Language:
Hebrew
Year of publication:
2014
Titel der Quelle:
תיאוריה וביקורת; במה ישראלית
Angaben zur Quelle:
43 (2014) 211-237
Keywords:
Appelfeld, Aharon
;
Hebrew literature, Modern History and criticism
;
Arab-Israeli conflict Literature and the conflict
Abstract:
Aharon Appelfeld’s story “On the Ground Floor” (published in 1962 in the collection titled Smoke) takes place mainly within a Palestinian home that was destroyed in the 1948 war. This article explores the meanings arising from the fact that the author chooses to place Holocaust refugees in a Palestinian ruin. The state’s efforts to erase the memory of the Nakba by destroying the Palestinian home are supposed to contribute to the Holocaust refugees’ bonding with Israeliness, but the efforts fail; the memory of the Holocaust in the site of the memory of the Palestinian Nakba generates opposition to the hegemony of the Israeli identity. Speaking from the margins enables Appelfeld to distance himself from the Zionist state’s repressive handling of the trauma of the Holocaust (symbolized by the phrase “from Holocaust to Revival”) and thus, perhaps unwittingly, he gives a voice to the Palestinian fate in the Nakba. This is because the revulsion of Appelfeld the immigrant and refugee at the enlistment of the trauma of the Holocaust and the framing of its memory as the exclusive identity of members of the Jewish national state – immigrants who are supposed to become natives overnight – leads him to highlight in an offhand way the memory of the Palestinian trauma without seeing it as a threat to the identity of the Jewish state and the justice of its existence. Appelfeld does not present the two traumas – of the Holocaust and the Nakba – as comparable, and therefore they do not compete with each other.Appelfeld’s entry into Israeli literature charged him with the responsibility of a member of the hegemonic “1948 generation” writers – creators of a literature that was characterized by a deep split in the subjective experience of the writers as Israeli authors. The canonization of Appelfeld is a clear act of Interpellation from which one may derive a claim to responsibility. And this split of the hegemonic subject is a split in his stance of responsibility as a writer: on the one hand, he is required to represent, within an Israeli hegemonic framework, the trauma of the Jewish victim; yet on the other hand, he is required, as an Israeli, to take upon himself responsibility for the trauma of the abuser who brought about the Nakba.
URL:
אתר את הפרסום בקטלוג המאוחד של ספריות ישראל
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