New horizons in Hebrew literature

The writing of the Sapir Prize finalists reflects the immigrant experiences, the coming of age of Mizrahi and Russian writers and the emergence of a ‘fantastical’ stream

By ROCHELLE FURSTENBERG
Sapir Prize winner Shimon Adaf521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Sapir Prize winner Shimon Adaf521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
“I don’t want my fiction to be considered difficult, esoteric,” says Shimon Adaf. “But that’s simply the way I know how to write,” he explains to The Jerusalem Report.
A red-headed poet, novelist and musician, the 42-year-old Adaf has an unassuming manner, a sweet smile, which masks the complexity and depth of his thinking and his fiction. “Writing expresses the autonomy of the self,’’ he points out. “How I can most be myself in writing. When I read authors like William Faulkner or J.D. Salinger, I want to exclaim about each one. ‘This is the only way to write!’ Each one is so loyal to himself that he convinces me that he’s absolutely right. He’s entirely himself.”
The judges of the Sapir Prize for Fiction evidently felt that Adaf is being loyal to himself. His trilogy “Mox Nox,” published by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, is this year’s winner of Israel’s most prestigious and, at 150,000 shekels, or $40,000, most valuable literary award, the Sapir Prize. Given annually by the national lottery Mifal Hapayis, the Sapir is considered the equivalent of the English Man Booker Prize. The judges announced that “Adaf was chosen because of his originality and novel language. The protagonist leads us through the twists and turns of his complex soul.”
In many ways, Adaf’s writing is a play of shadows, an echo chamber. There’s no narrative continuity between the three novels of the trilogy, but, in Adaf’s words, “similar stories and characters appear and reappear in each work.” A sense of mystery and uncertainty pervades all the works. The reader is never on sure ground as to whether a certain protagonist has appeared before, or even whether the exact event hasn’t occurred previously.
“In this trilogy I was forced to return to the same subjects and narratives and tell them in a different way each time,” Adaf explains. He discusses literature with the authority of one who can call upon the whole history of Judaic literature, including Talmudic literature, as well as play with the whole deck of world literature. “He is one of the most erudite Israeli writers today,” Prof. Chaim Weiss, professor of Talmudic Literature at Ben- Gurion University in Beersheba tells The Report. Adaf himself teaches Comparative Literature at Ben-Gurion, as well as being director of its Creative Writing Program.
Venturing into his own inner space, Adaf touches upon, but filters and reshapes, biographical elements in his life.
“I grew up in a big family in Sderot. My parents were from Morocco, and met in a ma’abara, an immigration camp, in the fifties,” Adaf relates. They had come from Mogador [modern-day Essaouira], a port city in Morocco where the Jews followed the rationalist tradition of Maimonides. My father regularly studied Talmud with me,” says Adaf, whose fiction is suffused with the language and lore of the Talmud.
“The early Israeli writers,” says Weiss, “didn’t use Talmudic literature. They identified it with the Diaspora, but Adaf is an Israeli writer who transforms Talmudic language and literature into the contemporary Hebrew canon.”
“Each of the books of the trilogy,” explains Adaf, “calls upon a different fictional genre, at the same time that it frequently mixes genres.
“The title book of the trilogy, “Mox Nox” is in the genre of the bildungsroman, the ‘coming of age’ novel,” he explains. Ostensibly “Mox Nox” deals with the rebellion of its teenage protagonist against his religious Moroccan father who forces him to work in a kibbutz welding shop, to keep him in line, in spite of the inappropriateness of the job for this delicate, scholarly child. It provides the boy with his first sexual encounters and intellectual aspirations, as expressed in the protagonist’s obsession with Latin words and desire to read philosophy and go to the secular school against his father’s will.
“The interest in Latin and classical literature,” explains Adaf, “is part of the young artist’s rebellion against his father’s Judaism because [historically, a limit was] set on Latin in Jewish culture. The Talmud integrated Greek and Persian expressions, but not the Latin tongue, because Latin was the language of the enemy, the Romans who destroyed the Temple. Rome and the Church stand in opposition to the Jews. By studying Latin, and using Latin terms, the protagonist is challenging his father’s weltanschauung, his Jewish patriarchal position.”
“Kfor,” the first novel of the trilogy, is in the science fiction genre. Fantasy and science fiction has always fascinated Adaf who also teaches a course in science fiction at Ben- Gurion. “Science fiction checks the world from a different basis, offers a critique of today’s reality, creates an alternative,” says Adaf. The events in “Kfor” (whose Latin subtitle is “Nuntia”) happen 500 years from now in Tel Aviv. But rather than depicting super cosmopolitan technological robotlike Israelis of the future, the population represented is one of Jewish traditional figures who study in yeshivas, and have the names and the lifestyle and language of the Talmudic period.
Is Adaf indicating that this is what Israel is heading towards, that his Tel Aviv of the future is a parody on the ultra-Orthodox community, disconnected from the world? But when certain genetic problems arise, and some of the yeshiva boys show signs of growths on their shoulders that threaten to become birdlike wings, the genius rabbiscientist Yehezkal Ben Grimm is sent out to the “goyim” to seek a cure, indicating that even ultra-Orthodox Jews are dependent on the larger world.
“In all Adaf’s writing,” says Weiss, “the boundaries between worlds and historical periods disappear. Figures are constantly moving from one world to another, interacting with shadowy figures. “This comes to its fullest expression in the last novel of the trilogy, “Arim shel Matah / De Urbibus Inferis,” translatable as Earthly Cities or Netherworld. It has, according to Adaf, both meanings: earthly, as in earthly Jerusalem, in contrast to heavenly Jerusalem, and Netherworld, a reference to Dante’s underworld.
On one hand, Adaf portrays the Moroccan Asido family realistically, but there is also something strange, “outsider,” about them, particularly the budding poet Tiveria. They live in the shadow of a father who studies strange, mystical texts. As an adult, Tiveria discovers the underground tradition of the mystical Rose of Judea sect. And in a parallel story, the narrator, an Israeli writer in Berlin, is threatened by it.
The Rose of Judea emerged from the story of Rabbi Ben Zoma of the Talmud, who went mad when confronted with the ultimate reality. In Adaf’s narrative, followers of Ben Zoma establish a secret sect in Essaouira, Morocco, in the 16th century under a fictional Rabbi Shavui. This subterranean mystical tradition from the Talmudic period that is revealed to the narrator while visiting Berlin is dangerous if articulated. He who uncovers unconventional sources of wisdom may disappear or lose his memory. Yet man continually seeks to again charge the world with mystery.
“I see myself as connected to “Jewish literature,” not merely Israeli literature, which is too narrow a definition of our literature, dealing with nation-building. I see myself going back to Yosef Brenner and Micha Berdichevski, seeking a language, or to Agnon, calling upon the Mishna and Tanakh, “to ask existential questions through a Jewish prism via the Hebrew language.”
Adaf pointed with satisfaction to the fact that the list of candidates for the Sapir Prize this year was quite varied. “They didn’t just represent Israeliness. The judges didn’t have one definition for Israeli literature.”
And indeed, the judges declared that the short list from which Adaf was chosen “reflects the strength of Israeli culture, in its multifaceted character.”
The novelist who won the award for the “best first novel” could not have been more different from Adaf; Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s novel, “Lila Ehad Markovich” (One Night Markovich), also published by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, is a whimsical story in the style of the well-known Israeli novelist Meir Shalev about pre-State halutzim who are sent to Europe before World War II to effect fictitious marriages to a group of Jewish women to enable them to escape Europe, and come to Palestine, then still under the British Mandate.
Two friends volunteer to join the group: Zeev Feinberg, a good-looking, charming man whom women can’t resist, and Yaakov Markovich, a seemingly uninteresting man with little sex appeal. But it is Markovich who is allotted the most beautiful woman, Bella Zeigerman, with whom he falls deeply in love. And when the time comes to divorce her he refuses. However immoral and unkind to Bella, it is the first time in his life that he is standing up for something he wants passionately, making his life meaningful. His friends beg him to relent and he is humiliated, even beaten up, but he stands his ground and lives with a woman who hates him and will not sleep with him: she only does so when he finally agrees to let her go.
All this takes place against the great historical saga of the establishment of the State of Israel, where Markovich proves to be heroic in the same down-to earth, dogged manner with which he holds onto Bella.
Deflating the heroic myth of Zionism, it is a good-natured depiction of this period, often humorous to the point of laughing out loud.
The other five novels on the “short list” for the Sapir Prize display a wide spectrum of subjects and genres. In contrast to the “Israeliness” of the 1948 generation, and following that, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman, who grappled with nation-building and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 1980s and ’90s ushered in a new, more personal tone, which continues to flourish in local literature in a multitude of ways.
While the writing at the end of the 20th century brought women to the fore, the Sapir Prize candidates for 2012 particularly point up the fiction of Israelis of different ethnic backgrounds. Three, or perhaps even four, of the candidates for the Sapir Prize, including Adaf, do not have the “typical” Ashkenazi Sabra background, but are Sephardim from “periphery” development towns, such as Sderot-born Adaf himself, or represent the recent aliya from Russia.
In cer tain ways, Sami Berdugo’s collection of stories in “Hayeled Ha’acharon Shel Hamea” (The Last Child of the Century), published by Kibbutz Hameuchad/ Siman Kriah, echo Adaf in that they both depict North African and working-class cultures in Israel. But Berdugo’s emphasis is more psychologically nuanced. It portrays the ambivalence to the protagonist’s Mizrahi home versus the outside world. The home is poor, narrow, static. Language is limited to practical matters, “do this, do that.” The outside world, on the other hand, is exciting, rich in stimuli, language. But the home, and especially the mother figure, can still provide physical warmth, a sense of protection in a world where it is hard to be accepted. Adaf’s depiction of the Moroccan family is less enervated, perhaps because he creates father figures steeped in a rich religious or spiritual culture.
But the primary difference between these North African Israeli writers is Adaf’s penchant for the mystical and fantastical, while Berdugo is tied to the common human experience, albeit in a sensitive, perceptive way. Haya Hoffman, the literary editor for the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, points out that for a long time critics didn’t believe that the “fantasy,” “science fiction,” “alternative worlds” trend would catch on in Israel, where the problems of the “here-and-now” in Israeli life “were too much with us.” But she admits that in recent years this type of writing has begun to appear and Adaf is an outstanding example of this.
Leah Aini’s novel, “Susit” (Horsey), published by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan, is fantastical in a very different way than either Adaf’s dark mystical, science-fiction mode or Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s whimsical look at pioneering history. Aini, whose previous work “Rose of Lebanon” was a heavy, autobiographical work, has now “let go” with a wild, absurd, novel. From the very beginning, Sasha Zayit, a horse-like looking woman, declares she has comes to terms with herself. She lives on a Texas farm for seven years, until she receives word that she has inherited lands from her grandmother in Israel. She returns, but this free-wheeling story jumps from place to place. She meets all kinds of grotesque characters, and ultimately the reader discovers that her lover is a horse.
Playful and impulsive, it is reminiscent of Orly Castel-Bloom, a celebration of freedom and randomness Humorous in a satirical, almost Borscht Belt, type of humor is Yermi Pinkus, “B’Zair Anpin” (Petty Business), Am Oved Publishers, which depicts Israel from an entirely different vantage point.
His protagonists are an extended family of Jewish petit bourgeoisie whose roots go back to Eastern Europe. Their Hebrew intonation borders on Yiddish. Pinkus knows of what he writes. He himself worked as a delivery boy in his family’s grocery store.
The story revolves around the family saving money to go on a vacation in Austria. One cannot help feeling that his satirical depiction is often a caricature of this community. Pinkus is a graphic artist and cartoonist, and successfully captures the expressions and cliches, the foibles and human weaknesses, family loyalties and jealousies of this segment of the Israeli population in the 1980s before this old Ashkenazi merchant class gave way to hightech business.
In contrast to Pinkus’s satirical and humorous rendition, Bella Shaier, a Russian immigrant fiction writer, who came to Israel as a child from Czernowitz in the Soviet Union, brings her Eastern European background to play in “Mat Yeladim” (Children’s Mate), Sifria Hadasha Publishers, a collection including two quiet, sensitive novellas and a short story.
The first novella portrays childhood in an apartment building courtyard in the Soviet Union through individual stories of Jewish and non-Jewish children who play together. Many of these children, though intelligent, feel as outsiders and yearn for a different life. This is also the case of Galit in the story “Galit and Gordon.” Galit, a girl from working-class south Tel Aviv has a longstanding relationship with Gordon, a self-centered man of Romanian background, who can’t bring himself to marry Galit nor to give her up. The hidden pain and cruelty is expressed in an almost still, what some critics have called “Chekhovian,” manner.
The short story in the collection is about a Russian immigrant who subsists by washing floors in an office building. Lonely and lost in this new country, she denies herself the only pleasure she has of visiting a friend who lives far away because she cannot afford it.
In summary, the immigrant experiences, the coming of age of Mizrahi and Russian writers as a matter of course and, most of all, the emergence of the “fantastical” reflect new horizons in Hebrew literature. In addition, the variations on the Hebrew language, the different ways writers play with it, is creating new forms, reflecting the dynamics of Israeli culture. 