Writing as a Subversive Activity

...He looked me over and said, "Impossible...

...Eliezer Ben Yehuda's Hebrew language revival was considered treason—a desecration of the holy name—by the residents of Jerusalem's Mea Shearim...

...Like Sheherezade, the artist may grant himself a sort of temporary autonomy...

...As a child, I used to run the Hebrew translation projector...

...They did not ask me to change my name at my father's parents' home, but they did see me as a Trojan horse...

...Later, he would join the Iigun...

...He took his yarmulka off his head, cut his beard and earlocks, and announced that there is no God...

...My other grandfather hoped for a Jewish Soviet Socialist Republic, with no Siberia or NKVD...

...And so I wrote it down, and betrayed them all...

...It helped me to see more clearly, to see things that had not been apparent to me before I arrived in America...

...Alas, we are writers, despite the muscles and the guns, we wear glasses and suffer writers' block and spend our lives scratching a truth or two...

...the doctor said...

...I was a little luckier than most children of my generation...

...There was one Israeli book in translation: Moshe Day an's memoirs...

...For the most part, Israeli literature has been written from the point of view of the rebellious youth...

...During the course of the decade that started in 1943, both my grandfathers changed fundamentally...

...Naturally, he joined the Haganah...

...In our case, the fading memory is of Labor Israel...

...Somewhat later, poor Moses Lilienblum witnessed his own books being burned as heretical in his home shtetl...

...the first, The Fifth Heaven, recipient of Israel's Brenner Prize for Literature, will be published in English (The Jewish Publication Society) in the fall of 1984...

...It was a messy, nasty, vindictive affair, and the child was the battlefield...

...Each embellishes its own version, portrays itself as the drama's martyr...

...And the telling of the tale is, in its way, a kind of vindication as well...

...They used to claim that I was spying on them, passing secrets to the enemy...

...They used to call me by his name, as an insult...

...may though his own spells avert the Evil Decree...

...Aha...

...Let the truth be told...

...And my grandmother, who wanted mostly a cheap maid, just like her family had had back in Poland...

...The social visionaries who founded the State, those whom the new order is relegating to the footnotes and the margins...

...he came to help found a religious Zionist state...

...It happens that the Israeli writer belongs to a long line of traitors...

...Suddenly the writer feels an enormous obligation to pass all this on, so that the next generation, which knew not Joseph, will appreciate what he appreciates...

...My paternal grandfather had come to Israel to help found a socialist, humanist Jewish state...

...And My friends and relatives didn't know, back then, that they had a spy in their midst...

...Why should I, an Israeli novelist, pay attention to the opinions of one American professor...

...In Hebrew...

...He had made aliyah on a Soviet passport, five years after the Bolshevik revolution...

...And so, from the age of five, in learning to cross over the walls between father and mother, between east and west, north and south, heaven and hell, I learned that opposing camps can write the same history in very different ways...

...Their images hover around him, constant companions...

...He went to his bookcase and threw out all his books of Marx, Lenin, Borochov, even Berl Katznelson...

...And in the end, the traitor must even betray his own treason...

...Perhaps, in censoring whole chapters of history, they were trying to save the younger generation from pain—or themselves from embarrassment...

...There were more serious elements to the conflict as well...

...And today, as I write, I can feel that professor peering over my shoulder, whispering in my ear: "Traitor...

...Then he opened the first movie theater in B'nai Brak...

...Writing is, among other things, a betrayal of everything around us: family, friends, lovers, party, kibbutz, government, army, nation, homeland...

...At my mother's parents' home, I represented my father's side...

...As a writer, I see myself as a laboratory processing raw materials through my own personal blend of acids and bases...

...They are, he claims, creating a new, foreign literature...

...I was fortunate—as a writer—in that my parents divorced when I was five years old...

...Impossible...

...Don't let it disappear...

...When I stayed in their home, they wanted me to change my last name to theirs...

...The man shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment—he had never heard of it...

...No wonder your temperature is so high...

...we have become witnesses for the prosecution...

...in fact his temperature went down the very next day...

...To do so angers them and confuses them...

...One of the miracles expected of the State of Israel was that it would eliminate the ambiguities from Jewish thought and from Jewish life...

...The religious grandfather changed when he heard about the Holocaust, about most of the members of his family, who had gone to Auschwitz and Treblinka with the six million...

...rail the critics...

...Then he bought himself an air-conditioner, which he had always condemned as a bourgeois indulgence...

...I lived with my mother's family for several years, receiving a traditional education in a Mizrachi school—segregation of the sexes, praying "who hath made me according to His will" every morning, developing the proper self-image as a source of Satanic temptation, and also—for this I am grateful to this day—acquiring a grounding in Bible, Mishnah and Aggadah...

...And, right down the block from us, the German Jews sat at their caf?s on Ben Yehuda Street, still speaking German and dreaming of the slate Herzl had imagined, complete with Beethoven (Strauss, at least) and Heine...

...the other deserves cholera...

...Item: A friend of mine, one of the Israeli authors best-known in the United States, tells me that whenever he is presented to an American audience, the moderator always makes a Rachel Eytan is Professor of Israeli and Yiddish Literature at Hofstra University...

...Eliminate the ambiguities of our history...

...One of my grandfathers envisioned a shtetl without goyim or pogroms, led by a Jewish General Pilsudski...

...1 tried to explain it again...

...Item: In the windows of New York bookstores, you will normally not find a single Israeli book...

...I wandered through the aisles, and felt like an orphan...

...One side's tragedy can be the other's comedy...

...Iron out the ironies of the Jewish psyche...

...A just, true revolution, it should only be without bloodshed...

...The first time I visited Europe was in the late 1950s, before Israel really hit the big time...

...My friends and relatives didn't know, back then, that they had a spy in their midst...

...Now their memory is in our hands, and we have no one to complain to any Jonger, for it is now to us that the younger ones will come with their complaints, crying, "What kind of world have you— you!—handed us...

...he has won total autonomy...

...In politics," he said, "anything that is not pro-Israel's government is anti-Israel...

...I learned a little more of the truth than most because I was an outsider in two camps...

...I resembled him—to them, at least—in both appearance and behavior...

...When my father was 1?, in Jerusalem, he was hospitalized with a high fever...

...When I lived with my father, I attended a progressive Histadrut school, complete with red flags and the "International...

...Perhaps the artist's only victory is the victory of viewpoint—but even so, for the time, for the place, it is his viewpoint that is engraved...

...Yet suddenly, as the author grows older, he finds that everything he has been writing about is gradually disappearing from the land of the living, crumbling into dust...

...But there are readers who want to read only of miracles...

...Write it all down...

...Together, we are making a literature, better or worse, not a presentation...

...point of emphasizing that "although he has written thus-and-such, he did participate in three wars as a tank driver"—as if to prove to the crowd that though he's a writer, he's kosher...

...The "lucky" writer is the one who manages to grow up between two warring camps, for he then receives an intensive life-seminar in love and hate, prejudice, human folly, self-righteousness and zeal...

...Item: Not long ago I had occasion to speak—along with two other Israeli writers—with a certain man, an open-minded, genial fellow, active in the Jewish lobby in Washington...

...He speaks to them, he asks them questions...

...In the Tel Aviv of my childhood, it was generally supposed that a new city had arisen on the dunes, without history or heritage, therefore without constraint...

...Why...

...Until I came here, the only public I had known was the Israeli reading public, which is loyal and attentive to its authors, no matter how controversial they are, no matter that their books may stray far from the style of the prime minister's campaign speeches...

...Sometimes they answer, sometimes they try to dodge the questions, the way they did so often when alive...

...A man in Rome asked me where I was from, "from Israel," I told him...

...AH their terrible struggles, their bravery and viciousness, their wisdom, their foolishness, it is all on his head...

...The two live together, in a Hieronymus Bosch world of angels and devils...

...One of the common preconditions to life as a writer is what we may call an "abnormal childhood...

...He made aliyah five years after the Balfour Declaration...

...All the pain, all the grief, all the funny, all the terrible...

...I am a Jew who was born in Tel Aviv, who was raised on lullabies sung in Hebrew, and who has to wait for the green light before crossing the street, because in Tel Aviv, there are no miracles...

...Her articles and short stories appear frequently in Israeli news and literary publications...

...For what we write about the earthly Jerusalem, they read as a betrayal of the heavenly Jerusalem...

...He teaches his students that Israeli authors since Yizhar Smilansky have discontinued the long tradition of Jewish literature...

...Yerushalayim...

...Is-ra-?le...

...If we display sensitivity to injustice—not just others' but our own (and isn't that the stuff of the writer's game, wherever it's played...

...his Hebrew-speaking children were stoned by Yiddish-speaking children...

...Each side is nobler and lovelier than the other, more just, more learned, more pure, its existence is more vital to the world...

...The truth of one camp is a lie to the other...

...The fever did not respond to treatment and the doctor was concerned—until he saw the book my father was reading...

...You are reading Bereavement and Failure, the novel by that rebel Yosef Haim Brenner...

...Delete the dialectic from Jewish philosophy...

...The very first word written by a Hebrew author of the Enlightenment was treasonous—for it betrayed the time-honored tradition of reserving the Hebrew language exclusively for matters sacred—a tradition, incidentally, that was not shared by our Sephardic brothers and sisters...

...Traitors...

...And then there were the Yemenites, barefoot and beautiful, dreaming of the Messiah now that it was clear that Palestine was not yet utopia...

...And I watched all this and whispered to myself: Never forget...

...You people may be right from a literary and ethical point of view," he told us, "but not from a political point of view...

...say our readers...

...And he asked us, "Why can't you write another Exodus...

...A laboratory: When I was a girl, I was, like any child, exposed to my share of pain and confusion...

...It is a fighting literature, that asks hard questions, that rebels against past and present...

...He told us that American Jewish readers do not like to read Israeli literature...

...Along the way, I learned that there were many things they never told us...

...In Tel Aviv, he founded a transportation cooperative affiliated with the General Federation of Labor...

...Item: The temple where my son studies held a Jewish book exhibition last year...

...My reaction to human cruelty and stupidity, and sometimes even to opposition that was couched in humanity and wisdom, was to promise myself, "Some day I will write about this...

...But the truth was that the people who wandered through that city carried with them their own private visions of utopia...

...I think, too, they wanted our loyalty and thought they had a better chance of getting it if we remained ignorant...

...She is the author of several novels...

...Those whom Amos Oz calls the "Monsters of Redemption...

...What disturbed that doctor in Jerusalem half a century ago—and what upsets many American Jews today— is the ambiguity in our literature...

...My maternal grandfather was a Mizrachi man, a religious Zionist, one of the founders of the religious town of B'nai Brak...

...Because Jerusalem is in Heaven...

...I used autobiographical material from this period in my novel, The Fifth Heaven...

...Jerusalem...

...And both accused me of treason...

...I sit at my desk, and am told my words are a betrayal...

...That, I suppose, was the beginning of my treason...

...So the professor's thesis was a kind of eye-opener for me...

...There was a wide selection of books and magazines in English and Yiddish—but not a single book in Hebrew, not a single Israeli journal...

...I heard this thesis from an important lecturer in Hebrew literature—an American living here in the United States...

...Traitor...

...Perhaps they thought they could silence the evil spirits by passing over them in silence...

...And just this last year, his grave in Israel was desecrated by those who, to this day, have not forgiven him his treason...

...Writing can also be distracting, a way of dispelling evil...

...Moses Mendelssohn's Hebrew periodical, Ha'measeph, was the first link in the chain...

...But the writer burns with curiosity to uncover all the sordid details, expose all the mistakes...

...My socialist grandfather changed when he heard, some time before the Twentieth Party Congess, about Stalin's crimes...

...He snatched the book from my father's hand...

...And suddenly he is responsible for preserving their memory...

...No one sees it that way any more, but very many people still want it that way, resent the fact that Israeli literature, although it speaks of Yerushalayim shel ma'alah, the heavenly Jerusalem, also deals with Yerushalayim shel matah, the Jerusalem right here on earth...

...My father's family, jovial folk of Lithuanian origin, used to tell marvelous Sholom Akichem-style jokes about my mother's family, which was of Polish Chassidic origin...

...He begins to feel that all the people he has been writing about are now betraying him— by dying...

...that's how I learned Hollywood English...