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Mothers, Fathers, and the Hebrew Literary Canon

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00295132-7547020

1945-8509

Shai Ginsburg,

Middle East Politics and Society

As its title implies, Tamar Merin's 2016 Spoiling the Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction purports to interweave two stories. The one pointed out by the clause after the colon is easier to phrase: the volume seeks to relate the rise of Hebrew women's fiction. With only a handful of writers to boast for much of the twentieth century, marginalized and belittled by literary critics and scholars, Israeli Hebrew women's fiction came into its own toward the end of the 1980s, gaining quick recognition as among the most prominent literary phenomena of contemporary Hebrew literature. Merin seeks not so much to trace the contours of the emergence of Hebrew women's fiction at that time as to reclaim the import of its forerunners in the 1950s through the 1970s, of those writers who inspired and set the stage for its belated arrival. Identifying three such writers—Yehudit Hendel, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and Rachel Eytan—Merin thus sets out to reassert (and, to a certain extent, reevaluate, in Eytan's case) their significance for the canon of Israeli Hebrew women's fiction writers and, by extension, Hebrew fiction in general.In her book, Merin seeks to go beyond available portrayals of Hebrew women's fiction, commonly contained within assertions of the marginal role it played in the Hebrew canon (at least until the 1980s): beyond the review of this literature's critical and scholarly reception (and misperception) as well as the delineation of the transformation of values that ultimately led to its rise. At the heart of Spoiling the Stories lies, rather, a probe into the literary strategies employed by women writers as they approached the canon of Hebrew fiction, dominated as it was by male writers—strategies that allowed them both to lay their claim to the canon and to carve a space for their own subject position and perspective. As the title clause before the colon suggests, the essence of these strategies lies in “spoiling” the stories told by male writers, inflecting and refracting them, uncovering new possibilities and sensibilities.Merin seeks to define such strategies in contradistinction to the hierarchical, linear, and Oedipal coordinates that inform discussions of modern Hebrew fiction and that further accentuate the dominance of male writers in its canon. To do so, she relies on feminist scholarship—mainly on the works of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler—to develop the notion of “intersexual dialogue” as “an indeterminate space between sexes and texts,” challenging “the distinction between female and male texts, between an original and a rewrite, between the literary children and their authoritative parental figures” (11). The gist of Merin's book, however, is not theoretical but, rather, historical or, more precisely, historiographical: she employs the intersexual prism to shed light on both the forces that shaped the history of the Hebrew literary canon and the canon as a historical force. Such an alternative approach is particularly needed, Merin notes, given the lack of continuity that characterizes the history of Hebrew women's writing. More than two decades passed between Dvora Baron's 1927 collection of short stories (commonly seen as the first instance of Hebrew women's fiction but not discussed in this volume) and Yehudit Hendel's first major publication (1950), and it was more than a decade later that Eytan and Kahana-Carmon published their first books (1962 and 1966, respectively). I will return to this history below.Unfortunately, Merin's introduction overstates her own position and contribution vis-à-vis available feminist scholarship of the Hebrew literary canon. Indeed, one cannot support the claim that this book “presents the yet untold story of the rise of Israeli women's prose fiction” (6)—an unhappy assertion, especially since the author herself readily acknowledges earlier attempts to relate that story by scholars such as Lily Rattok, Yael Feldman, Tova Cohen, and Wendy Zieler. Nor is the history the book puts forward—pushing the emergence of Israeli Hebrew women's fiction back from the late 1980s to the 1950s and 1960s—completely novel, given that two of the three protagonists of the book, Hendel and Kahana-Carmon, have received much critical attention. That being said, Merin's critique of earlier studies is persuasive, and the approach she puts forward seems to me to be worthy.As Merin observes, feminist scholars, critical as they were of the treatment of women's fiction, have nevertheless embraced the predominant historiographical and critical paradigms. Spoiling the Stories, on the other hand, seeks to undo such hegemonic models (and models of hegemony) to show how women actively and productively engaged with the canon, asserting their affiliation while simultaneously challenging its gender boundaries. In other words, Merin shows, and convincingly so, how women writers developed what we might call “poetics of the canon,” turning key male figures of the Hebrew canon into “motherly fathers” whose gender-fluid fiction tests and destabilizes the Oedipal dynamics of the canon. She thus offers a much more engaged and nuanced discussion of the relationship of women writers with the Hebrew literary canon, and in this her book is a real contribution not only to the scholarship of Hebrew women's fiction but to our understanding of the Hebrew canon and its making as a whole.The three chapters of Spoiling the Stories put forward insightful and persuasive close readings not only of Merin's three women protagonists but also of their intertexts, key works of the Hebrew canon written by men. Perceiving the latter through the way they were read and reworked by her protagonists, Merin succeeds in reanimating them and reinvesting them with significance, particularly for a feminist reading. In the process, she reanimates the Hebrew canon as a whole. Herein, I think, lies the greatest merit of Merin's book.Chapter 1 explores the early fiction of Yehudit Hendel, commonly noted as the only woman writer of her literary generation, the so-called 1948 generation. Whereas Hendel's later fiction from the mid-1980s on is recognized as a central pillar of Israeli Hebrew women's fiction, critics and scholars struggle with her earlier work. By and large, critics have contended that in her early works, Hendel internalized the dominant masculine literary norm of the fiction of the time. A handful of critics, however, have read in Hendel's early fiction a distinct gendered poetics that sets her apart from her male counterparts. In doing so, however, they have left Hendel's work (as they have the fiction of the other women writers discussed in this book) in a void, as distinctly separated from the Hebrew canon and its heritage.Merin likewise underscores the unique poetics of Hendel's early fiction but, unlike other critics, seeks to chart its relationship with the canon by reading its intersexual dialogue with the fiction of Sh. Y. Agnon, the great master of the Hebrew canon. Merin suggests that whereas male members of the literary generation rejected Agnon as a literary father, Hendel did not merely engage with his fiction but also anchored her own fiction in it. To illustrate the point, Merin probes Hendel's novella “Eliezer's Widow” and the novel Street of Steps in relation to Agnon's short fiction. Let me linger briefly on Merin's treatment of the first text, because it epitomizes most persuasively and clearly her approach in the book. Reading Hendel's “Eliezer's Widow” and Agnon's short story “The Doctor's Divorce” side by side, Merin points out that both texts feature first-person confessional narratives depicting a love triangle (of two men and one woman) structured by the male protagonist's voyeuristic gaze and his spouse as its object of desire as he obsesses about her previous lover or partner. Rather than affirm the heteronormativity of gaze and desire, however, the two texts test these, questioning both the gendered character of the gaze and its object as well as its unidirectionality. From the prism of Hendel's novella, Merin is able to read Agnon's story, commonly interpreted as a narrative of possessive male jealousy, as a text dealing with the fluid boundaries of gender identity and problematizing the dynamics of desire. “The traditional literary heterosexual triangle” Merin concludes, “in which two men compete for the affections of one woman becomes one in which desire and identification, masculinity and femininity, symbiosis and separateness are all expressed interchangeably” (50). Ultimately, juxtaposing Agnon's and Hendel's fiction allows Merin to rethink the canon not only in its exclusive dynamics (directed in the case at hand against women writers) but also as a space that could be made, even if retroactively, inclusive.Chapter 2 explores the fiction of Kahana-Carmon, arguably the corpus of writing most identified with Israeli Hebrew women's fiction prior to the 1980s. Merin's point of departure in this chapter is Kahana-Carmon's vehement rejection of the critical praise her first collection of short stories, published in 1966, has garnered. In their focus on the love plots of her stories, Kahana-Carmon argued, critics have missed their main point. From the perspective of the canon, then, Kahana-Carmon offers a unique problem: not so much of marginalization or exclusion as of the terms of acceptance and co-option into the canon. Merin consequently suggests readers should move away from the love plots of Kahana-Carmon's fiction to regard it as female Künstlerroman, exploring the conditions of women's writing through intersexual dialogue (and identification) with the literary fathers of the Hebrew canon. Merin proceeds to read Kahana-Carmon's best-known short story, “Ne'ima Sasson Writes Poems,” and the novella “Heart of Summer, Heart of Light” alongside Agnon's and M. Y. Berdichevsky's short stories, pointing out the complex dynamics by which Kahana-Carmon's female characters situate themselves and their writing in relation to male characters and in identification with them. Endeavoring to retrieve the Hebrew literary past, Kahana-Carmon does not merely stretch the boundaries of the literary canon but also points the way to other writers who burst on the literary scene in the 1960s.Chapter 3, which explores the two novels of Eytan, The Fifth Heaven and Pleasures of Man (published 1962 and 1974, respectively), provides what is arguably Merin's most significant intervention in the literary canon. Though Eytan's first novel received critical acclaim, her second novel was harshly censured by Hebrew critics, and her fiction is altogether neglected by scholars of Hebrew literature. Eytan's refusal to enlist the dynamics of Eros to spin a national allegory, as the literary taste of the time dictated, opting on the contrary to employ the elements of national allegory to relate a tale of erotic subjugation, alienated her from the literary establishment. Unlike Hendel and Kahana-Carmon, then, Eytan's predicament presents us with the scholarly stereotypical image of the marginality of Hebrew women's fiction that Merin disputes in other sections of Spoiling the Stories.As in her discussion of Kahana-Carmon's early fiction, Merin suggests that the plots of growing sexual awareness (of The Fifth Heaven) and escapades (of Pleasures of Man) are secondary to the plot of women's writing and literary initiation. She consequently reads Eytan's two novels also as Künstlerroman. As Merin observes, the female protagonists of both novels are victims of the violence unleashed by the unravelling of the patriarchal-Oedipal order. Simultaneously, however, they depend on the law of the father for their literary initiation. Juxtaposing Eytan's fiction with U. N. Gnessin's 1905 novella “Sideways” and David Vogel's 1930 novel Married Life, she sets out to trace the predicament of writing in Eytan's novels as it is inflected by the question of gender. Merin shows that, following in Gnessin's and Vogel's footsteps, “Eytan promotes the erotic plot not only at the expense of the national plot, but also at the expense of the literary one” (127). She radicalizes and disrupts Gnessin's and Vogel's exploration of the conflict between writing and Eros, Merin ultimately contends, seeking not so much to liberate herself from the male canon as to expose its repressive mechanisms. In my mind, Merin's discussion of Eytan's Pleasures of Man and her insistence that we read it in relation to and within the Hebrew literary canon is the greatest contribution of Merin's book. It does indeed point to a crucial link in the making of Hebrew fiction from the late 1970s on that heretofore has gone completely unappreciated, not to say unnoticed.As she makes explicit in the epilogue to the book, Merin responds to the image of women's fiction as popular, escapist, and, ultimately, ahistorical. In other words, she seeks to stake the claim of Hebrew women's fiction to history, not just its own history but its role as an essential force in the history of Hebrew literature and, more than that, in the canon of Hebrew literature. History, she implies, does not end with Eytan's Pleasures of Man, and women writers to the present continue to deploy similar poetic strategies to engage with the canon and to carve a space for their fiction. Likewise, though that history is not limited to women, one cannot account for the canon of Israeli Hebrew fiction, particularly from the late 1970s on, without acknowledging the crucial role played by women's fiction in its making. On that point, I concur with Merin.Where I found Spoiling the Stories to be less persuasive is precisely in the history it relates. The nuanced and sophisticated readings the book puts forward of short stories, novellas, and novels, whether written by women or by men, are framed within a schematic narrative that reduplicates the blind spots, omissions, and distortions that characterize the received histories of the Hebrew canon Spoiling the Stories seeks to challenge. As noted, Spoiling the Stories suggests that the Hebrew canon prior to the 1980s was made of Dvora Baron (erroneously crowned as the first woman to write Hebrew fiction) and the three women protagonists of the book. The curtness with which it dismisses the fiction written by Leah Goldberg and Elisheva Bikhovsky in the 1930s and 1940s because they failed to impress critics and scholars at the time, however, raises the question of the criterion for inclusion and exclusion Merin applies in determining the canon. If critical success is the measure for inclusion, then Merin's effort on behalf of Eytan's second novel is misguided. Still more, the book leaves inexplicable Merin's silence over other women writers who enjoyed critical (as well as commercial) success over the period of time covered by Spoiling the Stories. Indeed, notwithstanding the small number of women writers of fiction until the 1980s, the literary scene was not as desolate as Spoiling the Stories makes it appear. Here I would mention just two examples: first, Yonat Sened, who in 1951 published Land without Shade, the first of a series of novels she coauthored with her spouse, Alexander Sened; and second, Naomi Frankel, who in 1956 published the first volume of her historical trilogy Saul and Yohana. Both Sened and Frankel enjoyed much critical acclaim. I find the fiction of these two authors particularly suggestive in the context of an approach such as Merin's, which underscores both intersexual dialogue and the struggle with history. I also find it telling that Spoiling the Stories, like other studies of Hebrew women's fiction, fails to note Sened's and Frankel's fiction and puts forward an impoverished portrait of the Hebrew literary scene from the perspective of women's writing. The point is not that one has to account for every single case of women's fiction, nor that Sened and Frankel are as central to the canon of Hebrew fiction as the writers Merin chooses to highlight. In fact, I am inclined to agree with Merin's assessment in selecting the writers to feature in her book. The point is, rather, that to retell literary history as Spoiling the Stories purports to do calls for a more careful account of the literary record. The history of Hebrew women's fiction is not as discontinuous as Spoiling the Stories contends.A similar tendency is noticeable in the schematic portrayal of men's fiction of the time against which Spoiling the Stories sets its detailed readings: that of the 1948 generation that serves as a background for Yehudit Hendel's fiction and that of the state generation that serves as a background for Kahana-Carmon's and Eytan's fiction. Whereas Merin acknowledges recent scholarship that has uncovered tension and fissures in the fiction of the 1948 generation (but does not mention the scholarship that has argued similarly for the fiction of the state generation), Spoiling the Stories still insists on portraying men's fiction of both generations as homogenous and unvaried. Yet one would be hard-pressed to yoke together the literary sensibilities, thematics, and poetics of Shamir and Yizhar, the prominent representatives of the 1948 generation; or, in the case of the state generation, Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, on one hand, and Yehoshua Kenaz and Yeshayhu Koren on the other. Nor can one generalize about their relationship with the Hebrew canon as Spoiling the Stories does. The tendency to rely on a schematic portrait of Hebrew literature even after that portrait has been debunked is not unique to Spoiling the Stories; it is shared by most scholars in the field. It seems that we still need something to push against when we tell and retell the history of Hebrew literature.Yet perhaps it is time to try to incorporate the insights produced by scholars over the past three decades that have complicated greatly our understanding of the Hebrew canon. From such a perspective, Merin's Spoiling the Stories, in her insightful reading of Hebrew women's fiction and in her insistence that we consider it in relation to that canon rather than as detached from it, is an important step in that direction. As such, it is well worth reading.