Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Moshe Shamir's Novels

74 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No. I Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Moshe Shamir's Novels1 Esther Fuchs Esther Fuchs is an associate professor of Hebrew literature at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is the author of numerous essays and two books on S. Y. Agnon and a book on feminist criticism entitled Israeli Mythogynies: Women in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction (SUNY Press, 1987). Moshe Shamir is one ofthe leading authors of what has become known as the Palmah Generation, the literary generation that became prominent immediately after the establishment ofthe State ofIsrael in the late 1940s and continued to defme the canonic center throughout the 1950s. Comprising authors like Aharon Megged, Nathan Shaham, Benjamin Tammuz, David Shachar, Hanoch Bartov, and Yigal Mossinsohn, the Palmah Generation was devoted to exploring the ideals of socialist Zionism, notably the confrontation between these ideals and the concrete circumstances of the group and the individual. Inspired by socialist realist conventions focusing on specific locales and historical contexts, the Palmah Generation wrote about the Kibbutz, the youth movement, the military unit, the struggle against the Arabs, or against the British mandate. The heroes ofthis literature were judged by the desiderata of the ideology of Labor Zionism: devotion to the collective, commitment to productive labor, attachment to the land. Gershon Shaked characterized this literature as the literature of the first person plural.2 What has not been scrutinized by critics who have written about individual authors and the Palmah Generation in general is the presentation of women in this literature. The presentation of women is important because they constitute the "Other" in a literature widely defmed by a masculinist ethos, the ethos of the male Sabra. The male native of the Land of Israel was understood as the oppositional embodiment of the diaspora Jew. Though there was evidence for the participation of women in the ventures of the Palmah and the Kibbutz, women appear as outsiders in IThis article is a revised version of two related papers. The first, entitled: "Moshe Shamir's Confined Women," was delivered at the Annual Conference of the Assodation of Israel Studies, Boston, June 1-3, 1996. The second, entitled "Private Woman, Public Man in Moshe Shamir," was delivered at the Workshop on Hebrew Literature in Translation, sponsored by the Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, Jerusalem, July 7-10, 1996. 2Gershon Shaked, Gal hadash ba-siporet ha-ivrit (A New Wave in Hebrew Fiction) (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1974). Women in Moshe Shamir's Novels 75 most ofthe Palmah literature.3 It is possible to interpret the marginalization of women in the Palmah literature as a metaphor for the dismissal of other groups-the Sephardic immigrants, the Holocaust survivors, the Orthodox minorities. Moshe Shamir was born in 1921 in Safed. His parents, laborers in the Galilee, moved with their one-year-old son to Tel Aviv. In 1939 he completed his studies at Herzlia, one of the best high schools in the country, and joined the socialist Zionist party, Hashomer Hatzair. From 1941 on he was a member of Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek . In 1944-45 he was a member ofthe Palmah, the fighting forces of the emerging national army. In 1947, Sharnir moved to Tel Aviv, where he was the editor of several literary journals. He first began to publish in 1939, with his first novel, He Went Through the Fields, appearing in 1948. In subsequent works, he continued to focus on the youth movement, the para-military contexts ofthe Palmah, and the Kibbutz. Notable exceptions are his historical novels, King ofFlesh and Blood (1954), focusing on the Judean kingdom ofthe first century BCE, and The Poor Man's Lamb (1956), revolving around the Davidic monarchy of the first millennium BCE.4 Using Mishnaic Hebrew, Shamir recreates the socio-political context of the Second Temple period with an eye to investigating the seeds of its ultimate downfall. He analyzes the social conflicts that contributed to the eventual deterioration of the kingdom, and the psychological weaknesses of the leader, in this case Alexander Jannai. Shamir suggests that the processes that led to the collapse of the Hasmonean state may eventually lead to the collapse ofthe modem state...