[In the following essay, Beizer-Bohrer discusses the contrast between starkly realistic plots and elaborate rhetorical styles in the works of female Israeli writers.]

Like their pioneering parents who rebelled against old traditions and left their homes to build a new society in Israel, the second generation and native born Israelis (the 1948, or War-of-Independence-generation) share with their parents an ideology based on the highest values of humanism and egalitarianism. Like those parents, these young Israeli men and women had to face a harsh and hostile landscape, and defend their homes and lives against enemies in order to fulfill a national dream. Both generations were inspired by myths of equality, among them the equality of men and women, which was nourished by the Narodniki and socialist movements in Russia, and the humanitarian vision of writers like Tolstoi and Turgeniev, especially the latter's image of a forthright and accomplished new woman.

One of the striking features of the literature of these native speakers of Hebrew is that, on the one hand, it clings very closely to reality, depicting mundane aspects of working and fighting in an egalitarian society, but, on the other hand, it resorts, contrary to our expectations, to a very high flown style, using language which is very rhetorical and literary, excessively decorative and rich in neologisms and archaisms. It is language that aims at an exalted stylistic level, that attempts to elevate daily life rather than stooping down to it. Characters who are young Sabras, whose qualities and actions are quite typical and ordinary, may be presented with a pathos and with rhetorical stylistic devices that aim to create around them an aura of utter importance as in the following description from Moshe Shamir's novel He Walked In The Fields:¹

He was a lad whose education could have been somewhat better, and with somewhat less flaws, but he was, in fact, one hundred lads put together, if not more .. . He was a vintner, and someday perhaps he would return to being one again; then he would tend the vines, carefully handling the bunches so as not to cause them any harm . . . He was a young talent, good at field training and at skirmishes in particular . . . He was a beloved child of one of the kibbuzim . . . He was one Jew, young and tanned of skin, marching on the road of Migdal-Karem .. . He was a finger, that knew to press, firmly and knowingly, on a trigger of a Brenn machine-gun .. . He was the mystery of the sudden awakening presence .. . He was the commander of a platoon marching back from a voyage of field training.²

The works of all of these young writers, especially during the Forties and early Fifties, display this common stylistic tendency of elevating and stylizing mundane daily occurrences, which Prof. Gershon Shaked calls pathetic realism.³ Writers like Shamir and Yizhar, Megged, Shaham and Mossensohn, despite the vast differences between them, share an attitude that sees in the simple daily actions of work and defense, of a young growing society, manifestations of heroism and uniqueness. Consequently, the characters and the collective group that appear in the fiction of that period are portrayed in heroic terms, and are surrounded by a certain mythical aura. This heroic treatment and myth-making tendency becomes further evident when one observes the presentation of the male characters in the stories as compared with the females, a sample of the former being obvious in the paragraph quoted above. It is further amazing that in this literature we see only a society of men; no women participate in the central plots of the stories or, rather, the women stay in the background, while the action is reserved only for the men. The roles of the men, furthermore, are made heroic and their images and actions are magnified by means of the high style and the rhetorical intensification, as demonstrated above. In this whole literature we see these young men going to battle, building, defending, and facing trying conditions. We meet them in the Underground against the British and in prison (Yigal Mossensohn), mobilizing the Hagganah and the Palmah (Moshe Shamir, Nathan Shaham), and participating in battles and defense (S. Yizhar, Shaham and others).

This fact, of presenting the history of the formation of the State of Israel, as carried out by men only, is rather surprising, since it is well known that the women participated with the men in all of the actions; they worked, fought and died side by side with them. It seems to me, also, that there is a significant relationship between the magnification of the roles of men and the minimizing of the roles of women that is manifested in the works of these writers. I will try to illustrate this point by a closer examination of the images of women in the works of five authors.

Nathan Shaham's novella, Always We,⁴ deals with the transition period in Israel from an informal and ideological Underground army (the Hagganah)—to a formal army structure. The story presents several analogical tales of some young lads who are appointed to official higher commanding ranks, but prefer, instead, to volunteer for more dangerous tasks. Each one of them confronts tests of moral and ideological commitments to the values of the Hagganah, and each one of them has to leave behind him an unhappy girl-friend. Thus, Ram, who volunteers as commander of a dangerous mission, has his ability to exercise authority severely hampered and doomed to failure because of a neglectful upper-level commander, a lazy bureaucrat. This is, for him, a test of his manhood and of his moral character. Young Avi, another fellow, and an only son; also volunteers for action in the front line, despite the objections of his mother. The test for his call to action is high-lighted by a scene with his girlfriend Batya, who turns off the alarm clock so as to keep him longer in bed with her. Thus, he wakes up too late to join his troop in their early morning departure. Consequently, he leaves alone and, as said, too late, an action which results in his eventual death. Avi feels cheated by the girl but does not communicate to her the seriousness of his obligation. He feels contempt for her in her inability to understand, as well as for his mother, who tries to keep him behind by pretending sickness. The girlfriend, on her part, cannot understand why he cannot sacrifice a few hours for the sake of their love.

There is a deep gulf between the world of the man and that of the woman. The man faces his duty and destiny alone. He has to leave the comfortable world of the woman, to tear himself away from her seductive sexual attraction, in order to get out and fulfill himself.

The following descriptions of women (pp. 95, 98) are typical to Shaham's stories:

Ilana: She was short and her features were small, except for her bosom, which rose in front of her with a maternal tranquility and glorious ripeness.

Semadar: He saw that her lips were thin and well formed and her breast beautiful . . . He leaned towards her under the jacket above their heads, and her breast rubbed against him. The fresh smell that came from her body, mixed with the smell of the rain and the aroma of the atmosphere intoxicated him . . .

The repeated words and phrases describing women are: gentle, pleasant, motherly with soft breasts, warm eyes, moist lips, etc. . . . These images evoke a sense of comfort and associations with bedrooms. Military offices are decorated by the girls with curtains and flowers that are reminiscent of home, and the characterizations of the girls are made in indiscriminate sexy clichés.

The world of men, in contrast, is tough, full of action and of moral and ideological tests. The man controls his emotions and is non-talkative. The woman tries to lure him to stay "in her arms," she wants to spoil him with domestic and sexual comforts. The world of battle and conflict seems to be completely outside of her realm. The exception to the rule is Gipka, the tomboy, who tries to imitate the boys and accompany them on their skirmishes. But even she has to use manipulation in order to be allowed to join them.

Similar to Shaham in this aspect of a complete separation between the worlds of men and women is Moshe Shamir in his previously mentioned novel, He Walked in the Fields. Shamir, however, characterizes his women with greater individuality, endowing them with emotional articulation and expressiveness, while the men, by contrast, cannot express their emotions. Mikka, who has recently come to Palestine with the Youth Aliyah, also wants Uri, the hero of the story, to remain with her. They have just fallen in love, and have spent only a few weeks together in an affair that has come to a climax by their having sexual relations on their trip in the open fields. This scene, which is the high point of the book and of their intimacy, is also imbued with innocence and youthful trust. Uri, however, is immediately afterwards called to duty in the Hagganah, in spite of his father's and Mikka's pleas. He claims:

I must go .. . I will not agree that someone else will defend me and you and give his life instead of me. . . . One must go because it was so decided, and those who will return, if they do, will return to the wife, the children, the work and triviality.

The man must go out, away from "triviality," and selfishly free himself from the challenges of personal complications such as Mikka's pregnancy, about which he prefers not to find out. Uri feels himself masculine, free and strong, away on the mountains, leading his soldiers:

He hops over masses of rock fast, agile and smart; a knapsack tight on his hip. Just rely on Uri, he does need to look where he is going on those heights. His legs, his eyes, his nostrils move as if on their own . . . In only two months he was elevated to the rank of platoon commander... his own privates now at his command, adapting themselves to his steps.⁵

The love affair between Uri and Mikka is interrupted by Uri's enlistment in the Hagganah and ends with his untimely death in action two months later. He leaves behind him a pregnant Mikka, who will not abort the child so that she will keep his legacy alive. She is a biological enabler, the progenitor for the mythic father; carrying his seed she will bear the fruit of this young god.

Yigal Mossensohn's book, The Way of Man with Women,⁶ as the title of the book implies, openly deals with the battle of the sexes. It takes place some time in 1946, during the resistance against the British and the imprisonment of Jewish leaders, and focuses on the man-woman relationships of three married couples on one of the kibbuzim. Two of the men, Joseph Alon and Raphael Huber, whose story is narrated from their point of view, alternating between an omniscient narrator and their own interior monologues, have adulterous wives. Both of the wives are attracted to the same man—Ruben Bloch, the grand seducer of the kibbuz, who is also married, who is attractive and tanned, handsome and smiling, and "who seems to wipe the women off their feet without any effort" (p. 20). The two cheated husbands, whose stories are strictly analogical, are ugly, tormented by jealousy, self-doubt and misgivings. One of them ends up committing suicide, while the other is driven to a crime of passion, killing Ruben as if by accident, an act which, in itself, solves the problem of the seducer's presence on the kibbuz.

The third couple serves as antithesis to the triangles of passion. Nahum Genkin and his wife, Ruth, have an ideal marriage. He, the kibbuz intellectual, sits in his workroom writing "of things that deal with struggle, things that delve into depth" (p. 16), worrying about the many chores to be done the next day. His wife, in the meanwhile, after their happy love making, sleeps in the bedroom, "her yellow hair adorning her narrow face, her fist resting next to her on the pillow, in a peaceful dreamless sleep. She, he thinks to himself, lives her uncomplicated life, a creature being rejuvenated every new day" (p. 19).

The women in this book are presented in stereotyped sexual roles with no individual characterization. They are either sexual nourishers or sexual destroyers. The men, on the other hand, struggle and suffer, think and fight, both among themselves and against the British, each one of them engaged on two fronts—the political, ideological one and the sexual battleground. This dual aspect of the men's lives is epitomized in a scene in which the men of the kibbuz, locked up in Latrun by the British after the "Black Saturday," are anxiously watching Ruben, the seducer, being released before their eyes, and returning alone to the women, free from the competition of the husbands. According to Mossensohn—"Cherchez la femme"—behind every man there is a woman who determines his sexual fate, is the secret agent for his life and for his death.

The most sophisticated and accomplished artist among this group of writers is S. Yizhar. In his stories, which concentrate almost entirely on the War of Independence, we also meet primarily groups of men, with no women participating in the plots or in the action. Like the other writers, Yizhar emphasizes the theme of going out as indicated by the title of one of his stories. "Before the Departure."⁷ His men are tested in action, in confrontations with death and in their loyalty to each other and to the values of the group. In spite of the focus on the men at war, the testing and the call for action, Yizhar does not share the heroic point of view of his contemporaries, but, rather, ironically views the ultimate meaning of man's existence, in war as well in peace. He exercises the critical judgment of a moralist, mixed at times with pathetic enthusiasm when referring to the enterprise of the group as a whole.⁸

Yizhar's images of women, however, are also quite similar to those of the other writers. The women are neither individualized nor characterized, but are a composite. They exist only in fantasies of the main characters and are the objects of their yearnings. Each is an idealized female, whose features are suggested more as a silhouette:

That special way of pushing back the falling mass of hair, of turning her neck as she bobby-pinned the unruly lock, her curved hand and fingers moving in the silent dexterity of the casual and the calm.⁹

The main character usually notices with fascination the sight of "a quarter of her profile .. . the hair descending over her shoulders with mocking and divine coquetishness."¹⁰ She is also a fantasized mystery of a romantic lady with whom he would escape to "a distant place, with a magnificent citadel built on top of a hill . . . and bring her there like a princess."¹¹ In fact, she is an adolescent ideal of pure beauty, an unreachable cruel lady who frightens him, and whose presence he really avoids, preferring to be left alone on guard in the quarry, rather than spending the time there with her, so that he can adore her from afar; "she is so distant from being grasped, so fascinating in her absence, so regal in her glory."¹²

This woman appears in Yizhar's stories as a love ideal of a dream girl, to whom he devotes some of the most beautiful lyrical expressions, and who inspires longing and imagination. She is a love ideal and not a sex ideal; a personification of beauty and of poetry, and there is no mature love relationship in any of the stories. In addition, besides being a love ideal, the woman is also a symbol of the home and its stability. She provides the place to which the soldiers can return after the battle, so that, despite the threat of war, its destructiveness and meaninglessness, Yizhar's soldiers have the assurance that—

There is a Ruthie, or a Rena, or a Nira, or a Dali, who waits at home .. . to whom you can return from the fields and the cold .. . for this girl is sure to welcome you when you return, and be kind and loving, gracious and domestic.¹³

Similarly, the young soldiers at Ziklag,¹⁴ amidst frightful enemy attacks, hug the memories of their girl-friends back home. The girls' reality provides them with a sense of security about their own existence. Throughout the lengthy interior monologues of each of the soldiers, the girls are described in a dispassionate and controlled fashion, discussing their sensuality without really communicating it (p. 571-572), not even in the descriptions of Amihai's red-headed girl-friend. The young men's associations with the girls disclose feelings of trust and security, rather than sexual lust; the girls are symbols of home rather than embodiments of Eros. In addition to the idealized girl-friends, there also appear in Yizhar's stories incidental women figures, who are shown as loyal home makers and trusting wives preparing food, or welcoming their husbands back from work.¹⁵

The images of women common to this whole group of young writers, who also represent a unified cultural phenomenon in Israeli literature, are stereotyped sexual and domestic models, relegated to secondary roles, while the male figures are elevated to almost mythic proportions. This is a literature written by men about men, who make a separation between a superior world of men and an inferior world of women. This gulf is bridged by the power of the sex drive and by the men's need for domestic comfort and stability as provided by the women. In many ways this is a sexist literature which reveals the minds of men, who are very young, which reflects cultural attitudes of condescension towards women, while it reveals very little about the qualities or the inner world of the women themselves. Shaham and Mossensohn share a sharp sexist approach, consistent throughout; even in their later works, expressed by a sense of male superiority that either claims women's ineptness, or takes on a patronizing attitude of protectiveness. The women in their stories are portrayed as incapable of comprehending the complexities and difficulties of the men's world; they are motivated by the need for love expressed via sex or the wish to possess a man and keep him home. This simplistic and man-centered viewpoint results in total stereotyping of the women along sexual models, and the complete separation of the realms of men and women. The women are located in the home, the bedroom, the kitchen, while the men go out to war, to prison, to hardships. The war seems not to touch the women at all; they remain on its periphery, except when their lovers or husbands get killed.

Shamir and Yizhar reveal greater complexities in the treatment of the man-woman relationship, and in the characterizations of both men and women. Shamir's hero is aware of the challenges of involvement with the woman and opts to avoid them by escaping into the heroic and glamorized world of the man and of the war. Yizhar's heroes also reveal a complex psychological attitude to women, expressed by avoidance and youthful adoration of an idealized woman. The young heroes in both Shamir and Yizhar's worlds display the complexities and complexes of immature young men.

The central metaphor employed by all of these writers and which expresses their common cultural attitudes is, as mentioned before, the going out, accompanied by a physical separation of territories. The men must go out to a different realm than that of the women in order to meet challenges and prove themselves. They must be able to tear themselves away from that world which is characterized by comfort, pleasure, reassurance and sexuality. The separate worlds are portrayed in opposing images—hardness versus softness, toughness versus pleasure, action versus talk, challenges versus emotions, sacrifice and death versus security and stability. The world of this young macho male society measures itself in terms of heroism and confrontations, wishing to create through the fiction and the language a new mythic male model, reminiscent of Hemingway's world of men.

The picture that emerges from this literature stands in sharp contrast to the ideals of equality between the sexes which Socialism and Zionism included in its ideology. What, then, happened to the ideals? Leslie Hazelton, in her book, Israeli Women, The Reality Behind the Myth (1977),¹⁶ claims that the myth of equality of women exists only as a rationalization, not as a reality, because "myths compel respect, not necessarily by their truth, but because they are needed by those who believe in them" (p. 21). The myth presents an admirable Israeli woman, strong and independent, sharing and contributing equally with her male pioneer countryman in the army, on the land and in politics. Indeed, the myth exists, but it is mostly conveyed in parades and in photographs that show "a gun toting woman fighter, ready to sacrifice her life for her country, looking tough, dressed in fatigues, hair severely pulled back under caps, training with full concentration and deadly seriousness." In reality, women did learn how to use guns but it was generally the men who did the guard duty and the women who welcomed them and, if necessary, nursed them. In the first stages of the War of Independence women soldiers were essential for convoy duty since they could conceal guns and grenades under their clothes and evade detection by the British troops manning the road blocks. Some women served in the Palmah as well as in the underground organizations of Ezel and Lehi, but few were actually involved in combat, once the war was under way. Later, in spite of the women's protest against the discrimination, they were trained for defense warfare only, which meant that they served as wireless operators, nurses and quartermasters. There were some women who actually fought and died in battle, but it was solely on these exception that the rule of the myth was to be based.

Deeply revealing and most important documentary material on how the women themselves felt and acted is offered by Netiva Ben-Yehuda's biographical novel—Bein Hasfirot (Between Calendars),¹⁷ 1981, which deals with her experiences as a 19 year old commander in the Palmah during 1947-48. She says:

The girl in the Palmah had a very hard time. We were only three women commanders in the whole third battalion. We did not seek to become commanders, we were not suffragettes, the Palmah was. It inscribed on its flags the principle of equality of the sexes, but it did not uphold it. We continuously had to prove that we deserved that right, that we were able and capable, a thing no male had to do. Our success did not count, our previous achievements did not add up, each time we had to prove ourselves anew. In 1947 we were only 3,000 Palmah members ready for combat in a country of 60,000 Jews, and half of us were women. On November 29, 1947 came the order—to remove all the females from the front to the rear. This left only 1500 men ready to defend the country .. . my heart was ready to explode, we were waiting all these months, dying to go out to the real fighting . . .¹⁸

Netivah's book gives expression to her outrage and continuous struggle against male chauvinistic attitudes summed up in the familiar slogan, "no female will be in charge of us." Two central incidents vividly illustrate the nature of the dual struggle that these young women (and men) had to face. On the one hand, they were teenagers, who unpreparedly but enthusiastically were caught in a situation of "making history" with their own bodies. On the other hand, they were women and, as such, encountered additional difficulties from their male comrades. Two incidents which occurred in the Galilee before the formal outbreak of the war illustrate this situation. In the one, Netivah participated in an ambush of an Arab bus carrying important Arab agitators. She suddenly found herself alone facing the head Arab terrorist who had jumped out of the disabled bus. Unflinchingly, and for the first time in her life, she pulled the trigger and killed him. This story gave rise to an immediate legend about a demonic Jewish woman fighter. The other incident took place in Ramot Naftali while taking her thirteen newly arrived trainees to the fields to teach them the use of the rifle, when, suddenly and unexpectedly, they were surrounded by thousands of attacking Arab enemies. Under a hellish barrage of fire she taught those trainees to use the rifle and carry out field retreat, and succeeded, after a tense and breathtaking five hour period (and a remove of one kilometer), to bring them back to safety. One man got killed immediately and she had to leave him behind. Afterwards, she had to fight off the rumors and the slander by the very same commander who himself selected those training grounds where they were ambushed, and who blamed her for leaving the dead man behind on account of her being "a woman."¹⁹

Conclusion: The documentary material from the period about male attitudes towards women in Israeli society confirms, in many ways, the picture that comes forth from the literary evidence. The literary and the historical material reveal the same gap between the ideological declarations of equality between the sexes and the real psychological attitudes of male chauvinism and discrimination against women that are deeply imbedded in the existing cultural patterns. It is a phenomenon, common to revolutionary and battling societies, quickly to create new myths that project a new self image, which do not always strike root in the actual cultural-social patterns of life. Both myths, the one of women's equality, the other of a new male hero, ironically contradictory to one another, grew simultaneously from the same ideological roots of an emerging new society in Palestine. Both were projections of ideals; neither was true to reality.

Even later developments in Israeli society have not much altered these patterns. The many wars and the continuous state of siege have directed the concerns of society towards national priorities, rather than to the status of its individuals. Issues like equal rights for women in social, economic and religious matters, and the attempts at creating a feminist political platform in the Knesset have met with little success or popularity, even among the women in Israel. With the continuous need for a large, stable male military structure (the women's divisions being relegated to service roles only), the tendencies towards the preservation and cultivation of a strong male self image have continued to prevail. At the same time, the insecurities on the outside have continued to emphasize the need for security and stability in the home and the traditional roles of women. Few dare to rock the boat and challenge the foundations of society's structure, and much is rationalized by excuses of national unity and existing myths of equality. The needs, however, for an improved quality of life for both women and men, and the need to share equally the responsibilities for the nation are more and more felt, as well as the yearnings for a state of peace, in which these just and fair goals might be implemented.

¹ Moshe Shamir, Hu Halakh Bassadot (Sifriyat Poalim, 1947), pp. 269-270. Translations my own (RBB).

² Note the recurring anaphora "he was." It is repeated twenty times in a passage extending over one and a half pages and devoted to the descriptions of the qualities of Uri, the hero of the novel.

³ Gershon Shaked, Gal Hadash Bassiporet Haivrit (Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1971), p. 41.

⁴ Nathan Shaham, Tamid Anakhnu (Sifriyat Poalim, 1952). Translations from Shaham my own.

⁵Hu Halakh Bassadot, p. 240.

⁶ Yigal Mossensohn, Derekh Gever (Tel-Aviv: Tversky, 1953). Translations from Mossensohn my own.

⁷ S. Yizhar, "B'terem Yeziah," (1949) in Arba'ah Sippurim (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbuz Hameuhad, 1967), sixth printing, p. 46. Translations my own.

⁸ See the concluding parts of S. Yizhar, Midnight Convoy, trans. Reuven Ben-Yosef, (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1969) and "B'terem Yeziah."

⁹Midnight Convoy, p. 199.

¹⁰"B'terem Yeziah," p. 29.

¹¹ Ibid, p. 20.

¹² S. Yizhar, "Laila B'li Yeriyot," 1939, in Hahorshah Bagivah, (Sifriyat Poalim, 1947), p. 329. Translations my own.

¹³"B'terem Yeziah," p. 29.

¹⁴ S. Yizhar, Yemei Ziklag, 2 vols. (Tel-Aviv: Am-Oved, 1958).

¹⁵ S. Yizhar, B'fa'atei Negev (Hakibbuz Hameuhad, first edition 1945, revised edition 1978); and "Massa' El Gedot Ha'e rev," 1941, in Hahorshah Bagivah.

¹⁶ Leslie Hazelton, Israeli Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977).

¹⁷ Netivah Ben-Yehuda, Bein Hasfirot (Jerusalem: Keter, 1981).

¹⁸Ibid., paraphrased and translated by me from pages: 86, 107, 121, 160, 278, 280.

¹⁹ This exciting and realistic account, written in reportage style, can be found on pp. 218-235.