had accumulated in her heart over all those years, letting it fester and bubble like molten lava, locking her heart even against rare moments of sweetness” (163). Although the daughter is aware of the atrocities her mother lived through during the war, she does not understand how that trauma affected her mother’s sexuality.14
The protagonist, who never dared rebel against her mother when the latter was alive for fear that she would add to her pain and suffering, now, after the mother’s death, tries to divest herself of the depressing heritage that was bequeathed to her. She has sex with a total stranger—the real estate agent who, at her request, takes her to her parents’ old apartment, which is now for sale—in order to take revenge on her mother. In an act symbolizing her separate individuality, she makes love to the man in the exact spot where she used to hear her mother rebuff her father’s advances. This hasty, meaningless sexual encounter marks the differentiation between the daughter, who enjoys her sensuality, and the mother, who denied her physical urges. The daughter wants to prove to herself that she is capable of enjoying sex even without emotional ties, and so she seduces a stranger and makes love to him in the empty apartment, on an expensive fur coat given to her by her husband on their anniversary.15
Only after this act of rebellion can the woman begin to think about her mother with some understanding and ponder the reasons why her mother could not enjoy her own body and what lingering effects this hostility toward physical pleasure had on her. The daughter’s plea to her mother is a combination of sorrow and helpless rage: “I wonder why you never accepted the consolation of the body, why you never taught me this great conciliatory gift, this immeasurable pleasure, and I had to learn all this by myself, as if I were a pioneer” (167). Only in this extreme situation is the daughter capable of separating from her mother and father to become an individual person—although it is doubtful that this symbolic rebellion is sufficient to relieve her of the heavy burden left by her family.16
THROUGH LOVING EYES
Psychological studies examining the impact of the Holocaust on survivors’ children have demonstrated that many of them are marked by unusual sensitivity to other people’s suffering. The explanation, according to Wardi (106), is the high level of empathy these children have for their parents’ anguish. Their sense of justice regarding civil rights and the rights of minorities, disadvantaged, and deviant individuals in society is remarkably strong. Liebrecht’s identification with the victim is demonstrated in various social situations throughout her work. Her protagonists often identify with the “Other”: Arabs, Sephardic Jews, the elderly, women, children.
Particularly noteworthy is her protagonists’ ability to identify with members of the Arab minority in Israel, who suffer discrimination as a corollary of the continuous conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. The Other in this instance is a former enemy, a compatriot of the present adversary.17
Liebrecht tries to play the role of a healer, presenting possibilities for mending the rifts that threaten the existence of Israeli society. Her work describes the healing of breaches between Jews and Arabs, the building of amicable relationships, and the disappearance, at least on a small scale, of the gaps that separate Ashkenazic Jews, who constitute the elite of Israeli society, and Sephardic Jews, the disadvantaged ethnic group. Her stories offer moments of grace that span the gulfs between secular and observant Jews, between old and young. In such moments of grace, the Other is revealed as a complete human being, and a new social integration is created.
The literary paradigm by which Liebrecht constructs this vision of integration is the observation of the Other through the eyes of a representative of the ruling group. This pattern relies on strongly accentuating the motif of the observing eye, and on using the observer’s point of view as a means of effecting a change of attitude toward the object of scrutiny. The pattern comprises two stages that stand in contrast to each other: in the first stage the protagonist sees the Other in the conventional way, that is, as a different, offensive, threatening figure. In the second stage, however, the protagonist comes to realize and appreciate the Other’s unique qualities and thus regards him or her with more compassion. Readers who identify with the protagonist may thus change their own attitudes toward the Other, by seeing the Other through her loving eyes.
This literary pattern recalls Kaja Silverman’s analysis in her book The Threshold of The Visible World, in which she claims that the art form of the cinema can play an important political role in changing spectators’ attitudes toward people whom they have learned to fear or despise. Her argument is that this change may take place when the undesirable people are presented through the loving eyes of the main character in the movie. Silverman’s argument pertains mainly to changes in attitude toward people whose skin color or sexual orientation are different from the spectators’. She maintains that the success of this process depends on repeated presentations in different movies.
A similar pattern emerges in Savyon Liebrecht’s stories, since they emphasize visual elements and are based on intensive mutual observation of characters. Liebrecht’s technique favors a telling of the plot through nonverbal means, a fact that also explains her predilection for screenwriting. Liebrecht herself commented on her nonverbal sensitivity in her interview with Amalia Argaman-Barnea, connecting it to the fact that she is a daughter of Holocaust survivors: “Our home was a silent home. In a home of this type, a child learns very early on to observe and absorb clues from nonverbal sources.”
The events in Liebrecht’s story “A Room on the Roof” are conveyed largely through silences and exchanges of looks, since the characters do not really have a common language. The heroine is a young Jewish woman who is asserting her independence by having a room built on the roof of her house, using three Arab construction workers. She does not speak Arabic, and the workers’ Hebrew is broken and limited in vocabulary. The room is built against the wishes of her husband and during his absence, which results in uncommon closeness between the woman and the strange workers who find themselves inside her house.
This unexpected closeness enables the woman to get to know the most threatening Other figure in Israeli Jewish reality, under unusual circumstances. Unlike most Israeli women, who have no contact with Arabs from the occupied territories, the protagonist in this story maintains personal contact, on a daily basis, with the Arab workers in her employ. It is a very complex relationship, conducted against the background of the protracted conflict between the two peoples. Hence the woman’s fear that the Arabs may harm her, and her momentary anxiety about a possible connection between them and some acts of terrorism carried out against the civilian population in her area: “Could these hands, serving coffee, be the ones that planted the booby-trapped doll at the gate of the religious school at the end of the street? Her heart, which had been on guard all the time, began to see something, but it still didn’t know; this was just the beginning, appearing like a figure leaping out of the fog” (49).
Under these conditions, the woman’s decision to hire the Arabs to work inside her house without any male supervision evinces considerable courage. This decision can also be interpreted as a political-feminist protest against the state of affairs between the two nations, for which men are by and large responsible. Thus, the feminist project of building “a room of one’s own” is contingent on cooperation between a woman and Arabs—members of two groups of Others in Israeli society.
An element that contributes to this protest is the love that evolves between this Jewish woman and one of the Arabs, Hassan. It is a hesitant, fragile, and hopeless love, but even in its incipient, germinal existence, it points to another kind of relationship that could exist between the two peoples. The turning point in the relationship between the two main characters in the story is marked by this emergent love and by a change in the balance of power between them. While in the beginning of the story the relationship is that of conqueror and conquered, the turning point enables the characters, now finding themselves on the same level, to experience a measure of reciprocity and a true egalitarian rapport. This turning point comes with the baby’s fall from his cradle and the woman’s subsequent panic; Hassan,
