Listening to the Other Side: Feminist Perspectives on Natan Shaham's The Other Side of the Wall

20 SHOFAR Summer 1995 Vol. 13, No.4 LISTENING TO THE OTHER SIDE: .FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON NATAN SHAHAM'S THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL! by Naomi Sokoloff Naomi Sokoloffis an associate professor in the Department ofNear Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington. Her publications include Imagining the Cbild in Modernjewish Fiction Gohns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, co-edited with Anne Lapidus Lerner and Anita Norich Gewish Theological Seminary ofAmerica, 1992); and Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature, co-edited with Elizabeth Goodenough and Mark A. Heberle (Wayne State University Press, 1995). One of the fundamental goals of feminism has been to let woman tell her side of the story. Arguing that women have too often gone unheard, feminism seeks ways to acknowledge .female voices and air women's perspectives.2 As it examines the silencing and sounding of women's voices in literature, feminist criticism provides a productive framework for rereading Natan Shaham's novella, Kirot eets dakim3 • This narrative, by 'The research for this essay was supported in part by a Fulbright-Hayes grant. 2For an overview of women's silences as a topic of feminist debate, see for example, Tillie Olsen's Silences (New York: Dclacorte Press, 1979), Adrienne Rich's On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose: 1.966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979), and Elaine Showalter's "Toward a Feminist Poetics," in The Neul Felilinist CriticislIl, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York, Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 125-143. Jrel Aviv: Am Oved, 1977. Listening to the Other Side . 21 a man, scrutinizes the silences of a woman protagonist and aims to tell her side of the story even as she makes her own tentative moves toward selfexpression : The main character is a 24-year-old woman who joins a kibbutz but doesn't fit in. She is a quiet personality who often goes unnoticed and suffers a kind of anonymity. (This impression is reinforced by the fact that she remains nameless throughout the narrative.) However, she does keep a diary, and this becomes a place for her to give voice to her own experience. The title of the novella as it appeared in English translation, The Other Side of the Wall,4 aptly homes in on some of the key issues. This title features a metaphor of sides that calls attention to the protagonist's position as an outsider. That metaphor quickly takes on dynamic concreteness through the plot. The main character lives next to a beautiful young woman, Raheli, who-though newly married and assumed by all to be happy-enters an illicit love affair. The protagonist knows what is going on, thanks to the thinness 6f the wall separating their rooms, and in her diary she records her changing feelings about Raheli, the husband Big Yitzhak, and the lover, dubbed "Theo." By organizing itself around her inner thoughts and her diary, Shaham's tale becomes the story of her perceptions and constructions of others, even as she is aware of how they perceive and construct her. The Other Side ofthe Wall thus forges a series of tensions concerning the opening or closing of gaps between self and others, and the erection and dissipation of barriers between the individual and the community. In the process Shaham crafts a critique of kibbutz life by entertaining conflicting perspectives on the· protagonist'S experience. Feminist approaches yield useful readings of this text because they have been so attuned to explorations of power, to comparisons of insiders and outsiders, and to questions of who controls the prevailing discourse in society. In Shaham's text those issues are very much connected with a woman's experience. This is not to say that Shaham is necessarily sympathetic to feminism or its goals. But feminist reading, a mode of criticism that is still under-explored in the field of modern Hebrew literature, opens ~p this t'ext to new understanding. As it does so it also puts into reliefsome of the complexities and accomplishment of Shaham's . 4Natan Shaham, Ibe Other Side of the lVall, in ]be Other Side of the Wall: Three Novellas, trans...