Night Reading: Hunger Artists--Voices from Israel

by Ruth Knafo Setton

On a July evening in 1976, as I walked along the sea towards Jaffa--under a purple blue sky that seemed even closer than usual, with stars large as drooping flowers--I saw a young man emerge from the water. He shook his long, wet black curls and languorously stretched his tall, slim body. When he saw everyone on the beach watching him, he stopped in mid-stretch. As if in echo, I held my breath, until he threw back his head and laughed. And I laughed with him. There was an irony in the moment, completely and purely Israeli, in which text, subtext and commentary battled for supremacy.

We should be speaking Aegean, I thought: black shadows, blue shutters, white street. Desert paradise, tropical drinks with little umbrellas, a sea that sparkles like diamonds. Instead, at the Wailing Wall, men spoke in parables of Zion and swallowed prayers. And as I walked along the beach, longhaired teenaged soldiers licked ice cream cones and smoked, the ever-present Uzi slung over a shoulder. For an instant we had all been caught in the collective dream--like the beautiful young man caught in mid-stretch, glorying in life and flesh and sand and sea. With a sigh, I continued trudging on the sand in hot wind.

While I walked--Jaffa's lights blinking and beckoning like a mirage--I saw myself as part of a "people in the sand, a nation sinking in the desert," like the characters in A.B. Yehoshua's The Lover, the first Israeli novel I read, and still my favorite. I read that book when I was on the other side of the world, on a gray winter day, facing the frigid Atlantic rather than the turquoise Mediterranean, but Yehoshua's surreal yet harsh vision of Israel, its surface already cracking under the strain of being everyone's Promised Land--immediately brought me back to the dreamers dreaming the dream and the swimmer and the stars like flowers, and what I missed most of all: the me who bloomed in Israel and nowhere else, as if I were a rare plant that needed a certain soil and quality of sun and air to flourish.

Like the characters in The Lover, I never slept in Israel; there was no time. I was too busy learning the words for sun (shemesh), sea (yam), moon (yareakh), hunger (rav). Learning the language was as urgent as biting into the fruit the sabra man held out on his palm: sabra--red queen on her prickly skin--against his darker flesh. I plucked it from his fruited hand and swallowed it whole: cold, sharp, so sweet I ached. There was no tomorrow: there was only now until midnight. Being in Israel in the mid-70's was a Cinderella-at-the-ball experience--dancing on the grass and hitchhiking to Nuebba and the Red Sea and desperately falling in love, anything to beat the grim ticking clock. Awake all the time, fighting the morning. "And Israel in a fitful, dreamless sleep, a moment's slumber."

The lover in the novel is as elusive as the Promised Land. "A hungry man in Israel in 1973," in the bitter aftermath of the Yom Kippur War--the dawning of the realization that the land may have been promised, but it is not a given--he fades in and out of people's awareness, slips into different roles, disguises himself to join the Army, makes love to other men's wives, plays with people's perceptions of him, until those who search for him think "perhaps he never existed, it's all a delusion."

Finally, in a startling moment that reverberates through the decades since the book was written, he deserts the Army and the codes that have defined him since his birth: "Then I put the hat on my head and started walking out of history. Heading east." Even though the lover ultimately fails in his quest for freedom, I remember how that act of defiance haunted me when I first read it, how I brooded over whether or not it was possible to refuse to get ensnared by Israel's weighty past and ancient covenants, and to recreate oneself, bright and shiny and new--without roots, ignoring the footsteps that came before.

The question of whether freedom is possible within Jewish identity also runs through Karen Alkalay-Gut's poetry, particularly in her vibrant collection, In My Skin. British-born, American-raised, Israeli, daughter, wife and mother, professor and poet, Alkalay-Gut manages to merge the voices she carries within her into sharp, concise, vivid, deceptively simple images, as in this view of a housewife on the phone after a bomb attack:

Don't you see--
I seem to scream into the phone--
I have no ideologies. Left right stones
cities mean nothing in the face
of all this love, all this blood.

I first read her poems during those manic insomniac nights in Israel, and I recall my initial shock of awareness, the shiver tingle at the back of my neck, that someone else had expressed exactly what I felt: the complexity of emotions that arose from living in this crazy country. It was an awakening for me, a realization that poetry could speak as powerfully as the newspaper headlines, that everyday language could weave together a "prayershawl of words," dedicated to the sanctity of human life and the sacredness of the moment.

Alkalay-Gut's poetry transcends boundaries: she enters the mind of the Dizengoff suicide bomber as effortlessly and profoundly as she does that of a Bedouin woman in labor, a Holocaust survivor in Tel Aviv, and an Israeli woman in Munich. She expresses the frustration of poets in Israel, where a poem can never simply be a poem, where "life and death are in the hands of language." In the poem, "Public Outcry," she writes:

Perhaps it is true
that all we write is in vain--
But the silence, the silence

thunders through me like a train.

Although she acknowledges the temptation to echo "the lover" and leave history and her "weird homeland" behind, she confesses, in "Death to Fanatics" why it's ultimately impossible to turn her back on Israel:

All the history books, all
the explanations, all the
whole load of sensitive Reasons
do not add up to
the hunger, the certainty
of that hunger, the fact
that I do not move from this place
even when fire
drops from the sky
even when my dreams
blow up like suspicious parcels
left only for a moment
on a normal afternoon.

Savyon Liebrecht's characters, in her acclaimed short story collection, Apples From The Desert are hungry too. Like Yehoshua's lover and Alkalay-Gut's poet, they hunger and thirst for a compassionate Israel that allows the Other--in his and her guises--to speak freely, and to be seen, heard and acknowledged as an equal: Holocaust survivors, Israeli Arabs, Sephardic/mizrahi Jews, and women. Liebrecht, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, creates a multi-layered, dense country filled with memorable people who must confront their deepest fears.

In the dreamlike, sensual, and frequently anthologized story, "A Room on the Roof," a young Israeli woman hires Arab laborers to work on her roof--in a sense, to build her "a room of her own"--against her husband Yoel's wishes. In the beginning, she sees them come to the roof, "all of them with the same face." But gradually their faces take on individual characteristics, especially Hassan, who has "elongated eyes whose bright color was like the band of wet sand at the water's edge." The attraction she feels for Hassan culminates in a powerfully drawn scene in which he comforts her crying baby, Udi:

"She heard Hassan talking softly to the baby in Arabic, like a loving father to his child, in a caressing voice, the words running together in a pleasant flow, containing a supreme beauty, like the words of a poem in an ancient language which you don't understand, but which well up inside you. Udi, resting tranquilly on his chest, reached out towards Hassan's dark face, and Hassan put his head down towards the little fingers and kissed them. She, stunned by the sight, stood where she was and looked at them, as the tremor inspired by fear gradually died down, and another, new kind of trembling arose within her, seeing something which, even as it happens, you already yearn for from a distance, knowing that when it passes nothing like it will happen again. And, as though dividing themselves, her thoughts turned to Yoel, whose eyes examined his son with a certain remoteness. Since the baby's birth he had never clasped him to his body and was careful not to wrinkle his clothes or have them smell of wet diapers. "

This scene is symbolic of Liebrecht's art: tracing a fissure, a widening crack, in a society that has sacrificed so much of its soul in order to survive. Slowly, the ancient language reveals itself, the one that speaks in gesture rather than word. This language of tender connection rather than brutal rupture is possible to hear only when we let down our guard and recognize our shared humanity. Liebrecht does not judge her characters, but she clearly sympathizes with the disenfranchised, the second-class citizens, those from Arab countries, and those with blue numbers branded on their arms, all those who were dismissed and silenced when it came time to create an Israeli culture that was Ashkenazi, militaristic, male-dominated, rooted in the present.

A.B. Yehoshua, Karen Alkalay-Gut and Savyon Liebrecht are hungry for Israel in a way that no other country can satisfy, like Kafka's hunger artist who would not have starved himself if only he could have found a food that pleased him. Like them, I look into Israel and see my own desires and fears magnified. Like them, I have never been hungrier than in Israel. If you look hard, you will see me, still walking across the sand to Jaffa--arm in arm with the lover, the poet, the woman, the Arab, the mizrahi Jew, the survivor--transforming the Promised Land with our presence and our ceaseless hunger; transforming it into a dazzling land of promise.
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