her parents’ past: how many brothers and sisters they had, what these siblings’ names were, and what happened to them during the war. She knows that her father was incarcerated in several concentration camps, but she does not know which ones. The silence her parents maintained regarding their experiences during the Holocaust was total. Liebrecht contends that this historical lacuna resulted in children of survivors developing problems of identity.
Her family background had a significant impact on one of the major developments in Savyon Liebrecht’s professional career: the delay in the publication of her first collection of short stories. She began writing fiction at eighteen, but her first novel was rejected by a publisher and she shelved it; later, she wrote another novel, but it was also rejected by the same publisher. When she got married, she stopped writing and channeled her creativity in other directions. She studied art and sculpture at an art institute, but soon sensed that this was not the right art form for her.
When she was thirty-five, she joined a creative writing workshop under the guidance of Amalia Kahana-Carmon,2 who immediately noticed her talent and encouraged her. Kahana-Carmon submitted Liebrecht’s story “Apples from the Desert” to a literary magazine, Iton 77. Following its publication, one publishing house offered to issue a collection of her short stories. Liebrecht wrote half the stories in her first book while it was in the process of publication.
This turning point in the acceptance of Liebrecht’s work can be attributed to several factors. One is the maturation of her artistic craft in the years between the rejection of her earlier works and the enthusiastic reception of her later ones. Another is the receptiveness to the female voice that has developed in Israel only in the 1980s and 1990s, according to Rochelle Furstenberg (5). In addition, Israel’s more open attitude and its acceptance of the Holocaust, a subject that Liebrecht sees as “the biggest riddle, not only regarding my own life, but regarding the entire human existence,”3 opened before her an avenue of expression that had perhaps been blocked, both for internal and external reasons.
One must not forget, however, that a major reason for the delay in publication was Liebrecht’s deliberate decision to repress her writing impulse to satisfy the need to have a family. In many families of Holocaust survivors, this is a supreme imperative, and perhaps Liebrecht needed a new family as a power-base of security and normality. Her assertion, in the interview with Argaman-Barnea, that “I am a normal woman, living a normal life” emphasizes how much she needed this kind of solid foundation in order to obtain the freedom to soar on the wings of her imagination.
Liebrecht chose to bear children before she could dedicate herself to her art because she believes that “for a woman writer, each new book is one less baby.” She sees this as a major difference between male and female writers. Liebrecht also sees a difference between women’s wider emotional range and men’s narrower, more power-oriented range. But despite this observation, she rejects any differentiation between the writing of men and women, since, as she put it, “the hand that writes is genderless,” and she denies the existence of a discrete women’s literature.
Liebrecht’s objection to such categorization is interesting precisely because her literature belongs, in my opinion, to the domain of women’s literature. In most of her stories, the woman’s point of view is dominant, and relationships within the intimate feminine circle occupy a central position. Relationships between mothers and daughters, sisters and friends, are rendered with great depth and sensitivity, whereas relationships with men—lovers, husbands, or fathers—while also treated perceptively, are most often relegated to second place. In her stories, Liebrecht also criticizes patriarchal society for having victimized women and exploited them by denying them any position of power. The female protagonists in her stories often reveal great strength, but they are also characterized by vulnerability and compassion, and Liebrecht’s work as a whole successfully embodies the female moral code defined by Carol Gilligan as an ethics of help in distress, caring, and nurturing.
Liebrecht’s stories reflect her deep yearning for reconciliation between people placed on opposing sides of conflicts. The starting point is often a rift, an intense confrontation, that resolves itself at the conclusion with the opponents reaching a moment of grace, of rapprochement. Even though not all of Liebrecht’s stories end on a note of reconciliation, as Esther Fuchs has argued (47), they all manifest a strong, inherent need for harmony. The emotional intensity in Liebrecht’s work stems, on the one hand, from animosity and hatred often expressed in terms of warfare, and on the other hand, from a longing for unity and for a sense of belonging that overcomes the divisive forces.4 This yearning for reconciliation can be traced to several elements in the author’s biography: her exposure to the trauma of the Holocaust, her awareness of the continuous conflict in the Middle East, and—for me, of paramount importance—the fact that she is a woman, and therefore acutely sensitive to situations of distress, weakness, and vulnerability.5
BREAKING SILENCES
Liebrecht’s stories do not describe the horrors of the concentration camps; instead, they touch upon the memories of the survivors, which surface in their minds years after the liberation, tearing the veil of normality that they have striven so hard to maintain. The story “Excision,” for example, depicts the compulsive behavior of a Holocaust survivor, who chops off her grandchild’s beautiful hair just because she finds out that the child may have head lice, a fact that brings back a horrifying memory of the camps. The story’s ambiguous title (meaning both “removal” and “cutting”) indicates that the theme is not just the cutting of hair, but the cutting off, the destruction, of life in the Holocaust.
Liebrecht criticizes Israeli society, especially the relatives of survivors, for their reluctance to open their hearts to the sufferers, to listen and to empathize with the tormented souls. The conspiracy of silence that surrounds the atrocities they have endured only adds to the survivors’ anguish. In the story “Hayuta’s Engagement Party,” the granddaughter represents contemporary Israeli society, which is alienated from and impervious to the survivors’ pain. Hayuta tries to keep her loving grandfather, Grandpa Mendel, from attending a family gathering for fear that he might spoil the party with his horror stories about the concentration camps. These memories tend to resurface in his mind particularly on festive occasions, since the family gathered around set tables reminds him of those lost relatives who cannot be present at the feast. Grandpa Mendel’s daughter Bella, who understands his need to remind others of those who have perished, shudders at the thought that the old man will be excluded from the party by his own granddaughter: “We are raising monsters . . . hearts of stone!” (84). The story ends tragically, with Grandpa Mendel dying in the middle of the party after he is prevented from expressing himself on the subject of the Holocaust. The last sentence in the story encapsulates how Israeli society tries to cover up the tremendous anguish with the “sweet frosting” of the new reality: “Then [Bella] took another tissue and very gently, as if she could still inflict pain, wiped the anguished face which knew no final relief, and the handsome moustache, and the closed eyes, and the lips that were tightly pursed under a layer of sweet frosting, firmly treasuring the words that would now never bring salvation, nor conciliation, not even a momentary relief” (91–92).
Israeli society, where many Holocaust survivors found a new home, had considerable difficulty in opening up and accepting the descriptions of what the Jews of Europe had endured under the Nazis.6 This difficulty was primarily due to the unimaginable and unbearable nature of the atrocities inflicted by the Nazi exterminating machine on a defenseless, innocent population, a reality so terrible that it could hardly be conveyed in words. But apart from the depth of the atrocities themselves, there were specific components in the makeup of the young Israeli state, established in 1948 after a bloody war of independence, that contributed to the difficulty in accepting and empathizing with the survivors. The sharp contrast between the self-image of the Israeli as a fierce freedom fighter and the abject image of the Jew as a helpless victim, led to annihilation almost without resistance, gave rise to an ambivalent attitude toward the survivors.
A
