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The Literature of the Generation of the State
A. B. Yehoshua
Im no researcher, although I do teach at a university. I think of myself as a reasonable interpreter of literary texts, but not as one having wide and authoritative knowledge, allowing me to make a vast panoramic evaluation of literary trends, or identify and characterize literary generations. Therefore, if I try to delineate the identity of the founding generation of the state, I do so only as an author and myself a member of that generation, and not with the responsibility of being involved in research.
This stated, I do not seek only to provide personal testimony, but to try to examine a few general characteristics from the creative sources of my generation. I believe that, despite reservations, there is something to generational division, not only in literature and the arts but also to politics and in life in general. And although artistic creativity springs from the depths of the individuals soul, from his own personal experience and the make-up of his own personality, he is still deeply connected to and nourished by the spirit of his times and life experiences, and is eternally co-dependent upon the creativity of others of the same generation.
What we are now considering is the generation that has been active for some 40 years, concurrently with at least three other generations. I published my first short stories in Masa in 1957, and in a literary student circle and that very same year, I remember Aharon Appelfeld reading his stories "Smoke" and "Berta". Amos Oz showed me his first story a year or two after this, and in Keshet we discovered a nice story by someone called Avi Otniel. When I asked the editor, Aharon Amir, who the man was, he told me about a fellow called Yehoshua Kenaz who was living in Paris, from where he had sent this story. In those years, I remember going to General Staff Headquarters in Tel Aviv to meet a certain major by the name of Yitzhak Orpaz, who wanted to talk to me about my "The Evening Express of Yatir" and about the story he was writing. At that time Yoram Kaniuk returned to Israel, while Dan Miron wrote a wildly enthusiastic article about Kaniuks English novel, "The One Descending from Above," solemnly warning us that it was in fact the real thing. In Jerusalem, at the university library, Appelfeld excitedly presented Amalia Kahana-Carmon to me, and both of us enthusiastically congratulated her on her wonderful story "If I Had but Found Grace" which had just appeared in the magazine Amot. To these names, naturally, one could add Yitzhak Ben-Ner and Dan Tsalka, the late Yaakov Shabtai, who started to write a few years later and I will even allow myself to be cheeky and to annex Yoel Hoffman to our generation. He is exactly our age and not as far from us as it seems, even though he began being published quite a long time after we did.
So, we all started out together, and every one of us underwent their own personal process of development. At our side were also a few critics university people, whose opinion was extremely important, to me at least. That was still in the days when we deeply respected academics, and imbued them with exaggerated spiritual authority, way before the onset of inflated and academic banality. (Reflect on it: at the close of the 1950s, with the Israeli population at around a million and half souls, the total number of students came to around 6,000. Since then, while the population has almost quadrupled, the student body has multiplied almost 20 times.)
Were I asked to sum up the identity of the Generation of the State in a headline, it would be: "The Meaning of Israeliness as Complete Jewishness." And if I had to examine my own creativity from the starting point of the purely Agnonesque, surrealistic short story "Death of the Old Man," which appeared in 1957, up to my latest novel, published 40 years later, "Journey to the End of the Millenium," I feel that despite the strangeness of that point of departure and the finishing point (temporary, I hope!) it would still be possible to define the path between the two stories as an organic process. It might be difficult to envisage that the abstract, amorphous writing, divorced from place and time, in "Death of the Old Man," would eventually lead to compact mimetic writing on a totally Jewish experience set in the mediaeval period, completely removed from all Eretz-Israeli connotations. But it seems to me that by examining the starting point carefully one sees that this was not an unpredictable process.
In the story "Death of the Old Man," Mrs. Ashtor, who represents the positive, natural, and self-confident forces of the country, buries the old, virtually ageless tenant, who embodies, if you will, Jewishness, and who is accused of an inert, aimless and tasteless existence. But the tired narrator, who collaborates with the aggressive and charismatic Mrs. Ashtor, somehow grasps, even if only in retrospect and after the burial that hastening death by means of living-burials is also dangerous to him, and that this strange Mrs. Ashtor, to whose charisma he is so under the influence of, will eventually finish him off too. Thus, during the period in which we so zealously strived to create an Israeli identity, not only did we see no contradiction between it and Jewishness, or with Jewish culture, but we saw it as swallowing and absorbing Jewishness within it but also assuming responsibility for every detail in it. This is a point that I have returned to time and time again in a thousand lectures and tens of articles: Israeliness as an identity (not as citizenship, in which a Palestinian national minority participates) is the fulfilment of Jewishness.
The Generation of the State (and I am extremely fond of this term and happy to include myself in it) helped, first by poetry and then through prose, drama, and perhaps also in the cinema, to consolidate and mould the Israeli identity. And here I wish to posit a few characteristic bases for determining this assumption; bases that helped us consolidate the essence of this generational identity card not only in itself, but also as a clear distinction between two adjacent generations that which preceded us, which is the Generation of the War of Independence, and the two generations which succeeded us, whose function and aim was also to distinguish themselves from us and perhaps even to pit themselves against us the better to define themselves, just as we wished to distinguish ourselves from the Generation of the War of Independence. I am referring to the 1980s and 1990s generation, about part of whose characteristics we have read in the excellent book by Gadi Taub, "The Dejected Revolution." I will therefore attempt to enumerate seven points.
The first : We are the generation which internalized very clearly the transition from Eretz-Israel to Israel, and this had great significance, since through this we acquired a grasp of frontiers and the security that comes from understanding frontiers. The fact is that we were the sons of an outstanding generation one could almost say unique in the history of the Jewish people in the past two thousand years and that we grew to maturity having a clear understanding of the states physical frontiers, and what was within the bounds of its judisdiction and responsibility, and what was not. This fact helped us tremendously in crystalizing our identity as a separate generation.
One of the clearest examples of the ability to apply a literary treatment to these frontiers was, in my opinion, the ability to deal with the persona of the Israeli Arab. I recall, for example, how when I was still a youth, at the start of the 1950s, visiting a village in the Galilee with my father, who in those days was the director of the Department for Moslem and Druze affairs at the Ministry for Religious Affairs. I then understood very well the sense of belonging to a framework that linked these Arabs to us, and our responsibility towards them, and this sense permitted me, some twenty years later, to try to enter into the soul of Arab characters such as Naim (in "The Lover") and to place them naturally within the framework of the novel and the short story. Despite all their differences, national and religious, and despite their enmity and their indignation, they were part of us. And it was the clear territorial frontiers which, in my opinion, determined their place within Israeli identity.
These frontiers gave the individual security, and one of the things which distinguishes our generation is additional freedom from the ties and affinities to the collective, as if the clear territorial frontiers also strengthened and consolidated the frontiers of the individual. On the one hand, again relatively, the events of those years were not so stormy and dangerous as to force one to experience them incessantly though the collective (see S.Yizhar "Days of Ziklag"), in which there is a real stream of collective consciousness; on the other hand, this solitary hero was able to depart far more from the norm, without endangering himself or the framework in which he operated. For us the state was already an established fact, which you do not find in Yizhar or Moshe Shamir or Matti Megged at certain stages, and not in Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the noted philosopher, who never ceased speaking of the state as an instrument of power rather than on the essential meaning of living together, for only within that is it possible to do both good and bad.
This brings me to the second point: We had a positive attitude but also a realistic one towards the experience of statehood, without the romanticism of the previous generation, the generation of the War of Independence, which had already adopted the rhetoric of disappointment. The content of Matti Meggeds "Hedva and I," or even the long monologues of the youths in "Days of Ziklag," or Hanoch Bartovs "The Reckoning and the Soul," in which the hero goes to Paris to mourn for the state which at that very time was being created; Meggeds "The Lighthouse" and many other works. We did not pin too many hopes on the state because it was not us that gave birth to her, and therefore neither could we be too disappointed. At the same time, there was our ability to criticize the experience of statehood without feeling that our criticism might cause it to collapse. Amos Ozs criticisms of the kibbutz, for instance, were interior-humanist much more than Zionist-ideological, as in the generation which preceded him, for example Nathan Shaham. I was able to write a surrealistic story called "The Last Commander," about a group of army reservists who spend their service time in a kind of idle stupor. But this was on the basis of deep belief not just that the War of Independence was fully justified (and that is my belief to this day), but that in fact the state had finished with wars, and that we could sink into a passive sleep instead of dashing to the hilltops. Thus we were freed to a certain degree from the intensity of the focus on the intimate collective, but also from the need to accomplish everything which preceded us. We found our own uniqueness, which is so important in the formation of a writers writing style, but this was a linked uniqueness, not an amorphous one. It was a loneliness by comparison to some kind of prior and strong collectivism which cast a strong light in the 1940s. But we related to this collectivism, after all, with respect, even if we cut loose from it. The concept of responsibility did not leave us.
This uniqueness balanced the political and ideological forces that were prevalent in the 1950s and the start of the 1960s. But with the Six Day War, and regarding the weighty ideological and political issues which it stirred up, our generation most of whom had already had more than a decade of creative writing behind them could digest this renewal of political ideology within literary personas that were already shaped. From this point of view we did not spring up as did the generation which preceded us, bearing the full weight of ideological questions. Neither did we come, as with the generations which succeeded us who were born into a political reality of conquest, a burning reality, constantly in the headlines, demanding but also easily tiring, sometimes one-dimensional and therefore such that they hurry to escape it. The political-ideological dimension at some point, breathed new life into writing, without prematurely tiring it out, because there still remained a strong basis of solidarity.
On the other hand, and this is my third point, the transition from "Eretz-Israeliness" to "Israeliness" eliminated the romantic, Canaanite * ) option which, to some extent, had effervesced in the previous generations. The huge waves of immigration which engulfed the country, even if they were beyond our literary abilities proved clearly and decisively that neither we nor our fathers were born of the sea, nor from the fields of Philistia, and that behind the assumed accents of Yonatan Ratosh and Aharon Amir, stood their Jewish forebears from Eastern Europe, who, when it came down to it, were no different from Danino or from Gueta who came from Morocco or from Libya and whose hets and ayins ** sounded more natural. Canaanism is an excellent spice to refresh and intensify the taste of Zionism, but only if you put a mere pinch into the dish. The disappearance of the Canaanite option made it possible for us to relate to Jewishness with more maturity, with less anger and hypocrisy, and, my opinion, thus advanced the process of assimilation within the Israeli identity.
And this brings me to the fourth point: the attitude to religion and the religious. In the 1950s and 1960s, the vacuum around us was not charged with the same intense animosity to religion and to religious people that we find in our generation and the generations which followed us. On the other hand, there has never been quite the same complete disassociation from religious elements as there was in the writing of the generation of the War of Independence. See, for example, how deeply the subject is ignored in "Days of Ziklag," which is nevertheless the most instructive interior and sociological study of the spirit of the War of Independence generation. This allowed many of us to integrate in a limited but tangible way the elements which are so very central both to our people and to our culture, in a way that enriched our writing. Let us recall, for example, the stories of Amalia Kahana-Carmon "Naima Sasson Writes Poems," "If Only I Found Favour." Here and there, we might have been able to portray religious people and/or rituals and thus to enrich and vary the fabric of the story, and perhaps even to deepen it. I am thinking of the stories of Yitzhak Orpaz, "Tomozhenna Street" and others, and of course, the strength of religious people in the later novels of Aharon Appelfeld. In my novels "Mr Mani" and "Journey to the End of the Millenium," I, as a person both secular and agnostic did not find it a problem to enter into the souls and spiritual world of rabbis and religious Jews and to present them in a legitimate way at the forefront of the story without immediately running into the weary conflict, for or against religion. Nevertheless, in our period there was the approach, which was revealed later as hasty and mistaken, that secularity or secular nationalism had won a decisive victory over the religious and religion, and it was therefore permissible to include some of the more outlandish religious aspects, so as to enrich the kneading of the dough of fiction. (Incidentally, see how naturally Brenner includes real religious people in his novels.) Yehoshua Kenaz told me that his mother, who was a rabbis daughter, told him when he was a child: "All these religious people whom you see around you; in a few years time, theyll no longer be like that." Thats how we all thought. Meanwhile, theyre not disappearing so fast, but despite the scared descriptions of many of my friends about the growing power of the religious the demonic, not the demographic power seem to me to be greatly exaggerated.
In any case, in the 1950s and 1960s we viewed the religious as a sinking and disappearing world, and therefore less threatening. Hence, their absorption within our Israeliness seemed to be more possible. Those were also the heydays of Agnons "Ido and Einam" days of kabbalah and mysticism, according to the writings of Gershom Scholem and Yeshayahu Tishbi. We felt that here are treasures that were well able to season our literary repasts.
From here to the the fifth point: our sense of continuity to Hebrew literature. This sense of course, was also that of the generation of the War of Independence, however, in contrast to that generation, which embarked upon academic studies considerably later (e.g. Matti Megged, Hanoch Bartov, Yizhar Smilansky, Haim Gouri), if indeed they did so at all, most of the writers and the poets of our generation had the benefit of a regular university education at a normal age; moreover, many of us also studied in the faculty of Hebrew Literature in Jerusalem, and researched it in a systematic and organized fashion, and were examined on it.
The sense of continuity and commitment to Hebrew literature of our generation has permitted a more integrated attitude to the Jewish past while celebrating a distinct Israeli identity, and that without any contradiction. I stress this point, since I have a clear impression that in the generation of the 1990s in particular, there has been an almost complete cessation of the dialogue with the dynasties of Hebrew literature. Perhaps that is connected to the sense of post-modernism, to alienation and to breaking away.
And it might be that this is connected to the political nausea of writers far to the north *** of Judaism and Jewishness. In any case, it is clear to me that without such a dialogue with the past, which exists with greater or lesser intensity in all literatures, it is difficult to give stability to literary writing. In the final analysis, what is Agnon without Mendele or even without Brenner, what is Yizhar without Gnessin, what is Oz without Berdichevsky, or what are Appelfeld or myself without Agnon?
From here to an additional point, the sixth: the experience of the modern world around us. The experience of contemporary world literature, which nourished us in the 1950s and 1960s, now included perhaps for the first time in a legitimate way, literature which identified itself as Jewish and which had attained recognition in the cultural centres of the world. I refer in particular to the impressive phenomenon of American Jewish literature on the stage of world literature. Jewish literature in English or in French, the most important languages in world culture, was not only that written by Jews or by part-Jews such as Kafka, Henry Roth, Yaakov Wasserman or Proust, but literature by Jews and about Jews. Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Philip Henry and even Patrick Modiano and others, were important to the international literary world. Not only did they provide us with legitimization, but they honoured our Jewishness as a component of our Israeliness.
But in my opinion, the last and seventh point, is the most important of all, at least to me and to some of my colleagues. It is that point that gave the writing of the generation of the state a kind of special vitality that gave it such a conspicuous and central place in the last fifty years and among all the literary generations, to the point that even critics who love to make incessant changes to the literary map, so as to present a sort of stormy football field where various writers are deposed so as to crown some new ones they are still required to move and change around, or depose and crown, within the same generational group.
What made this generation so dominant in Israeli literature, not only from a pure literary standpoint, from the stance of literary research, but also in the rich inter-relationship with the readers? I think that right from the beginning we had some kind of interesting balance between the revealed and the hidden. I am talking about hidden, false-bottomed compartments that were within us, drawers that were opened in the course of our creativity, and because of which the writings of Agnon became the source of such multi-layered inspiration for us. Because Agnon is the supreme artist of folding and hidden-away drawers.
The generation preceding us was open in its writing. You read entire pages by Yizhar, or Moshe Shamirs "With His Own Hands," and you do not have to search for what is buried behind these pages. They are open, with all their strength and importance. They present reality with straightforwardness and force, and they believe in it. With our generation, the concealed drawers were buried, which we might not even have known at the outset, but due to these hidden drawers, reality became dual-faced, as if saying one thing and yet another thing that at the beginning was not even clear to ourselves. Usually these were autobiographical drawers that were concealed for various reasons, and which were gradually disclosed. With Orpaz, the Holocaust and Exile which burst out afterwards in such a provocative manner in the addition of his previous surname: Auerbach-Orpaz. The entire pre-war Jewish world in the case of Appelfeld, which began to take hold on the world of Holocaust survivors, and which marked the start of his writing. My own Sephardi origins, which started showing through as a question of the overlap between South and North or between West and East. The sad revisionism of the 1950s in the shadow of the mother in the novels and stories of Amos Oz. The intense antagonism to the generation of the War of Independence that erupted in Amalia Kahana-Carmon. The semi-non-Jewish, alienated Yekkishness **** of Natan Zach and of Yoel Hoffman.
These were strong elements, which were at first covered up out of a desire to adapt to and acclimatize to the codes at the heart of Israeli society. So different from the princely elements in Yizhars Tzalhavim and others of his generation. However, their permeation, as concealed and disclosed within the text increased its complexity and gave it richness and uniqueness.
Most of our generation, the generation of the state, is moving into the seventh decade of our lives, and if the threat, which I saw in one of the papers, that our life span may last till 140, does not materialize, then were already in the last quarter of our lives. Sometimes I empathize with the feelings of younger generations that we have been hogging the stage for rather too long, and perhaps the time has come to move us over, or at least to distance us from the centre. However, I do not know if we can carry out their secret wish so quickly. Sometimes the state after which our generation is named, infuriates us greatly, but we are still not so bored that we will leave our task to others.
Translated by Yvonne Wohlgelernter
* The "Canaanite" movement, beginning in the 1940s, rejected traditional "Jewish" roots and advocated a new Eretz-Israeli, "Hebrew" nation and culture.
** Gutteral letters in Hebrew, often pronounced more distinctly by Sephardi than by Ashkenazi Jews.
*** a reference to the post-modernist writers associated particularly with trendy north Tel Aviv.
**** Yekke possibly from the German Jacke ("jacket") is a derogatory term for Jews of German origin, presumably because they were thought rightly or wrongly to be imbued with perceived German attibutes of rigid, straightlaced, rather humourless, ideas of ordnung, etc.
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