Israeli Literature Comes of Age
GOODHEART, EUGENE
Israeli Literature Comes of Age ISRAELI STORIES Edited by Joel Blocker Schocken. 256 pp. $3.95. Reviewed By EUGENE GOODHEART Assistant Professor of English, University of...
...An artist comes along and does the thing that cannot or should not be done and by his success makes all the theories look foolish...
...What are we to say of S. Y. Agnon, for instance, the patriarch of Hebrew literature...
...In "The Parched Earth," for example, Kaniuk (the most interesting of this group) gives us a remarkably realized Tel Aviv, seen with the intensity of fantasy: the houses "shrieking of whiteness like jackals," the hot winds of a spring short and fleeting, the empty lots where the pioneers roasted potatoes turning into the reality of balconies...
...The conflict between grandfather and granddaughter (the mother of the new child) issues in a Pyrrhic victory for the granddaughter...
...With the younger writers, Yoram Kaniuk, Yehuda Amihai and S. Yizhar, we are in the presence of real fiction...
...For fiction, the thing that is, is greater...
...There is no doubt about the answer to the question...
...Kaniuk's wail at the desert city being corrupted into progress supports a fierce aberrant vision of the city, reminiscent of a Mayakovsky poem...
...The experimental mood of the young Israeli writers of which Robert Alter speaks in his introduction springs from their impulse to discover and present the actual life of Israel...
...Should the child be named Mendele or Ehud...
...Israel for the narrator is no choice, no object to be made, no issue to be understood...
...We were born here, without ideals...
...Forevermore," his beautiful and magnificent tale which concludes the collection, hardly fits into the discussion: The story is a reminder of the timeless and universal dimension which the greatest art inhabits —beyond explanation or expectation...
...The mold is by no means completely broken, however...
...The eyes that see the city with such fierce clarity will have no truck with idealisms brought from Europe and the Exile...
...mother] came here on the wings of ideals...
...Israeli writers seem to be on the verge of producing a national literature that is a world literature...
...Bitterness, mockery, gaiety, pain—the emotions of the young narrator distort the scene into a peculiar vividness: "a black sky hanging in its crown...
...Of course, the charting of literary trends is at best a precarious business, for it is based on the partially false idea that literature is the history of technique...
...The question is, which is greater: the thing that is, or the thing that can become...
...What is lacking in both Hazaz' and Megged's stories is the vision of life actually lived that genuine fiction gives us...
...the impulses of ideology are still present in several stories...
...Israel is the inescapable fact of one's birth: to be lived, seen, felt...
...The polemic itself is interesting and Hazaz has in the process created a character (a muscular, passionate quarryman who splits rocks and speaks incoherently when at all—a new type in Jewish life), but the author's mode is essentially argumentative and not fictional...
...During the day the blue will turn white, "roofs will be swept into flight by the multitude of sheets that hang flickering in the sun by day and the moon by night...
...Megged's simple symbolic tale, sufficiently ambiguous not to incur the charge of ideology, nonetheless bears the marks of an embattled fiction, engaged in the work of helping make the new community...
...Its very existence, initially, was less a literary than an ideological fact: A product of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment movement of the 19th century), Hebrew literature fought a battle against the insularity of East European Jewish life...
...The stories move too quickly, too impatiently to their point...
...It is clear from a reading of the stories in this anthology that the parochial mold is breaking...
...For what is, is a mystery, as yet unknown, and the thing that can become is only that poor fixed thing in the mind—an ideal...
...Haim Hazaz' "The Sermon," for instance, despite its clever pretenses at drama, is essentially a polemic against Jewish history in the Exile and an affirmation of its transcendenee in the establishment of the State of Israel...
...contributor, "Saturday Review,' "Commentary," "Midstream" Until the establishment of the State of Israel, modern Hebrew literature was necessarily cast in a parochial mold...
...The moon had no face, no eyes, no teeth, no mouth...
...Aharon Megged's "The Name" is a sentimental fiction about the great national conflict between the exilic past and the Israeli present...
...And though it attacked the provinciality of Jewish life in behalf of a cosmopolitan ideal, the polemical situation in which it found itself inevitably gave it a didactic and pedagogic character which made it interesting only within the Jewish community...
...Extremely limited in its audience both inside and outside of Palestine, it was a minority literature even among the Jews...
...Mother has a world of her own...
...in the middle of the sky there was a yellow hole...
...In the fantastic writing of Kaniuk, Amihai and Yizhar we have the prospect of a brilliant new Israeli fiction...
...two clouds tickled it...
...The child is named Ehud, but we are made to feel the heavy legacy of estrangement and conflict that the boy has inherited...
...In an atmosphere charged with ideal and ideology, the via media to a perception of reality becomes, paradoxically, fantasy and dream and a destruction of the conventional narrative technique...
...Old Rabinowitz, along with young Rabinowitz, paints his balcony the color of the murder of beautiful wastelands...
...My world is the world of the parched earth to which I am tied with an umbilical cord...
...Reviewed By EUGENE GOODHEART Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago...
Vol. 46 • March 1963 • No. 6
