What do we expect from a modern literature written in the language of the Old Testament? To traditional Jewish culture, the text is all-important. Israeli writers are as attentive to the text as their forebears ever were, but in a manner that proclaims modernism: they manipulate its sacred voice in such a way that it speaks for their secular selves.
Amos Oz commented recently that Israeli readers do not enjoy their literature. They often complain, he added, that their writers are dangerous to the national morale and damaging to Israel's reputation in the outside world.
The blurring of the boundaries between art and life in Israel, the fact that Oz is both a politician and a novelist and was once a soldier, underlines the Israeli literary ethos: a mixture of fantasy and hard experience, realpolitik and messianism. Some time ago, speaking in Oxford, the equally celebrated novelist AB Yehoshua also defined the Israeli writer as one who is always expected to expound on current events, always expected to know. Yehoshua claimed that he and his fellow artists wished to be "left alone," to pursue their vocations without being called on to serve as a public voice. But the ancient prophetic tradition dies hard.
Hebrew literature in pre-Israel Palestine and during Israel's infancy shared many of the assumptions of Soviet literature. It was an element in the making of the nation. It gained a sense of social commitment which it has never lost, despite the give-and-take of literary themes and styles across the generations.
After the Israeli war of independence in 1948, there was a gradual loss of concern for Jewish culture, as literature began to establish an Israeli culture which reflected present-day circumstances. It was S Yizhar (pseudonym of Yizhar Smilansky, born in1916) who signified this mutation in his enormous The Days of Ziklag (1958). Similar evocations of change have been offered by writers of a later generation, such as Oz and Yehoshua, Yaakov Shabtai and David Grossman.
There is still one signal difference between Israeli literature and most other western literatures: the writers' unique use of language. However hard they try, Israeli authors cannot deny their history. They may not refer directly to the ancient Judaic discourse, but it survives in their language. The negotiation with Hebrew is one of Israeli literature's greatest achievements. Writers have become adept at taking passages of canonic literature and modifying them. In Israel, allusiveness-the distortion and, more importantly, secularisation of portions of the biblical text-becomes a tool for irony. For contemporary Hebrew writers allusion signals a confrontation, a writing against, a defusing of the overriding cultural power of tradition. The poet Yehuda Amichai, a master of what John Carey called "witty blasphemy," turns the holy tongue against itself through ingenious manipulations reminiscent of English "metaphysical" verse:
An eye for an eye,
Your body for mine.
All open:
The Ark, your mystery
My mouth.
In the spirit of 17th century English poetry, by playfully distorting the portentiousness of the lex talionis (Ex. 21,24; Lev. 24,40), Amichai makes his verse an exercise in eroticism.
A surprising number of contemporary Hebrew literary works refer to a biblical text. For example, the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham, has become a code which many Israeli writers have used to express their views of victimisation and war. Yizhar's The Days of Ziklag tells of an evening before an important battle; soldiers question the philosophy behind the war, citing themselves as sacrificial Isaacs.
Israeli literature has not yet offered up any literary "periods" or "schools." If anything, groups of Israeli writers are defined by Israel's wars. For example, following the war of independence, the "heroes" of the early literature spoke about the perceived disparity between Zionist dream and Israeli reality. They also questioned their relationship to the diaspora. After the Six Day war in 1967, they worried about the state's relationship with the Palestinians now under Israeli control. With the Yom Kippur war in 1973, they were thrust into a painful self-examination as individuals and as a nation.
This all confirms that Israeli fiction and drama up to the 1990s was indeed politicised "in the broadest sense." But only one political voice was heard-the voice of the left. Its fiction writers, among them Oz, Yehoshua, Shabtai, Yitzhak Ben Ner, were predominantly male, Ashkenazi, secular and ex-army. Theirs was an apologetic voice, sometimes too self-abasing for its own good. Yet there is a reason for this: literature in Israel retained the morality which underlay the prophetic ideal. In 1948, the year of the foundation of the state, Yizhar wrote an angry story, "The Prisoner," which outlines the oppression of an Arab shepherd by a group of Israeli soldiers. This subversive story was published in an official government journal; it met with great critical acclaim. Its underlying sense of moral right was then lauded, and this continues to provide the subtext of much Israeli writing. Yehoshua Sobol, a controversial Israeli dramatist, warned, in a play about the Holocaust (Ghetto, 1984), of the potential consequence of the Jewish victim becoming victimiser. He was not the only artist to do so.
Such writers show that, despite its domestic concerns, Israeli literature transcends the parochial to speak to the world with a truly moral voice. It is unafraid to wash its dirty linen in public, unafraid to take public issue with its own politicians. It preserves the moral conviction that characterises all good political writing. Novelists such as Oz and Yehoshua, David Grossman and Yitzhak Laor, and poets such as Natan Zach and Dalia Rabikovitz, reflect this.
This is not to say that the literature exclusively beats the political drum. Indeed, there have been writers all along-such as David Shahar,Yehoshua Kenaz, Hayyim Beer and Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and dramatists Nissim Aloni and Yosef Bar Yosef-whose appreciation is by no means diminished by their decision not to take political or ideological positions in their work.
The Holocaust has come to constitute a thematic leitmotif through Israeli literature, although it is often referred to obliquely. Israeli literature on the subject was, for some time, surprisingly sparse. Even in the 1940s the literary response in Palestine had been restricted to isolated examples, and there was little sustained reference to the Holocaust in the following decade. Only with the appearance of Aharon Appelfeld at the end of the 1950s did the Holocaust begin to claim a place in Hebrew literature. Later, in 1961, the Eichmann trial compelled a general confrontation between the Israelis and the facts they had attempted, for whatever reason, to avoid.
Since then a significant body of Hebrew literature has emerged on the subject. The Yom Kippur war in 1973 brought a change in Israel's perception of the Holocaust, probably because of the dreadful casualties suffered by the Israelis, controversy over the Occupied Territories and the rapid development of religious Zionism. Aharon Appelfeld produced a series of novels in which he described the effects of the Holocaust on the survivors' world. A different evocation of this world was Grossman's See Under: Love (1989), which examined the victim, perpetrator and survivor through shifting perspectives and contradictory literary styles, creating a disturbing masterpiece. He is one of a new group of writers whose attitude towards the Holocaust is entirely different from that of the earlier writers: their writing does not depend on direct personal experience, although some of them, such as Nava Semel and David Sch?tz, assume the perspective of members of the second generation.
The past decade has seen the emergence of many writers who have diverged from the literary mainstream. The prominence of talented young women writers exemplifies the shift away from the well-worn "Israeli naturalism"-that is, the male-dominated political writing of the previous three decades. Orly Castel-Bloom has entirely freed her prose from Jewish cultural allusions. Her novel Dolly City deals with the mania of an urban dweller living in a surrealistic environment which can scarcely be recognised as a grotesquely distorted Tel Aviv. Savyon Liebrecht's prose is even darker, her protagonists' world no less fearsome, often referring to Jewish experience which underlies the sunny daily surface, but most often searching out the darkness in human relationships. This period also saw the emergence of Sephardi writers who had been overtly or covertly classified as "the other" in Israeli society. All these writers are loosely categorised as "post-modernist." Their themes are less confined, more humanist, focusing on relationships, families, the experiences of women, Jewish immigrants and Palestinians. Literary language has been modified-from the rhetorical elaboration of the early writing, to the spare, sparse, often crude language of contemporary culture. Textual sources are no longer exclusively classical; expression is derived from television, cinema, comics, pop music. Post-modernism re-examines the "Israeli condition" from its own ironic, often violent and often female, if not feminist, point of view. The conventional ideological role of Hebrew literature is relegated to the past.
There has also been the (re)appearance of more universally "Jewish" narratives. The world of the diaspora is back; Gabriella Avigur Rotem tells the story, in Mozart Wasn't a Jew, of two immigrant families in South America at the turn of the century. Sephardi writers return to a community view-which deals with Jewish rather than Israeli issues.
But, given that Israel is still a society in transition and that it is more fragmented than ever before, perhaps its writing cannot entirely avoid social reference. Contemporary Israeli literature may appear to have become wholly post-modern, but a war, or the intifada, or a bomb, will drag it back to its social roots.
Israel has a fractious, difficult, idiosyncratic literature akin to no other in the developed or developing world. Oz once wrote that the story of Hebrew literature is full of sound and fury. So is the literature itself. While its sounds may be new, its fury is ancient.
