and so she tried to prevent him from leaving by using childish ruses. In this story, the Oedipal elements in the father-daughter relation are prominent, discernible when the mother tells her daughter, “Sometimes I thought that it was not normal, the way you loved him. Perhaps this should not be between father and child, such love.” (Similar elements can be found in subtler form stories such as “What Am I Speaking, Chinese? She Said to Him.”) Dina Wardi points out that such relationships are not uncommon in families of survivors; the father often turns to the daughter for the fulfillment of emotional needs because of the mother’s precarious mental state, steeped in chronic mourning and depression.
14. Wardi cites research showing that women who suffered during the Holocaust had difficulties functioning emotionally and sexually with their husbands.
15. Unlike Leon Yudkin, who interprets the incident as a failed attempt on the daughter’s part to reconcile her parents to each other (178), I see it as the daughter taking a position with her sensuous father against the mother who denied her sexuality. Moreover, it is a failed attempt to wipe out the stains of the past, symbolically represented by the stains on the bedroom ceiling, which the mother implores the father to blot out. The stains of the past, indelibly lodged in the depth of the mother’s psyche, have left scars on the daughter as well. This is not a story about “lack of communication,” as Yudkin has claimed, but a work describing the insurmountable difficulty of understanding the survivors, who forever feel as if they were speaking Chinese to those around them.
16. Many characters in Liebrecht’s stories suffer from an inability to forge for themselves a unique individual identity, because they bear the brunt of their parents’ past on their shoulders. According to Wardi (40), this difficulty is characteristic of the second generation of survivors, due to the parents’ expectations that their children will stand in for family members who have perished, and also that they will fulfill the aspirations that they themselves were unable to realize because of the war. Thus, the second generation is saddled with the dual task of “pulling a hearse” and of carrying out the “youthful wishes” of the survivors. This heavy burden lies on the shoulders of the protagonist of Liebrecht’s ars poetica story “To Bear the Great Beauty” (published in the collection Apples from the Desert). Even though the mother in the story is not presented as a Holocaust survivor, her severe medical condition and the death of all her immediate relatives in a disaster serve as a “camouflage” in this respect. The mother who suffers from depression, untreated chronic mourning, and an inability to relate even to the people closest to her, is in fact characterized by “survivor’s syndrome,” defined by psychologists as the emotional condition of concentration-camp survivors. (See, for example, W. G. Niderland.) Her son, the protagonist, feels that he has to carry, for her sake, the memory of her dead relatives and, at the same time, write the poems that she herself was unable to produce because of the traumas she has suffered.
17. The protagonist of the story “Reserve Duty,” from the collection Apples from the Desert, is not content with merely wishing for peace and with working diligently and clandestinely to bring it about; he is willing to cross the line that separate the two peoples, to come and live in the Arab village as one of its native sons. This urge to “desert his nation,” to immerse himself in the world of the Other, comes over him at the least expected or appropriate moment: when he enters the village as the commander of an army detail searching for indigenous persons suspected of hostile activity.
It is important to note that Liebrecht is not the first nor the only writer in Hebrew literature to express guilt feelings vis-à-vis the Arab minority in Israel. According to Benjamin Tammuz and Leon Yudkin (16), Hebrew literature has been dealing with these feelings for many years now. The best known stories in this respect are S. Yizhar’s “The Prisoner” and “Hirbet Hiz’ee.”
A. B. Yehoshua, in the story “Facing the Forests,” describes the dissolution of the Zionist enterprise by an Arab and a Jew who collaborate in the act of destruction. The Jewish forest ranger whose mission is to watch over the symbolic forest sets fire to it, in collaboration with an old Arab who has found refuge in the forest. Thus, the old Arab avenges the destruction of his village during the war of independence and the obliteration of its site by the planting a forest on its ruins. The young Israeli joins him out of a desire to rebel against his parents, who have subjugated his life to a cause sacred to their heart—the guarding of the forest (the State) that they have created. (For a detailed analysis of Yehoshua’s story, see Gila Ramraz-Rauch, 128–40).
Yehoshua’s story is more extreme than any of Liebrecht’s, both in its violent tone and in its political implications. It not only gives vent to the guilt feelings of the younger generation in Israel, but also warns against a destructive eruption that threatens the entire Zionist enterprise because it has ignored the needs of the Arab minority. Liebrecht, on the other hand, is interested mostly in expressing the malaise of conscientious Jews, escaping to an unrealizable, momentary fantasy about resuming a harmonious relationship between Jews and Arabs. The dream of forming an alliance, of creating a brotherhood between Jews and Arabs, expresses the profound need to overcome the power struggle and the animosity that exist between the two peoples.
18. This is in contrast to the presentation of the Arab as the epitome of sexual attraction in Amos Oz’s “My Michael,” where he remains voiceless. Liebrecht grants the Arab in her story a more humane and complex presence.
19. The fierce tension between the Sephardic culture and the dominant Ashkenazic culture in Israel is described in Ella Shohat’s Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (115–78).
20. The mourning customs of the various ethnic groups in Israel are described in Phyllis Palgi’s book Death, Mourning, and Bereavement in Israel.
21. Sisterly bonding that transcends the deep chasms between orthodox and secular Jews in Israeli society is the theme of Liebrecht’s story “Purple Meadows” (published in the collection “What Am I Speaking, Chinese?” She Said to Him). The friendship that develops between two women whose lifestyles and world views are so different is motivated by a wish to rehabilitate the shattered life of a little girl. The girl’s life fell apart when her mother was raped and consequently became pregnant. The rabbis instructed her to abort the fetus, divorce her husband, and sever all ties with her daughter. This woman is, in fact, a victim of a double rape: the physical rape perpetrated on her body by a strange man, and the more horrendous spiritual rape perpetrated by members of her congregation under the instructions of the patriarchal religious establishment. Here, the affinity between the women is based on another element—on the bond created by female vulnerability. (The traits and practices of the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community are described by Menachem [130–33].)
22. Risa Domb discusses the patriarchal structure of Arab society in The Arab in Hebrew Prose, 1911–1948 (29).
23. This is how Gunew and Spivak define the (in their opinion) reprehensible attempt to represent marginal groups through “token figures” (416).
24. The status of women in the kibbutz is succinctly described by Calvin Goldscheider (162–63) and by Judith Buber-Agassi (395–421).
WORKS CITED
Agnon, S.Y. “Metamorphosis.” In Twenty-One Stories. New York: Schocken, 1970.
Ashkenazi, Nehama. Eve’s Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986.
Azmon, Yael and Dafna N. Izraeli., eds. Women in Israel: Studies of Israeli Society. New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Publishers, 1995.
Buber-Agassi. Judith. “Theories of Gender Equality: Lessons from the Israeli Kibbutz.” In Azmon, Yael and Dafna N. Izraeli., eds. Women in Israel: Studies of Israeli Society. New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction
