name was also Shlomo. Now Erella comprehends the old woman’s guilt for having named her son Shlomi, after her first husband—a name that, according to her belief, brought him death.
Erella now understands the old woman’s admonition not to name her new baby after Shlomi, because this is a “name written in stone,” on a grave (117). Erella realizes the profound logic of putting a boundary line between the living and the dead. The wisdom of generations and a bitter personal experience have prompted the old woman to try and keep her away from the forbidden territory. One cannot build a new life in the shadow of a life that was cut off; one has to find the spiritual strength to tear oneself away and begin anew.
The story concludes with a description of the profound change that has taken place within Erella: “Today she had been set free! This woman had the power to release her from the vow that neither of them had ever understood. And she had done it. The old woman had let her go” (117). Her pregnancy, so burdensome to her before, now fills her whole being with unfamiliar happiness. She feels wondrously weightless, “as if her body were made of light” (118). Liebrecht breaks away from the stereotypical pattern of a mother-in-law envious of her young daughter-in-law, and instead describes the pact between the two as a bond between mothers. In “Written in Stone,” this bond overcomes the gap between the Sephardic culture and the Ashkenazic, and focuses on an Israeli common denominator—fostering the next generation.21
FEMINIST PROTEST
A more extreme protest against the disfranchisement of women by the patriarchal religious establishment is found in the most feminist of Liebrecht’s stories, “Compassion.” The ironic title refers to the misfortunes of the female protagonist, Clarissa, a Holocaust survivor who was hidden in a convent during the war years and afterward came to Israel. The transition from an orthodox Jewish home to a Christian convent and then to a secular kibbutz in Israel totally undermined her sense of belonging, so when she later fell in love with an Arab, she went to live with him in his village. After she had borne him children, the husband demanded that she marry an old uncle of his, so that he could marry a younger wife. Her refusal to comply did not stop him from marrying the woman anyway, since as a Moslem he was allowed to have four wives. Still, the husband punished her by locking her up in a shack and keeping her totally isolated.22
Clarissa’s predicament does not break her spirit, but when she finds out that her husband and her son are about to murder her daughter because she refused to marry an old man, preferring her young beloved, Clarissa is gripped by a powerless rage. From her place of confinement, she sees her husband and son setting out on their murderous expedition, and she is prepared to kill them in order to prevent them from carrying out their scheme. “Had she been free and light-footed, had she had a knife in her hand, she would have sped after them on the mountain slope to stick the knife in their backs, withdrawing it and plunging it in again and again until they sank dead at her feet” (193).
The isolated, abused, and humiliated woman knows that nobody will come to her aid. In the village she is considered a “witch” and is ostracized for her rebelliousness. The women in the Arab village are resigned to the absolute sway their men have on their lives, as dictated by Islamic law; they will not come to the rescue of this woman or her rebellious daughter. The villagers mock her, saying, “She used to be a Jew, she used to be a Christian, and she used to be a Moslem—not one God wanted her” (196).
Clarissa resolves to kill her cruel son’s two-month-old daughter, entrusted to her care because the baby’s mother is ill. The grandmother’s decision to drown her little grandchild in a well is a horrendous deed that combines both revenge on her son and compassion for his daughter. Death is preferable to a woman’s existence in this kind of reality, Clarissa thinks. She sees herself as performing an act of charity—a mercy killing. She cleans the baby, feeds her, and hugs her, making her last moments as pleasant as possible, then gently puts her in the water.
The murder, which to some extent is also a symbolic suicide, is an act of desperation, meant to spare the little girl the suffering that is every woman’s lot in the Arab village: “the homelessness, the helplessness, her father and her brothers and her uncles, her husband and her husband’s brothers and her sisters’ husbands, who would close in around her, the household chores from one night to the next, the loneliness, the heart fluttering, encased in the body, the man in her bed, rolling her over as he wished, coming into her as into a wound, and the fear for her daughters and their spilled blood” (200).
This description attests to Liebrecht’s unique ability to explore a foreign reality and to grasp, with great sensitivity, what takes place there. She gives expression to the suffering of women in the Arab village, but without purporting to fully understand it. By making the protagonist a Jew who married a Moslem of her own free will, Liebrecht deliberately eschews “speaking for the ‘Other.’”23 Against this alien background, she is able to depict a woman in distress so extreme that it produces a horrendous reaction, and to make an emphatic protest against the kind of conditions in which infanticide might be understood as an act of loving kindness.
FEMINIST REVISION
In her first published story, “Apples from the Desert,” Savyon Liebrecht has pointed to a possible way out of the impasse that faces every woman in patriarchal society. Rivka, the young heroine of the story, recognizes the need to free herself from economic dependence on men in order to achieve equality with them. She joins a kibbutz, where she works for a living and is independent in every respect.24 Her decision to live with the man she loves without marriage is meant to ensure her absolute emotional freedom as well. For Rivka, her move is a revolutionary one, since the secular, basically Ashkenazic kibbutz is so different from the traditional, Sephardic community in which she grew up. Her decision is an expression of her rebellion against her father, who has ignored her all her life, thought she was an inferior specimen of womanhood, and tried to find a match for her without even consulting her.
In fact, Rivka’s departure from home is a concealed rebellion, since she never confronts her father. The confrontation takes place via her mother, Victoria, who comes to the kibbutz in order to bring her rebellious daughter home. But Victoria betrays the mother’s traditional role, dictated by the patriarchal system, of making daughters conform and accept male domination. Victoria not only fails to quell her daughter’s rebellion; she actually colludes with Rivka in keeping the father in the dark about what is going on. This surprising development has several causes. The first is Victoria’s rediscovery of her daughter through the eyes of the young man with whom Rivka lives. Victoria is moved by the way her daughter has blossomed and is amazed at the changes in her. Another reason is her identification with the young couple’s love, viewed against her own missed opportunity in her youth, an episode she recalls upon witnessing her daughter’s loving relationship.
Victoria decides to help her daughter realize her dream of a love-filled life, and not let Rivka languish, as she herself has, in a cold, loveless marriage. The bond between the women allows Rivka to help her mother gain a measure of freedom and independence, and at the same time allows Victoria to protect her daughter and offer her emotional support. Victoria’s decision to become her daughter’s ally is motivated by a symbolic dream she has in which the image of the lost beloved of her youth is merged with the image of the young man who wishes to marry Rivka. In the dream, this composite figure appears in the Garden of Eden, hinting at the wondrous nature of love. The apple held in the figure’s hand turns out to be “precious stones,” indicating the riches that love harbors (71).
But “Apples from the Desert” is a subversive story not only by virtue of its plot. It also employs “emancipatory strategies,” as defined by Patricia Yaeger. The suggestive title of the story highlights the motif of the apple, linking it through the dream to the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden. But Liebrecht’s Garden of Eden is an inversion of the biblical one; sexuality is not a sin here, and the woman is not viewed as responsible for the expulsion from paradise for having tempting the man to eat the apple. This is
