men will be coming home from war now," said Professor Barzel. 'They'll all have learned to fight. The country will change again. Everything will become more professional, the fighting too. The individual won't count any more—only the stupid plural. The plural is always stupid."

[. . . ]

"And what will be then, Elias?" asked Hulda worriedly. "We will be then," said Elias, so quietly that they couldn't be sure they had heard right. "For better or worse, we will be." (pp. 182; 197-98)

This is the notorious "we" of the Palmach ("We are everywhere the first / we, we, the Palmach" as their song proudly announced), which has been the object of nostalgia since the fifties and the subject of debunking since the early eighties.¹⁴ Hareven walks the middle way, having her characters grieve this loss of the first person singular, while rationalizing it as the unavoidable result of the political situation. Her ambivalence is further demonstrated by her treatment of Sarah's interior monologue (quoted in our epigraph): On one hand, she allows Sarah a measure of self-awareness, the admission that she lives "on the top floors." But then she lets her state flatly, without any change of tone, that "the cellar is locked, and I don't even know where the key is any more" (pp. 184; 199). Moreover, the attentive reader may note not only what is marked as "locked" but also what is marked by its absence: the curious omission of a bedroom from the list of rooms on the top floor, which is passed unnoticed.

Apparently, in order to join the war effort, Sarah must, like Professor Barzel before her, "skip over her own self (ibid.; cf. pp. 122; 130): Barzel, the German-born physician who had trained her as a nurse in her youth, now insists that she help him prepare paramedics for the insecure, threatening future. It would seem that in this society under siege male and female share the same lot. But not quite: It is Sarah and not Professor Barzel who registers the loss in psychological rather than social or intellectual terms. While he is reported to "have lost the key" to his hobbies and philosophical ideas (pp. 122; 130), Sarah is aware that what she misses is nothing less than the key to her own "underground room," to the cellar of her psychic apparatus (pp. 184; 199).

Her metaphoric language barely camouflages a Freudian insight; "repression" is of course unnamable in the discourse of this narrative.¹⁵ Yet this insight does not lead to any action. Neither the protagonist nor the authorial voice shows any signs of rebellion ("Perhaps one should not know"). On the contrary: Despite the great losses, the novel closes on a poetic note of mystical transcendence:

a silent presence, the whole city spread at her feet, and [she] looked at the lambswool light out over the mountains, over the houses drowning in radiance, as if once this city, long, long ago, soon after Creation, had burst from some great rock and its truth flown molten and shiny over the hills. She could feel the moment to the quick. Now this is me, she told herself, now this is me, here on this hill, with this feeling of great peace [reconciliation] that will never last, or standing in the street, people know [recognize] me: I have three sons and so little time. Now this is me in this moment of hers. Tomorrow I'll be gone and the street will be gone. Or another street and another time. And always, forever, this fleecy pile of light, that rock tumbled halfway down the hill to a lonely stop, a terraced alley, a dripping cypress tree, a caper plant in a wall. A place to walk slowly. A place to touch the sky: now it is close. To breathe in mountain-and-light. Now.

It is hard to exaggerate the contrast between this reconciled woman and the spunky girl that she once was. Described by herself and by others as a chip off the strong and feisty (mostly male) Amarillos, those who "are always quarreling with life" (pp. 36, 113; 36, 119), this "big" emancipated woman now takes a turn towards submission, "lying low in realities, the wick trimmed all the way down" (pp. 179; 194). The woman who prided herself on her sharp tongue and unabashed "meanness," is now beginning to wax emotional over her motherly duties (ibid.). And the daughter who as a young girl vented her rage against her absent father by screaming "No father! No mother! No grandpa! No grandma! No nothing" (pp. 16; 14), is now processing poetically her discovery of his helpless insanity: "I went down into a garden of nut trees [to see the fruits of the valley]. Down down down. To the rock-bottom beauty of madness" (pp. 187; 202. Cf. Song of Songs 6:11). Again, the anguish is camouflaged by the indirection of metaphor. And again both protagonist and narrator stop on the brink of the abyss: "Sarah looked at him for a long while, the great question that had haunted her for so long, now a spent little answer, cast mindlessly before her" (ibid.).

This is all Hareven grants her protagonist by way of self scrutiny. Staged as it is two pages before the end of the novel, this encounter loses its potential force as an allembracing psychological explanation. The "haunting question" is allowed to enter into language only when it has lost its power and turned into a "spent little answer." For despite the intimation of Freudian depths, this is no novel of psychological motivation. In its laconic, pointilistic style, its skimpy descriptions and its quick shifts of centers of consciousness, the narration hovers above and around the characters, empathically engaging them and ironically disengaging itself, but never aiming at rendering fully rounded psychological portraits.

Even Sarah, whose "education" is at the core of the plot, is rendered by brief surface brushstrokes. Moreover, she does not occupy center stage by herself; as the lyrical fusion of her last narrated monologue makes clear, she shares it with another female, the city of the title of the book. It is Jerusalem who is the strongest presence in this novel, because, ironically, it is "she" ("city"—as well as land, country, state—are conveniently genderized as feminine in Hebrew) who embodies the powers of history ("This city abides no one's decision about who they are. It [she] decides for them, it [she] makes them, with the pressure of stones and infinite time. It teaches humility." pp. 121; 129). In the final analysis, it is history rather than psychology that circumscribes human action in this novel, subsuming both anguish and pleasure under its impersonal workings.

What place is there for the female subject in this kind of narrative? To begin with, there is the closing statement of the poetic coda: Despite the constant effort of the authorial voice to decentralize its focalization, to multiply its points of view, Sarah emerges as the central consciousness of the narration. The more the rich mosaic of the past disintegrates, the more her introspective voice usurps that of the ironic narrator, culminating in the final monologue we have read. Should we hear there the beginning of a direct self-representation?

If we do we do so at our own peril. For Shulamith Hareven has not followed the lead she herself suggested. She never adopted the autobiographic modality in her writing, and except for one collection of stories partially addressing women issues (Loneliness, 1980), she has shunned female protagonists altogether. A City of Many Days stands alone in her oeuvre, written after two books of poetry and two collections of stories (1962-1970), and followed by more collections of poems, essays, short stories and two (allegorical?) novellas whose narrated time is the biblical past.¹⁶ Moreover, Hareven is notorious for her refusal to participate in any forum dedicated to "women's literature"; she does not believe in Women Writers as a category; and she has often claimed that a writer is a writer, never mind her (his?) gender. At the same time, she is politically active, voicing her ideological positions in her oral pronouncements and excellent essays (which are, by the way, among the best written in Hebrew today).¹⁷ But when critics tried to read her political convictions into her latest "biblical" novellas, she vehemently protested: Art is art and should not be confused with one's worldly preoccupation.¹⁸

In other words, the woman behind the novel is an engaged person of clearly drawn convictions and priorities. "Feminism," however, is not among them, as A City of Many Days complexly demonstrates. Why complexly?—Because, on the one hand, cross-gender equality as a realistic possibility is an unquestioned premise of this novel. Without this premise the characterization of Sarah would be totally spurious. In fact, in her independence of spirit, intolerance of weakness and provocative sexual freedom she is almost a parody of the typical male adolescent. It is almost as if she was naturally born to all those "privileges," never having to fight for them. Indeed Sarah, as we have seen, was free, easily brushing aside—with no separation anxiety, it would seem—the "weak" maternal tradition of her Sephardi stock (mother, paternal grandmother and sister). On the other hand, by equipping her with a weak father (he is easy prey for false female charms and a victim of mental illness) and a "strong" paternal aunt (the colorful, single but happy Victoria[!]), Hareven seems to give the lie to the feminist cliché of "transcending gender roles."

Sarah starts from a non-genderized dichotomy, unproblematically rejecting one model and adopting another. Structurally, she functions somewhat like Jo of Little Women, a single strong presence in a female household. But unlike Louisa May Alcott, Hareven accompanies her heroine into matrimony. Here is the moment of truth, the real test of this "new female" (the aunt, we recall, has never married): How would this male-modelled, autonomous woman function as a wife and mother? Superbly, of course, but at a "cost."

After giving birth to her first son, Sarah for the first time allows "weakness" to penetrate her hitherto armoured psyche. The self-centered, unrelational ego restructures itself, but reacts with a sense of loss and fear: "Help me, Grandpa," she prays from her maternity bed, "because a frightening vulnerability has opened up in me today" .. . (p. 111. Although the contemporary connotation of the word used in Hebrew, turpah, is generalized, on the order of "Achilles' heel," the context no doubt activates the word's original denotation [in Rabbinic Hebrew] of 'nakedness', 'private parts'; and we need not elaborate the sexual connotation of the use of the verb "open" in this connection—all of which is missing from Halkin's bland translation, "I've never felt so defenseless before," p. 118). But if we think that motherhood is the end of "androgyny," we are mistaken, at least as far as this novel is concerned. It is the father, not the mother, who verbalizes the effect of parenthood on the self: "The first child forces you to define yourself. When the second comes you are already defined. Not just as a parent. Whatever you are and aren't, you can be sure that's what your child will learn to demand from you" (pp. 112; 119). At this point of the narrative we are just past the midpoint of the story, and the myth of androgyny is still holding sway. But not for long. In the following pages we witness the deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations and the palpable echoes of World War II. Life is disrupted; individual destinies get farcically and hopelessly entangled in plots they do not comprehend (Miraculo, Zion). The dichotomy of weak/strong, so hopefully deconstructed in the human sphere, ominously sneaks back into people's political discourse (see particularly Professor Barzel, one of the first victims of Arab atrocities). Against this background, Sarah slowly emerges to her difference only to realize that under the circumstances she cannot take this difference anywhere.

The motive power behind her emergence is, predictably, a chance rekindling of a youthful love. But just as predictably, this emotional reawakening is painfully cut off, undermined by the historical moment—the underground activities and military voluntarism of men at war. All that she has left is "acceptance" of her "locked cellar," amor fati. So that when her self-conscious "I" is finally vocalized, it is only to be defined in terms of others: "They recognize me: I have three sons and so little time. . . . " The irony could not be any greater: Sarah Amarillo, the paradigm of the "new," Jerusalem-born, Jewess (echoes of the social-Zionist ethos of the "new man/Jew" are not unintentional here!), falls back on the most traditional and often maligned Jewish definition of womanhood. Like the biblical Sarah, she gains status through motherhood and more significantly, through the recognition of others. In the Hebrew phrase makirim oti, she is clearly the passive receptor of the action.

Inadvertently, Hareven offers a Lacanian insight: Reflected in the gaze of others, the subject of necessity perceives herself as an object ("me," le moi). But does this mean that the subject is in principle alienated from her/his own selfhood, as Lacan would have it?—Not quite. For unlike Lacan (and the Jewish tradition as well!) Hareven optimistically harbors a contextual rather than ontological "explanation" of the structure she has created. Subjecthood, female or otherwise, is suspended when the cannons are roaring. The celebration of the self, feminist or not, is temporarily compromised under the historical circumstances dramatized in this novel. The socio-political conditions that have given rise to the ideology of "we," the "stupid first person plural," have also dictated the suppression of the Freudian quest and the throwing away of the key to the psychic underground room. But all this is historically, not universally or essentially, determined.¹⁹ And if the female subject of this narrative cannot be privileged with a fully autobiographic voice, she is allowed the empowerment of existential transcendence: Stretching from Genesis to eternity, it is the big female Other, Jerusalem, that offers a moment of ecstasy, of metonymie submersion:

Now this is me, she told herself, now this is me . . . with this feeling of great peace [reconciliation]. [ . . . ] Now this is me in this moment of hers. [ . . . ] A place to touch the sky: now it is close. To breathe in mountain-and-light. Now.

The uniqueness of Hareven's position on feminism (among Israeli writers), is paralleled by the splendid isolation of her heroine among Israeli female protagonists. In no other novel had the gap between lofty ideals (both authorial and Zionist, both intratextual and contextual) and the limitations of reality been so sensitively (but also ambivalently) dramatized. In some sense, this novel was ahead of its time. In the early seventies the horizon of expectations was not yet ripe for a literary discussion of feminism, even in its moderate, selective form. Female victimization was convincingly evoked by the early work of Kahana-Carmon, but it would take her more than a decade to get to a stage of protest and action. In poetry, one could hear some revolutionary tones in Yona Wallach's verse, but not too many were willing to listen. It is not surprising, then, that A City of Many Days was received as another nostalgic tale about Jerusalem, "lacking highly significant themes and conceptual contents."²⁰ That the issues of gender and female subjectivity, as well as their conflict with the historical constraints, are central to the novel—this passed totally unnoticed. It goes without saying that the potential critique of Zionist ideology implied by this material was not even surmised.

It would take a whole decade for the next attempts to materialize, and this not without the impact of the Yom Kippur War (1973) and its aftermath: the protest movements, Lesley Hazelton's demythologization of "the realities behind the myth" (Israeli Women, 1977) and the first report of a Knesset commission on the status of women (1978).²¹ This report, says Dafna Sharfman, a political scientist at Haifa University, "publicly revealed and described in detail the real situation of the women in Israel, and the discrimination to which they are subject" (p. 14). But in the early seventies, when Hare ven was writing, the topic was still dormant. Although Shulamit Aloni's treatise on woman's deplorable status within the Israeli legal system, Women as Human Beings, appeared in 1973, nothing changed in the view that "their contribution to society was marginal and supportive by nature .. . a reflection of their political status and the inclination of the Labour Movement elite to view them as voters but not as decision makers" (ibid.).

As for Shulamith Hareven, raised as she was outside the ranks of the Labor movement (in fact, well to the right of it) but with a strong faith in "human Zionism" (which eventually has moved her left), she was no doubt torn between her political critique and her intuitive "selective" feminism (her terminology).²² This is why, I believe, the ideological underpinning of her characterization of Sarah is totally suppressed, thereby giving the impression of "inadequate motivation," as critic Gershon Shaked has put it.²³ Displacing the gender codes theoretically adumbrated by the Zionist movement and the Palmach generation (which will be confronted head on only in the next decade by Netiva Ben Yehuda, 1981) to a different ethnic setting (where they hardly belong), Hareven created in Sarah a vicarious self that released her from the risk of personal exposure, while giving her the liberty to explore her own ambivalence. If we add that Hareven served as a paramedic in the besieged Jerusalem of 1947-48 and that she likes to trace her maternal lineage to the fifteenth century Spanish exiles, the parallels as well as the disguises become transparent.

The distance travelled by Hebrew readers in the seventies can be readily measured by the openness in which Gei oni (1982), a highly popular historical novel, tackled the very issues upon which Hareven had circumspectly touched a decade earlier. Here we do not find metaphoric indirection and nuanced play of voices. On the contrary. In a rather coarse realistic style, crowded with dialogues and interior monologues that are stylistically indistinguishable, the third person narration weaves its way through a maze of "relationships" that would easily rival those of any Hollywood or TV romantic melodrama. Nothing is implied here, not even the characters' most intimate reflections. Thoughts, emotions, ideology and popular psychology are all evenly spread out as if illuminated by the bright Israeli sun.

Yet despite its limitations (and perhaps because of them—the book is often classified as a novel for young readers), Gei oni caught the imagination of Israeli readership in an unprecedented manner. In the first place, it played right into the wave of nostalgia that swept the country in the eighties, when the first centenary of the earliest Jewish Aliya (immigration) to Palestine was celebrated. Indeed, Shulamit Lapid—until then a rather obscure short story writer,²⁴ but since then a prolific novelist and dramatist—wrote her first novel in anticipation of 1982. In that year the Galilean settlement Rosh Pinah, whose earlier name had been Gei Oni, celebrated one hundred years of its existence. Judging by the reception the book enjoyed, the timing was right; readers exhibited great hunger for the richly documented panorama of that distant past filtered through a fictional prism.

This was not the only reason. Readers were no doubt responding to the novelty of being introduced to a "serious" historical reconstruction through the eyes and mind of Fanya, a young Russian immigrant who joins Gei Oni in the opening scene, and remains the central consciousness through which the narrative is focalized throughout the novel.

But why should this be considered such a novelty? Wasn't the pioneer movement, indeed the Zionist ethos in general, supposed to have promoted the equality of women? In fact, wasn't "the woman question" one of the basic issues debated—and deemed solved—by the early communes and kibbutzim?²⁵ The answer is, of course, "yes" to all of the above; but only as long as we remember to add the qualifier—"in theory." For what recent research has shown is that in practice, neither the early settlers nor the second wave of immigrants at the turn of the century had transcended the patriarchal norms of their home communities in Europe.²⁶ And as Shulamit Lapid herself has recounted, she could find no historical model for her heroine in the archival records of Gei Oni—later named Rosh Pinah.²⁷

As the jacket of the book states, the names of those "giant women" who were part and parcel of the early settlement wave "are absent from history books because the records of the saviors of the motherland list only men." Even among the figures of the second aliyah, Lapid could make use only of one exceptional personality, Manya Shochat (1879-1959).²⁸ Fanya had to be invented; here is a woman who "did not know she was a feminist," but whom the contemporary reader recognizes as such, as the jacket of the book clearly attests.

We are in a better position now to appreciate the source of the great appeal that Gei oni exerted on its readership. The book was a bold attempt to do justice to the founding mothers, to rectify by fiction the wrongs of (maledominated) historiography. And it was no small challenge. For how does one create a narrative frame that would authentically preserve the patriarchal way of life of the 1880s, while at the same time accommodate a fictive protagonist whose own norms would satisfy contemporary "feminist" expectations?

The solution came in the form of a collage, piecing together two novelistic genres: the settler epic and the romantic melodrama. On one level, Gei oni is a typical settlement drama, almost a western ("The Wild East," as one of its reviewers labelled it²⁹ ), realistically depicting the struggles against all odds of the small Galilean group in the early 1880s. The chief antagonist of this plot is nature itself, the mythic mother-earth. In this story she is no welcoming bride; as we join the narrative she has been holding back her gifts for two consecutive years. Severe draught has chased away most of the pioneers, leaving behind just a few tenacious and idealistic families, including that of Yehi'el, the male protagonist of the novel.

On another level, this is a typically euphoric "heroine's text," as defined by Nancy Miller.³⁰ It is a predictable love story whose models are not only the canonic texts adored by the protagonist (Anna Karenina, which had just "arrived" from Russia, and the novels of Jane Austen, Fanya's favorite; see p. 161), but also popular romances à-la Rudolf Valentino which Shulamit Lapid herself ridiculed in one of her journalistic forays.³¹ Despite her ridicule, Lapid utilizes the popular genre with great dexterity: Fanya is the self-conscious budding young woman, who struggles to preserve her independent spirit while falling in love with her enigmatic "dark prince." The latter, for his part, is "handsome like the Prince of Wales" (pp. 34, 69, 85), "wise like king Solomon" (p. 117), and the envy of all women. Predictably, he is also proud, reticent and distant, the very qualities Lapid has enumerated in her brief article ("preferably, a widow / divorcé /bachelor, thirty-year-old, tanned, dark hair, a sneering look . . .")—which means, of course, that although he falls in love with Fanya's looks the moment he sees her, he keeps the secret to himself. Since neither the reader nor Fanya gets to know the truth before half the story is over, a chain of romantic misunderstandings and jealousies constitute the better part of the plot. To add insult to injury, there are echoes of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca: Fanya is "welcomed" to her "prince's" abode by the picture of his deceased wife, whose two sisters are conveniently present to evoke her beauty and otherworldly qualities whenever they can. All this naturally makes the denouement that much sweeter.

But before we get there, a question arises: Haven't we wandered too far afield from "founding mothers" and "inadvertent feminism," as I have elsewhere called it?³² Can the conventions of the romance, of the heroine's euphoric text, which Lapid herself declared "obsolete," indulge a fighting, independent spirit à la Manya Shochat? Hardly, of course, Lapid could not have sustained her model and satisfied her feminist quest had she kept the model intact. Nor could she write a true historical novel (fully omniscient narration, authorial perspective into general historical processes) while staying as close to Fanya's consciousness as she did (more about this below). She resolved this problem, however, by splicing the two models together just at their respective points of cracking. In other words, the meeting ground between them is that of deviation, where their generic conventions are violated. As we shall soon see, it is from this intersection that a new model emerges, one that generously accommodates contemporary expectations.

To begin with, Fanya's romance deviates from its imputed model in one crucial detail: its denouement does not coincide with the closure of the novel. Nor does it lead to a proposal or an engagement. For all this typical "heroine's text" takes place within the boundaries of a marriage. And our two protagonists are atypical as well: Fanya is not only an orphan, as suggested by Lapid in the above-quoted piece ("an English orphan, preferably penniless . . ."); she is a 16-year-old survivor of a Russian pogrom (the infamous Ukrainian pogroms of 1881-82 that are credited with inspiring the first wave of immigration to Palestine), who finds refuge in the Promised Land, accompanied by an old uncle, a deranged brother, and a baby—the initially unwanted fruit of her rape in that pogrom. Yehi'el, who happens to see her upon her arrival in Jaffa, is a 26-year-old widower and a father of two, one of the few courageous souls still left in the nearly desolate Gei Oni.

As the narrative opens, we are privileged to hear Fanya's reflections after a hasty betrothal in Jaffa. While Yehi'el's motives are not disclosed, it soon becomes clear that for Fanya this is not just a marriage of convenience but also a marriage of appearances. Upon arrival in Gei Oni she insists on separate sleeping arrangements, a rather unexpected turn within the conventions of the romance but a perfectly plausible step for a psychologically conceived character who is still smarting from her traumatic past. The attentive reader, however, will notice a structural and symbolic analogy in this otherwise realistically motivated action. It is not only the human bride who denies her husband her favors; with the draught continuing, the fertilization of mother earth is also prevented.

There is a perfect symmetry, then, between the two plots: the psychological and the mythic, the romantic and the historical. In both the male principle is initially defeated and no consummation is possible. This symmetry does not escape Yehi'el himself, who, unaware of Fanya's trauma, reacts to her refusal by saying: "When you change your mind, let me know. I ask for favors only from the land (= earth)" (p. 45). To get the story rolling again both female protagonists must give in; it is against the background of the long-awaited rains (pp. 117, 121, 123)—a pioneers' version of the notorious Romantic storm?—that the passionate (and confessional) reunion between Fanya and Yehi'el finally takes place (pp. 119-28), and the euphoric plot seems to have reached its happy ending.

But not quite. For in the second part of the narrative, the settlement plot comes back with a vengeance, leaning down heavily on the delicate balance of the new romantic attachment. Not unlike Hareven's Jerusalem, the Galilee, or mother earth (or perhaps the pioneering quest itself) exerts pressure on the human subjects of this story, limiting their freedom of choice and forcing them into its mold. But unlike Hareven, Lapid seems less willing to accept the verdict of the historical moment, of the Zionist "dream of redemption, burning like fire in the bones" (pp. 103-4, 144, 175). She does not have Fanya "skip over her own self," as did Sarah in A City of Many Days, but rather lets her develop her female subjectivity despite and against the pressures of the collective vision, with all its tragic consequences. By so doing, Lapid has unwittingly blended her two models into a third one, a Bildungsroman which may be rather fanciful for the 1880s but totally satisfying to readers one hundred years later.

I have elsewhere suggested naming this new model after Erich Neumann's Jungian analysis of the legend of Amor and Psyche, namely, "The Psychic Development of the Feminine."³³ The heuristic convenience of this choice stems from the story's origins, as Neumann brilliantly shows, in the myth of the "Great Mother," the archetypal mother-earth. It is this archetype that has nourished all myths—old and young—of a return to the motherland, Zionism not excluded. And it is this nexus of images and metaphors that has been recently questioned in the attempt to explain the problematic place of woman in the Zionist ethos.

Only a few years before the publication of Gei oni, psychologist Lesley Hazelton deconstructed the familiar Zionist image of sons-lovers returning to mother-land/earth "to build and be rebuilt in her" (notice again the effect of Hebrew's genderized grammar!). She did this by a literal, almost ad absurdum analysis of the psychoanalytic ramifications of this language:

But while Zion played Jocasta to the male pioneers' Oedipus, where was the Agamemnon to the women pioneers' Electra? What value could all this libidinous attraction have for them? What archetypal images could it arouse in a woman's mind? What role was there for women in this scenario of sons and fathers fertilizing the motherland?³⁴

As startling as this query is on first reading, it loses some of its persuasive power once we recognize one small oversight: Except in songs, has Zion ever played Jocasta to her returning sons? Was she a welcoming bride? Or was she mostly an earlier Jungian archetype: "The Great Mother"?

The difference is crucial: In the primitive myth the female figure had not yet undergone what Neumann calls "the process of secondary personalization"; she had not yet functioned as a human representation, but as an "impersonal blind principle of fertility."³⁵ In fact, this is the negative aspect of the "great mother," the scary "Terrible Mother" that Neumann has unearthed in the ancient myths and fertility rituals. In these myths the male had more to lose than to gain, for the impregnation of the female principle was achieved only through the perennial death of her "consoit," her son/lover/savior, later incarnated in the myths of Tamuz, Osiris and Dionysus.

We can now return to the plot of Gei oni and discern that this scenario does not support Hazelton's feminist worries. Here it is not "Electra" who is excluded from the game but rather "Oedipus." The deep structure of the settlement plot is therefore not a Freudian triade, but an earlier, Neumannesque diade, that of the Terrible Mother and her doomed consort. In Yehi'el's failure to conquer mother-earth (he eventually dies of malaria), primitive fertility myths play themselves out once more. The essence of myth, we are reminded, is endless repetition. Standing alone, then, the settlement script would have come to an impasse if not for its dynamic intersection with the second plot, the heroine's text.

In this text, Yehi'el is a "passive accomplice" in Fanya's long and often bewildered search for her own identity as a woman and an autonomous Individuum. As in the story of Amor and Psyche, the main psychological thrust of the novel is the liberation of the female protagonist from the yoke of the social norms imposed on her by Aphrodite-like representatives of the community. "Psyche's act of rebellion," says Neumann in Amor and Psyche, "signals the end of the mythic era. . . . From now on it is the era of human love, when the human soul knowingly undertakes all fateful decisions for its own life.³⁶

It is interesting to note that Neumann speaks about the maturity of the human soul in general. That this process is symbolized for him precisely in the process of individuation of the feminine principle, should come as no surprise. After all, it is the latter that has to liberate itself from the blind collective principle of fertility and veer toward the "light"—the archetypal symbol of masculine consciousness in Neumann's (and others') conceptual system. Although this genderized reading has its problems, particularly for feminist critics,³⁷ it can readily accommodate the Bildung plot of our story. Fanya "develops" from a scathed teenager who acts under duress and runs away at her first experience of pain and frustration, to a mature woman who stays on out of conscious choice to realize the pioneering dream of her dead husband-lover.

Predictably, Fanya achieves her independence by a process of individuation in which she transcends the norms dictated to her by mother-figures who try to teach her "her natural place" (pp. 117, 144, 175, 234). Like Psyche, she reaches maturity after a series of tasks which she undertakes in order to save her husband and home from the devastation wrought by mother nature. We find her breaking into the male-dominated world of commerce, political discussion, even armed self-defense. At the same time, she does not deny her femininity (cf. Psyche's care to preserve her beauty), her difference from the male world surrounding her: the fun of lighthearted chat, of good romantic novels, of some childlike pranks (pp. 104, 144, 175). Her personal code is defined, then, as the freedom to choose the best of the two worlds, to move freely from one to the other. More than her predecessor in Hareven's novel, this heroine fully embodies cross-gender equality as she shuttles between home and "world," Gei Oni and Jaffa, taking care of husband and children—and trading. Yehi'el turns out to be just as exceptional. Although he does not fully approve of Fanya's "androgynous" tendencies, he does not stand in her way, which is more than can be said of any of his peers (pp. 109, 172-73, 188, 236). The result is a virtual reversal of conventional gender-roles (with Yehi'el staying close to home and Fanya going into the world), and more importantly—the transformation of Fanya from a child-bride into a mature wife-companion, fully aware of her choices, sexual as well as social.

It is only natural, then, that as the novel comes to a close and Yehi'el succumbs to exhaustion and malaria, the reader is ready to embrace Fanya's Bildung as a necessary training for her ultimate task: the perpetuation of the mythical male quest. But in an ironic twist on Hazelton's critique, Fanya, though ready to undertake the role, perceives it as something alien, not her own script:

Shall she sell their home? Driving Yehi'el out of his dream? This home and this land were the purpose of his life. Once again fate has decreed that she realize others' dreams. Has she ever had her own dreams? But perhaps everyone is like this? Everyone realizes someone else's dream? (p. 256)

Is this a "feminist" protest lamenting the lot of women in general? Or is this a specific charge against the androcentric Zionist dream? And who is the "everyone" of the final questions: Women? All people? The lines seem to blur here, leaving the reader with a sense of an unfocused grievance. For what is read throughout the novel as a critique of a male-engendered ideology ("Her father's dream of rebirth has turned into sacred madness which now consumes her youthful years, her life," p. 102; and cf. 142, 194, 202-3, 226), is now taking on an existential turn, possibly hiding behind "the human condition."

We may be witnessing here an attempt (prevalent in women's life writing, as recently demonstrated by Carolyn Heilbrun³⁸) to rationalize away the justified rage against the social system, which, in the guise of a new ideology, has reinscribed traditional double standards toward women. More often than not Fanya's feelings remain unexpressed. Typically, her frustration and hurt are reported to the reader ("Fanya wanted to scream: And I? And I?, but she kept silent," p. 176, and cf. 105, 144, 164, 187, 217), but they always remain confined within the seething turmoil of her narrated inner monologues. When they are actually verbalized, it is only in the framework of private female discourse. Fanya may have penetrated male praxis, but not its public discourse. The prevailing ideology remains uncontaminated by her feminist critique. In the final analysis, Fanya's quest for selfhood inscribes itself only as a comment on the margins of an androcentric system.

We should not be surprised, then, that Lapid does not give her heroine the chance to try and make it on her own. In the last page, the plot of the romance prevails. Sasha, an old acquaintance, himself a survivor of the Ukrainian pogroms, reappears, asking permission "to help and be helped" (cf. the Zionist quest "to build and be rebuilt"). With this new beginning, the novel reverts to its original two models: the historical and the romantic. Subjective experience is embedded again in Jewish collectivity, symbolized throughout the story by the legendary Phoenix ("This is what we Jews do. Start all over again. Again. And again. And again."), only to be taken over by an old/new romance closure:

"I need you, Fanya! Will you allow me to help you?"

Fanya looked at him wondering. Then she thought that if he hugged her, her head would barely reach his shoulder. And then her eyes filled with tears. (p. 266)

What right do we have to claim this quasi-historical, quasi-feminist romance set a century ago as a vicarious representation of the contemporary author's self? The answer lies in the transparency of the authorial intention, which is hardly camouflaged by the historical displacement. This intention grows suspiciously palpable when we consider a peculiar technical aspect of the novel. Although it is told in a straightforward third-person narration, information is mostly limited to that which is available to the heroine. Fanya is not only the protagonist of the action but also its point of focalization. Her inner world is too close to that of the narrator (to the exclusion of all other figurai perspectives), to do justice to the narration of a historical novel. This lack of distance (ironic or other), as well as the narrator's narrow point of view, undermines the work's claim to be a historical novel. It generates the impression that the development of the historical heroine represents the concerns and expectations of a contemporary consciousness which Israeli present-day reality cannot satisfy. In some sense, Gei orti is a feminist Bildungsroman masquerading as a more acceptable genre: the historical novel. Lapid had obviously felt that Israeli society of the early 1980s would accept a "feminist" identity as a historical projection but would find it difficult to digest as a realistic proposition for the here and now.

This impression is further reinforced by the (unmistakenly contemporary) feminist protest of one of Lapid's earliest stories, "The Order of the Garter,"³⁹ and by the totally female orientation of her oeuvre in the last few years. Although, like Hareven, she does not consider herself a feminist, she has been limiting herself, by her own confession, "to women's thematics" and perceives herself as "small, delicate, and becoming more and more aggressive" at the "ripe age of 54."⁴⁰

While her play Abandoned Property (1987) explored the psychological dynamics between mother and daughters in a broken family on the margins of the social system (and her forthcoming play is entitled "Surrogate Mother"), her recent novel, Local Paper,⁴¹ features a lower middleclass woman journalist in a contemporary provincial town (Beer Sheva). Thirty years old and single, Lisa is not a descendant of Hareven's aunt Victoria, but rather a throwback to the turn-of-the-century detective spinster of English literature. In this popular quasi-detective story Lapid does what she has not dared to do in Gei oni; she imagines a female character more common in contemporary America than in Israel: an unmarried woman who is proud of her work ethic, of her "professionalism," and whose priorities are "working" and "being in love." (This seems like a rather wry commentary on Freud's notorious definition of [male?] mental health which stipulated the ability to work and love! Similarly, the novel's final question, repeated twice, "What do you want, Lisi?" reads like a parody on Freud's famous question, "What does woman want?") Yet despite this daring move, Lapid's penchant for romance, for the euphoric heroine's text, is operative here as well (although from a more ironic perspective). For if matrimony has totally lost its appeal ("I have seen my sisters," Lisa explains), the romantic attachment has not. Like Fanya, Lisa gets her reward in the form of a "dark prince," updated for the 1980s: a tawny, handsome, rich and worldly divorcé, whose timely offered "information" rescues Lisa from the imminent danger of losing her job.

Working within the conventions of the popular romance, Lapid (who is herself a happily married mother and a former Chair of the Israeli Writers Association) has created female subjects whose identity seems to be much more seamless and unconflicted than those created by Hareven (or other women writers, such as Kahana-Carmon and Ruth Almog). While Hareven, for example, consciously questions the place of individual autonomy, gender difference and psychological determinism in a society under siege, Lapid uses the historical and ideological materials as a setting against which her protagonists reach toward their optimal development. By the same token, she does not subject her own premises about gender to a serious scrutiny ("motherhood," for example, is never really problematized: Lisa rejects it out of hand and Fanya just weaves it into her busy schedule, although it is never clear how); nor does she indulge in a true psychological exploration of her characters. In a curious way, the wealth of information we accumulate about them, even about their past, does not allow for any meaningful conceptualization. Lapid is content to follow their present entanglements to their happy endings without delving into the larger questions posed by the issues she has dramatized.

The exploration of some of these issues (not least among them the question of women as representing the "other" in general⁴²) is carried out in the latest work of two other writers, Amalia Kahana-Carmon and Ruth Almog.⁴³ Although highly different in almost every aspect of their artistic conception, these two narratives share a common impulse—the attempt to overcome the state of siege so convincingly dramatized by Hareven and Lapid. While the first is still couched in the language of the "historical" romance, breaking out of captivity and reaching the feminist quest only in its last page (more as a promise for the extratextual future), the latter has successfully transcended the limitations of this tradition, testing feminism in the here and now of contemporary reality. That by so doing it uncovers a new set of limitations and perhaps another kind of "siege" (psychological or existential rather than historical) is an inevitably ironic chapter, to be told elsewhere.⁴⁴

NOTES

Work on this essay was made possible by an NEH Fellowship for summer 1989.

¹ Shulamith Hareven, 'Ir yamim rabim (Tel Aviv, 1972), p. 184. Subsequent references appear in the body of the text. The second page number refers to the English version, A City of Many Days (New York, 1977), translated by Hillel Halkin.

² Yael Feldman, "Living on the Top Floor: The Arrested Autobiography in Contemporary Israeli Fiction," Modern Hebrew Literature 1 (Fall/Winter 1988): 72-77.

³ The only exception to this generalization, Pinhas Sadeh's Hahayim kemashal (Tel Aviv, 1958) [Life as a Parable] (London, 1972), stands alone in Israeli literature in its blatant denial of the national collective with all its trimmings. Despite its belated popular appeal, particularly among young readers, Sadeh's example of solipsism, mysticism and (Christian?) confessionalism was not followed by any of his fellow writers, nor by the younger generation (at least not before the eighties).

The literature on the construction of the subject in Western literature is too vast to be enumerated here. For a recent monograph see Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, 1988).

⁴ Idevelop this idea in my article "Gender In/Difference in Contemporary Hebrew Fictional Autobiographies," Biography 11:3 (Summer 1988): 189-209; reprinted in Sex, Love and Signs: European Journal for Semiotic Studies 1 (1989): 435-56.

⁵ This is not to say that women do not use autobiographic materials—e.g., Naomi Fraenkel, Rachel Eitan, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Hedda Boshes, Yehudit Hendel—but rather that their narratives generally do not take the shape of autobiographic retrospection. (On the obvious exception, Netiva Ben Yehuda's Bein hasfirot [Between the Calendars, 1981], see my article [n. 4].)

⁶ See Yaffa Berlowitz, ed., Sippurei nashim [Stories by Women of the First Immigration] (Tel Aviv, 1984).

⁷ See, for example, Shari Benstock, ed., The Private Self (Chapel Hill and London, 1988).

⁸ It was also easier to write verse without the training in classical Hebrew traditionally reserved only for males. It is no coincidence that the first modern Hebrew prose writer, Devorah Baron, had been raised "as a son," that is—instructed in the sacred sources—by her father who was a rabbi.

On the emergence of women's poetry see most recently Dan Miron, "Founding Mothers, Step Sisters" [Hebrew], Alpayim 1 (June, 1989): 29-58.

⁹ Shulamit Lapid, Gei oni (Tel Aviv, 1982). All further references will appear in the body of the text, translated by the author of this essay.

¹⁰ Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Lema'lah bemontifer [Up on Montifer] (Tel Aviv, 1984), pp. 59-184.

¹¹ Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (New York, 1979), p. 134.

¹² See, for example, Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist (New York, 1983).

¹³ And see on this point Gershon Shaked, "Imbued with the Love of Jerusalem" in Gal ahar gal [Wave after Wave in Hebrew Narrative Fiction] (Jerusalem, 1985), pp. 15-23.

¹⁴ See in particular Netiva Ben Yehuda, Between the Calendars, 1981.

¹⁵ Although the precarious position of Freudian psychology is most palpable in the language and plot of this narrative, it is not easy to determine whether it derives from the historical materials themselves (the 1930s-40s), or from the personal ambivalence of the author, who expressed her contempt of classical Freudian psychology in her conversation with me (August 16, 1989). The problematic reception of psychoanalysis in Hebrew literature is the subject of my Freudianism and Its Discontents (work in progress), and is partially presented in "Back to Vienna: Zionism on the Literary Coach," in Vision Confronts Reality, eds. Sidorsky et al. (Rutherford, 1989), pp. 310-35.

¹⁶Sone' hanissim (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1983) was published in English as The Miracle Hater, trans. Hillel Halkin (North Point, 1988); Navi' [A Prophet] (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1988) was also translated by Halkin (Worth Point, 1990).

¹⁷Tismonet Dulcenea [The Dulcenea Syndrome] (Jerusalem, 1981).

¹⁸ See, for example, her essay "The First Forty Years," The Jerusalem Quarterly 48 (Fall 1988): 3-28, esp. 25-26; and more recently, an interview with Helit Bloom in Bamahaneh, March 1, 1989.

¹⁹ See on this point the succint analysis of Noami Chazan, "Gender Equality? Not in a War Zone!" Israeli Democracy (Summer 1989): 4-7.

²⁰ Shaked, p. 23.

²¹ See Dafna Sharfman, "The Status of Women in Israel—Facts and Myth," Israeli Democracy (Summer 1989): 12-14.

²² Private communication, August 16, 1989.

²³ Shaked, p. 20.

²⁴ Shulamit Lapid, Mazal dagim [Pisces] (Tel Aviv, 1969); Shalvat shotim [Fools' Paradise] (Tel Aviv, 1974); Kadahat [Malaria] (Tel Aviv, 1979).

²⁵ See, for example, Elkana Margalit, Hashomer hatsa 'ir: me'adat ne'urim lemarksizm mahapkhani [From Youth Movement to Revolutionary Marxism] (Tel Aviv, 1971).

²⁶ See Dafna Izraeli, "The Labor Women Movement in Palestine from Its Inception to 1929" [Hebrew], Cathedra 32 (1984): 109-40; and Devorah Bernstein, "The Status and Organization of Urban Working Women in the 20s and 30s," [Hebrew] Cathedra 34 (1985): 115-44.

²⁷ Private communication, 1984. Literature does not score much higher on this point, the few exceptions [e.g., Rivka Alper's Hamitnahalim bahar, and Moshe Shamir's Hinumat kalah] notwithstanding. Israeli literature has been good in inscribing women's victimization, as shown by Esther Fuchs in her Israeli Mythogynies (Albany, 1987), although I am not sure I share her enthusiasm for this project.

²⁸ Shochat's fascinating biography, Before Golda, told by Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, was recently released in English, translated by Sandra Shurin (New York, 1988), as was a documentary film based on it. See also Shulamit Reinharz, "Toward a Model of Female Political Action: The Case of Manya Shohat, Founder of the First Kibbutz," Women's Studies Int. Forum 7:4 (1984): 275-87.

²⁹ Yehudit Oryan, Yedï'ot aharonot (April 16, 1982): 22, 26. See also Shlomo Har'el, "Around the Settlement—between Myth and Historicism," in Bein historya lesifrut (Tel Aviv, 1983). pp. 134-50.

³⁰ Nancy Miller, The Heroine's Text (New York, 1980).

³¹ Shulamit Lapid, "The Romantic Popular Novel" [Hebrew], Ma'ariv (Oct. 17, 1975).

³² "Inadvertent Feminism: The Image of Frontier Women in Contemporary Israeli Literature," Modern Hebrew Literature 10 (Spring/Summer, 1985): 34-37.

³³ Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine (Princeton, 1952). And see my essay, "An Historical Novel or Masqueraded Autobiography?" Siman qr'ah 18 (March 1986): 208-13.

³⁴ Lesley Hazleton, Israeli Women: The Reality behind the Myth (New York, 1977), p. 93.

³⁵ See Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 1973), p. 50 et passim.

³⁶ Neumann, Amor and Psyche. pp. 55, 60, 68.

³⁷ For a summary of the debate see Mary Ann Ferguson, "The Female Novel of Development and the Myth of Psyche," in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, eds. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover and London, 1983), pp. 228-43.

³⁸ Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York, 1988).

³⁹ In Mazal dagim, 1969.

⁴⁰ See an interview with her in Lilith (Summer, 1989): 20. [The same issue also includes a translation of one of her new "aggressive" stories, "The Bed."]

⁴¹ Shulamit Lapid, Meqomon [Local Paper] (Jerusalem, 1989).

⁴² See my "The Other Within' in Contemporary Israeli Fiction," Middle East Review 22:1 (Fall, 1989): 47-53.

⁴³ Ruth Almog, Shorshei avir [Dangling Roots] (Jerusalem, 1987). For Kahana-Carmon see note 10.

⁴⁴ See my forthcoming "Inventing a Life for Oneself, or: Taking Feminism to the Streets in Israeli Literature."

Esther Fuchs

SOURCE: "Images of Love and War in Contemporary Israeli Fiction: A Feminist Re-vision," in Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, Susan Merrill Squier, eds., The University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 268-82.

[In the following essay, Fuchs observes the identification of women with destruction in Israeli fiction of the 1960s and 1970s.]

In an essay on the new Israeli story, Baruch Kurzweil argues that since the early 1960s, Israeli fiction has demonstrated an increasing obsession with the subject of Eros. He refers to Eros not in its Freudian sense of the life instinct but in the sense of "the temptations of woman," and as such he uses it as a term of opprobrium: "But this special conspicuousness of Eros, which is so characteristic of so many Israeli stories, testifies to the lack of a real goal in life. This mania for Eros in the Hebrew story is not a sign of effervescent vitality, but of something sick. It signifies an escape from the emptiness of life."¹ Kurzweil goes on to interpret the proliferation of the stories about the sexual "temptations of woman" not only as a manifestation of existential nausea, but also as an expression of self-hatred, an attempt to flee from Jewish identity, a suicidal pursuit of false Western idols. Although he calls attention to an important development in what came to be known as the literature of the New Wave (which emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s in reaction to the confined realism and socialist Zionist ideology of their predecessors), Kurzweil ignores the fact that Eros (in his sense) is often linked to Thanatos, the human desire to die. By failing to note the punitive element in the association in the literature of the 1960s and 1970s of "the temptations of woman" with the motif of death, Kurzweil implicitly endorses the androcentric vision which couples woman's sexuality with destruction. It is this tendency in the new Israeli story, to couple woman with destruction, that I would like to examine here.

The thematic relationship between heterosexual love and national war has pervaded Israeli fiction since its inception in the late 1940s. Yet the presentation of this relationship has undergone radical structural transformations from its bipolar appearance in the works of S. Yizhar and Moshe Shamir to its interdependent presentation in the works of Yitzhak Ben Ner, Ya'akov Buchan, and David Schütz. Whereas in the Palmah fiction romantic love and national war appear as dichotomously opposed indices of happiness and anguish, hope and despair, peace and violence, life and death, in the fiction of the generation of the state, the boundaries between the thematic poles seem to have dissolved: love and war are not only inextricably intertwined, but, in terms of their ideational function, virtually reversed. Heterosexual love is exposed as a power struggle, a relentless war leading to atrophy, to psychical and even physical death; whereas military confrontation emerges as a kind of refuge. The female character, previously symbolic of peace and love, turns into a pernicious victimizer. Romantic love—previously idealized as the loftiest human drive—is translated into lifeless, exploitative, and mechanical sex, degrading and debilitating for both man and woman. Perhaps the most dramatic expression of the thematic complementarity of love and war in Israeli narrative fiction can be found in war-related stories, in which the horror of war is both highlighted and counterbalanced by a subplot revolving around romantic love. In addition, most stories about romantic heterosexual love contain war-related subplots and/or war-related thematic kernels. Another common feature in this context is the identification of national war with male characters, and the complementary identification of love and sex with female characters—a tendency which, in view of the active involvement of women in Israel's military history, should not be taken for granted. The agenda of this study is then threefold: first, to illustrate the dialectical relationship of love and war in stories by the most prominent writers of the 1960s and 1970s; secondly, to analyze the implications of the results within the context of sexual politics; and thirdly, to suggest some general explanations for the most common configurations observed in our examples.

The transformation of woman from an icon of peace and romantic love (e.g., in Yizhar's Yemei Tsiklag [The days of Ziklag, 1959]) into one of death is illustrated in Yoram Kanyuk's Himo melekh yerushalayim (Himo king of Jerusalem, 1966). The novel revolves around the peculiar love of Hamutal Hurvitz, a young and beautiful nurse, for Himo, a casualty of the 1948 War of Independence. The only unmutilated remainder of what used to be a dashing young officer is Himo's lips, which convulsively and incessantly mumble, "Shoot me! Shoot me." The rest of his body, including, most significantly, his genitals, have been irreparably damaged. Undeterred by Himo's ghastly physique, Hamutal showers all her love and devotion upon him, to the astonishment and envy of the other wounded soldiers in the hospital. Finally, however, Hamutal gives up and decides to poison Himo in order to put an end to his agony. Ironically, Himo undergoes a strange transformation just as Hamutal is preparing the fatal injection. He is shown suddenly to recover his long-extinct desire to live: "He is pleading for his life. His mutilated body is writhing now, he tried to stretch out his hands imploringly; he pleaded like a starving dog, but he could no more say a word."² The juxtaposition of the upright stature of the beautiful nurse, gripping boldly the poisonous injector, determined and all but immune to the dramatic reversal of events, and the victimized man writhing helplessly at her feet, dramatizes the reversal in traditional power relations between male and female that are often occasioned by war³ I would like to suggest that the transformation of Hamutal from an icon of love to an angel of death reveals a male fear of the radical transition that wars in patriarchal societies tend to bring about in the status of women, changing them overnight from passive dependents to active participants in the economy and in leadership roles on both the civilian and military fronts. While wars are likely to empower the "weak" sex, they also tend to emasculate the "strong" sex. War casualties find themselves at the mercy of female nurses, and even male survivors discover their dependency on female services and nurturance. Himo, who used to be the epitome of virility, is not only sexually emasculated and physically incapacitated, but also emotionally dependent on Hamutal.

By ending with a calm and collected Hamutal stopping at a coffee shop several years later, only to remember the tragic incident in passing, Kanyuk's novel subverts the romantic image of woman in the Palmah literature as protective mother/lover, as well as that of the perennial mourner.⁴ It is true that Hamutal's love for Himo supplies the motivation for the larger part of the novel, but the ironic denouement challenges the impression heretofore created. Hamutal's decision to kill Himo turns out to be just as irrational and unpredictable as her unyielding love for him: neither one serves the desires and needs of the male victim. Woman's proverbial selflessness and concern for the male war victim are here exposed as irrational and transient.⁵ Even her deepest identification with the male victim, even the most passionate love, is shown to have its limits. At best, woman is an outsider in war. At worst, she is a dangerous enemy under the guise of a caring, nurturing female role model.⁶

In Amos Oz's novel, Michael shell (My Michael), the symbolic representation of woman as Thana-os in the guise of Eros becomes even more explicit. Although this novel also presents the man, Michael, as victim, and the woman, Hana, as victimizer, the novel celebrates the male victim's quiet victory over his destructive enemy. Despite Hana's refusal to cooperate with Michael either as wife or as mother, and despite her exploitative and humiliating treatment of him, it is she who finally degenerates through successive stages of boredom, passivity, and physical sickness into psychosis, while Michael succeeds in launching a brilliant academic career, moving progressively toward greater professional accomplishment and economic stability. Hana's perverse attitude toward her husband is most eloquently dramatized in her sexual exploitation of him: "I would wake up my husband, crawl under his blanket, cling to his body with all my might. . . . Nevertheless, I ignored him; I made contact only with his body: muscles, arms, hair. In my heart I knew that I betrayed him over and over again with his body."⁷ Hana's sexual abuse of her husband is a perversion and prevarication of Eros. Using Michael as a sex object (the traditional literary role of the female), she turns what constitutes the ultimate symbolic expression of love into a ritualistic enactment of war.⁸ Having failed to vitiate her husband's virility by other means, she attempts to castrate him by exhausting him sexually. Sexual relations in Michael shell become a metaphor for the power relations between man and woman, and it is a woman who is blatantly responsible for this perverse reversal. Hana is incapable of and uninterested in love; what she seeks is sadomasochistic titillation, a luxury her dedicated husband does not afford her. She therefore resorts to erotic fantasies in which she is both the commander and the victim of Halil and Aziz, her Palestinian childhood playmates, who she imagines have become terrorists. It is significant that Hana first starts to fantasize about Halil and Aziz when Michael is drafted during the war of 1956. The analogy between the husband, who is fighting the Egyptians in the Sinai Peninsula, and the wife, who indulges in erotic fantasies about the Arab twins, dramatizes not only Hana's infidelity, but also her national disloyalty.⁹ This becomes even more pronounced at the end of the novel as Hana imagines herself sending her Palestinian lovers/servants on an anti-Israeli terrorist mission: "I will set them on. . . . A box of explosives, detonators, fuses, ammunition, hand grenades, glittering knives."¹⁰

The presentation of woman as conjugal and national enemy reveals, among other things, a deep-seated suspicion of woman's allegedly passive role in wartime. The notion that married women stay home, secure and relatively invulnerable, while men sacrifice their lives to defend them has powerful implications for relations between the sexes in a country constantly threatened by war. It must be remembered that despite the compulsory draft in Israel, only 50 percent of draftable women actually join the armed forces. Religious, illiterate, married, and pregnant women are exempted from the draft. Furthermore, the law bars women from combat duties; consequently, the majority of women serve in auxiliary jobs (e.g., as secretaries, clerks, teachers, drivers, wireless operators, parachute folders).¹¹ These circumstances create the impression that women are not really involved in the war effort, that their suffering and sacrifices are negligible compared to the price paid by male fighters. This impression is shared by both men and women in Israel. Two factors are all too often forgotten in this context: first, that women were not consulted when, in 1948, as the War of Independence was underway, it was decided to pull them out of the front and confine them to noncombat duties;¹² and secondly, that war takes a heavy psychological toll on Israeli mothers and wives, especially because of their inability to contribute to the war effort more substantially. This imposed impotence results in anxiety, guilt, alienation from the national scene, and a loss of self-esteem.¹³ While in reality war ends up damaging the status of women both inside and outside the army, mythical thinking, which often serves as grist for literary creativity, tends to envision women as protected and secure, and perceive men as vulnerable and victimized by war.¹⁴ Mythical thinking, to which Amos Oz, like other New Wave writers, is especially susceptible, ignores social, economic, and legal constraints, and tends to perceive the human world sub speciae aeternitatis.¹⁵ A literature inspired by mythical thinking will construe a social situation not as the outcome of external constraints, but as the product of human nature. From this perspective, woman stays home because she is inherently passive, confined, indifferent to war. In the volatile political context of Israel, a country continually on the brink of military conflagration, willful passivity entails treachery or, worse, a perverse subconscious love for the enemy: Eros bound with Thanatos, Thanatos in the guise of Eros. Fostered on the one hand by the archetypal association of treachery with female sexuality, and on the other by the Freudian theory concerning woman's alleged masochism, this vision spawns an image very much like that of Hana Gonen, a woman who indulges in orgiastic fantasies of rape by Palestinian terrorists while her husband fights for the common weal.¹⁶

If the implicitly incriminating portrait of Hana Gonen derives from the subconscious mistrust of the homebound passive woman, Ben Ner's "Nicole" (1976) is inspired by the apparently opposite distrust of the active army woman. While Hana's passivity and unsociability are essentially excoriated by the standards of socialist Zionism, Nicole's participation in the army is criticized by the traditional Judeo-Christian endorsement of woman's place in the home. Like Hamutal and Hana, Nicole is beautiful and sexy; like Hana, Nicole wields her sexuality as a weapon in her eternal contest with men she wants to subdue. Unlike Hana, however, Nicole is not content with fantasies of self-destruction. In order to satisfy her sadomasochistic proclivities, she joins the army and ends up destroying others. What attracts Nicole to a career in the army is not patriotism or even a professional interest, but the vulnerability of the sex-starved soldiers, the perfect potential victims for her narcissism and nymphomania. The story focuses on Nicole's sexual campaigns and conquests, especially after her affair with Lt. Col. Baruch Adar, or Barko, whom she seduces away from his lawful wife, as she has done with all her previous lovers. On the eve of the fateful Yom Kippur of 1973, she convinces Barko to spend the night with her in a hotel whose location remains undisclosed to their brigade. When the war breaks out, the soldiers are unable to contact Lieutenant Colonel Barko, which results in confusion, disorientation, and ultimately defeat. Although Barko blames himself for the tragic blow to his brigade, the story implies that the military defeat is the product of Nicole's wiles. The aetiological linkage of one of the most traumatic wars in Israel's military history with woman's role in the army reveals a deep-seated distrust of women soldiers, especially those endowed with authoritative status and power. When allowed to affect the public scene, woman evolves from a personal to a national enemy; her vampiric bite affects not only the individual man, but the entire army.

In addition to the distrust of women in power—who endanger the traditional power-structured status quo between the sexes—the story reveals a deeper discontent with woman's encroachment into what appears to be an exclusively male domain. The next monologue, in which Amiram castigates Nicole for her neglect and irresponsibility, reveals not only contempt for women in power, but also a vision of woman as an outsider who is incapable of comprehending even the most basic facts about the army: "Look madame, this is the army. This is an army at war for life or death. In such a war, things must be decided like that, sharply, this or that way. You have been among us long enough to understand this, haven't you?"¹⁷ Amiram implies that despite Nicole's status and experience, she remains a woman, a "you," an outsider, against "us," the male insiders. The hostility toward military women corresponds to a masculinist insecurity rooted in the identification of virility with military prowess. In a patriarchal and militarized culture, successful military women may compromise the self-image of men as fighters and defenders of the civilian population, namely helpless women and children.¹⁸ Furthermore, a military woman constitutes a threat to male bonding, of which the army is one of the remaining socially sanctioned mainstays.¹⁹ Finally, symbolically identified with sex, gentleness, pleasure, and sensuality, woman embodies all the values that threaten the military ethos, which thrives on coarseness, vulgarity, toughness, and the suppression of Eros.²⁰ In a military context, woman is reduced to a sex object, and sex to a mechanical activity, intended to relieve physiological tensions rather than gratify emotional needs. Because it is necessary not to give in to normal human needs for love and intimacy, women and sex become the subjects of vulgar jokes, and objects whose importance must be defied in order to sustain the psychic balance necessary for military efficiency.²¹

Like Hamutal Hurvitz and Hana Gonen, Nicole is an epitome of the castrating bitch who, under the guise of love, emasculates her male victims: "She is so glad to know that he [Barko] is afraid. At last. He should be afraid. She wants him to be afraid."²² Like Hana Gonen, Nicole sadistically tortures her man in an attempt to vanquish his male pride and subject him to her will. Realizing how guilty Barko feels about his brigade's defeat, she calls him up, pretending to be a widow of one of his dead soldiers. But in this battle between the sexes, Nicole, like Hana, cannot win. With resentment and exasperation, Nicole admits her defeat: "But, damn it, he does not crawl, break down, quiver, cry, scream, writhe helplessly; he keeps rising from his downfalls."²³ Once again, man is victimized not by national but by sexual war—the real enemy is not the Arab across the border, but the Israeli woman inside the hospital, the home, the camp. The most fatal blows come not from firearms, but from the "loving" arms of woman. Death lurks not in violence, but in sexuality; love is not the opposite, but the motivating principle of war.

Although the interdependence of Eros and Thanatos is conspicuous in Israeli literature, it pervades other literature as well. The motif of man's fatal entrapment by a sexually irresistible woman has deep roots in the Western literary tradition; from Samson and Delilah, to Holofernes and Judith and to John the Baptist and Salomé, from the Sirens and the Sphinx to the Lorelei, woman serves as the composite symbol of Eros and Thanatos. Karen Horney suggests that this ubiquitous phenomenon derives from man's castration anxiety, which is related to his realization of the difference between his genitalia and that of the female, and from man's dread of physical flaccidity/weakness/death after coitus.²⁴ To conceal his anxiety and dread, man either glorifies woman, putting her on an unreachable pedestal, or objectifies her as evil and dreadful, thus rationalizing and justifying his dread. "'It is not,' he says 'that I dread her; it is that she herself is malignant, capable of any crime, a beast of prey, a vampire, a witch, insatiable in her desires. She is the very personification of what is sinister.'"²⁵ This psychoanalytic explanation has a political dimension that Horney does not go into. Since men have been the primary producers of canonic religion, art, literature, and culture until fairly recently, their representations of women have become a hegemonic perspective through which both men and women perceive themselves. The representation of woman as the embodiment of Eros and Thanatos then serves as an important weapon in the hands of patriarchal hegemony; by wielding this image, the patriarchal system succeeds in both fostering man's distrust of woman as well as in keeping woman in her proper place.²⁶ One can conclude, then, that war and love appear together so frequently because love, as perceived in Western culture, is a kind of war.²⁷ Romantic love in Western society perpetuates the power imbalance between the sexes; rather than drawing them together, as it often purports to do, it intensifies the enmity between them.²⁸

To return to our specific case study, it is clear that contemporary Israeli literature has not invented the thematic and compositional interdependence of Eros and Thanatos; as an essentially Western literature, it has inherited this vocabulary of images and concepts. Nevertheless it is unique in its quantitative and qualitative use of this vocabulary. Here Eros and Thanatos are usually polarized and then welded together as, respectively, sex and war. Eros is usually represented not as a love or life instinct, but rather as a sexual drive; Thanatos is normally associated with violent death—usually war. In this context, man is the victim of woman, who is out to destroy both his virility and his life.

Israel's protracted war with its surrounding neighbors, a war whose inevitability and complexity began to emerge in Israel's national consciousness after the war of 1956, has created what Marcuse calls "a repressive society," a society in which death is either feared as constant threat, glorified as supreme sacrifice, or accepted as inescapable fate.²⁹ In a repressive culture, Eros is feared as a distracting, energy-consuming principle. Instead of allowing human sexuality to sublimate itself into Eros—a life-giving social order—a repressive system suppresses it by trivializing it, reducing it to a biological need and presenting it as potentially dangerous. Under repressive circumstances, especially in the context of war, which sanctions and often sanctifies the destruction of life, sex, symbolically represented as woman, is depicted as lifethreatening. The cultural acceptance of Thanatos brings about a reversal where woman, the giver of life and the principle of Eros, is depicted as a deathly victimizer, while man, who does the killing, is perceived as the victim. On a less abstract level, Israel's protracted war and the sexual division of labor within the army produce a suspicion of women who seem not to do quite their share, despite their traditional nurturant and protective roles as wives and mothers outside the army, or nurses and auxiliary soldiers within it. On the other hand, the constant threat of war and continuous political instability create a strong need for security within the private sphere, a need that is often translated into a nostalgic and regressive move back to traditional—namely patriarchal—patterns of intersexual and marital relations. In this context, women who seem to defy traditional power relations inspire anxiety and distrust.

Contemporary Israeli literature reflects not only the effects of war and siege; to a large extent, it is also what Yosef Oren calls a literature of disillusionment.³⁰ The disenchantment with both Israel's political and military constraints and with the gradual transformation of what used to be a pioneer society—dedicated to Utopian and idealistic visions—into an organized, bureaucratized state that often sacrifices ideals for pragmatic considerations, is sharply registered in Israel's canonic literature. The internecine relations between husband and wife and the degeneration of love into mutually destructive sexual relations serve as metaphors for what Israeli writers perceive as Israel's ideological disorientation and social disintegration. As Oren points out, 'The writers of the new generation dramatize an extreme scene that has not yet been established in Israeli reality, and [they] ask us to accept it as an authentic testimony to the reality of our lives."³¹ Identified with the family (the fundamental unit of society), woman came to signify the stultifying and corrupt society from which the Israeli male hero constantly flees, often right into the arms of war. Thus the romanticized nurturant mother/lover of the Palmah generation—often the symbol of civilian life—became the vampiric bitch in the literature of the 1960s and 1970s, just as the idealistic, victorious, and admirable male fighter turned into a pathetic victim.³² In so far as private relations serve as allegorical constructs signifying a national reality, the vampiric woman reflects not only the exasperated society, but also the devouring country with its insatiable demand for sacrifices, with its endless hunger for male corpses. The land of Israel is often symbolically portrayed as a female principle, a conception with deep biblical roots.³³ Just as in Hebrew-Palestinian Utopian literature, this country is often depicted as a loving mother/wife waiting for her son/lover to return to her; in contemporary Israeli literature, it appears as a deathly woman exacting endless sacrifices from her male lover.

Baruch Kurzweil was right in observing the increasing prevalence of what he calls Eros in Israeli literature, but his interpretation of this development can only be accepted if we consider its full range. It is not merely the increasing preponderance of women (especially in the capacity of sexual agents) that conveys a sense of disorientation and existential nausea. It is rather the presentation of women as symbolic of death that may perhaps signal an expression of despair, disorientation, and demoralization in Israeli fiction. It is the pervasive combination of Eros with Thanatos that may convey what Kurzweil sees as the flight from affirming values to self-hatred and self-destruction.

NOTES

I would like to thank the editors of this volume and John Bormanis for their editorial assistance in the preparation of this article, which also appeared (in a modified version) in Modern Judaism 6 (1986): 189-96. See also Fuchs, Israeli Mythogynies.

¹ Kurzweil, Hipus hasifrut hayisraelit, 67. This and all the following quotations from Hebrew sources are based upon my own translations.

² Kanyuk, H imo melekh yerushalayim, 170-71.

³ In her article on British literature during and after World War I, Sandra M. Gilbert notes that "the unmanning terrors of combat lead not just to a generalized sexual anxiety but also to a sexual anger directed specifically against the female, as if the Great War itself were primarily a climactic episode in some battle of the sexes that had already been raging for years" (Gilbert, "Soldier's Heart," 424).

⁴ Yigal Mossinsohn appears to be the exception in the overall tendency of the writers of the late 1940s and 1950s to portray woman as a symbol of peace and normal civilian life. His portrayal of women as adulterous traitors suggests that it is man's failure to assert himself, rather than woman's innate power, that is the true cause of his defeat.

⁵ Although this is not one of the major themes of the novel, Hanoch Bartov's Pitsei bagrut (Acne, 1965) offers an analogous example of woman's transient commitment to the male warrior. Likewise, Benjamin Galai, in "Al haholkhim" (On the travelers who will not return), writes, "For not forever will your girl cry, and not forever cast down her eyes" (313-15).

⁶ Woman also appears as outsider in Yitzhak Orpaz's Masa daniel (The voyage of Daniel, 1969).

⁷ Oz, Michael sheli, 178.

⁸ Yitzhak Orpaz's Nemalim (Ants) offers an analogous description of internecine relations between husband and wife.

⁹ An allegory of the political situation of Israel as a state in siege, Orpaz's Nemalim also presents woman as a potential national threat.

¹⁰ Oz, Michael shell, 197.

¹¹ On the status of women in Zahal, the Israeli Defence Force, see Yuval-Davis, "The Israeli Example," 73-78; Hazelton, Israeli Women, 112-61; Rein, Daughters of Rachel, 44-54; Lahav, "The Status of Women," 107-29; and Padan-Eisenstark, "Are Israeli Women Really Equal?" 538-45.

¹² Women protested indignantly against the decision to exclude them from combat duties. See Rein, Daughters of Rachel 46-7; Yehuda, 1948—Bein hasefirot, 277-81.

¹³ Only recently have Israeli women begun to give expression to their frustrations in wartime. See Sharron, "Women and War," 8.

¹⁴ In Amos Oz's "Minzar hashatkanim" (The Trappist monastery, 1965), the male protagonist sets out on a reprisal mission against an Arab village while his girlfriend stays at the army base. A. B. Yehoshua also casts his male heroes as victims and his female characters as passive outsiders who are, in the final analysis, the enemies of their male counterparts. See his "Besis tilim 612" (Missile base 612, 1975) and Shamai Golan's Moto shel uri peled (The death of Uri Peled, 1971), where woman appears not only as passive, indifferent, and treacherous, but also as the perpetrator of her husband's death.

¹⁵ The New Wave emphasized the universal and unchanging patterns of human behavior, rather than the peculiarities of the Israeli situation, and hence its frequent use of allegory, archetype, and myth. See Shaked, Gal hadash basiporet haivrit.

¹⁶ The association of woman, and especially female sexuality, with treachery has a long tradition in Western culture and literature; see Hays, The Dangerous Sex; Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate. For a. critique of Freud's theories on female masochism, see Horney, Feminine Psychology, 214-33. For a more general revision of Freudian theories on female sexuality and psychology, see Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 141-58.

¹⁷ Ner, "Nicole," 170.

¹⁸ Natalie Rein, Daughters of Rachel, 47, suggests that the reluctance to credit women for their contribution to the underground groups of Etsel and Lehi, as well as to the Palmah, manifests the unwillingness of male Jews, who have come from generations of emasculated manhood, to share with women the experience of asserting their newfound virility. The reluctance to acknowledge women's military contribution is a rather common phenomenon. Despite their participation in Europe's modern armies, mostly in service jobs, women are barely mentioned in most military histories; see Hacker, "Women and Military Institutions," 643-71.

¹⁹ According to Lionel Tiger, for example, women are by nature incapable of bonding, and as such threaten male bonding, which he sees as one of the major forces of social cohesiveness (see Tiger, Men in Groups). On the hostile responses to integrating women into regular combat forces in modern armies, see Rogan, Mixed Company.

²⁰ Amos Elon notes that the continuous and repeated periods of war and military tensions in Israel have produced a cult of toughness. On the effect of this cult on intersexual relations, he points out, "The letters written by young Israelis to their sweethearts are notoriously dry, unimaginative, and frequently, oddly impersonal. They are often so skimpy in exclamations of love, devotion, or longing—indeed of any feeling whatsoever—that a reader may suspect a near total lack of sensitivity and refinement. Or else he may suspect that the young writers, if they have feelings, are so frightened by them—or so ashamed and embarrassed—that they have apparently resolved to keep them permanently concealed. One does not talk of feelings, one rarely admits that they exist"(Elon, The Israelis, 238).

²¹ See Fetterley (The Resisting Reader, 51) on the analogous attitude toward women and sexuality in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

²² Ner, "Nicole," 179.

²³ Ibid., 180.

²⁴ Horney, Feminine Psychology, 107-18; 131-46.

²⁵ Ibid., 135. Horney also points out that Freud himself objectifies the male dread of woman when ascribing this fear to woman's actual hostility toward the male, a hostility that is allegedly generated by the pain and discomfort of defloration. See Freud, "The Taboo of Virginity," 70-86.

²⁶ On the political dimension of male-authored literature describing women and intersexual relations, see Millett, Sexual Politics, 3-31; 331-505.

²⁷ See Rougemont, Love in the Western World.

²⁸ For a political analysis of romantic love in Western culture, see Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, esp. 126-45.

²⁹ Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 222-36.

³⁰ See Oren, Hahitpakhut.

³¹ Oren, Hahitpakhut, 24.

³² This is only one aspect of the parodic treatment of the Palmah literature by the New Wave. For further analysis, see Gertz, "Haparodia," 272-77.

³³ The words referring to the concept or object of the land of Israel are all of the feminine gender in Hebrew. For example, "erets" (country), "adama" (earth), "moledet" (homeland), "medina" (state). Biblical literature, notably prophetic writings, and later Jewish traditional literature often identify the land of Zion as an abandoned wife or a widow. The symbolic presentation of the land as female has had an enormous impact on modern Hebrew literature, as well as on contemporary Israeli writers. In a recent treatise on Zionism, A. B. Yehoshua identifies the land of Israel as the long-neglected symbolic mother of the Jewish people. See Yehoshua, Bizkhut hanormaliut, 55-62.

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