its power.
The power that grows apples in the desert is the power of devoted love. The story creates an analogy between growing apples in the desert and making it bloom and the blossoming of Rivka, whose life was a wasteland as long as she lived in Jerusalem among family members who did not appreciate her virtues. Only when she found love did she become handsome—“milk and honey,” as her mother says. This expression, used in the Bible to describe the land of Israel as “the land of milk and honey,” creates an analogy between the love of the land and the love of a man for a woman. Liebrecht depicts an ideal reality, where love and fertility coexist in the image of a kibbutz named “Neve Midbar” (oasis). The heroine’s name, Rivka, also has symbolic overtones, since it recalls the independent spirit of the Biblical Rebecca, as discussed by Nehama Ashkenazi (12); the mother’s name, Victoria, underlines the triumph of sisterhood over patriarchy.
THE HEALING POWER OF STORYTELLING
This first publication in English of Savyon Liebrecht’s selected stories is indeed an important event. For readers outside of her native land, Liebrecht’s stories provide essential insights into contemporary Israeli society. But as really fine literature does, they also reach toward deeper truths that know no national boundaries. Liebrecht’s protagonists, in their own ways, commit quiet acts of courage or achieve small epiphanies of understanding, which change and often enlarge them as human beings—and through her fiction, she offers her readers the opportunity to do the same.
Liebrecht’s skill as a writer, combined with her perceptiveness, her compassion, and her deep humanity, create a body of work that is testament to the healing power of storytelling. It is a power that can help to close old wounds, to inspire new levels of empathy and understanding, to build bridges across the chasms that divide people—to make apples grow even in the desert.
Lily Rattok
Tel Aviv
March 1998
NOTES
1. In her youth, Liebrecht wrote two novels that were rejected by the publisher she approached, but her mature output in fiction consists entirely of short stories. Liebrecht has also written prize-winning film scripts, and one of her short stories has been made into a play.
2. Amalia Kahana-Carmon is one of the central figures in modern Hebrew literature, and, in my opinion, one of the two founding mothers of Israeli women’s literature (see Rattok, xx–xxv). A strong friendship formed between the well-known author and the fledgling writer, although it should be noted that Kahana-Carmon’s artistic influence on Liebrecht has gradually diminished over the years.
3. Quotations in this and the subsequent two paragraphs come from Liebrecht’s 1992 interview with Amalia Argaman-Barnea.
4. In two stories, “Written in Stone” and “Dreams Lie,” the dynamics are of hostility giving way to reconciliation. “Dreams Lie” (from the collection Apples from the Desert), contains descriptions of an astonishing physical struggle between an old woman and her granddaughter. “Like two blind women, their fingers clutched at each other’s throats, grabbing hold of it with hatred, with a true intention to hurt, to beat unconscious, to cleanse the body from the malice that seeps through the hands and thrashes frantically.” In “Written in Stone,” the violence is mental: Erella prepares to meet her dead husband’s relatives, “whose eyes flashed daggers at her”; she imagines that they wait for her “with eyes like hidden traps” (99).
5. In the interview with Amalia Argaman-Barnea, Liebrecht said that women cope much better than men in situations that are beyond their control, and that a sense of helplessness may lead directly to insanity. Consequently, one expects women to feel compassion—the most important element in the feminist ethos, according to Lugones and Spelman (1987: 235).
6. This difficulty is presented in the stories “Excision” and “Hayuta’s Engagement Party” through the figures of the daughters-in-law. Savyon Liebrecht, in her essay on the Holocaust’s influence on her writing (128), justified her use of these figures as the vehicles for venting aggression toward the survivors; according to her, the children of the victims would never dare utter the words said by the daughters-in-law in the stories. Only those family members who did not grow in the shadow of the Holocaust could do so.
7. An example of the problematic function of Holocaust and Heroism Day in Israeli reality can be found in “Hayuta’s Engagement Party,” in the words of the survivor’s daughter-in-law when she tries to shut him up. “Don’t we have Memorial Day and Holocaust Day and commemorative assemblies and what have you? They never let you forget for a minute. So why do I need to be reminded of it at every meal?” (88)
8. In the article “The Holocaust in Hebrew literature: Trends in Israeli Fiction in the Eighties,” Avner Holtzman writes that he considers Savyon Liebrecht one of the most important writers in this respect (24).
9. Wardi calls children of Holocaust survivors “memorial candles,” underlying their role in preserving the memory of relatives who perished in the war. It is this role that makes the natural separation during adolescence so painful for the parents, resulting in difficulty in individuation for the children. Savyon Liebrecht overcame this difficulty by requesting to work on a kibbutz during her miliary service and, particularly, by going to London to study immediately after her discharge. Her father was angry at her and would not talk to her for a year after she left, even though she was almost twenty at the time.
10. The main characters in “Dreams Lie” and “General Montgomery’s Victory” (published in the collection On Love Stories and Other Endings) are both grandmothers who channel all their efforts and energy to preparing food and nourishing their grandchildren in order to ensure their health and well-being.
11. The most direct descriptions of the Holocaust are found in Liebrecht’s third collection of short Stories, What Am I Speaking, Chinese? She Said to Him (1992), particularly in the stories “Morning in the Park with the Nannies” and “The Strawberry Girl.” The majority of her stories, however, present echoes that the trauma of the Holocaust left in the survivors’ souls, either through memories or as an ideological position. For example, in the story “Pigeons,” which appeared in Apples from the Desert, the protagonist loses her faith in God as a result of the atrocities she has lived through, and becomes active in a movement fighting religious coercion, claiming that “God went up in smoke in the chimneys of Auschwitz.”
12. In “A Married Woman,” there is a sharp juxtaposition between the story’s title and the opening sentence, which presents the main character as a divorced woman. “Only when the divorce bill lay in her hand did Hannah Rabinsky remove her wedding picture from the wall next to her bed” (73). That photograph is the symbolic expression of a survivor’s yearning to have a family and to live a normal life, and it is more powerful than the legal document, the letter of divorce. It is clear from the events in the story that the title conveys a profound truth; Hannah remains a married woman even though she has divorced her husband. One can see “A Married Woman” as a negative image of S. Y. Agnon’s story “Metamorphosis.” Both stories open with a description of a divorce proceeding, and both allude to a reversal at the end. However, in Liebrecht’s story, “the marriage wasn’t really a marriage and the divorce won’t really be a divorce” (78).
13. A somewhat similar pattern of relationships is portrayed in the story “A Love Story Needs an Ending” (from the collection Love Stories and Other Endings), in which the protagonist, a Holocaust survivor, cheats on his devoted wife. The wife is resigned to her lot, but agonizes over what she regards as the betrayal of her daughter. After the father’s death, the daughter decides to take revenge on one of the women he has loved, whose love affair with her father she witnessed as a child. That affair was a source
