Essayists From Israel

"Perhaps he did not know about that land at all, though it was so near, right beyond the wall, only a password between the twilight and it. Most people do not know."

"A profound weariness was reflected in his eyes, a sorrow intermittently replenished; he was like a boxer's old punching bag, still suffering blow after blow, still returning to the hand that struck it."

"They were born without, and I was quibbling over a housecoat."

"The smell of monstrous pity remained in the empty room."

"Past Latrun, between the low hills and the mountains,Ada, without warning, finds herself driving into fear. (first line)"

"Together with her, we feel how stuffy the car is, how the world is boxing her in."

"Ido's mother is the only person with whom Ada can really laugh out loud, the way you can laugh with someone who has known you since childhood."

"Midway in life, as at its outset, you do not trust your body not to fail or disappoint you."

"She feels sad that the light has gone; she thinks of darkness as one of those bad times that only being old enough can get you through, with a measure of resignation."

"Ido chatters gaily as a sparrow."

"Shmaryahu's blue eyes seem frozen to him, focused on some other world."

"Reality seems to have broken up into little particles that she can't fit together again."

"From now on there will always be a great self-consciousness between us, as between people who have gone too far."

"the two of them, really, what an idea."

"My feeling is that at our present stage of Judaism, knowledge and creation within the culture have come to replace ceremony, just as ceremony and prayer, in their time, came to replace the sacrifices."

"Hebrew, you know, is truly untranslatable."

"I write about Israeli experience, and that experience, being so intense and concentrated, is probably a good background for distilling human experience anywhere."

"Israeli society has always been very practical, very goal-oriented. A certain kind of egotism, self-centeredness goes with this a lack of empathy. The first of the new settlers who came here came voluntarily, like yourself. People tend to forget the difference between this and the postwar, more practical aliya. In order to start again in this land, the idealists wanted to forget, to obliterate their past. But when you amputate your past, you pay a price. Part of that is the failure of empathy. When the massive Eastern aliya occurred in the early 1950s, I was among the few who realized what was happening. I was then serving in the army with special responsibility for a number of transitory immigrant camps. These forced immigrants from Arab countries wanted to stick to their former customs at a time when Israel was committed to our version of the melting-pot theory, which was prevalent as well in the 1950s in America and recognized only by very few as the failure that it was."

"Jerusalem-which sometimes feels like the frontline of an ongoing war"

"There has been an intensification of tunnel vision, of efforts by fundamentalists to impose rigid constraints on us all, mostly the status quo has been maintained. Nevertheless, the pressure to conform to religious norms is simply unbearable and has led increasingly to acts of violence, the result of which is to divide us each against the other."

"(HC: How do you account for this burgeoning of religious fanaticism among us Jews?) SH: Funny you should ask. I addressed myself to this dilemma in an article in a recent issue of The Jerusalem Quarterly. In brief, there are four interrelated ways in which our whole culture has gone off the rails before our very eyes: (one) in the subordination of the rule of law to the way of faith; (two) in the misguided perception of our times as "The End of Days," thereby validating excess as acceptable Jewish behavior; (three) in conferring excessive authority on rabbinic figures; and (four) in the abolition of a sense of sin-which is contrary to the spirit of the Bible. I consider all of these to be deviations from Judaism."

"Do you know, in the month before the Jewish Terror Groups were arrested and indicted, I printed an article, "Messiah or Knesset [Parliament]," that predicted the existence of such organizations? Shulamit Aloni read it aloud at the Knesset. "If a writer could predict this," she asked, "why couldn't the authorities?" Anyway, such is the present dilemma in this country-Messiah or Knesset? The Knesset does not-cannot-prevent the coming of the Messiah, if and when this were to come to pass, but the messianic principle now rampant in some Israeli circles absolutely negates the Knesset: that is to say, the law, democracy, and ultimately our statehood. In this I consider myself a follower of the Sages who have taught that even the divine voice does not take precedence over the ruling of a duly-appointed high court. The supremacy of the law is surely one of the greatest tenets of Judaism."

"We cannot live for long with the present state of schizophrenia: with democracy on one side of the Green Line and military law on the other; with citizens' rights on one side and no citizens or rights on the other; with one law on one side, a different law on the other. The effect is a breakdown of norms leading inevitably to brutalization. Young people will sooner or later show the effects of this."

"The radical, right-wing parties-Tehiya and Kahane-America's "gift" to us."

"I much prefer this cold peace to a hot war. But let me tell you about the atmosphere in Egypt in May '82. That was a real honeymoon. Everything was open, even euphoric. We had already given back Sinai, and every Egyptian in the street would stop to tell us that Israel was an honorable nation, one that kept its word. Practically all of our friends were making definite plans to visit Israel for congresses, lectures, or simply for private purposes. There was a joint exhibition of women painters-Egyptian and Israeli-at the biggest hotel in Cairo. Once they knew we were Israelis, waiters and shopkeepers refused to accept our tips. "You are family now," they would say. And you know the level of poverty in Egypt where a teacher earns $40 a month. In May of '82, Egypt was a ball! (HC: And then?) SH: And then Israel invaded Lebanon, and everything, everyone stopped-horrified."

"We must never make the mistake of confusing a criminal act with a national policy."

"(HC: What is your feeling about the current role of women in Israeli society?) SH: For myself, I have always done just what I wanted. I do have a sense that in Israel this is really less of a problem than in the United States. After all, in periods of emergency our women have always carried a heavy responsibility and functioned in most capacities in what still is, in some ways, a pioneer country. That makes it very hard to deny us appropriate roles. Moreover, it springs right from the Jewish family tradition of women serving as breadwinners while their husbands study. I know that Israeli society is famous for being rather macho. But my experience is that any woman who has something to say is listened to."

"(HC: I know that in recent weeks you have stayed with friends of yours at the Jhabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, and that you've described what you've witnessed in Yediot Ahronot. I realize the difficulty of summing up your impressions in brief, but would you try?) SH: In a phrase, we have been badly over-reacting. Look, we have been harassing and humiliating the Arabs for twenty years. Sooner or later, this uprising had to come. Anyone who thinks it was P.L.O.-inspired is out of his mind. In fact, the P.L.O. is trying to catch a free ride on what is happening and for the most part is finding itself impotent. Instead of applying the techniques of conflict-resolution to solve the problem, we have tried to bulldoze it out of existence: Violence, however, will achieve nothing because the Palestinians really are not "out to get us," and in any case are unable to do so. They are fighting for their identity. As a girl student in Gaza told me, "Please understand that in order to co-exist with you, first we must exist.""

"You know, I am not a pacifist...I fought in the War of Independence, and I have covered several wars, including Yom Kippur on the Golan Heights, as a correspondent. But both in the Lebanese War and in these past months of overkill in our reaction to the uprising, we seem to have lost our ability to differentiate between the necessary use of force and plain aggression. For everyone's sake, I hope we regain a proper perspective very soon."

"One of the best-known and most highly respected Israeli writers"

"She wrote passionately about her love for Israel while also being a vocal critic of Israeli treatment of Palestinians and serving as a spokesperson for Peace Now...Making her debut with a book of poems, Predatory Jerusalem (Hebrew, 1962), Hareven never tired of exploring new artistic avenues, publishing nineteen Hebrew books in a variety of genres, including suspense fiction (under an androgynous pseudonym) and children’s literature (inspired by her grandchildren). Her exceptional mastery of language and style made her one of Israel’s outstanding essayists, the recipient of the Avrech Best Essayist Prize. Her terse essays and press columns gained momentum in the aftermath of the 1973 war and the 1977 fall of the Labor government..."

"The leading Israeli novelist Shulamit Hareven...was a clarion voice for reconciliation in the Middle East."

"From The Vocabulary Of Peace, Hareven's 1995 volume of poetic, philosophical and biographical essays, comes one typically mordant observation. "On the outer wall of one of the Israeli administration buildings in Gaza, a section painted in white stands out. In gay colours are the words Love, Brotherhood, Peace, Friendship. Beautiful words. There is just one problem: they are written solely in Hebrew.""

"Ultimately, Hareven's greatest impact was on Hebrew itself. A linguistic patriot, she was the first - and for 12 years, the only - woman in the Hebrew Language Academy, where she contested "sexist" neologisms foisted on the 3,000-year-old language."

"Shulamith Hareven is a great writer. She combines historical and emotional depth with a brilliant and haunting style...Shulamith Hareven writes with integrity; her historical and human truthfulness cannot be lost in translation. She makes all our lives richer, traversing all borders."

"The Israeli novelist Shulamith Hareven, born in Europe, has described herself as more Levantine-by disposition and sympathies-than Ashkenazic Israeli: "Authentic Levantism means the third eye and the sixth sense. It is the keen sensitivity to "how," the knowledge that "how" is always more important than "what;" therefore every true artist is a kind of Levantine. It means a perpetual reading between the lines, both in human relations and in political pronouncements—an art no Israeli political leader has yet succeeded in acquiring....Levantism... is the tacit knowledge that different nations live at different ages, and that age is culture, and that some nations are still adolescent, among them, quite often, Israel. And it is the bitter experience that knows that everything-every revolution, every ideology-has its human price, and there is always someone to pay it. It is the discerning eye, the precise diagnosis, that sees the latent narcissist in every ideologue. It is the joke at his expense, and the forgiveness"...Hareven ends her essay, "I am a Levantine because I see war as the total failure of common sense, an execrable last resort. And because I am a Levantine, all fundamentalists on all sides, from Khomeini to Kahane, will always want to destroy me and all Levantines like me, here and in the neighboring countries.""

"After 1948 and with the mass immigration of Jews from neighboring Arab countries, Sephardim quickly became a significant component of Israeli society. But a cultural rift between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim quickly developed, which has persisted to this day. More than a few Sephardic authors in Israel have been published to international acclaim-Sami Michael, A. B. Yehoshua, Shulamit Hareven, and Orly Castel-Bloom spring immediately to mind-and the difficult relations between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Israel often figures prominently in their work."

"Either born in Palestine or having come with their parents at such an early age that Hebrew became their natural language, writers like S. Yizhar, Benjamin Tammuz, Aharon Megged, Moshe Shamir, Natan Shaham, David Shahar, Hanoch Bartov]] and Shulamith Hareven wrote in the emerging local idiom, of orange groves and olive trees rather than birch woods and evergreens."