No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women's Fiction (review)

Yael S. Feldman No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women's Fiction Columbia University Press, N.Y., 1 999 reviewed by Amia Lieblich Graced by a portrait of Virginia Woolf on its cover, Yael Feldman's book is an original attempt to construct a bridge between Woolfs legacy - and, secondarUy, that of Simone de Beauvoir - and the literary creations of several contemporary Israeli women novelists. Feldman accomplishes this challenging goal by presenting three interwoven topics: the elaboration of a literary-feminist thesis on gender and society, originating in the works of Woolf and de Beauvoir and further developed by scholars in the U.S. and Europe; a historical review of feminism in Israel and its unique sociocultural character; and, principally, a literary analysis of the work of five novelists - Ruth Almog, Netiva Ben Yehuda, Shulamit Hareven, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and Shulamit Lapid - focusing on the themes of gender and sex, androgyny, motherhood, self-actualization and selffulfillment in the lives of women. While each one of these topics is a fascinating project in its own right, the amalgamation of the three produces a brilliant cultural-historical study. The fact that Feldman, an Israeli scholar, resides in the United States would seem to provide her with the proper distance from which to view Hebrew-Israeli works and processes in their broadest, most meaningful context. Examining these five novelists from the larger perspective of European and American feminisms, Feldman concludes that the local Israeli version, though it emerged somewhat belatedly and is colored by specific national circumstances, is no less troubled and complex and no less tormented by issues of gender essentialism and differences. The works of these five authors, as well as many others who are mentioned in passing, represent feminine Israeli voices grappling with the Zionist notion of the "New 262Nashim:A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and GenderIssues, no. 4. © 2001 Yael Feldman: No Room of Their Own Hebrew Woman" in all its manifestations and contradictions. Thus, they are embedded both in gender conceptions and in nationalist ideologies, and they are entangled in the struggles of individual women for expression and equality, on the one hand, and in the shadow of the Holocaust, the siege mentality of the state, and the constant threat of war in the Middle East, on the other. All of these create fertile ground for the growth of a multitude ofrepresentations. The international theoretical context to these analyses is furnished by the literature of the past half-century on the Woman Question. As Feldman puts it: What may have seemed in the first half of the century a relatively simple issue of social and psychological emancipation to be achieved by educational and economic equal opportunity (represented by a surface reading of Woolfs A Room of One's Own, 1929), seems hopelessly entangled today with philosophical challenges to a long, even ancient tradition, that of woman's alterity (as documented in Beauvoir's 77ie Second Sex, 1949). (p. 12) It is beyond the scope of this review to present the intricate literary analyses which follow these lines and include many other ingredients, from Freudian psychoanalysis to Hebrew linguistics and biblical scholarship. I will demonstrate some of the insights I derived from this book by referring to the chapter about Netiva Ben Yehuda. Though Ben Yehuda's entrance into the Israeli literary scene is relatively recent, the topic of her Palmach trilogy, which appeared between 1981 and 1991, is the 1948 War of Independence. Written in very blunt, often humorous Hebrew, her books demystify the war and in particular the activities of men - and women - in the battlefield. Until the publication of these three books, the participation of women, who comprised half the Palmach's fighters, had left hardly any mark on the literary legacy of Ben Yehuda's generation. Her work depicts the Palmach's cruel betrayal of its promise of sexual equality. According to Feldman's interpretation, it is the pain of this old wound that prevented the author from giving voice to her experience for three decades. Only by the late 1970s, when feminism began to emerge in Israeli society, was Ben Yehuda - brave as she has always been - able to...