Language:
English
Year of publication:
2021
Titel der Quelle:
Prooftexts; a Journal of Jewish Literary History
Angaben zur Quelle:
38,3 (2021) 557-583
Keywords:
Ben-Amotz, Dan Criticism and interpretation
;
National characteristics, Israeli
;
National characteristics, Israeli, in literature
;
Jews Identity
;
Hebrew fiction, Modern History and criticism
;
Israeli fiction Themes, motives 20th century
Abstract:
This article introduces the concept of “passing” into the study of Hebrew literature, through the oeuvre and biography of Dahn Ben-Amotz, the infamous Israeli icon, prolific novelist, humorist, journalist, artist, linguist, bon vivant, and polygamist. Born in Rivne, Poland as Musia Tehilimzogger, Ben-Amotz is sent to Palestine in 1938. Failing to fit in as an immigrant, he begins his passing, shedding the skin of a meek diaspora Jew to become the ultimate representation of the New Hebrew; reborn in Tel Aviv, he erases all connections to the past. Hebrew literary criticism deals primarily with these two polarities of the historic Jew—the old versus the new, the diasporic versus the Hebrew. But this article argues that this negotiation has an adverse effect on our study and understanding of Israeli fiction and nation creation. Through an analysis of Ben-Amotz's semiautobiographical 1968 novel, Lizkor velishkoaḥ (To Remember, To Forget), the article shows that, while aspiring to locate a space for multiple identities, critical readings of Israeli literature also work overtime to emphasize the negotiation of identity/difference and end up creating more segregated, essentialist identities instead of ones that are multiple and contingent. This reading of Ben-Amotz's novel uses passing criticism, legal theory, and political science to argue that an unconventional author calls for an unconventional reading that diverges from and challenges prior understandings and approaches to trauma, testimony, and identity in Hebrew literature and opens the discourse to other tangible possibilities in the search for individual coherency, outside the binary of the Old/New Jew, possibilities that previous negotiations seem to dismiss.
DOI:
10.2979/prooftexts.38.3.04
URL:
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